Heft (8 page)

“And you aren’t happy about it, I suppose?”

At this she snapped her head up and looked at me with such vitriol that I twitched.

“Of course I am,” she said.

Silence.

Finally I gathered enough courage to venture, “Then
what . . . ?”

“I had to break up with him,” she said.

“Why?”

“He’s not really good enough,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Like he doesn’t work.”

“Ever?”

“Sometimes,” she acknowledged. “He works for his uncles at their garage. But no real work.”

She lifted the sandwich from her plate & bit into it miserably.

“And is he a good person?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. The girl does not hold back what she is feeling, you see.

“Plus he used to date this girl and she’s still calling him. It’s
complicated
,” she said.

Clearly it was.

We sat together silently & then she asked if she could turn on the television & I said of course she could.

We watched the news for a while.

“These are good,” she said finally, & I noticed she had eaten all the Pop’ems.

“Yes, I like those too,” I said. & I realized it was the first time I had ever referred to my eating in front of her.

She seemed considerably happier after a while, & she even asked if I would tell her a story, which I took to be her way of humoring me, so I said, “Did you know that in 1960 there was a huge plane crash right on Seventh Avenue and Sterling? & that as a young boy I saw it?”

“Not that kind of story,” said Yolanda.

So instead I told her the story of Deirdre of the Sorrows & her valiance and strength.

After a couple of hours she said she had to go.

& I was worried about her because she did not have a ride but she said she could take the subway, no problem.

“I’ll pay for a cab,” I said. “Please let me.”

“No, thank you,” she said, very polite.

“Please be careful,” I said, & then she was gone.

It was only one o’clock in the afternoon. I had a number of emotions rattling around inside of me and the whole day before me to mull them over. If I were a pacer I would have paced, but I am a sitter so I sat.

I am embarrassed to admit I was thinking of what it would be like to adopt Yolanda, sort of, to tell her that she could live with me & grow her child here. That I could really care for her & help her. That I could help her child. Wild crazed fantasies, all.

For one thing I rely on television shows for all of my ideas about being a parent. No, not the terrible sitcoms—but the
reality shows.
I sometimes watch a program that shows real couples as they prepare for the birth of their child & then actually have it.

I can’t watch them without crying, silly as they are. I have a favorite type of father: young working-class fathers, especially ones who wear baseball caps and trainers. I feel somehow that these will be the best fathers of them all. These will be the ones who toss balls with their children, whose children will use them as jungle gyms. These are the fathers who kneel by their wife’s side & kiss her hands as she pushes & sweats & groans out the baby. Then when the baby is born these are the fathers who cry out in ecstasy, who lean over their wives & put their faces close to them & tell them
I love you, I love you.

Of course I would be nothing like these fathers but they move me. When I was a younger man, only a bit older than Charlene’s son, I thought I would certainly have children: it was just something that one did. Alas it has not happened.

But I still think about it. Holding a wet purple baby against your chest, knowing that it is yours, knowing that you will be in charge of it. This is what is waiting for Yolanda.

I was in a brown study. There was a trembling inside me. I felt that something in me had broken, like my ribs themselves had been cracked open and something wanted to get out. Since I have been bound to my home, I have often felt that it has become a physical manifestation of Plato’s cave, and that I am the man in it. & that my mind is bouncing off all of the walls and ceilings even if my body cannot. I felt a bit claustrophobic & I longed to go outside so instead I opened the doors & then I inhaled deeply. It was cold out and I stood there in the doorframe and allowed myself to shiver for a while.

Then, without giving myself enough time to really mull things over, I walked back inside and lifted the phone and dialed Charlene’s phone number, which I have memorized.

I made myself go numb. I did not even have my transcript in case she answered. The phone rang five times.

And then for the first time a message machine picked up, & for the first time I heard the boy’s voice, higher than I expected, younger than his picture seemed.

You’ve reached the Kellers,
his voice said.
We can’t take your call right now. You know what to do.

I waited for the beep and then I hung up.

Because I didn’t.

