Calamity and Other Stories (5 page)

When he did, the next morning, out by the flagpole before the bell rang, Tilda’s face dropped and her eyes lowered. She looked annoyed. “I already have a date.”

“You do?” This possibility hadn’t occurred to Mack, and so he sounded even more incredulous than he felt. “But you never said you did.”

“Do I have to tell you everything I do?”

“Who is it?”

“Carmine Bocchino.”

Mack laughed. “No, really, who is it?”

“I just told you.” Tilda’s face was red.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” When she shook her head, Mack said, “You don’t even know him.”

“He at least asked. He at least had the nerve to come up to me and ask. He didn’t wait a whole month because he was too lazy to get off his ass and do something that takes guts.”

Tilda looked like she wanted to say more but suddenly turned and walked quickly away. The bell rang, and everyone funneled into the building for the start of yet another day.

The morning was even hotter than usual, and already the classrooms were filled with that stuffy excitement that blows in with the end of the school year. The only thing left was final exams, and yet with weather so sunny it didn’t seem exams could possibly matter. Nothing did, this time of year, with flowers sprouting out all over the place and teachers sneezing from hay fever. The heat made it impossible to concentrate, and everyone smelled. All Mack could think about was Tilda. He spent all morning staring out of windows, the air filled with a melancholy scent. He felt something growing inside him, something uncomfortable, unbearable. He thought he might burst.

That afternoon, in seventh period French, Madame Lipsky took the weekly tally—Whoever doesn’t have a date, raise your hand. She didn’t look surprised at the fact that Mack was the only one with his hand in the air. “What’s the problem here? Are you waiting for the moon to be at exactly the right angle? Are you waiting for a drum roll? Are you waiting for a sign from God?”

Mack felt the heat in his cheeks. He said, “The girl I want to take is going with someone else.”

He was sweating now. Someone in front of him was snickering. Mack didn’t dare look at Tilda to see her reaction.

Madame Lipsky shook her head. “I’m sorry, did I miss something? Is there something someone forgot to tell me? Is there some new policy here?” She walked right up to Mack’s desk and said, “Since when does everyone get to go with the person they
want
to take?”

When Mack didn’t say anything, she continued. “You are going to a dance. You are going to spend approximately eight hours in the company of a girl who for all I know you won’t speak to again after you graduate three weeks from now. There’s probably a perfectly nice and deserving girl in another classroom at this very minute just waiting for someone to take her. Since when does it have to be the love of your life?”

Mack felt a trickle of sweat rolling down the side of his torso. He didn’t want to ask that perfectly nice and deserving girl. He didn’t want to take anyone but Tilda. This was so clear to him that he thought he might shout it.

Instead he spoke in his usual, lax tone. “Why shouldn’t it be? If the person’s out there and wants to go with me, too, but happens to have already said yes to some dumbass who got to her first, then why can’t we shuffle things around? Why do we always have to be punished for our mistakes?”

It wasn’t a terribly convincing argument, he knew, but, then, he had never done very well in any of his written essays, either.

Madame Lipsky squinted at him from behind her purple-tinted glasses. “Sometimes we’re punished, and sometimes we aren’t. But you, young man, have a decision to make.”

Mack, though, had made up his mind. He had decided to suffer. Because even suffering was easier than getting up and doing something about it.

After class, when everyone was zipping backpacks and slamming lockers shut for the day, Tilda found him. Her cheeks were red from the heat, and her sweat gave her a healthy shine. “Did you really mean what you said in class today?”

“Which part?”

“The whole thing, I guess.”

“Tilda, I’m just kicking myself for not asking you sooner. I know I was dumb. I’m sorry.”

Tilda looked down shyly for a moment. In a soft, guilty voice, she said, “I think I might be able to get out of going with Carmine. I mean, I’m sure I can figure something out.”

Mack felt his heart leap. He had made a mistake but had been saved. Wasn’t that the way it should be? Somehow he wasn’t surprised, and he realized that he had expected something like this. His whole life, it seemed, women had come to his rescue— his mother, his grandmother, his teachers. He was accustomed to having things work out.

And so he took it as a matter of course when, that evening, Tilda called to say, in her best hit-man imitation, “Alright, boss, the deed’s been done.” She sounded jokey, but Mack heard something else behind her voice.

“I’m really glad, Tilda.” Mack waited for her to say that she was glad, too, but she changed her tone completely and asked him about the math homework. When he had answered her question, she said a quick Thanks, see you tomorrow, as if the math, and not the prom, were her reason for calling in the first place.

