Traveller_Levin's Blog

Ever After

Kim Addonizio

The loft where the dwarves lived had a view of the city and hardwood floors and skylights, but it was overpriced, and too small now that there were seven of them. It was a fifth-floor walkup, one soaring, track-lighted room. At the far end was the platform where Doc, Sneezy, Sleepy, and Bashful slept side by side on futons. Beneath them, Happy and Dopey shared a double bed. Grumpy, who pretty much stayed to himself, kept his nylon sleeping bag in a corner during the day and unrolled it at night on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. The kitchen was two facing zinc counters, a built-in range and microwave, and a steel refrigerator, all hidden behind a long bamboo partition that Doc had bought and Sneezy had painted a color called Cherry Jubilee. The kitchen and bathroom were the only places any sort of privacy was possible. To make the rent they all pooled their money from their jobs at the restaurant, except for Dopey, who didn’t have a job unless you counted selling drugs when he wasn’t running them up his arm; and Grumpy, who panhandled every day for spare change and never came up with more than a few wrinkled dollar bills when the first of the month rolled around. Sometimes the rest of them talked about kicking out Dopey and Grumpy, but no one quite had the heart. Besides, the Book said there were seven when she arrived, seven disciples of the goddess who would come with the sacred apple and transform them. How, exactly, they would be transformed was a mystery that would be revealed when she got there. In the meantime, it was their job to wait.

“When she comes, she’ll make us big,”said Sneezy. He had the comics section of the Sunday paper, and an egg of Silly Putty, and was flattening a doughy oval onto a panel of Calvin and Hobbes.

“Oh, bullshit,” said Grumpy. “It’s about inner transformation, man. That’s the whole point. Materialism is a trap. Identifying with your body is a trap. All this shit”—Grumpy swept his arm to indicate not just their loft but the tall downtown buildings beyond the windows, and maybe more—“is an illusion. Maya. Samsara.” He shook out the last Marlboro from a pack, crumpled the pack and tried a hook shot into a wicker wastebasket by the window, but missed. He looked around. “Matches? Lighter? Who’s going for more cigs?”

“She will,” insisted Sneezy. “She’ll make us six feet if we want to be.”

“She can’t change genetics, you dope,” Grumpy said.

At the word dope, Dopey’s head jerked up for an instant. He was nodding on the couch at the opposite end from Grumpy, a lit cigarette ready to fall from his hand. The couch had a few burn holes already. One of these days, Doc thought, he’s going to set the fucking place on fire, and then where will we be? How will she ever find us? He got up from the floor, where he’d been doing yoga stretches, and slid the cigarette from Dopey’s stained fingers. He ground it out in an ashtray on the table, in the blue ceramic water of a moat that circled a ceramic castle. From the castle’s tiny windows, a little incense smoke—sandalwood—drifted out.

“She’s not an alien from outer outer space who’s going to perform weird experiments,” Doc said. He hunted through the newspaper for the Food section.

“Where is she from, then?” Sneezy said. Sneezy was a sixteen-year-old runaway, the youngest of them. From the sweet credulousness of his expression, you’d never know what terrible things he had endured. He’d been beaten, scarred between his shoulder blades with boiling water, forced into sex with his mother by his own father. Sneezy liked to ask the obvious questions for the sake of receiving the familiar, predictable answers.