I Want to Tell Her

• • •

• • •

W
hen she is very bad, usually I will tell her things to calm
her down. I will tell her Mom, Mom. We have to be quiet because the neighbors will call. We have to be very quiet. Come up here with me on the couch. Come watch your show. Then I will wait for her to fall asleep, and then I will leave her on the couch and see her in the morning.

Or I will lie to her by saying things about Dr. Greene, her hero. Dr. Greene asked how you were and I had to tell him that you’d been misbehaving, I will say. You have to be better for Dr. Greene.

Or I will leave. I will leave her where she lies. I will leave her bouncing off the walls with drunkenness, or crying, or trying to cook. I will get in the car and leave, and in my guilty heart I will tell myself she deserves it.

Tonight, when I walk in the door, I do none of these things because she is passed out already. She is lying on the living room floor in a pile, facedown, her red bathrobe covering her like a blanket and hiked up on one leg disturbingly. She is holding a portable phone in her hands & her thumb is on one of the buttons. A piece of hair has fallen across her gray damp face like a mustache. My God she’s dead is what I think. She’s dead this time.

I drop onto my knees beside her and for reasons I don’t understand I rip my baseball cap off and throw it across the room. I shake her very hard, one hand on each shoulder, then flip her over completely, which is maybe not smart. I cry immediately. There’s no deciding not to. My mouth fills with water, my eyes, all the parts of my face and frame go numb, numb. WAKE up, I say. WAKE up.

It takes a second and then she opens her eyes, half smiling, someone coming out of a dream. She reaches up very slowly and pats my face, then tucks her hands under her head and sort of nestles into the carpet.

Night, she says.

I smell it on her. The bitter backtone of half-digested rum. The stink of never showering. When I am feeling gentle sometimes I cut her hair for her and her toenails.

After a very long moment she opens one eye again and says, Kel, Kelly, do you love me? Do you love me, honey?

No, I say, and she does a little pout.

I think, You don’t love
me.
But it’s a lie I tell myself because in fact I know she does. Love me.

What are you doing, why are you doing this, I say.

She closes her eyes again. She goes,
Aahh.
As if she were going to sleep in a comfortable bed.

I watch her for longer than normal, until my back starts to hurt from crouching, until my knees throb.

Get up, I whisper. Get the fuck up the stairs. Go to bed.

When I was a baby she held me and kept me alive. This I tell myself at times to stop me from hitting her squarely in the jaw.

I try to lift her but she won’t be moved. She has gotten steadily heavier in the last two years and now she might outweigh me even though I’m tall and strong. She eats crap mostly, Cheez Doodles and chocolate, except when I force-feed her microwaved frozen vegetables that I buy from the store. Sometimes when she’s very bad I feed her like a baby.

She’s balding. Her hair’s falling out. It began when I was ten and was one of the first things that prevented me from bringing people around her. I remember being in the car with her and the sun hitting her scalp and thinking Oh my God, my God, she’s actually bald. Small fuzzy tufts of hair stand up from the top of her head. The rest of it has gotten long and is stringy or frizzy depending on when she has washed it last. She dyes it red except when she forgets to, and then it’s gray and red. She has bad skin and what looks like a rash on her face. Almost always she has this. She puts one black line on each eyelid that’s meant to be at her eyelashes but it drifts upward at the edges. Shakily. All of my life she’s worn terrible clothes that no one has worn since the 80s and she has never let herself be helped in this department, believe me I have tried. And she has two tattoos on her, a honeybee on her arm and a fucking electric guitar, an electric guitar with a long and snakelike cord that goes down her back and comes over her shoulder. She wears a bathing suit—she used to wear a bathing suit—without a back to show it off. She loves her tattoos. She’s proud of them.

I give her a nudge with my foot rougher than I should. Then I stomp up the stairs feeling every wooden thud completely. I go to my own room and toss myself onto my bed hoping it will break.

I hear her wailing at me from downstairs. Keeeeeeel, she is saying,
help
me,
help
me.

But I can’t.