Mack told her goodbye. The feeling that had filled his stomach, that had made him want to burst, was gone.

The next week at school, Mack saw Carmine everywhere. Ahead of him in the lunch line, in the hall between classes, in the parking lot at the end of the day. Always Carmine would look Mack in the eye, a flat, blank look that made Mack’s heart pause. He wondered what sort of lie Tilda had made up for Carmine. But when he finally asked her, at her locker one afternoon, she said, briskly, “The truth. You know what they say, honesty, the best policy, blah blah.”

She had been this way with him for days now, quick and dismissive, as if she didn’t have much time and would rather not waste it on Mack.

“And he was fine with that?”

“He said he had someone else he could go with. Look, I’d better get going. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Tilda, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. You just seem . . . like you’re mad at me or something.”

Tilda nodded her head slowly, squinting her eyes as if filtering Mack’s words through them. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she said. She stood there and looked, all at once, full of disgust.

“I don’t get it,” Mack told her. “What did I do?”

“Nothing,” she said. “That’s what. You had me do your dirty work for you. You sat back and let me hurt somebody in the most ignoble”—it was a word from the college entrance exam— “way. You didn’t have to hurt anyone. You got me to do it instead.”

Mack stared at her. “You’re the one who said you wanted to come with me. You’re the one who was stupid enough to say yes to Carmine in the first place.”

“What choice did I have? When you sit there and do nothing? Was
I
supposed to ask
you
? Why don’t you do some of the work for once?” Tilda shook her head and walked away. She didn’t speak to him for the next three days.

The day of the prom, Madame Lipsky took a final tally. She nodded with approval and told Mack, “I knew you’d do the right thing.”

Mack tried to smile. He didn’t dare look at Tilda, even though she had, twice that week, spoken to him briefly and even eaten lunch with him.

“And your friends?” Madame Lipsky asked the rest of the room. “They all set? Everyone’s paired off?”

“Except for Carmine Bocchino,” a girl called out. “I heard him in the cafeteria today. He said his date backed out and he can’t find anyone.”

Mack gave Tilda a covert glance. She looked surprised.

“Who was his date?” people were asking, but the girl said she didn’t know.

“He didn’t say her name.” (He hadn’t said any of the others, either, of course, but each of them had told someone.) “He just said he’d been stood up.”

Madame Lipsky’s face reddened and her mouth tensed. “This is unacceptable.” She shook her head, bit her lip. “We can’t stand back and let this happen.”

Mack looked at the floor. He felt himself sweating. A crumpled note landed by his foot.

“HE TOLD ME HE HAD SOMEONE ELSE TO GO WITH!”

Prithi Desai raised her hand. “My little sister’s never been to a prom before. She’s a freshman. I’m sure she’d want to go.”

“Where is she now?”

“Math, maybe? I’m not sure.”

Madame Lipsky was scrawling something on a piece of notepaper. “Go to the office and find out. And find out where Carmine is. And when you’ve talked to her, go tell him.”

The room filled with a sense of emergency. Since their class was seventh period—the last class of the day—Madame Lipsky wrote passes for the rest of the girls, too, so that they could go home and set their hair.

“Go, now, get going, make yourselves beautiful,” she cried, shooing them out the door. The girls filed out of the room, even the ones who had never done anything with their hair and probably wouldn’t tonight. Tilda collected her books and gave Mack a cold look. Glumly she told him, “See you at five.”

Mack watched her and the other girls funnel into the hallway. With a piercing, explicit pang, he wondered if Tilda would ever truly like him again, the way she had liked him before.

In a few hours she would be by his side, in a magenta dress that tied in a halter behind her neck. She would dance with him, and with Geoff, and with Carmine Bocchino, whose date would spend most of the night with her sister instead. Carmine would go around with a fancy camera taking pictures of everyone, roll after roll, as if this were a wedding or some other occasion warranting an entire photo album. He would request a dance with each of the girls who had originally refused him, and they would each say yes, even Belle Gardner, since it was one thing to dance with him and another altogether to be his date for the night. They would dance. Across the country they were dancing—teens in ill-fitting tuxedos and strapless gowns, smiling for cameras, arms around each other, waiting for the flash. They had been dancing for months now, to “Twist and Shout” and “Pump the Jam” and “What I Like About You” and to songs they complained could not be danced to. Since April they had been ordering special creations from florists. All of May they had been doing fancy things with their hair. For the rest of June they would pile into limousines, drink cheap champagne, hold hands with people whose hands they didn’t usually hold. In every state in the Union they would dance, had danced, were still dancing, in auditoriums and gyms laden with crepe streamers and balloons, in rented banquet rooms, and on fold-out dance floors. The dancing would continue for a few weeks more, and for years and years.

