"Powdered Sugar" by Isabel Wolfe-Frischman
Prose
“Serrated knives, with their scalloped, toothlike edge, are ideal for cutting through foods with a hard exterior and softer interior, such as a loaf of crusty bread. The principle behind a serrated knife is similar to that of a saw: The teeth of the blade catch and then rip as the knife smoothly slides through the food.” – The Internet
At dawn on January 28, 1986, when the AIDs virus was raging, Doug pulled himself up in front of his second-hand Motorola black-and-white TV. He adjusted the angle of the rabbit-ear antennae, sculpting triangles of aluminum foil to the tips. For a good five minutes there were only buzzing grey dots, but Doug didn’t panic, because he had turned the set on just before seven, and the launch wasn’t scheduled for at least another three hours—he knew the picture would clear in time. Yesterday after work Doug had bought a dozen of his favorite ShopRite powdered sugar doughnuts and, with some restraint, had eaten only one. Now he placed the doughnuts and an extra-sweet cup of instant Folgers—The Best Part of Wakin’ Up—on a TV tray and settled in for the watch, flipping back and forth between channels, looking for
Challenger-related coverage, getting stuck for a minute on The Twenty-five Thousand Dollar Pyramid, and then stopping at CNN, the only place he knew he could see the actual event.
Looking at the sweet white doughnuts, smelling the coffee, and anticipating the liftoff made him tingle.
Doug had wanted to be an astronaut: to leave the earth, to explore space, to fly close to the stars. He thought he needed to go into the military first, but they wouldn’t have him—after his interview they told him his rejection had to do with color blindness. Doug had responded to a veiled question about homosexuality with a vehement denial. His mother called him a sissy.
He wished she could see him, now, at thirty, in his new life, his blonde hair cut stylishly, showcasing what she had called his finely-chiseled features. He was, he thought, a man about
town, even if it was a different kind of man than she might have hoped. Doug had plans to go back to school to study rocket science, although he wasn’t unhappy working office temp jobs for Manpower, as a stopgap. He had his own apartment in New Jersey, in Elizabeth, and a whole new life, a good life, in its own boyfriend-less way.
And Mama, a civilian, Christa McAuliffe, is going into space! A school teacher, like you—she’s from New Hampshire, like us. It’s gonna be so cool.
Rest in peace, Mama.
For nearly twenty minutes after witnessing the space shuttle catastrophe, Doug gaped at the TV, barely able to focus enough to hear words and mostly just following the broadcasters’
moving mouths. When he finally mustered the energy to move, he cut Christa McAuliffe’s photo from the newspaper and taped it to the wall. A tear came, then another, until he nearly sobbed.
Time had become warped—it sped up and slowed down as if it were an accordion played by someone with an other-worldly sense of rhythm. At noon, when the hands of his Swatch met at the number twelve, Doug, having scrubbed the kitchen floor until his knuckles stiffened, lit a martyred saint candle and a stick of patchouli incense and arranged them under Christa’s taped-
up likeness, creating an altar to honor someone who was, he thought, now a martyred saint
herself. He put a cassette into the tape player and set up an endless loop of Windham Hill instrumentals—the effect was calming, despite his quick thought that he would always associate this music with The Day the Space Shuttle Exploded. Like that song about the music dying, only it was astronauts.
Doug looked around his head-of-a-pin-sized apartment—he often said there was no room for angels to dance on that particular pinhead. He liked the place, though, despite its size. The bed was in the living room, for god’s sake. He lay down and tried to take a nap, to shut out the image of the fireball that had been the Challenger, but images of his mother’s death the previous year after being pulled from a flaming house mingled with the television footage that re-ran in its own special endless loop in his brain. Unwelcome thoughts appeared. How he might have prevented the New Hampshire fire had he been there, the horror of his visit to the burn ward, and his guilt at having left before she died, fought with his memories of his mother’s homophobia. But how she would have loved Christa McAuliffe.
He gave up on rest, got up and dusted the bookshelf and the kitchen counter—more than once, imagining dust that wasn’t there. He cut the doughnuts into quarters with a serrated knife and ate them from a plate, with a fork, instead of right from the box, to keep himself from eating
too many. He ate most of them anyway, abandoning the fork, and drank more coffee. He puttered around until two o’clock, two hours that dragged like time did twenty years ago, when he was in sixth grade. (When Doug was little the kids down the street had a secret passage-way they called the Dougie Escape. Sometimes the Fairy Escape. Sixth grade was torture.)
