The New Tattoo

Milk, eggs, cigarettes, the paper. As Frank Robins enters the Micro Mart, he nearly stumbles over Alice Kibbert, who is squatted near the door, putting together the sections of the Sunday New York Times. He stands over her, panting, sweating lightly, as she collates the different piles of newsprint, the "Arts and Leisure" section, "Book Review," "The Week in Review," and so on. Alice looks up at him sullenly, and Frank smiles at her. She thumps a completed Times down at his feet. Frank picks up the paper and moves on to the dairy case.

Frank has seen something so startling, the image is still vivid to him as he opens the refrigerated case and takes out a dozen eggs. The girl has a tattoo, a large, scarlet heart, on her left forearm. He isn't sure whether it's a real tattoo or a temporary appliqué. It looks like wet paint.

Alice has noticed these things about Frank: He's about 30, trim medium build, a jogger, probably; that's why he came busting through the door like that. He's wearing white tennis shoes, gym shorts and a T-shirt that reads: Eros Loves Psyche.

She sees the words plainly enough but doesn't know what they signify. Some fruity nonsense or other. He has a broken nose and short brown curly hair. Jewish or maybe Protestant--most people in this neighborhood are Italian. Alice is of Irish and German descent, though she is only vaguely aware that she has any heritage at all. She likes to notice things about customers, because it's something to do. When no one is in the store, Alice can be content standing by the cash register, staring at the far wall.

Frank is a lapsed Presbyterian of Scotch-Irish descent. He is married and has no children. He and Natalie are trying, though, and tomorrow the doctor will phone with the result of the lab test. It will be positive. Frank works as an admissions officer at Yale. He broke his nose playing second-string halfback at Brown. He has had sinus trouble ever since.

The Micro Mart has a seedy, sleazy look to it, like the kind of place that gets held up all the time. An accordionwork of steel bars the windows after closing time. The store carries no fresh fruit, meat or vegetables but has one brand of most things you might need on short notice--light bulbs, orange juice, roach spray--and it's open till late, seven nights a week.

Frank moves down the aisle and picks up a half gallon of milk. The Micro Mart carries only its own brand, Micro Mart Farms, which sells for several cents less than major brands of milk. Frank knows enough to know there is no farm. Micro Mart Farms is an industry, with plants in New Jersey and Massachusetts. They buy raw milk by the tank-truck load, pasteurize and package it, and make their own brands of sour cream, yogurt, cottage cheese and ice cream.

What Frank does not know is that Micro Marts, Inc., which includes 168 stores in five Northeastern states, the two dairy-products plants and a fleet of refrigerated trucks, is owned by one Jason Hivarios, of Greek descent, religion Orthodox, who built up the business from a mom-and-pop store founded by his mother and father in 1923, in Rutgers, New Jersey. Micro Marts went public in the Sixties, but the Hivarios family still holds controlling interest. Jason Hivarios owns homes--estates, actually--in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Westhampton, Long Island. It is his dream, next summer or the next, to sail his sloop across the Atlantic, through the Straits of Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean to the ancestral islands of Greece. In fact, he will do just that, three summers hence, but will get such a bad scare during a storm in the Aegean that he will sell the boat to a rich American expatriate living on Lesbos, will fly home to the States and never seriously set sail again. Although Jason Hivarios never graduated from high school, his daughter Melina is, at the moment Frank reaches for the carton of milk, a sophomore at Vassar College.

The churches have not let out yet and there are few customers in the store. Frank often runs into people he knows in the Micro Mart, but he prefers not to. Sunday is his and Natalie's day together, reading the Times, taking leisurely walks. It has been part of the Sunday ritual that Frank bring home a couple of Danish pastries, for the sake of Natalie's sweet tooth. Frank does not approve of sweets, does not care for them, and today he is putting his foot down. When he gets home, they will have a real brunch, which he will prepare. Natalie still bakes a cake now and then, but he hopes that, if and when she turns up pregnant, she will give up sweets entirely, for the sake of the baby.

On his way to the Micro Mart, Frank jogged past a Presbyterian church and heard the strains of a Scottish hymn that evoked for him memories of childhood, sitting in spare wooden pews, the stained glass glowing softly, dark velvet padding the bowl of the collection plate. Frank had never chafed at being taken to church, but once he was grown, he decided, quite rationally, to quit attending, because he couldn't believe certain basic, supernatural premises of Christianity. Of course, he reasoned, the whole notion still has efficacy as a metaphor.

Frank has begun thinking about the church lately, not because faith is rekindling in his heart but because if they should have a baby, he doesn't want the child to grow up as a heathen, ignorant of the tradition into which it was born. Church will expose the child to a wealth of music and literature, and it has an ethical system, that's important; it has its own internal logic, even if, personally, Frank cannot agree with its conclusions. Everyone needs a foundation, and you can't just make one up from scratch. When they got married, Natalie had wanted them to compose their own vows, with Bach played on a cello and perhaps a friend on guitar singing a contemporary love song. But Frank had insisted on a traditional ceremony with the traditional words spoken and Mendelssohn played on the organ.