“She’s from the castle,” Doc said. “She’s the fairest in the land. She will come with the sacred apple and all will be changed.” This much the Book said. Once upon a time, it said. But when was that, exactly? Doc wondered. They’d been here for over six years already. Or he had, anyway. Ever since he’d found the Book in a Dumpster— the covers ripped away, most of its pages stained and torn—where he’d been looking for food a nearby restaurant always threw out. He’d been on the streets, addicted to cheap wine, not giving a shit about anything or anyone. He’d slept on cardboard in doorways, with a Buck knife under the rolled poncho he used for a pillow, had stolen children’s shoes from outside the Moon Bounce at the park. He had humiliated himself performing drunken jigs in the bank plaza for change tossed into a baseball cap. The Book had changed all that. It had shown him there was a purpose to his life. To gather the others, to come to this place and make it ready. He had quit drinking and found a job, at the very restaurant whose Dumpster he used to scrounge through. He had gathered his brethren, one by one, as they drifted into the city from other places, broke and down on their luck, headed for the streets and shelters. They had become his staff—two dishwashers, a busboy and a fry cook. The restaurant’s name was Oz, and the owner had been willing to hire dwarf after dwarf and present them as ersatz munchkins. There had been a feature article in the Weekly, and write-ups in some food magazines, which had drawn a lot of business. The dwarves were mentioned in the guidebooks, so there were often tourists from Canada and Denmark and Japan, who brought their cameras to record the enchanting moment the dwarves trooped from the kitchen with a candle-lit torte to stand around a table and sing happy birthday. They used fake high voices, as though they’d been sucking on helium.

“Why is the apple sacred?” Sneezy said dreamily. He had abandoned the comics and now had a few Magic cards spread out on the floor and was picking them up one by one, studying them.

“Because she will die of the apple and be resurrected,” Doc said. He glanced at one of Sneezy’s cards: Capashen Unicorn. An armored unicorn raced through a glittery field, a white-robed rider on its back. Underneath, Doc read, Capashen riders were stern and humorless even before their ancestral home was reduced to rubble.

“Why do you collect that crap?” Doc said. “And those comic books you’ve always got your nose buried in. Read the Book again. Every time I read it, I discover something new. The Book is all you need. You have to focus on the Book.”

“Check her out.” Sneezy held up another card, of an anorectic-looking woman with green skin in a gold ballerina outfit. One long-nailed thumb and forefinger were raised in the air in some kind of salute. In her other hand she held aloft a green and white flag. A couple of men in armor rode behind her, and behind them rose broccoli-like trees, being erased by mist rising out of the ground. Doc read: Llanowar Vanguard. Creature—Dryad. Llanowar rallied around Eladamri’s banner and united in his name.

“Will she look like that?” Sneezy asked.

“Give it a rest,” Grumpy said, and nudged Dopey with his foot. “Hey, man,” he said. “We’re out of cigs.”

Sneezy will outgrow it, Doc thought. Dryads and unicorns. Made-up creatures and clans and battles. “I don’t know what she’ll look like, exactly,” he sighed. He stood up and began tidying the coffee table. Empty semi-crushed cans of Bud Lite that Grumpy and Dopey had drunk the night before. A half-eaten bag of tortilla strips. A plastic tub of salsa had spilled on the naked body of a Penthouse Pet. The magazine lay open to her spread legs, her long, slender fingers teasingly positioned above her pink slit; it glistened, as though it had been basted. What would she look like? Maybe she would look like this, would come and drag her fingers through the graying hair on his chest and position her sweet eager hips above him. Maybe she would whisper to Doc that he was the one she came for, the only one; they could leave all the others behind, now that she was there. They would leave the city and move to an Airstream in the woods, overlooking a little river, where he could catch bass and bluegills. She would stand in front of their stove in cutoffs and a white blouse, sliding a spatula under a fish sputtering in a pan. When the moon rose, the two of them would go down to the river and float together, naked. Their heads would be the same height above the water. Doc closed the magazine. He gathered up the beer cans, carried them into the kitchen and threw them on top of the pile of trash overflowing from the can.

☆

The next afternoon he left a note on the refrigerator, securing it with a magnet Bashful had bought, of the Virgin Mary’s stroller with the baby Jesus riding in it. The magnet set included Mary in a nightgown, her hands raised in prayer, with several changes of clothes and accessories including a skateboard, waitress uniform, flowered pants and hippie shirt, a plaid skirt, and roller skates. Right now Mary just had on the nightgown, and was riding the skateboard. Another magnet, of a small Magic 8 Ball, had been stuck over her face. HOUSE MEETING 7 P.M., Doc had written. IMPORTANT!!! PLEASE EVERYONE. I’LL BUY THE BEER. He knew that would ensure that Grumpy and Dopey showed.