But for now it was still Fourth Year French, and the last girl had fluttered out the door. All that was left in the classroom was a bunch of eighteen-year-old boys and Madame Lipsky. She exhaled a sigh, smiling with relief. In her enormous plastic glasses and purple-tinted hair, she looked radiant. She had done what Mack had never done—and what he now longed, palpably, to be able to do. She had set all things right in the world.

Sunshine Cleaners

Any weekday in Brookline, drivers caught in Beacon Street traffic might see Sergei hurrying along a certain stretch of wet sidewalk. Sergei’s back crooks slightly to the left, and his pants, baggy on thin, bowed legs, billow in the cold April air. If he’s already completed his transaction, he’ll be heading west, pockets sagging with quarters. When he arrives back at Sunshine Cleaners, he obeys the PUSH sign on the door, half expecting—one might call it hope—to find something changed. But there’s old Lida behind the counter, smoking her second cigarette of the day, taking dirty silk shirts from a bald man. The man has also brought a pair of shoes to be resoled, and Lida is shaking her head.

“But the sign in the window says ‘Shoe Repair,’ ” the man protests. Other signs read, “24-Hour Tailoring,” “Instant Zipper Fix,” and “We Store Winter Furs!” but those are incorrect, too.

“Down the street,” says Lida, already turning back to her sewing machine, while Sergei, now out of his snow-flecked red satin bomber jacket, begins work: taking piles of clothes around to the front, past the partition, into the laundry, over to the wall of bright yellow washing machines. All day he tosses clothes into washers and dryers and adds them to flat, folded stacks.

If it is a Monday, Sergei keeps an eye out for the tall girl. Last week she told him, “You disgust me!” This was after the change machine took her dollar without giving quarters, and Sergei, when notified, said, “Not my machine.” Other customers have given up on Sergei—if they ever addressed him at all—and no longer bother to approach him when machines malfunction. Not the tall girl. When she offered him her other dollar for four quarters, Sergei just shook his head. That was when the tall girl yelled, “You disgust me!” The two other customers looked frightened, not realizing that Sergei and the tall girl have such conversations regularly. Sometimes Lida, from her wooden seat in front of the Singer, joins in while hemming a skirt, not looking up, yelling, “
You
disgust
me
!” or “Not
my
machine!” or something in Russian that the tall girl can’t understand.

The tall girl always does her wash on Mondays, when there are fewer people. Strong, fit, with blond hair that meets her shoulders, and clear, flawless skin, she looks to be in her early twenties. If a dryer doesn’t work and Sergei tells her, “Not my machine,” she confronts him with frank eyes that at times force Sergei to look to the ground. She speaks in the flat voice of someone used to having her demands met. After firing some comment at Sergei, she transfers her clothes to another dryer, then sits and reads. Usually she peruses magazines, but last week it was a book,
Love: Ten Poems by Pablo Neruda,
from which she copied phrases, every few minutes or so, onto a sheet of paper.

Her easy confidence Sergei sees as purely American. When the dryer buzzes, she sweeps out her clean clothes heedlessly, a clumsy shower of mixed cotton; she does not separate dark and light loads. Sergei has never seen her give any article of clothing special treatment, to be air-dried or placed flat. Her clothes are mostly denim and jersey, solid colors. She has no fancy fabrics or patterned socks like the other girls doing their laundry. But her underpants, Sergei has noticed, are the satin kind with just a thin band down the back.

Today, though, is a Thursday. It might as well be Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday. Lida has turned the radio to Easy Jazz 107.9, filling the air with the thin, slinky whine of an electronic alto sax. Outside, Beacon Street is already busy with altercations, a wrangle of horns. It has been a long winter, and even the cars are starting to show it—rusty, tired, snapping at each other. The snow began in early December and doesn’t seem to have finished. Down the street, store windows display flowered dresses, straw Easter bonnets, pastel pocketbooks.