Although lapsed from the Calvinist faith, Frank still believes that, by and large, virtue is rewarded on earth. He knows that it's more complicated than that. Frank's father owned a sporting-goods store in Lowell, Massachusetts, until his death last year of cancer. Cancer, certainly, was an unjust reward for a life of probity and good will, such as his father had led. He had a "full" life, though, and he died graciously, complaining only of the pain, not of the injustice. Frank's older brother runs the store now, so there's some continuity there, and his mother is healthy, active in the church and community, and seems good for another 20 years.

Frank was a good, if undistinguished, student at Brown. He enjoyed his college years and was not overly disappointed that he was not the football star in college that he had been in high school. He picked up a master's in history at Yale, thinking he would get the doctorate and teach, but soon saw that he would not be an academic star, either, and went to Europe to knock around for a year. When he returned, he moved back to New Haven, largely because he felt comfortable there. He eventually got the job as an admissions officer and married Natalie. They found a three-decker house in New Haven and bought it with help from his mother. He and Natalie live on the first floor and are making the mortgage payments with the rent collected from the two other floors. Natalie worked as a secretary to a dean at Yale until recently, but because they don't need the extra money, and because she wants to start making babies, she is staying at home, puttering around and trying her hand at water colors, which she has always wanted to do. Lately, she is sure that she is putting on weight.

Frank still weighs what he weighed when he was running halfback. He drinks wine and beer in moderation and is down to half a pack of cigarettes a day, looking to quit entirely. A couple of months ago, he noticed himself in the mirror looking a bit pale and paunchy, and started jogging, nothing extreme, two or three miles a day. This morning, he ran the two miles from his house to the Micro Mart at a good clip. On the way home, he will treat himself to a cigarette.

Although it is a bright fall morning, little light comes through the dingy windows of the Micro Mart, and the fluorescent tubes overhead cast a sickly greenish light on everything. Bottles of yellow disinfectant, cans of peas on the shelves, boxes of ice-cream sandwiches in the freezer--all look vaguely unhealthy and disheartening. Frank hurries to the check-out counter, eager to be home.

His way is blocked by a woman wearing a homemade blouse without sleeves and maroon polyester slacks that clutch her fat thighs. Her black-dyed hair is bound with an ocher scarf. She is filling a shopping cart with various junk foods. Dry cereals that are mostly sugar. Dehydrates reputed to "help" hamburger. Ice cream, soda, potato chips. A young boy of four or five, dark-featured and dirty-faced, wearing short pants and an undershirt and tennis shoes, clings to her leg, whining for a certain brand of candy that, perversely, considering the junk she has already chosen, his mother refuses to buy. Frank clears his throat and the woman, whose name is Margerie Savant, nee O'Casey--she is of Irish extraction and is married to a French-Canadian auto mechanic; they haven't been to Mass since the kid was baptized--swats the kid and yanks him out of the way.

Frank steps into the opening and clears it but, having done so, turns and stares pointedly at the woman for slapping the kid's leg like that. He notes with distaste her sour face and sallow complexion and sagging belly, her cheap ill-fitting slacks and the varicose vein that reaches down like a loose cord from her cuff and curls around her anklebone.

Margerie looks at Frank and figures, correctly: Yalie, and dismisses him as an asshole.

Alice sees the whole thing. From her position by the door, where she was putting together the Times, and now from her station at the cash register, she has watched Frank circle the store doing his shopping. She sees the dirty look he gives Margerie. So where does this jerk get off? Margerie has had a rough life. That kid is a constant pain.

(continued on page 283) New Tattoo (continued from page 130)

Frank himself has correctly surmised the broad outlines of Margerie Savant's life, judging by her looks, clothes, the food she buys, the way she treats her kid. Frank is in the habit of making snap judgments about people, based on scanty information. A place like Yale has a dozen applications for every opening, and half of those can be dismissed at a glance. Frank looks at the little boy and figures: No chance in this world.

Frank is dead wrong. The kid will grow up to be a terrific tight end, will enter Penn State on a football scholarship, will barely, but nonetheless will graduate and will open a real-estate agency on the eastern shore of Connecticut and prosper for the rest of his days.

The boy never looks Frank in the face. It humiliates him when his mother swats him in public, and his usual response is to pretend a keen interest in something set at his eye level. In this case, he stares at the black curly hair growing on the inside of Frank's thighs.

Frank places the milk and eggs and Sunday Times on the counter. When Alice reaches out for them, he sees again the vivid tattoo on her forearm--a red heart, with a blue banner woven through it, with Mom and Dad inscribed on it. It looks like a gaudy leech that he could reach out and peel from her arm, leaving dead-white skin underneath. Before he can think, he blurts out: "Is that a real tattoo?"