He thought of calling someone; he didn’t know who. He thought of going out; twice he
put on his vintage US-Navy-issue peacoat and his blue knit fisher cap, only to twice take them off and lie down on the bed. Where would he go? It was too early to go to the bars. Everyone he knew was at work. Doug had called in sick that Tuesday, actually hearing the bogus guy who answered the phone at his temp gig say to the boss, “Hey, Doug is sick, maybe he has AIDS.”
Doug spent the rest of that Tuesday straightening stacks of GQ’s and Scientific Americans, pacing back and forth, lying down, getting up, turning the TV on and off, feeling hollow around his heart. Sometime late in the afternoon, he pulled a couple of pieces of ham from a package in the fridge and ate them with a few stale Saltines, barely registering their tastes or textures. He looked for something mindless on television, but the Challenger coverage was ubiquitous, at least for Doug—it was a black hole; he couldn’t escape. He tried to fool himself into not caring—this was not his life; it didn’t affect him. But he was wholly sucked into the repeated horror of the Challenger transforming into that flame-ball, over and over. The kids saw that, the students in New Hampshire, Doug thought. He tried to forget the live camera footage of
McAuliffe’s parents’ faces as they witnessed the spacecraft blowing up, with their daughter inside.
Drained, exhausted, he undressed and went to bed at nine p.m.; he slept for an hour, until ten, and woke up. For perhaps three seconds he experienced the terror of not knowing where he was. At second four, terror crossed a border into the deep sadness he had been feeling all day. He lay there, partially immobilized, twisting and untwisting the sweaty covers. He had dreamed of conflagration; he had dreamed of falling, of drowning or being suffocated in a small capsule under the sea. At two-thirty a.m., he jolted upright, after dreaming of his burned mother.
Doug’s body felt heavy—I wish I could move, he thought, before surprising himself by
awakening again, and realizing he had still been asleep, had had a dream within a dream. Awake but almost sleepwalking, he got out of bed and began getting dressed. As he put on his lavender silk shirt and matching cashmere scarf and his Jordache jeans, he felt something like hope, as if it were indeed possible to survive the tragedies of the world—as if he and the space program and the cosmos had some promise of a decent future. He was moving, he was taking action, he was going out. Dousing his wrists and neck with Brut, he looked in the mirror, seeing eyes slightly puffy from the morning’s cry. He used a touch of concealer, then took out a lipstick and put a dot on each cheekbone, blending and patting till he had the right amount of blush. He ran his hands up and down his torso and was pleased to find no evidence of flab. He put on the peacoat and wool hat and descended ten steps to the parking garage to retrieve his grape-colored VW bug with its NASA bumper sticker from space number four. He got in, turned the key, and
drove through the Holland Tunnel and into the city, alternately buoyed with optimism and plunging back into despair.
It was three forty-five in the morning when he got to the lower west side, to what he thought of as his own private after-hours joint, next to the 10th Avenue Piers—a bar with no name, which the patrons liked to call The Pickup Truck. The place, the size of a high school
classroom, was a room in the basement of an old, unused warehouse; it sported a few cheap mirrors, a silent, out-of-order jukebox, an old mahogany bar, and black tables with candles in round, white-netted red glass containers, most of them unlit. When Doug walked in, looking for diversion, for a crumb of company, for perhaps more than that, the place was quiet, dark, like the
bottom of the ocean where Christa and her fellow astronauts probably lay. There were no patrons
but a couple of shadow-faced men, one gaunt as hell, close to the end of his virus days, sitting at a table near the bathroom. Doug saw the two men covered in seaweed. Blinked. They were human, alive; but now he saw that they were both sick. Doug shuddered, reflexively patted the condom in his pocket. He wondered if it was past its expiration date.
Looking past the pale, skinny men to the bartender, Doug tried a saunter, ended up doing something more like a shuffle.
“Douglas,” said Rory. “The usual?”
Doug nodded. He took off his peacoat, draped it over the tall bar chair, and sat.
Rory made Doug a White Russian.
“Some shit,” said Doug.
Rory’s right eyebrow lifted.
“The Space Shuttle.”
A grunt from Rory.
“You know that teacher’s class was watching,” said Doug.
Rory said nothing.
“My mother was a teacher,” Doug said.
Rory raised a finger in a hold-that-thought gesture and went to deliver a Cuba Libre to a newly arrived customer at the other end of the bar.
Am I the only one who cares about the dead astronauts? Doug thought. He fiddled with his bar napkin, tore holes in it, slurped his creamy drink. The bartender returned to Doug’s end of the bar. “Sorry. You were saying?”
“The space shuttle,” Doug said. It was a relief to talk about it.