Inside Sunshine Cleaners, the morning bustle is fluorescent-lit and smoky. People drop off broken computers; Sergei’s friend Val runs a computer repair business and tells perplexed early-risers to leave their machines at the cleaners. Sergei wonders about Val, a widower a good twenty years older than Sergei. Val has been in this country longer, nine years. It was Val who stood in wool pants and bright red suspenders to meet Sergei at the airport two years ago, holding a sign with his name on it. All they had in common was a mutual Moscow acquaintance with whom neither has kept in touch. Now Val and Sergei play poker with two other men every Friday. The men are not yet sixty but look ancient—teeth missing, hair gone. Their skin is gray-green and deeply wrinkled. They tease Sergei because he is slim-boned and lean, and call him “Omar” because of his dark coloring and high cheekbones.

From its wide spout, the fabric softener pours a lazy pink veil. At cards last week Sergei lost four days’ pay. Val sat across from him in a peaked flannel cap, winning, smoking ceaselessly, complaining of frequent doctors’ visits for lung tests. This computer business of his has to be a sham. How could a fifty-year-old from Smolensk, rotted through with emphysema, know a thing about computers? Val claims never to have touched one until he came to America, says one day he just found one, took it apart, and figured out how it worked. “It’s just a little chip!” he has said. He claims to know all the programs, all the languages, and tells Sergei, when asked how he does it, “I’m a genius!”

Sergei adds bleach to a load of whites. Nearby, Mr. Tyne, the young freckled man who owns the washers and dryers, is making his daily visit to empty them of their quarters. He says nothing.

Sergei wonders when he’ll next have luck at cards. Ivan, the eldest, gambles on anything—horses, dogs, Val’s test results. He plays the Massachusetts lottery regularly, claims to know someone who won. He and his wife have been here three years. “On the T today,” Ivan said recently, “I saw a man with a mole out to here!” He held his gray-green hand an inch from his chin and shivered with disapproval. “I come all the way to America, I’d like to not see such a thing,
for once in my life.
” That last bit is in English, one of the few American phrases Ivan uses (often, and somewhat indiscriminately).

Sergei thinks of his own skewed back. Ivan must disapprove; his wife is a big old St. Petersburg beauty with perfectly sculpted hair and eyebrows. On poker nights she puts on dark lipstick, tan stockings, and matching outfits from twenty years ago to go see a movie with her friends. Her ankles puff over the tops of little fur-lined boots.

The change machine is broken again, but Mr. Tyne has already left, his bag heavy with loot. Sergei hopes Val won’t raise the stakes again this Friday. The third man is a retired physicist named Miro. He has bad luck with poker and mutters to himself in Belorussian. His wife does things in the kitchen all night long, and every half-hour or so calls out some comment or other, always something brief, anxious, and inconsequential.

When Sergei sits in Miro’s dark apartment on a Friday night, dealing out the worn plastic cards, he thinks to himself that all over this city young people must be having fun and making love. For some reason—the long hours at Sunshine Cleaners, he supposes—he has yet to find those people. American ones, that is. Not the Russians Val has introduced him to, and whom he sees frequently: glossy-haired Yelena, her sister; her cousin; their neighbors and friends. He’s in America now; why should he hang around with them all the time? When he walks home from work at seven every evening, Sergei wishes there were a bar to stop into on the way, where he could meet other thirty-yearolds. People outside of his circle, friends to make on his own, nothing to do with Yelena. But it’s a college town founded by Puritans; the only bar on his route is a big one with booths and fried food and students in baseball caps.

Sergei wonders about the tall girl, what she does when she isn’t reading magazines or copying poetry or telling Sergei, “You disgust me!” Perhaps her friends, like Sergei’s, are aging geniuses. Sergei doubts it. He pictures them young and female. He has run out of quarters.

He will have to run down the block to change a twenty. Lida has gone on her lunch break, so there is no one to leave in charge; on a piece of paper Sergei scrawls “Back in 5 Minutes” and tapes it to the glass door, which he locks behind him. He hurries to the nearby liquor store. There is rarely a line there, at most someone asking for the on-sale cigarettes or buying a lottery ticket.

It happened once that he hurried back, nearly out of breath, to find the tall girl scowling in front of the door, her hands on her curved hips, and a plastic bin of dirty clothes in front of her. “People have lives to get to,” she said in that firm voice of hers. “People don’t have all day.”

“Neither do I,” said Sergei.

“You have time to run to the liquor store,” the girl said. Her hair was pulled back in a clip, so that her skin looked especially luminous. “I see where you go. Don’t bother denying it. And meanwhile your customers have to wait.”