Dopey didn’t arrive until 7:30, strolling in with a bag of peanut M & Ms. But at least they were all there, with a couple of six-packs and cigarettes and Nacho Cheese Doritos in a bowl on the table. Doc was drinking his usual, Caffeine Free Diet Coke. Bashful passed around a large order of McDonald’s fries and unwrapped a Big Mac. Crap, Doc thought, watching him eat, but it smelled pretty good, and he couldn’t resist a couple of the fries.

“Why do we need a house meeting?” Grumpy said. “I got things to do.” He hadn’t shaved in a while, and his black beard stubble went halfway down his neck. Not so long ago, Doc remembered, Grumpy used to shave every day, no matter what.

“Oh, I love house meetings,” Happy said. Happy loved nearly everything. He loved communal living, and being a bus boy at Oz. He loved being one of the Chosen who had been selected to wait. He loved the Book and would defend it when anyone criticized it, which seemed to be more and more often lately. Just a couple of days ago, Sleepy, who was taking a community college class, had come home talking nonsense. “It’s like the Bible,” he said. “It’s, like, a metaphor or something. You know the cross? Jesus on the cross? The professor said the cross is really like a pagan fertility symbol.” Sleepy had no idea what a metaphor was, though. When pressed, he couldn’t define symbol, either. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Happy had concluded, and Doc explained to Sleepy that the Book was nothing like the Bible. The Bible was meant for normals, Doc said, but the Book was for dwarves.

 “I called the meeting,” Doc said, “because I’m sick of picking up after all of you. Sleepy cleaned the bathroom and left soap streaks all over the mirror. I can barely see myself in it. And you, Grumpy, you and Dopey—all you do is strew beer cans and cigarette butts and fast food trash from one end of this place to the other. And this morning Bashful put the dishes from the dishwasher back in the cupboards when they hadn’t even been washed yet.”

“Sorry,” Bashful muttered.

“I have to do everything around here,” Doc said.

“Don’t be such a goddamned martyr,” Grumpy said, popping his second bottle of Red Hook.

“You should try pulling your own weight for once,” Doc said. “Don’t think we’re going to carry you forever.”

“Oh, but we love you Grumpy,” Happy said. He put his hand on Grumpy’s shoulder. “You’re the bomb,” Happy said, using an expression he’d picked up from Sneezy.

“Get your paw off me,” Grumpy said. “Freak.”

“Look who’s talking.” Happy had an edge in his voice now. The one thing Happy didn’t love was being a dwarf. At four foot ten, Happy was the closest to normal-sized, and Doc often wondered if Happy stayed, not only because of his dedication to the Book, but because this was the only place he got to be bigger than everyone else.

“I don’t need you freaks,” Grumpy said, giving Happy a shove. They were sitting on the floor, and the shove sent Happy into the coffee table. He banged his head on the corner.

“Look what you did,” Happy said, holding his temple. “I’m bleeding.”

“He’s bleeding,” everyone concurred, in unison. All except Grumpy, who glared defiantly at the circle of dwarves, his arms crossed in front of him.

“Violence can’t be tolerated,” Doc said sternly.

“Oh, yeah? What are you gonna do about it?” Grumpy said. “You and your stupid Book. Nobody believes in that shit but you. They’re all just humoring you, man.”

“You’re lying,” Doc said. He looked around at the others. “He’s lying, right?”

“Yeah, right,” Sneezy said. “We believe.”

 “We believe,” the others said. But it sounded wrong. Doc could hear the doubt in their voices, could see it in the way they shifted their eyes to the floor, hunching their shoulders. Bashful picked up his Big Mac in both hands and chewed, his head down.

“I absolutely, positively, believe,” Sneezy said.

But Sneezy was a kid, Doc thought, who believed in dryads and unicorns, wizards and fairies, in Spiderman and Wolverine and other bullshit superheroes. Sneezy sat rapt in front of the Saturday morning cartoons, saying “Rad” and “Awesome.” Sneezy’s belief was not hard-won.