“Oh yeah, I heard something about that,” Rory said. “I don’t really follow that stuff.”
Doug opened his mouth to speak—one of those milk strings connected his upper and lower lips—but no words came. His face twitched. He thought randomly of his mother’s homemade drapes. Don’t throw them away, she had said, when she was struggling for breath in
the burn ward, they’re so well-made. You’ll want to keep them. He felt guilty when he tossed their burned remnants into his building’s incinerator, and he could not forget the sound he heard when he closed the door and the heavy old fabric burst into flames.
Doug took a long breath before he said, “I mean, it blew up. It—”
Rory’s pocked face looked blank, lipless. “Terrible,” he said, before he bent down to wash some glasses.
Doug sighed. He took another look around the place, his hangout, his refuge. Shouldn’t have come, Doug thought. Why the hell am I here? But buried, not too far beneath his distress, was an answer to that question.
“Hey Rory,” Doug said, “Have you seen the guy I was hanging out with the other night?”
“Which one?” Rory asked.
Doug ignored what sounded like sarcasm. “The tight jeans.”
“Like I said.” Rory turned and put a stray bottle of Bacardi on a shelf of the backbar. Over his shoulder he said, “Don’t think so.”
Doug took a few sips of his drink. He frowned, decided to go home. As he stood up, the front door opened, and along with a frigid blast of air came The Guy. One of the customers next to the bathroom struck a match, lit a cigarette.
The guy looked to measure about five foot six, about three inches shorter than Doug, but
short wasn’t how Doug thought of him. Compact, tight, well proportioned. Not short. He wore a studded black leather jacket and no hat, his dark hair just covering the top part of his ears. Below the left ear there was a tattoo of a dagger. Doug fantasized about more tattoos, more daggers, about their locations. In the guy’s right ear lobe a rhinestone skull glinted—Doug wanted to lick that skeleton’s head like one of those sugar ones for the Mexican Day of the Dead. There was an empty, naked piercing in the left lobe.
Doug knew this man’s name; even sleep-deprived and with a head full of Challenger, Doug remembered that name. My name is Trevor, he had said. People call me Traz. When Doug said nothing, Traz had pinched his waist and called him creampuff. He laughed, and said, Like
Alcatraz, Creampuff. Now he watched Traz laser his eyes at the men in the corner and lower his lids like a B-movie coquette. One of the men seemed to want to take the bait; Doug could practically see him salivate. The other man’s hand shot out and covered the salivator’s. But then Traz’s face darkened, and he drifted toward Doug and sat down next to him, legs open in a macho vee.
“Dude,” said Doug, using a word he never used, a word he thought might somehow be right to say to a guy who looked like he should be the lead in a film noir.
What was it Doug had heard the guy say last week? I’m not from anywhere special. Maybe I’m a vampire. Doug had listened as Traz told him about the kid he knew, when he was
a kid himself, who threw lit firecrackers at lizards, lizards that would react by flipping over and exposing their soft, white bellies, right before they burst apart. That same kid, he said, used to pierce live butterflies through the torso with sharp needles and light their dying wings on fire.
Now Traz smiled a half-smile at Doug. “Hey man.” He jerked his head toward the couple
at the table. “You’re not like them, are you?”
Doug knew he didn’t mean gay—the guy obviously knew where he was. He must have meant the AIDS. Doug shook his head no.
At that moment, Rory dropped a wine glass onto the hard wood of the bar. It shattered into pieces, one of which hit Traz’s face, causing a pinprick of ruby teardrop to bleed down his cheek. Traz wiped the blood away with a cocktail napkin, held up his hand and said, “Gimme a Heineken.” After a moment he added, “And whatever this good-looking dude is drinking.”
Doug thought perhaps his luck was changing. “I’ll have a Heineken, too,” he said to the bartender. He turned to Traz to thank him, wondering if his urge to talk about the Challenger might be met with some kind of sympathy. But before he could speak, he felt Traz’s hand on his crotch.
“Oh my Lord,” Doug moaned. He leaned over to Traz “Where can we go?” he said.
“Hey man,” Traz said, “Want one of these?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, looking around him with a kind of humble pride as he accepted the Quaalude. He washed it down with what was left of his White Russian.
“Aren’t you going to have one?” Doug asked.
“Later, dude.”
“Oh my god, where can we go?”
Traz again gifted Doug with the lopsided smile. Rory put the beers down in front of them.
“Finish your drink,” Traz said.
Doug guzzled his Heineken and reached back for his coat.