Sergei felt his face heat up. Why didn’t he say anything then? Why did he just unlock the latch and, feeling his heart pounding, walk ahead of the tall girl without holding the door? From inside Sunshine Cleaners he watched her bend down to lift her laundry, and, without even trying, saw right up her denim skirt. He pretended not to notice as she struggled with the bin of clothes and an unwieldy bottle of detergent. Afterward, he had a horrible headache.

Sergei replays this in his mind as he enters the liquor store. The manager recognizes Sergei, knows why he’s here, greets him in a not-unfriendly manner. Sergei hands over a bill and takes back coins. How many times have their hands touched this way? Sergei leaves the store, passing shivering trees and an enigmatic sign announcing APRIL 25: HAZARDOUS WASTE DAY! He takes up his restrained run, his back at a tilt, pants parachuting. He considers that people may be watching him.

He does not understand that his red satin bomber jacket looks like a remnant of high school varsity and is insufficient for a New England winter. He does not realize that people who come to Sunshine Cleaners suppose he is Lida’s son, or that they suspect he is slightly ill—a Chernobyl victim, perhaps?—with his sunken cheeks and tweaked body.

He does not know that last week the tall girl called the Chamber of Commerce to complain about him, or that the woman on the phone told the girl, in a bright Brahmin accent, that Sunshine Cleaners was not a member of the Brookline Chamber, so that the girl now pictures the Chamber of Commerce as some sort of blue-haired ladies’ club. The girl was given a telephone number that turned out to belong to the Consumer Complaint Bureau, where a different woman asked, with a harsh South Boston inflection, “Have you lost any money?”

“Well, yeah, some quarters, a few dollars, I guess. But it’s not the money; it’s the rudeness, I mean—”

“I can only lodge a complaint if money has been lost. If you don’t like the way they run their business, there’s nothing we can do except urge you to take your business elsewhere.”

These are just some of the things that Sergei does not know. Today is Tuesday. Wednesday? Sergei shuffle-runs down the street. He arrives at Sunshine Cleaners, takes a breath, pushes the door that says “PUSH.” What change could he possibly expect to find inside? That Lida will be suddenly young and unwrinkled, like a replumped raisin? That her hair will be blond, her figure slim, and she will look at him when she speaks? Instead he smells cigarette smoke, sees the same faces, the broken machines.

Last night he had dinner with Yelena and her younger sister, Sonia. They ate hamburgers downtown, and Sergei admired Sonia, who had dyed her hair blue-black and pierced her eyebrow with a small silver hoop. Yelena said it was horrible, but Sergei could only like Sonia for it. Amazing what difference a few years can make; Yelena still spoke with an accent and wore embarrassing lace-up shoes, while Sonia, five years younger, looked and sounded American and had a skateboarding boyfriend named Timothy. Timothy met them after dinner, and the couple went off together.

Sergei wonders where they went. He wonders if the girls’ cousin Johnny (he gave himself that name) knows of any good parties going on this coming weekend. Johnny doesn’t always invite Sergei along, only when he happens to see him right beforehand.

Sergei works his way across the wall of yellow washers and dryers. Around ten, Val shows up to claim a computer keyboard. He flirts with Lida for a bit before telling Sergei, “Ivan wants to go to Foxwoods next Friday.”

“The casino?”

“In Connecticut. Ivan says he knows someone who won big.”

Sergei heads to the other side of the partition to start a new load.

“Where’s your enthusiasm, Omar?” Val calls to him. “It could be fun.”

“What do people play?” Sergei calls back. “Poker?”

“Everything! Blackjack! Slot machines!”

“No machines,” says Sergei. “I’m sick of machines.”

“We can all four play together,” Val says through his cloud of cigarette smoke. “You might win. Right? You could win something. Anything could happen!”

“Next Friday, then?”

“Unless my doctor’s appointment goes late. I’ve got another evaluation that afternoon.”

“Everything all right?”

“Of course not. You of all people, asking me that, with that spine of yours.” Val picks up the broken keyboard. “Your back, my heart, we’re all breaking down. All these breakdowns!” He winks at Lida and heads for the door. “Till tomorrow!”

Sergei checks the pockets of a pair of baggy pants before adding them to the cycle. He finds a roll of breath mints. They have the same scent as a mint that an aunt who raised him sometimes gave him when he behaved. He shuts his eyes to find the memory, but Lida says, “What does it mean, ‘Hazardous Waste Day’? How could they celebrate a thing like that?”

“It’s not a festival.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, in this town. It’s always something: flag day, flu vaccination day, cat-spaying day, voting day. That must be what it is: checking for toxic garbage. I like this town. They make sure everything is okay.”