Our Town (28 page)

CLOVER CAME TO
visit her mother in the hospital. She came to hold the mirror. Dorothy wanted to see her face. Clover tried to pick up Dylan on the way, but he wouldn’t leave his house. She knocked and knocked, but he wouldn’t come out. A pregnant black woman was smoking menthols on his porch. She told Clover that he wouldn’t come outside. That he’d been awake a week and that he’d grown paranoid. That he’d been hiding in the bathroom, and when he did come out all he wore was a shower curtain. And that there was a possibility, and it was in fact likely, that he’d have with him a handgun. Perhaps two. But now he was sleeping. Clover knocked once more, but decided it wasn’t worth it. She tacked a message to his door, then left.

You’re a fucking loser. Come visit Mom at the hospital, when, or if, you ever wake up.

Clover sat by her mother’s side alone for a few days while Dorothy watched soaps and smoked menthols and recovered. She’d lost two fingers in the accident and she’d killed her little dog. The third day Clover was there, they got a call at the hospital from a police officer. He said he’d just arrested a man who was coming to see her. That man claimed to be her son. She put the phone on speaker.

“What’s he been arrested for?” they asked in unison.

“He was driving on the highway,” the officer replied, “and he ran his truck into an off-ramp. But he wasn’t injured.”

“Thank God,” they replied.

“But when we walked over to his car,” he said, “it was crushed. It was totaled. We leaned down and peeked inside, wherein we found your son.”

He paused.

“And?”

“He was naked, behind the wheel, which was pretty strange. Completely soused, too. Naked on the road. But at least he was wearing his seatbelt.”

“But why was he naked? Did you ask him?”

Again, in unison.

“I did ask him.”

“And?”

“He said he was hot.”

WHEN CRANES DANCED

C
lover cried like a little baby girl when she lost her Mama. She had a relapse—coke, I think. Maybe OxyContin. Maybe both, after overtaking one in an attempt to balance out, but whatever. It’s really all the same. It all just keeps going. Hope and hope swallowed. Swallowed, then swallowed again. Before that, though, while Dorothy was in the hospital following the accident, they realized she had lung cancer as they tended to her wounds. Her diagnosis was thenceforth bleak. She refused chemotherapy, so she went fast. She died in October of 1990, at the age of fifty-one, and Clover was the only one there. Dylan never made it—he couldn’t make bail. He was still in jail from the wreck. He’d defended himself at the hearing and his statement that, due to his truck’s faulty air conditioner and his genetically inherited tendency toward heat-born “spells”—which would explain both his loss of control of the vehicle and thus his indisposition—was unable to be sold to the judge. Nor his father, whose embarrassment in his son made not paying to bail him out—to not allow him to go to his mother’s funeral—both scrupulous—Dale’s unwavering integrity still very much intact—as well as fiscally responsible.

Dale would eventually weep at Dorothy’s funeral. He would walk to the podium, head down, shoulder’s lowered, and then eventually raise his hands up to the sky. “
Why,
God?
Why
?” he yelled, and then
sobbed, putting his right hand out before him, gesturing that those were the only words he could muster, his tears bleeding into his thin goatee, nearly full enough to cover the incision scar on his chin from his facelift. But his gesture felt like no more than that, so nobody there quite believed him. Like I said, he was never much of an actor.

Just before she died, though, Dorothy asked Clover for another cigarette, and Clover gave it to her. She’d parceled them out like dog treats. For good behavior. “Only one every few hours,” she’d told her. “Otherwise you might get sick.” And she’d stuck to it—to her plan—but she couldn’t stop her all the way. She just wanted Mama to be happy. She couldn’t let her go with a long face.

“Mama’s on her way,” she said to her daughter, as she looked wistfully through the window and down the sunset’s blue. “Give me a minute, would ya please? I just want a minute with my maker.”

So Clover went to the bathroom. She wanted to freshen up. But when Clover came back, Mama’d put a gram of cocaine—cooked down with a lighter from her purse in the rounded, mirror side of a sunset-blue old compact—into the IV bag that was connected to her arm. That was keeping her alive. Who knows where she got it from. Maybe she paid off a paramedic. That made her have a seizure. Then cardiac arrest. But when Clover came back she wasn’t having a seizure anymore.

And that was it.

*
  
*
  
*

Before all that, though—maybe a month before, probably, just after the accident, just before the cancer forced her from her home—Clover brought over Jack Jr. and Dorothy babysat while Clover saw old friends. Clover felt comfortable and confident that her Mama would be okay with her son. She didn’t know why, she just felt it. For the first time she just felt it. Clover knew that this would mean a lot to her Mama. Clover knew that Mama might not have much time left after the accident. And Clover knew, even though it made her nervous, that this was the right thing to do.

Then, though, Clover came back from her friend’s house. She sat with her Mama at the kitchen table. Jack Jr. played outside in the yard. Clover told Mama how great it was to see her friends. How she hadn’t seen them in years. How it felt good to catch up. Dorothy sat across from her. She’d prepared two Arnold Palmers, and they both drank them and enjoyed them, even though the ice in their glasses had melted and they were watered down. Then Clover asked how it was watching Jr. and Dorothy replied it went swell. Then Clover told her Mama that it was great to see her, too. How she didn’t like waiting this long between visits. How much she’d missed her, and how happy she was that Mama had gotten to be a nana. And Dorothy smiled and showed her big white teeth and looked down at her feet and then up at her daughter, and she was bashful, and she was shy. And they were both happy. But then Clover had to go. She took little Jack Jr. and they got in her car and drove back to the airport and then back home. The flight home felt shorter than the one she came out on. Maybe she was more at ease. But maybe it was just the air stream.

