Authors: Beth Raymer
“Ho-ly!” said one of the construction workers. The rest of the crew turned, looked at me, and snapped their heads back. The same guys had been working on the corner since I moved into the neighborhood. Every day they waved and smiled, complimenting me on one thing or another. But today there were no compliments. I waved.
One of the crew walked toward me. His orange hard hat roofed sweaty, concerned eyebrows. “Give me his address,” he said. “I don’t need no name, no description, nothin’. I’ll know the monster when I see him.”
In the time it took me to grasp what he was getting at, he pulled a pencil from behind his ear and jotted his phone number onto the napkin wrapped around my to-go cup.
“You don’t want to tell me now, no problem, I understand,” he said. “You call me when you’re ready and I’ll be there.”
“Thanks,” I said, stuffing the number into my pocket. You never knew when an offer like that could come in handy.
As usual I was the only person in the train car, worming out to the Island while millions of others bustled their way into Manhattan. Resting against the window, one eye open to the burst of blooms and greenery, I tried to think of anything else I had to look forward to now that the big fight had flopped.
My father’s deep tan, lazy pace, and genuine crocodile-skin boots set him apart from the flows of midtown professionals passing us on the sidewalk. But what really pinned him as a bona fide Floridian was his surprise reaction once we walked inside the bar.
“Where’s everybody at, Bethananna?” he said, looking around the dark, empty space. It wasn’t even noon. But back at his hangouts along Fort Myers Beach, the bars would already be packed.
He held up two fingers and shouted “Beer!” to the bartender.
It was Dad’s first time in New York and he wasn’t impressed. He found the women stuck-up and the city loud, overpriced, and cold. He was disappointed in me, he said. Not because I had lost, or wasn’t doing anything long term with my life, but because I was choosing to live “in the snow.” Twenty years ago, my parents made many sacrifices to move their young family from a small coalmining town in eastern Ohio to the sunny climes of Florida. Dad understood my move to Las Vegas. Who wouldn’t want to live in Vegas? But to leave him and the Sunshine State for New York was a flagrant act of betrayal. Our backs to the street, he lectured me.
“Winter’s for poor people, Beth Anne. You have money, you get out. You can waste an entire life shovelin’ snow. You and Mr. Otis need to come home.”
The bartender set our beers in front of us. I pressed the frosty mug to my puffy cheek and held it there, like an ice pack.
“Dad, there’s nowhere for me to work in Florida. I like my job here, with Bernard.”
“You got a college degree. Use it. Be a teacher.”
“Dad.” I turned to him, slowly. My neck was sprained. “Do I look like I have anything to teach?”
“Don’t matter. Florida schools, they’ll take anybody.”
Nothing. Silence. When his shoulders wilted and he cast his eyes downward, I understood where this conversation was headed.
“Your sister’s back in the slammer,” he said.
My sister’s problems had existed for so long that declarations such as these no longer came as a surprise. What pained me, though, was bearing witness to the ongoing misery her problems caused my parents. After the divorce, my dad went through a lot of changes. He lost weight and grew a beard. He began drinking cosmopolitans and smoking Virginia Slims menthol cigarettes. An attempt, I think, albeit unconscious, to get in touch with his feminine
side. And it worked! For the first time in my life, I had a father who actually signed birthday cards (instead of just sending them off in the mail, blank), and spoke about his feelings. Sometimes he was only able to mutter one sentiment at a time—Sad. Hurt.—kind of like a caveman. But other times he could be very emotional. Now was one of those times.
“The daughter I know is gone. Poof!” He twisted the corner of the cocktail napkin. “I’ve tried to get her work at dealerships, she used to be great on the switchboard, but she can’t hold down a job anymore. I’m scared we’re gonna lose her.”
“Dad, I’m sorry.” I touched his arm. “Is bail going to be expensive?”
“I don’t know what else to do for her. Those rehabs don’t give a shit about people. They just want money.”
“Dad. Rehabs can work. The trick is, you have to stay awhile. She checks in and by lunchtime she’s gone.”
“She don’t need any more doctors putting shit in her head, Beth Anne. She needs family. You’re her sister, you should be helping her. But, hey, if you’d rather stay in the cold with the terrorists and get beat up, it’s up to you.”
