Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (20 page)

Hell, he didn't even know what they wanted when they were alive. They'd been unfortunate people: generous at their best, cartoony and livid at their worst. They hadn't wanted much, letting the world screw them over only until it did physically and finally. He was going to bring Jane, but both times after she'd heard the news she'd refused to leave her room at Lincoln hospital. Standing at both of his parents' graves, Claudio had felt like an only child as well as an orphan.

In all honesty, Claudio hadn't anticipated his parents living even that long, what with the constant worry, the toll of living life with the quality it had in Detroit. His father had been sixty-nine and his mother, sixty-seven. That hadn't been too old, not in this day and age. They could have lived longer. They could have lived better.

The only people he knew left in Detroit were his various friends, classmates, and neighbors, people who never once seriously thought of leaving the city that doomed them. Many sold drugs and stole in order to live. The Detroit police would only respond to murders because of the high frequency of crime.
If you want to commit a crime, Detroit is your place,
his childhood friends would always say.

Every time Claudio returned to his hometown, he'd expect the close world around him to lose color. A volta of black and white. He'd have the song “Fast Car” stuck in his head, which wouldn't leave until he did. There'd been a Dunkin' Donuts on a corner right by the highway, which closed down because
too many people had been murdered there. It was next to a liquor store, which was (obviously) still in business. Packs of dogs roamed the streets. One time, Claudio even saw literal tumbleweed.

He wanted to help people. Yet he wanted to stay alive. Back home, there hadn't been many opportunities to attempt the first without taxing the second. Was this hopelessness the same as selfishness? Or was selfishness a result of retired hope?

The residences gave Claudio the worst feeling of all. Many of the yards of the abandoned housing areas had been void for so long that sometimes he'd see a front lawn that looked more like a forest. Every time Claudio saw an abandoned house with a mowed grass plot, it meant that the house next to it had neighbors. It meant that the neighbors didn't want anyone to think that the house was discarded, so they'd tidy up the place in the hopes that no crime would be committed nearby. Claudio used to pass a house that he concluded derelict, in the strongest sense of the word, on his way to school, until he saw one day that someone had put up Halloween decorations. Claudio felt his insides smoldering. Whoever lived in that awful house had children.

Not his house. Never his children. -
Not bad. Not too bad. -
Claudio swore that his life wouldn't ever be bad. Even if it wasn't good, it would never be too bad. Disaster would be yielded for a man who worked hard and spoke up when he saw injustices. The only part of Claudio needing reassurance was the idea that he was this man.

The dancers' backs, asses, and legs struck Claudio with melancholy. They had the same parts as Mathilde. They had the same parts as his daughters. They had the same parts as his sister. Every stripper was somebody's daughter. He knew that chestnut. Daddy issues et al. Everyone he knew was so quick to throw her or his opinions about strippers around. People always mentioned sex trafficking, like how easy it was to mention drug addicts when talking about drug use.

He left the club after three minutes, deciding this wasn't who he was. Though it wasn't like Claudio to declare himself enough of anything to feel cognitive dissonance. He left because being there was exhausting.

You just got here,
the host said. To maintain his baseline of pleasantness without needing to converse, Claudio reached inside his wallet and gave him fifty dollars. This was when he felt contrite. Of course he'd tell his wife. What would she say? It wasn't even a matter of forgiveness; it was a matter of belief. He was still the same Claudio, and she had to believe him. On the drive home, he stopped at a twenty-four-hour bodega and bought his wife some refrigerated flowers. They weren't glamorous, but they were still alive. White roses, her favorite.

I left after three minutes,
he said again. He didn't have any more explaining to do, so he kept on saying the same things.

Mathilde answered in her loping, dazed way.
What do you even want me to say, Claudio?

I really don't know,
said Claudio. He kissed his wife's fingers.

You went alone? That's the worst part. You could have at least gone with Zane.

But you hate Zane!

There is something so creepy about you going alone.

I didn't realize this was a situation where there's safety in numbers.

Mathilde had kept an open mind her entire life, even welcomed the sensational appeal of strip clubs in the same way she enjoyed Funyuns and Yankee Candles. (After all, who didn't appreciate Night Ranger and Warrant? Shots? Beautiful women with strong upper bodies?) But what had her husband been doing there alone? What other disappointing behavior could finally put his demons to rest?
Can you explain to me why?

I'm sorry. I can't.
He knew he would've never done something like that if he had to explain it to somebody.

Claudio scratched at his temples, the first place he noticed he'd been going gray. Claudio received his first silver hair at
thirty-six, and a full-on, seasoned white reached him by the time he was forty.
It was as though I had seen something scary,
he told friends of his whitening hair, still as thick as it was when he was twenty, like cirrus. Every time he felt like he'd been living too long, he scratched the backs of his hands. Mathilde had been the one to point that out. She knew his mannerisms by Heart, the same way he was intimate with her veins and freckles. He assumed that, since he didn't regularly care to look in the mirror, Mathilde had probably seen his face more times in his life than he had. Wasn't that something?

Do you remember the time I flew to see my parents when Lucy was an infant, and I wouldn't let you guys come?

Yes,
said Mathilde, still hurt, still deciding how to react. She had never been a distrustful wife, but that was only because he had never really given her a reason to be before.

I was hoping to spare you.

You kept telling me you couldn't bear to run into your family's old milkman.

Claudio's old family had received milk every Friday from a man named Timothy. Timothy, who wore glasses with wire rims and called people by their names at regular intervals in conversation. When he said
good morning, Claudio,
Claudio felt a self-centered and attaching kind of love for this extra-effort-taking man. When Claudio was six, he noticed that one of the milk cartons was leaking. He told his father, who called the supermarket.