WHEN CLOVER GOT
home she kept it up. At this point it was hard to care. This was a cheap relapse. A real relapse. She wanted to get dirt high. Ugly high. Not like pills, which she could always rationalize. Those were necessary. Her doctor told her so. Those were for her overwhelmingly paralyzing anxiety. Her doctor told her so. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been prescribed. She had to treat her pain—physical and emotional—as well as the other various ailments from which she suffered so. But this wasn’t that. This time she’d get dark with it. She’d test herself. Push as hard as she could. She’d overdosed before and survived. And, anyway, who gives a shit, right? She has a disease. She doesn’t have a choice. This isn’t up to her. This is just protocol.

And so she went downtown to buy crack where she used to. To the East Village. Anywhere on Avenue C. She asked a Spanish kid at a bodega if he knew where she could score. He said he could help, but he came back in a police car, as he happened to be an off-duty cop. So she got arrested. And when Jack found out he left her. He thought
when they got married she’d left that behind her. Sympathy was never his forte. So he left her and he took Jack Jr., too. And Clover fought for little Jack Jr. And she saw him when she could. And she tried her hardest to be a good mama—she had so much love to give—but something in her never let her quite do so. Something inherent seemed to paralyze her belief that she could do so. She just couldn’t get out of her own way.

*
  
*
  
*

Dylan, later, was coming home from his dad’s house on the bus. He saw him sometimes when he needed money. He’d gotten fired from his job, and Clementine went back home to live with her parents. And then he got another girlfriend, and he got her pregnant, and he had a kid. But it turned out he wasn’t a good daddy either. Once he tried to become a Scientologist, noticing that that’s what seemed to be a prerequisite for financial success in Hollywood, but once he couldn’t make the payments—sorry, “donations”—he was no longer allowed a seat in the service pew.

DYLAN GOT OFF
at his stop. And again he got off at his stop. Different houses, different buses, but Dylan, now, only went to work, and then took to the bus, and then got off at his stop. Perpetually got off at his stop. There were more women, and more kids—three girls, two boys, four mothers—but he didn’t much care. He wasn’t particularly interested. He wasn’t a family type of guy. When he got home, he snorted a roxy—30 mg. rapid-release oxycodone. A blue—slipped disk and another slipped disk, all sorts of different doctors. And enjoyed a Coors, poured deftly into a tall, chilled glass and watched the History Channel.

*
  
*
  
*

Known today as pulmonary tuberculosis, consumption was referred to as such, in antiquity, because it seemed to consume people from
within, from bloody cough, fever, pallor, and long, relentless wasting. In the early twentieth century, some believed TB to be caused by masturbation.

Before the Industrial Revolution, consumption—tuberculosis—was sometimes regarded as vampirism. When one member of a family died from it, the other members who were infected would lose their health slowly. People believed that this was caused by the original victim draining the life from the other family members.

TB—consumption—was romanticized in the nineteenth century. It was believed that TB sufferers acquired a final burst of energy, just before they died, that produced feelings of euphoria and a final burst of energy and life. This phenomenon was referred to as spes phthisica, or “the hope of the consumptive.”

THE HOPE OF THE CONSUMPTIVE

“B
aby, don’t ever smoke ever ever,” Dorothy spoke to him softly but nervous. “Worst things in the world for ya,” she said like she would to a suitor—coquettish—she didn’t know any other way. We’ve at least learned that already—and then paused to kiss the lipstick-stained, barely burning Virginia Slim—here, still, Virginia Slims; she ended with Virginia Slims—she just finished to the still pearly-white one hanging from the end of her mouth. Tobacco spit stained her long, painted, pointed nails, but the rest of her was done up proper. She’d taken time to get ready for the occasion. She liked the opportunity to play dress-up, and she was aware this was potentially her last. And she was right about that. “Smokin’s the worst thing ever,” she whispered, again, breathing earl-gray colored breath through her nose, like the world’s most prettiest dragon.

When Nana—henceforth she’ll be Nana, Jack Jr. doesn’t know any better, so henceforth she won’t be judged—wasn’t smoking, her breath was pulled and dry and heavy, and her Georgia-anxious cackle turned quickly to a cough, but with a thin cigarette hanging from her three-inch nails, or at the corner of her blood-stained lips, Nana was lovely again, and capable—capable enough for this, anyway—like cigarettes were invented just for her. Like when she wasn’t smoking she couldn’t really breathe, a thought she both had as a lark and a reality
due to her continually closing, cancer-shorn esophagus. “Like when fishermen drop their fish back in the water after they catch them,” the boy thought, still young enough to believe that this was the life of a fisherman. Because out of water, fish cough and fight and squirm, attempting to escape the body bestowed upon them. Out of water, fish hate themselves and struggle, unable to ascertain the meaning of their own existence, or really of anything at all. But in water, fish were lovely—fish were home—like water was invented just for them. At one point in Jack Jr.’s life he will become jaded and distant. He’ll smoke, and he’ll hate himself for it. He’ll become aware that the world around him and the people who populate that landscape—this landscape—tend to disappoint. But not her. She never disappointed him. Even if he had to patch her life together—even as its threads, often, fell apart in his fingers, she never disappointed him. Even if he had to make it up—especially if he had to make it up—she never disappointed him. No matter what, he understood that they had something in common. That they were both alive and they knew what living meant. That they were together. That they were real. That this is real. In the end, he was her. She was him and he was her. And that’s all that ever mattered. That’s all this was and will be. That’s all that this is about. But he’s not there yet. Thus far, in his short life, he just likes to be outside—in the day—and he just likes things that are pretty. And he thinks his Nana is the prettiest thing he’s ever seen. He thinks his Nana’s pretty as a picture.