The guilt trip worked. They usually did, even though I knew better. After all, I was the only one on speaking terms with everyone else in the family. My sister didn’t speak to my mother and my parents didn’t speak to each other, and since I spoke to everyone, I was well aware of their worries and struggles. Dad still wasn’t paying my mom alimony. Knowing she spent most of her time pecking at a calculator, living in paralyzing fear of an unexpected bill, Dad would call her, drunk, and tell her about his young date and the surf-and-turf dinners they enjoyed out on the gambling boat.
And then there was my sister. When she wasn’t waking up in jail cells, she lived with an abusive drug addict who had a Lee Press-On Nail for a front tooth. I was so scared of him and their dreary living conditions that I no longer visited her. Accepting her collect calls at two in the morning, I’d listen to her cries turn to howls as she pleaded with God to give her the strength to blow her brains out and put an end to the paranoid nightmare that was her life.
She could stay in manic states like that for hours, her screams coming through the receiver and piercing my eardrums as though she were being stabbed to death.
Coming down, she’d say how much she loved me. Later, when the drugs were gone and withdrawal set in, she’d threaten to have me killed unless I sent her twenty-eight dollars, Western Union.
Between the three of them, my loyalties and anger would get so confused that I didn’t know who to be mad at or who to pity, who was lying or who was telling the truth, who to send money to, or who to spend Christmas with. And though my father’s tormenting of my mother and endless promotion of the guilt trip gave me plenty of opportunities to put him in his place, I rarely did. Because, as the years went by, it became more and more obvious that out of all of us, it was Dad who missed having a family the most. After the divorce, and post–Brenda Baby, he moved not into a beachfront condo like he’d been telling everyone he would, but into a sturdy three-bedroom house he named the Raymer Ranch. Everything he bought for the house was family-sized: the couches and pool floats, boxes of cereal and shampoo. It was as though he believed he was holding down the fort until whatever misunderstandings passed and we all returned home.
And after the evenings spent eating lobster with his latest girlfriend and the drunken, mean-spirited phone calls to my mother, Dad would settle into the little corner of his three-piece sectional couch and watch home videos he had shot when we first moved to Florida. With the remote resting on his belly and the side of his face nudged into a pillow, he’d fall asleep to the family sounds of “A Raymer Christmas, 1983.”
I understood that my father’s guilt trip was really a plea for me to come home so that he wouldn’t be alone. At moments like these, when I was forced to admit to myself just how defeated and broken my family was, how absolutely alone each of us were, I felt a violent hacking through the center of my brain, like a butcher’s knife, digging in and dividing my thoughts, leaving half of me desperate to make my father’s, my mother’s, and especially my sister’s life
easier, to never leave them again. The other half demanded I pack up my shit immediately and run.
My mood was now so low I found it hard to keep my head raised. Noticing this, Dad nudged me: his way of apologizing.
“Forget about it, Beth Anne. Don’t let your sister get you down.”
“She didn’t get me down. You got me down.”
We looked at our beers, not each other.
“Your old man’s just depressed, that’s all.”
“Dad, I’ll come home.”
“When?”
I tried to imagine when I’d be truly ready to return to Florida and help, once and for all. At what age did life begin to seem unspectacular? Forty-three, I decided.
“In 2019,” I said.
“We’ll all be dead by then,” he said.
“Nobody will be dead. Just old. I’ll be the caretaker.” I’d never heard myself sound more depressed. “Do you have money for the jukebox?”
He tossed his wallet onto the bar. It, too, was made of crocodile skin.
“We’re staying here all day,” I said, pulling out a fifty-dollar bill.
“Fine with me, Bethananna.”
To everyone’s astonishment but my own, I continued to box. At twenty-six, I understood that boxing should’ve been an exciting, healthy
supplement
to my life as opposed to its centerpiece. But to me, and every other woman over the age of nineteen who was involved in the sport, it served as the ultimate distraction from life’s dilemmas and complexities. I cherished it for that reason.
The one thing I had in my life that I did look forward to was returning home from a long day of gambling in Ronkonkoma to find my roommate standing over the stove, lovingly whipping up an exotic
dessert—some
Brigadeiro
, some zabaglione—while reading Sartre in French or translating poetry from Portuguese or watching a film in Italian. The daughter of a Brazilian United Nations officer, Carolina had traveled all over the world and lived, it seemed, in most of it. As a result, she was fluent in six languages and spoke with an unrecognizable accent. I had met her four years earlier, in Las Vegas, where she was a student at Nick’s Blackjack School. To work as a casino dealer was one of her secret fantasies.