“Whatever gets you through,” Dopey said, surprising everyone. Dopey never talked at house meetings. “It’s cool,” Dopey said. “She’ll come, dudes.” He lay back against the armrest of the couch and closed his eyes.

“ It’s just—” Bashful said.

“Just what,” Doc said, his voice flat.

“We’re kind of in a rut, I think. Maybe. Or something.” Bashful stared at the hamburger in his hands. A little dribble of pink sauce was falling right onto the table Doc had cleaned.

“You have doubts,” Doc said. “That’s okay, that’s perfectly natural.”

But didn’t Doc have his doubts, too? Didn’t he lie awake at night, listening to the snores of the others, wondering if maybe she wasn’t coming after all; didn’t he try to bury those thoughts, to tell himself to be patient, to withstand the test of these long years? Some nights, when he couldn’t sleep, he would get up and take the Book from the wooden lectern Bashful had built for it, and he would go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet lid and read it again. Once upon a time. She ate the apple, she fell. The dwarves were there, in the story— they took care of her. The Book was a mess of half-pages, missing pages, the story erratic, interrupted. But some things were clear. A few powerful words shone forth, in large letters. There were faded illustrations that had once been bright: a man with an ax. A hand holding a huge, shining red apple. The stepmother and her mirror. But the page that might reveal her, that page was only a scrap, and all it showed was a short puffy white sleeve, and an inch of a pale arm, against which lay a heartbreaking curl of long, blue-black hair. So many mysteries, so many things they might never know. But in the end, on the very last page of the Book, the promise, the words that had given him such hope the first time he read them: They lived happily ever after. She and the dwarves, Doc thought, all of them together. She would come, and see that he had made things ready. She would take the pain that had always been with him, the great ache of loneliness at the center of his life, into her hands, like a trembling bird; she would sing to it, and caress it, and then with one gesture fling it into the sky. A flutter of wings and it would rise away from him forever.

“They don’t buy any of your religious mumbo-jumbo,” Grumpy said. “They’re just too chickenshit to tell you. Well, I’m done, buddy boy. Basta.” He lifted his chin and scratched his stubble, glaring at Doc.

“Grumpy,” Sleepy said. “Don’t go.”

“And my name isn’t Grumpy,” Grumpy said. “It’ s Carlos. I’m a Puerto Rican—” he paused. “—little person,” he said. “I’m sick of all of you with your fake names and voodoo loser fantasies about some chick who ain’t coming. She ain’t coming, man. Get it through your fat heads.”

No one looked at him. Grumpy stood up.

“All right then,” he said. He went to the corner where he kept his sleeping bag, and picked it up. “Adios, you chumps. See you around.”

Doc listened to his boots on the stairs. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It doesn’t matter. She’ll still come.

“A dwarf by any other name—” Happy said.

“Would still be an asshole,” Sleepy said.

“My name used to be Steven,” Sneezy said, and Sleepy told him to shut his fucking piehole.

☆

It was a Friday afternoon in November, full of wind and rain, and everyone who came into Oz shook out their umbrellas and dripped water onto the yellow brick tiles in the foyer, and asked for one of the tables close to the big stone fireplace.

Doc was short-staffed. A waiter was out with the flu, and Bashful had left town on Tuesday to attend an aunt’s funeral. On Thursday, he had called to say he might not be coming back, except to pick up a few of his things.

“Of course you’re coming back,” Doc had said.

“She left me some money,” Bashful said. “Nobody thought she had any, she lived in this crummy little studio apartment and never bought a thing. Turns out she had stocks from my grandfather, and she left it all to me and her cat. I’m the trustee for the cat.”

“You can’t just take off.”

“I want to live here for a while. See how things go. I’m sorry, Doc. This just seems like the right thing for me now.”

A couple of men came into the restaurant, dressed in matching red parkas, their arms around each other. The first man’s hair was blond and combed back off a perfectly proportioned face; the other man had a square jaw, outlined by a thin black beard, and when he shucked his parka Doc saw his chest and biceps outlined in a tight thermal shirt.

