The Quick-Change Artist: Stories

Sailor's Valentine

Sailor’s Valentine Let us begin with two islands called Male Island and Female Island. —Marco Polo, The Travels BOB WILLIAMS, DRUNK for seven years, surprised his wife by sobering up and opening a candy store in an abandoned boxcar that had sat for years beside the railroad tracks. He got the proper licenses, cleaned the place up, and made all the candy himself, old-fashioned sweets such as fondant, pralines , toffee, butter creams, and maple fudge. He was handsome again, Brandy saw, for he had shed his gut. His black hair grew in a shock past his ears. Nine years they’d been married, and now Bob was thirty-six and Brandy twenty-six, still her same small-boned, nut-blonde self, still barren. Her parents had died of pneumonia the year before, not in the winter but in the spring, within a week of each other, leaving the blue house that Brandy and Bob had shared with them not just to Brandy, but to Bob, too. That surprised her; she hadn’t thought they liked him.  The blue house sat right beside the railroad tracks, close enough to the boxcar that Brandy could see Bob’s every move through its long open sliding doors. She watched him at night when he worked in the glow of yellow light, stirring vats of chocolate and rolling out almond paste on a marbletop table. For two years now, even before her parents died, she and Bob had slept in separate rooms—hers the one they used to share, the room she’d had as a child and all her life, and Bob in the downstairs den that Brandy’s father had kept as an office and had yielded to his son-in-law. The den contained a sofa and a cot, but Bob slept on the floor. Once or twice, Brandy had tiptoed to the threshold and found him stretched out on his back, sound asleep, dressed in the clothes he had worn all day. He had slept so much from the drinking, all the early years of their marriage, that he looked young and fine and rested. Now he kept long hours at the candy store, and he was so happy he sang, which she had never known him to do. He sang the old songs that he had learned as a child in the elementary school they’d both attended, only he’d gone there ten years earlier than Brandy. He sang “Supper on the Grass” and “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie” and “John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith,” which got on her nerves so bad she finally went out to the boxcar and asked him to stop. It was early morning. In her nightgown and bathrobe, she climbed up the steps, stuck her head in, and saw him pressing pecans into a pan of fudge, licking a big wooden spoon. “Breakfast,” he said. “You woke me up,” she said. “It’s time you got up anyway,” he said. “I wish you’d help me, Brandy. Make the candy and sell it with me.”  The Quick-Change Artist She had held two jobs for a long, long time, while Bob was too drunk to complete the house painting he’d contracted for, and now the habit of work was as strong in her as her love for Bob had been when she was sixteen and wild for him. “How do I know this will last?” she asked him, in the dim morning cool of the boxcar while a mockingbird trilled outside . “This store might fold. You might start drinking again. Why did you stop, Bob? What turned you off from it?” “I had enough,” he said. He put the fudge away to cool. “Do you want me to start again?” “I never knew you had so much willpower,” she said, but she didn’t mean it as a compliment. She felt instead that he was keeping secrets from her, that before her very eyes he had changed into somebody else, while she was still stuck in her barren body, living in the room she’d had as a child. Bob said, “Some people count the days they’ve been sober. I don’t. It just doesn’t attract me anymore. I can even cook with it and not want any.” “Well, stop singing that damn song. You know the one I mean,” Brandy said, and stumped away from him...