"Yeah, it's real," says Alice, punching the keys of the cash register.

"Give me a pack of Marlboros, please."

She reaches behind her to the cigarette rack and hands him a pack of Winstons.

"No, I said Marlboros."

"Here," says the man behind the counter. Frank recognizes him as being the manager of the Micro Mart. He is taking inventory, checking things off on a clipboard. He finds a pack of Marlboros and places it on the counter. Frank wonders whether the check-out girl is his daughter. He has seen her behind the counter once or twice before, but she seems to be uncertain of how to operate the cash register. The manager finds the key she is looking for, punches it and gives her a warm smile. That's why Frank thinks she must be his daughter--with ordinary help, he wouldn't be so kind. The girl has a sullen, defensive look about her and Frank figures, correctly, that this is because of the tattoo. She is short, with blunt-cut hair and a hard-bitten look; She could be anywhere between 18 and 25. In fact, she is 21. Alice lives with her parents. Her father is a lineman for the railroad and her mother cleans up a lawyer's office after business hours. The manager is not her relative; his name is Roger Walker, and although neither Frank nor Alice knows it, he is a homosexual; he is also a Jaycee. He smiled at Alice simply because he is a nice guy. He feels the same way about the tattoo that Frank does--it's hideous, pure and simple. Alice has deeper feelings about the tattoo--after all, it's on her arm.

What possessed her, Frank wonders, to do such a thing? Was it done to flatter her parents, or to memorialize them? Was she drunk at the time? Does she regret it? Clearly, he thinks, she does. Frank has seen tattoos that he liked, but the thought of having one himself makes him shudder. He likes his body just the way it is. He knows that in certain circles, tattoos enjoy a certain vogue, but this is no discreet butterfly such as the disco crowd might have applied to a shoulder blade, but a loud, gross and corny abomination.

Alice's feelings are these: She was not drunk at the time. She had thought about having it done for a long time but made the mistake of saying so in front of friends. Knowing Alice's temperament, they had taunted her unmercifully as being too chicken to go through with it. Alice, being combative as well as somewhat dim-witted, showed them all--and now has to live with the consequences of rash pride. What she thought of having done was her birth sign, Leo, a small lion's head, over one breast. But she knew her folks would hit the ceiling and sought to assuage their anger by choosing, from the tattooer's sample board, the design that celebrated Mom and Dad. It went on her forearm because that's the kind of design it was--a drunken sailor's tattoo, bold and up front. The tattooer knew it was inappropriate for her, but when he pointed that out to Alice, she became obstinate and he gave her what she said she wanted. He had been in the business 40 years, he had seen it all and argued with no one.

Alice's mother shrieked and ran from the room, to cry her eyes out. Her father had a tattoo on his shoulder, a faded blue anchor from his Navy days, and he tried to be understanding. He was quiet for most of the evening, but when Alice was going off to bed, he pulled her to him and gently kissed her tattoo. And Alice cried, not in front of her father but later, alone in bed. And now, because she loathes the tattoo, she has to pretend, even to herself, to like it, and is hardening her heart against the scorn of the world.

Frank takes the folded five-dollar bill from the waistband of his shorts and hands it to Alice. She gives him his change and he dumps it into the bag with the groceries. She is staring, he realizes, at his T-shirt.

"What's that mean?" she says, with a sullen jerk of her head.

How to explain it, he wonders, without first teaching her something of classical mythology, and something of this modern age's mordant wit? Frank has surmised, correctly, that Alice is neither very well educated nor very hip.

"It's just a joke," he says.

"What's the joke?"

He smiles apologetically and says, "I don't know, really. Somebody gave it to me as a present."

In fact, Natalie gave him the T-shirt; she bought them matching T-shirts, pale blue with red lettering--Eros Loves Psyche--at a boutique on Martinique, when they were honeymooning there three years ago. Now and again, they show up at parties wearing the matching T-shirts, grinning as if they shared a sweet secret. In the coming months, when Natalie is beginning to show, she will stretch the shirt over her rounded belly and the message will take on a special poignancy.

Frank takes the brown bag from the counter and balances it in the crook of his arm. With his free hand, he tucks the tail of his T-shirt into his shorts and pushes down the broad, tight chafing elastic waistband of his jockstrap. There is a mole at the base of Frank's spine, a seed of dark pigment that has been there since birth, which many doctors have suggested he have removed, because its location makes it prone to irritation. Frank has never had it removed for the simple reason that it is part of his body, and Frank does not lightly give up parts of his body.

It has started bothering him lately, itching and stinging, since he took up jogging. It's the first time in ten years that he was even aware of the mole; not since he was playing football and wearing a jockstrap all the time. The mole has started to grow, and although Frank doesn't know it yet, in the past few weeks it has grown from apple-seed size to the girth of a pencil eraser. It's there, and it's not going to just go away.