• • •

M
onday morning I walk downstairs and she’s up. She’s sitting
at the table. She’s bleary eyed and baggy faced. She’s wearing a giant T-shirt and that red bathrobe over it. The T-shirt says,
IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
. The bathrobe is red plaid and smelly. She smells like rum and Coke and, deeper than that, underneath it someplace, she smells sour, like curdled milk, like something rotting. She’s smiling at me because she wants to apologize or because she can’t remember last night.

Game day? she says.

I’m wearing my regular clothes today and if she knew anything she would know that on game days we wear other shit to school, our uniforms, green and gold stripes on our faces.

Not talking? she says. She has a half smile on as if to tell me she’s willing to be patient, that she’ll be very very patient with me.

I think of saying,
What’s in your mug?

I don’t say it but I should. Someday I should say it. We’ve been pretending for several years that I don’t notice all the things that I notice.

Good news, she says, Jan Howard called.

Jan Howard is our social worker. It’s never good news when she calls.

I got the disability extension, she says.

Cool, I say.

She pauses. She holds the mug up to her face.

Kelly, she says. I have a friend I want you to meet. I called him on the phone.

I think, She’s crazy all the way now. She has no friends. She does not go out.

Cool, I say.

He can help you with colleges, she says. He’s very smart. We talked on the phone.

Cool, I say again.

Kelly, she says, and for a moment I think she is going to tell me something important, it’s the worry in her eyes. But all she says is Have a good day.

I leave without anything, no goodbye.

She thinks she’s dying. She is, probably, but she’s doing it to herself. One time I came home very late from Trevor’s and she had passed out on the couch with a pad of paper on her lap.

Dear Kel.

Do not read this until I am dead. If I am dead there are a couple things you should know. One is that I love you so much honey. Your a good kid always have been. Sometimes I can’t believe your mine. If

It was terrible. I was embarrassed for her and I flipped the whole thing over and knocked it roughly out of her hands and onto the floor. The yellow pad she dug up God knows where. She didn’t budge.

She drops little things into our conversations. I’ll say something about next summer and she’ll say
We’ll see . . .
very dramatically, as if to say
If I’m around . . .

Another time she made me write down her will for her, which was a pathetic undertaking because everything she had went to me. And she had nothing. Her parents are dead. She has no siblings. My dad left when I was four. Since then, since forever and ever, it’s been the two of us alone.

• • •

E
very day I drive half an hour from Yonkers to Pells Landing.
I went to school in Yonkers all the way through middle school. My mom was better then. She grew up in Yonkers too, back when our neighborhood was OK. When they got married, she and my dad bought the house together and always said they were going to fix it up and never did. Our neighborhood got worse and worse. My mother found a job as a secretary at an elementary school in Yonkers right out of high school. But she wasn’t happy there, so when I was eight, she applied for a job at Pells Landing High School. When they gave it to her, she cried.

I thought I’d go to Yonkers High. It was where my mother and father went. It was where my friends were all going. But I got into some trouble in eighth grade and it was a big deal when it happened. And to make everything worse, my friend Dee Marshall was involved, and Dee is the only son of her only friend Rhonda, so there went that friendship. My mother petitioned the Pells school board to let me go to high school there. It was without me knowing it. She didn’t like my friends in Yonkers, she never did, even though they’re good guys. She wanted to separate me from them, to drive me to school with her every morning, to give me a new start, she said. This was when she was still awake enough to care what I did.

I hated her for it. I had been to Pells enough growing up to know that it was nothing like Yonkers, old friendly ugly Yonkers, with duplexes and projects and run-down libraries and police stations and pubs. Pells Landing is the opposite of Yonkers. It’s twenty miles north but it feels like a different world. The windows are cleaner, the lawns are always green. All the yards and streets are rolling and new. The doors are painted bright colors. There is a sailing club on the Hudson in Pells where rich families go in summer. Where rich kids go together. There is a restaurant at the marina. Trevor’s parents are members and I have been there several times and I have ordered steak there. There is a country club in Pells and it’s so old that I don’t even know anyone whose family belongs. One girl in my high school, her family belongs, and even though we are not friends I know it about her. It’s the thing that is always said next after her name.