“Nasty weather out there,” Doc said. He stepped down from his stool behind the podium to lead them to a table near the fireplace. He heard one man whisper something to the other, and the second’s “Shh, he’ll hear you.” He was used to comments. On the street, teenagers yelled to him from passing cars. People stared, or else tried not to, averting their eyes and then casting furtive glances in his direction. Children walked right up to him, fascinated that he was their size, but different. He’d learned to block it out. But when the men were seated he walked away from them, feeling a sudden, overwhelming rage.

Things were falling apart at home. At night he would sit on the couch, the Book on his lap, and read a few sentences aloud. In the old days, everyone would gather around, relaxing with cigarettes and beers, and maybe some dessert they’d brought back from the restaurant. But now they drifted away. To the kitchen, or up to the loft to turn on the TV and watch some inane show he could hear as he tried to focus on the words in the Book, the all-important words that were going to change their lives. That had changed Doc’s life, given him hope. But now that hope was being drained away. One by one they were going to leave him. And she would never come, not to a lone dwarf. An old, balding dwarf whose feet and back hurt him every night so that he had to soak in a hot bath for some relief. She wouldn’t take his gnarled, aching feet in her hands and massage them. In the black nights when he lay awake and empty, she wouldn’t lay her long white body, smelling of apples, on top of his.

As the evening went on he forced himself to greet customers pleasantly, not to yell at Sleepy when he dropped a bus tray, or at Happy when he mixed up orders—Happy was usually a dishwasher, but he was filling in tonight for the absent waiter. Doc focused on keeping everything running smoothly, not letting it get chaotic. He let a German woman pull him onto her lap so her friends could take a picture with their cell phone, beaming the image to other friends in Stuttgart. He sang “Happy Birthday” with the other dwarves and handed a giant lollipop to a girl with a magenta buzz cut and several facial piercings, while her parents sat there with strained smiles on their faces, obviously uncomfortable that they found themselves with such a weird-looking daughter and were now confronted with several pseudo-Munchkins in striped tights. By closing time he wanted to hit something. He took his time totaling up the evening’s receipts, to give everyone time to finish up in the kitchen and leave him alone. Finally Sleepy, Happy, and Sneezy were finished and hovering around the office door.

“ Just go,” Doc said.

“What’s the matter?” Happy said. “Is it me? I did my best. It’s hard being a waiter. I never realized it was so hard, keeping everything straight.”

“You did fine,” Doc said.

“Do you really think so?” Happy looked thrilled.

“We’ll wait for you,” Sleepy said. “We can all share a cab.”

“You guys go,” Doc said.

“Cool, a cab,” Sneezy said. “Here’s something weird,” he said. “Whenever I get in somebody’s car, I make sure to buckle up. But in a cab, I never put on a seat belt. Isn’t that weird?”

“You should,” Doc said. He wanted to slap them. “Go,” he said. “Just get the fuck out of here and leave me alone.”

Sneezy and Happy stared. Sleepy pulled them each by a jacket sleeve. “Sure, man,” Sleepy said. “No problem. You want to be alone, we’ll leave you alone.”

Finally they were gone. “Over the Rainbow” was playing softly on the stereo. Judy Garland’s voice usually soothed him, but now Doc felt mocked by the promise in the song, the sappy land where dreams came true, the bluebirds and the bright colors everywhere, troubles melting away.

He locked the zippered bag of credit card slips and money into the safe. He switched off the stereo and straightened the stack of CD’s beside it, then turned off the last of the lights. The alarm code had to be set by punching numbers into a keypad by the door that led from the kitchen to the alley; he was about to set it, but stopped. He walked back through the dark kitchen, out the swinging doors into the restaurant and behind the bar, and took a bottle of Johnny Walker and a rocks glass.

☆

At four a.m. the streets in this part of the city looked like a movie set about to be struck. The storefront businesses had mostly failed. Lights shone in the tall office buildings, where janitors were emptying wastebaskets and running vacuum cleaners. Doc knew what that was like; he’d done it, years ago, a flask in his back pocket that he’d drink from through the night, working under the fluorescent glare while everyone else slept. At dawn he’d be ready to pass out, and would reel off to find a hospitable bench or doorway. He’d forgotten the feeling of drunkenness, the happy, buzzy glow, how the world shifted pleasantly out of focus and retreated to a manageable distance. He staggered in the direction of the loft, clutching the bottle to his coat, hardly feeling the rain that was still falling, though not with its earlier force. Now it was soft, almost a mist, cold kisses on the top of his bare head, a damp chill coming up through his shoes.