“Guy, you drank that pretty fast,” Traz said. He left three-quarters of his own bottle on
the bar.
“I’m all right,” Doug said. “I have a cast iron stomach.”
He sucked in his abs, feeling pretty buzzed, brushed aside Traz’s shiny black hair, and whispered into the ear with the skull. “How about my place?”
It was cold out, windy, as they left the Pickup Truck, and there was ice on the ground and about an inch of dirty snow. Doug wrapped his scarf close around his neck. The sky was beginning to grow light, illuminating his purple car just half a block away—he had found a decent parking space in the dark early-morning hours. He pulled his keys from the pocket of the
pea coat, dropped them, picked them up from the gutter, and fumbled with the lock before he could open the car door.
“Would you like to drive my car?” Doug asked. “Will you? I mean I’m kind of — ”
“Don’t know how,” Traz said. “Just watch the fucking road.” The half-smile appeared.
The tunnel was so bright, each lamp exploding with light, that Doug’s skin prickled. “What’s with the lamps?” he asked Traz, panic in his voice.
“Downers and alcohol, buddy,” Traz said.
“But they look like—they look like—did you see the space shuttle blow up this morning?”
The car swerved.
“Fuck, man, watch the fucking road. Didn’t I already say that? Where the fuck did you learn to drive?” No smile. The blood from the cut on Traz’s cheek had congealed.
Doug emitted a nervous laugh, squinted against the glare, closed an eye against the
doubling of the car ahead of him, against the glare of the lights; he gripped the steering wheel. “In answer to your question,” he said, “my mom taught me to drive. She died in a fire.” True confession time, Doug thought. I’m an idiot.
The car swerved a second time. Doug turned the wheel too fast, almost ramming them into the guard rail, but his instincts kicked in and he steered them back into the lane.
“It’s those lights,” Doug began. “They—"
“Just drive the car, man. Enough about your mom or that rocket ship or whatever.”
Doug concentrated on the blacktop in front of him and didn’t talk for the rest of the way. He was thankful there weren’t too many other cars on the road. When they reached Jersey City, and there were only about fifteen more minutes left in the drive to Elizabeth, Doug’s focus broke and the car drifted out of the lane again; again his adrenalin kicked in to keep the car on the road, taking the top edge off his high. At a stoplight near his building, Doug turned to the passenger seat and was momentarily startled, then excited, by Traz’s presence.
At last, they entered the parking garage, and Doug parked in his white-lined space. He felt so exhausted and drained by the day and the lack of sleep that he put his head down on the wheel, setting off the horn. It was six a.m.
“Jesus,” Traz said. “You’ll wake up the whole building.”
Doug lifted his head to see Traz opening the passenger door and getting out of the car. A chilling draft blew through the garage as Doug climbed up from his bucket seat, and before he could say anything, he felt Traz’s arms around him, pulling him close, squeezing stiffly, as if he didn’t quite know the mechanics of hugging. Nonetheless, Doug felt pinpricks of joy. The reliving of 11:38 a.m., January 28th, and all that went with it, took a break.
Doug’s crotch tingled. “Let’s get upstairs,” he said.
Traz released Doug; they climbed the ten steps, and Doug unlocked the door.
“Is this your place?” Traz asked.
Doug didn’t make the angels joke.
“Yes,” he said. The apartment was overly warm, stuffy, heavy with smells of patchouli, stale cologne, candle wax, and the sulfur of a wick trying to snuff itself out. The New Age tape was still playing, and the dead astronaut was hanging on the wall, but barely, as one of the pieces
of tape had unstuck, and the clipping flopped. Doug was relieved that Traz seemed to take no notice of—the word pathetic came into his head—his pathetic little wannabe shrine.
Doug felt awkward, alien, as if he didn’t belong in his own apartment. He was glad he had cleaned the place, that he had made the bed. “Would you like a beverage?” he asked. Beverage. I sound like someone’s mother.
The doughnut box was on the kitchen counter, open. Crumbs and sugar covered the fork and the plate and the serrated knife in the sink. Doug watched a solitary ant carry a piece of doughnut away from the wet drain-hole, perhaps to an invisible ant feast, maybe an ant orgy. There was one hard, crusty piece of doughnut remaining in the box, pitiful remnants of gluttony.
Traz ignored the beverage question and grabbed the knife from the sink, skewered the bit of cake with it. “Feed it to me,” he said, thrusting the knife and doughnut toward Doug.