At night in Brooklyn, Carolina and I listened to bossa nova records from our rusty fire escape while planning exotic vacations. She brought the cigarettes, the South American maps, and fascinating stories, and we devised a road trip from northern Chile to Rio de Janeiro. “Let’s just make sure we end up here,” I said, adorning Ipanema Beach with a doodle.
I would’ve been very happy to spend every evening on the fire escape soaking my sore knuckles and studying Brazilian road maps, but on occasion Carolina and I did venture out of the apartment. One night, while visiting a friend of hers, the three of us smoked pot and watched his collection of music videos from the sixties. Suddenly, the most gorgeous man I had ever seen appeared on the screen. His thick, dark hair was slicked back and he was dressed as a sailor. In the beat just before he began to sing, he smiled, shooting a primal energizing force through the room. Opening our mouths, Carolina and I let out the high-pitched screams of oversexed teenagers.
“I’ve never felt this way before!” I said, barely finding the energy to finish my sentence.
“Who is this,” Carolina gasped, “ …
god
of a man?”
“Frank Sinatra Jr.,” said the friend, unimpressed.
“What do you mean?” I said, confused. “Is Frank Sinatra Jr …. Frank Sinatra?”
“No,” said the friend.
“He must’ve had a son!” Carolina said. And to this realization, Carolina and I embraced and fell backward onto the bed. We were so stoned.
“What’s up with the Beatlemania?” said the lean figure standing in the doorway. His blue eyes shined as though they were lit from
within. I watched him situate himself in the corner chair and roll a cigarette. His messy, nut-brown hair and long lashes added softness to his angular face. I liked his freckles.
Sliding his fingers toward the middle of the rolling papers, he gave the tobacco a final twist. One smooth lick and the cigarette was taken care of. He shook the fire from the match and noticed I was staring.
“I’m Jeremy,” he said. “The roommate.”
Jeremy was in graduate school at Columbia, studying journalism. He’d been in the room next door, grappling with his thesis, until our screams disrupted him. He only stayed long enough to finish his cigarette and make some jokes about the videos, which made me laugh. Leaving the apartment that night, I walked past his bedroom. Looking a little depressed, he sat on his bed. Head tilted and pout tense; he played bluegrass on his acoustic guitar. He impressed me without meaning to.
From that night forward, I tried to stay in Jeremy’s life. I left awkward, giggly messages on his cell phone, inviting him to my fights. He didn’t come. I left more messages, inviting him to parties. He didn’t show. In the month after his graduation, I’d heard that he was recovering from shoulder surgery and I invited myself over. Taking cues from Carolina’s sophisticated tastes, I put together a gift basket of Belgian beers, dark chocolates with orange bits, and a CD of my favorite songs. Propped up on a pillow and tucked into crisp white cotton sheets, Jeremy lay, glassy-eyed from painkillers. Because he couldn’t move his arm away from his body, or wear deodorant, the room smelled strongly of body odor. Not an unpleasant smell.
I set his gifts on the nightstand. As he looked up at me, his long lashes touched the tips of his bangs.
“Can I massage your shoulder?” I said.
“No,” he said.
And that was the extent of our romantic dialogue.
I probably—
probably
—would’ve stopped imposing my feelings at that point. Except, on occasion, Jeremy did call me. I sensed in his voice and well-mannered conversation that he was open to getting
to know me. Or maybe he just liked being so enthusiastically adored by me. Either way, over the next year, something sweet happened. We became friends. At first, it seemed, he called or stopped by only when he was feeling downhearted. Like when a job interview didn’t go well or a story he pitched had been rejected. Otis won him over, however, and soon Jeremy was stopping by even when he was in a good mood. Like when his date with a pretty Korean reporter ended with a sunrise tryst inside a phone booth.
I wasn’t put off when Jeremy spoke about being with other women. In fact, I often initiated the more intimate talks. His last two relationships had ended quite badly, leaving him brokenhearted. I thought, maybe, if I knew what went wrong, I could make it better. “And what is it about her you like so much?” I heard myself saying as we sat at the cozy kitchen table, Otis at our feet. I listened to the details of his failed love life as carefully as an intruder listening for footsteps.