Timothy was fired and never came back to the Simone house again. The piece of Claudio that survived and grew into a man remembered this. His Heart felt like jam as he considered how families drank different concentrations of milk. Timothy had delivered them 2 percent.

It is impossible to substitute one Heart for another Heart. The family Claudio took part in forming, the family he committed to, drank skim. It was a different family from the family
he had grown up with: Mom and Dad, little Claudio and little Jane. This time, this family was Mom and Dad, and little Natasha and little Lucy and little Carly. Big Mom and Big Dad. Big, strong Claudio. Nobody would hurt the people he loved. The people he lived his life to protect. He knew all about class warfare, but Claudio figured that humans could inherently be divided into two classes: the weak and the strong. Claudio came from a crappy home, but at least he would save this family.

T
he Lincoln hospital in New York was different from the Pine Rest hospital in Michigan. This was how Jane knew she'd matured.

For instance, at Pine Rest, she'd fallen into jeopardy easily, flashing her chest to the orderlies and the other patients. But she'd only done it because they would tell her to. Usually
they
were the government workers, who called her on the telephone or through the radiator. Once, through the eggcup in her breakfast. One time her governor called her, and instead of asking her to vote, he told her to sing for the king and queen. She could borrow a coat from James Dean. So Jane started to undress, but before she could even look for the coat, she was in trouble.

Her Pine Rest doctor asked if she ever felt like somebody else, and Jane told her no. Though sometimes she felt so much that her insides could have filled two people. Yes, she could be more than one person, but whatever extra people were also Jane. Jane and a half, she felt like calling herself on those days.

Jane had been scared every day at Pine Rest, but at Lincoln she learned how to carefully differentiate her world from everybody else's. The Lincoln doctors told her that in everyone else's world, which was the same, people usually talked only one at a time and never through food or the radiator. And that
the government rarely contacted people individually. And that Jane only thought they were contacting her because she had delusions and hallucinations in her brain. Hallucinations were the voices screaming
JANE! JANE! JANEJANEJANE!
Delusions made her question to whom she would surrender.

The Lincoln doctors told her that she thought it was the government because she was trying to make her world exist with everyone else's, mark harmony out of the situation. This was how Jane knew how much she'd grown: the doctors told her that some patients never realized this. But she could and would, and things would hurt less soon. Very soon, if she continued to learn and grow and take her cocktails of antipsychotics. Thorazine. Clozapine. Librium. Who decided these medicine names anyhow? The stuff she took with Otis had easier names. You got high, you had a good time or maybe fell asleep, ached for more hours later. That was all. Nobody kept a file on you or approved tailored dosages.

Every time Jane was fed her pills, she'd say
pay day
to make the nurses laugh, but one day they just stopped laughing. Someone either told them not to encourage her, Jane guessed, or else they just didn't find her funny anymore.

On good days, her doctor would say,
let's see if we can try a smaller dosage.
On bad days, he'd say,
I'm sorry,
and after supper they'd feed her more of what made her feel like she was made of soft-serve ice cream, more of what made her hibernate for about fourteen hours a night. And on the worst days, Jane could barely speak of what happened. Nothing hurt, but everything was scary—they'd strap her to a table, feed her something to relax her muscles, then nothing. She'd wake up and wouldn't be able to remember the morning. Sometimes she'd forget her brother's name, the hospital's name, the town she came from. And then it would return to her. The memories always came back, but who could tell when? Time taunted her.

Jane felt blessed. At Pine Rest she hurt in ways she couldn't
explain to those who didn't share her world, the way the voices built up on each other and gnawed on the drums of her ears. Termites. But now things were getting better for Jane. Like the song off
Sgt. Pepper,
her favorite album, the one that went,
it's getting better all the time.
She was hearing fewer voices. She was getting to be a lovely grown woman, to quote Dr. Stein, her new doctor, who was so much more patient than her doctor back in Michigan. Dr. Stein was always saying things in Yiddish.
No shtupping,
Dr. Stein said, which meant,
no fucking
. This was after the incident with the night nurse.
That's bubkes!
Dr. Stein also said. Which meant,
that's nothing!
Jane wanted to learn Yiddish, but Dr. Stein said it was mostly a dead language.
What you need to learn are the curses.

And maybe now that Jane was mature, this meant someday she could forgive Claudio for telling her she'd have a better life with Sawyer. She never got to go on a honeymoon with Sawyer. Never got to
shtup
him. Never even got to really kiss him. They drove her to the Bronx the first day she was a wife and left her there. Maybe Claudio was doing a favor, protecting Sawyer from her, from realizing she'd make a bad bride.

Before bedtime, Jane would think of her husband.
Come,
was all she wanted to say,
be with me.
She'd imagine Sawyer lying beside her in the twin, turning her over so they shared a forehead. His arms glued to hers, soft as plants. She'd be in such good hands. Sawyer would say,
are you okay, Jane?
Or,
I love you even though you are sick.
Or,
I love you more because you are sick.
This most reckless of daydreams tortured Jane's weak prayers out of her, swelled her with humility. Or was it humiliation? Jane was too old to have crushes, even if the crush was on her husband.

As a little girl, Jane had been as ugly as a toad. Everybody at school had told her so. And when she'd said to her mother,
Mommy, I'm ugly,
her mother hadn't disagreed, only said,
next time you think you're ugly, just picture how you look on a globe.
Her mother had said things like that. What did it mean? -
Maybe
something about how small it is to feel ugly, -
Jane thought. But that didn't stop her from feeling it. Even after she won the beauty pageant. Being told she was beautiful somehow made her feel even uglier.

Now Jane didn't care about being pretty. These kinds of things didn't matter to her anymore. What mattered were only being alive and staying semi-sane and finding that ambitious balance between safe and free.