After removing the piece of doughnut, Doug tossed the knife back into the sink and took a step toward Traz, making thumbprints in the white powdered sugar as he tried to conceal
toothmarks from yesterday’s doughnut-fest. He lifted the pastry to the man’s thin lips, nudging his
mouth open with sugar-fingers. A few seconds later Doug stuck his tongue down Traz’s throat and said a quick prayer to the gods who had made a spacecraft blow up and a beautiful, mysterious man appear in his life. He stepped back from Traz and said, “The bed’s right here.”
“I see that,” Traz said. “You don’t have any blow, do you?”
“That would be so cool,” said Doug.
“That’s a no?”
Doug shook his head, took a long stride, and opened a kitchen cabinet. He reached up to the top shelf and pulled down a huge bag of M&M’S. Dropped it. The bag burst open and several of the candies clattered to the floor.
Doug laughed, and then saw the expression on Traz’s face. It was nothing like the crooked smile. It was the expression from the tunnel: Just drive the fucking car.
“You gonna clean that up?” Traz whispered. “Gay boy?”
Goose bumps sprang from Doug’s skin. He gagged a taste of vomit, knelt down, scooped up the candies and stuffed them into the bag, which he placed on the table under the picture of Christa McAuliffe. He could see half of her face, one eye shining with whatever she felt when she sat for her NASA portrait. Pride, joy, excitement? Fear?
“Take your clothes off,” Traz said. “Creampuff.”
Traz’s face was a void. Doug complied, getting his foot caught in the right leg of his jeans for a second. The shoes came off with the pants in one big tangle. Doug unbuttoned his shirt slowly, took it off, and stood before his conquistador—another word that popped unbidden into his head—in only his jockey briefs and his lavender scarf. He no longer felt buzzed.
Traz touched the cashmere scarf. “Feels like butterfly wings,” he said.
Doug didn’t speak. Butterfly wings? he thought, as Traz unwound the scarf from Doug’s neck. It was a gentle motion, as if a bandage was being removed from a sensitive wound—but then he didn’t remove it. He reversed direction. Once, twice, a few times. The scarf became tighter. Then looser, tighter, looser.
“Hey,” Traz said. “What’s this shit?” He had picked up Doug’s lipstick.
“L’Oreal,” Doug mumbled. “True Red. Hydrating Satin.” When Traz said nothing, Doug searched for a word. “It’s scrumptious,” he said.
“Scrumptious,” Traz repeated, the word vocalized in a flat, neutral tone, as if he were in a spelling bee. Scrumptious. S-C-R-U-M-P-T-I-O-U-S. Doug watched him pull the top off of the tube and twist the lipstick up a quarter of an inch, exposing the red tip. Traz’s hand floated toward him, and Doug smelled the waxy, fruity scent, felt the round, rolling cylinder greasing his lips.
Traz pointed to the bed. “Lay down on your belly,” he said.
Doug obeyed and almost immediately felt Traz’s weight on top of him, pinning him, and felt the lipstick moving up and down his spine. Doug closed his eyes and touched himself as he felt the slippery lipstick tickling his back, until there was no lipstick, just the metal tube, which bore down harder and harder. And then it was nearly unbearable. He tried to say you’re hurting me, but all that came out was a moan, an mmm sound. He opened his right eye when the weight on top of him shifted. Before Doug could react Traz had sprung up and fished the serrated kitchen knife from the sink, the doughnut knife, and climbed back on top of him. Doug saw sugar remaining on the knife’s blade. Was it strange that he wanted to lick it?
“Gimme some,” he said, not sure if he was actually speaking. Not sure if he wanted
Wolfe-Frischman / 15 / Sugar
sugar, or sex, or the astronauts or his mother alive.
“You like this, AIDS boy?” Traz asked.
Doug felt the scarf tighten around his neck.
NO! I don’t like this. I don’t like this game anymore, he wanted to say. AIDS boy? But he could not speak, he could not breathe. He felt the knife scraping his back, following the north-south direction, the lipstick map down his spine. He inhaled the scent of the dying candle and thought of a small boy burning butterflies. He heard a ripping, a tearing, and he felt on fire with pain.
I wish I could move, he thought.
Doug watched as the Challenger was pulled from the ocean, as Christa McAuliffe rose from the sea and came to him in his room. She took his hand, and Doug, shivering with cold, felt her lift him aboard the spacecraft.
From Isabel Wolfe-Frischman: “My short stories and personal essays have appeared in Fugue Journal, Streetlight Magazine, and others. I was long-listed for the flash fiction contest at Dillydoun Review and short-listed for Five South’s flash fiction contest and for the Bridport Prize in fiction. My story “Powdered Sugar,” won Descant’s Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.”