He sang “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Swanee River.” He stopped in the middle of the street and looked around to see if anyone had heard him, but there was no one. A cat slid away, around the corner of a building, pale against the dark bricks. He was breathing kind of hard, he realized. He stopped to rest in a small park, a square of grass with a single wrought-iron bench, a narrow border of dirt—mud, now—where there were white flowers in spring. He remembered the flowers, and looked sadly at the wet soil. No flowers. There would never be flowers again. It was never going to stop raining. The rain would wash away the soil, and the park, and himself; he would float down the river of rain, endlessly, until he sank beneath the surface of the water, down to the bottom like a rock, dead and inert, and finally at peace. He looked for his glass, to pour himself more liquor, but he had lost it somewhere. He had a vague memory of seeing it smash against bricks, the pieces, glittering like the rain, lying under a streetlight. He took a pull from the bottle and slumped against the freezing iron of the bench.

His dreams were confused: having his picture taken with tourists at the restaurant, only the restaurant was really an office building and their meals were being served on desks, and water was seeping through the carpet and he was down on his knees trying to find where it was coming from. When he woke he was lying on the wet grass, under a dripping tree. The rain had let up. It was getting light; the air was slate-colored. He was still slightly drunk, and could feel underneath the cushion of alcohol the hard, unyielding bedrock of a massive hangover. He got up and walked over to the bench, where the bottle was lying tucked under a newspaper like a tiny version of a homeless man. He picked up both and laid them gently in the wire trash receptacle next to the bench.

On the way home he passed a few actual homeless people, still asleep in doorways. He peered at each of them, but none of them was Grumpy. It had been nearly a month since he’d left, and no one had seen him. There was one dog, black and scrawny, that raised its head as Doc passed and then settled, sighing, next to its master.

He let himself into the building and trudged upstairs, stopping on each landing to catch his breath and stop the grinding in his head. He opened the door to the loft quietly, in case anyone was up. But it was too early. He could hear the steady snores of Happy and Sleepy, and Sneezy’s asthmatic breathing. Dopey slept alone in the double bed, angled across it, one arm dangling out from the covers. Beside the bed were an overflowing ashtray, a box of wooden matches, and a litter of pistachio shells. Doc knelt down and scooped up the shells and threw them away in the kitchen. He went back and got the ashtray and matches, emptied the ashtray, put the box of matches on the shelf where they belonged. He rinsed a few dishes that were in the sink and set them in the dishwasher, then tidied up the counter—someone had apparently consumed a late-night snack of cereal and pretzels.

Someone had also brought home flowers. There were irises in a vase—a vase stolen from the restaurant, Doc noted—set on a cleared section of the counter. Around the main room were stalks of star lilies in quart beer bottles. On the coffee table, which had been cleaned off, was a Pyrex bowl of fruit—oranges and grapefruits and apples and a bunch of bananas—flanked by two candles that had burned down to stumps. Also on the table was a homemade card, featuring a drawing that looked like Sneezy’s work. It was a pretty good likeness of Doc, and on the inside, in Happy’s loopy script, We Love You Doc was written in blue across the yellow construction paper.

Doc took an apple and went to the row of windows. A few cars crawled by below, the first trickle of morning commuters, their headlights still on. Clouds hung over the city, gray and pearl smudges above gray buildings. There wasn’t any glorious shaft of sunlight breaking through to set the thousands of windows glittering, or any rainbow arcing over the dense trees of the park at the far end of the city. There was no black-haired goddess, eyes dark and full of love, floating toward him. He polished the apple on his shirt. His was a small life. His head was barely higher than the window sill, but he could see that out there, in the big world, there was nothing anymore to wish for.