Everyone but You (9 page)

Did you ever even try to love him? I ask. After he came home, when he needed you?

My mother looks offended. Of course, she says. I frightened myself, loving him. You have no idea how love can wreck you, Anna, how love can wreck everything about you.

I leave her to the leg. In my room, I listen to Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” on 45 and revel in the old-fashioned crackling of the needle as the vinyl spins. I love that airy sound, and that sound covers my mother’s tears. I eat crackers and go through memorabilia, run my fingers over Roger’s gold cuff links, flick Gary’s lighter on and off, release the photo of Butcher, the golden retriever, from its frame, pull out Lenny’s Strunk and White and read about possessives.

Then I get up from my bed, go to the window, and open it. I
break up what crackers I’ve left. I spread them on the sill and wait until I have a sill full of birds, pecking and scraping for crumbs. In the summer (and more so in the winter) I am visited by many small birds, ones that are sullied-looking and hungry. They fly away and then fly back. They hop nervously and twitter lightly. They carry everything away.

L
ATER, JIMMY #3 CALLS
. He says, I know we just saw each other, but do you want to go out tonight? On a date? Then he adds: Don’t forget the leg.

Ha-ha, I tell him.

After I shower and dress in a red skirt, a wrap top, and cowboy boots, I come out to find my mother still on the couch, sleeping with the leg in her arms. I clear my throat until she rouses herself, rubs her eyes, and gives me a sweet, almost starry-eyed look. I say, I have a date. And it’s really time for you to get going. I add: Don’t you get enough beauty rest, as it is?

She seems surprised by the passage of time, and groggy. She says, I was having the most splendid dream, Anna. Your father and I were dancing to a waltz. I never wanted to wake.

I grab my purse and check my watch. I open the door, but she doesn’t move.

He’s not picking you up? she asks, and smiles in that rigid way she often does. I couldn’t tolerate that in a man.

Well, I say. Better than being coddled.

She frowns. I’m not entirely idle, you know, she says. I had a reason for coming. From her purse she removes a black velvet box, and from the box she removes a ring. It is a modest ring—platinum band, a small, solitaire diamond—and something my mother with all her many lovers wouldn’t be caught dead wearing
these days. She takes the ring and holds it up to the light, squints, then places it in the hole of my father’s leg. She smoothes the wrinkles of her dress and says, I feel like I’m finally free.

I say, You told me he never asked.

She looks out the window, to the neighboring apartment buildings. She wrings her hands. I say a lot of things. He asked
after
he lost his leg, and what could I tell him then? Tell me, Anna, what would you have said?

She gets up, collects her purse, and, at the door, she stops and faces me. He did leave us behind, she says. He
changed
.

I
BRING THE LEG
to dinner. Why not.

Jimmy #3 arrives at Bandito’s dressed in a button-down and khakis. He sits down, glances at the leg, and says, I wasn’t really serious about that.

I had a change of heart, I explain. I felt sorry for the leg, being there alone in the apartment like that. Jimmy #3 gives me that look, and then, as if he gets the joke, he laughs. He laughs even though there is nothing funny.

I prop the leg on the chair between us. It sits there, looking very conspicuous, lording over the salsa.

The waiters say nothing. I come to Bandito’s a lot. They parade past us, wearing black sombreros and elaborate, frilly tuxes. A man comes over, tips his hat, and recites the seviche and molé specials. We order and then sit without speaking. Around us, couples chat, raise glasses. Mariachi music plays and Jimmy sips his drink. So, he asks, finally, Are you going to tell me what’s up with your father, and that leg?

I’d rather ask you a few preliminary questions first. So listen up, Jimmy. I tap my fingers against the tablecloth, smooth the
wrinkled fabric. I want to know a few things before we go any further, I say. I want to know, what kind of man are you? Do you run at the slightest provocation? Are you still, after years of living, afraid of the dark? Are you waiting for your life to open? Do you feel you’ve failed others? Are you brave with your love? I want to know, do you believe that one event can change a lifetime? Do you hold on to the slenderest bit of hope?

Jimmy’s eyes widen. He says, Whoa, horsey. That’s a lot of questions. I really just wanted to take you out for tacos and get to know you better. I don’t even know your favorite color, he adds. He surveys the chips and salsa and the margaritas adorned with umbrellas. He says, Anna, it’s not as though you’ve been super easy. You’re not the most open woman I’ve ever known. Frankly, you can be a little scary, with all your interest in sex.

Look, I say. Sometimes I really wonder if there’s any person in the world who is really worth the risk. Love, I say, is a complicated thing, so maybe I should just leave right now.

He says, I’d hate to think you’re leaving me for a leg, Anna.

Perhaps, I say. In a manner of speaking. I don’t wait for dinner, and I don’t finish my margarita. I get up from the table and leave.

B
ACK AT HOME
that night I lie in bed with the leg, and peer into its hole. I search not for a canary but for my mother’s engagement ring. I shake the leg until I hear it move then fall down into the hollow toe. It should be substantial, it should hold weight and meaning, but finally it is just what it is—something carried and discarded or put away.

I make a decision then. I ransack the apartment and return with buttons, cuff links and lighters, dental floss, photographs,
CDs, and that red thong. I take everything I have pilfered and stuff each item into the leg. The cuff links skip down to the toe. The buttons tap lightly against the wood. The Chapstick follows. I rip pages and pages from Strunk and White, stuffing each page into the leg. I fill the leg. I open the window and set the leg on the sill. It is a warm summer evening that promises, across this city, a new beginning and start.

That night, I dream of my father for the first time in years. We meet on the street, and he seems happy to see me, which is surprising. I’ve been trying to find you, I tell him. He says, Me, too; imagine. It’s a real jungle, isn’t it? Together, we walk around the city. In my dream, we talk easily. I ask him about the years I’ve missed, and he speaks of distant countries, my mother, the war, and all his love.

When I wake, I check on the leg. I breathe in the warm air, expecting to find that the leg has been lifted by the waiting birds that are always so hungry. But the leg is still there and there is no miracle. I bring the leg inside again and pack it away for good. When I finish, I call Jimmy at the pharmacy and tell him that I’m sorry.

Hey, he says, genuinely surprised. Why are you crying?

Please, I tell him. I want to see you now. I’ll run over there to get you, Jimmy. I’ll run over there just as fast as I can.

M
y brother Georgie has taken off again, this time armed with a leaf blower and a kidnapped dog. From my bedroom window I watch as he sneaks across the grass, his body pushing against the breezy autumn air. The purloined leaf blower is strapped to his back. The always-unsuspecting Winston trots at his heels, nosing at the pepperoni stick sticking out of Georgie’s fist. It is bribery, I know, the pepperoni stick, a treat brought to coax Winston into Georgie’s Jetta. The dog yaps happily, with an easy willingness that makes me curse. I decide I have the most perfidious dog in the world, the craziest brother, and a perfectly good leaf blower, which is just about the only thing that has not annoyed me tonight.

“Call Elvis,” I tell my wife, Elle. “Georgie’s gone off to Memphis again, and this time he has a hostage.”

“Take no prisoners,” she says in a pillow-muffled voice. She
raises her arm in mock triumph. A mass of dark-blond hair furls the pillow’s edge. It’s late, too late for any of this, and I am already tired. I’d like to lie down again and drift off to sleep, undo the burden that is my brother. This is my first year married to Elle, but the honeymoon period has been anything but blissful, not with Georgie and these late-night trips, not with all of Georgie’s antics. Georgie is my younger brother; he will be thirty this December. He is also schizophrenic—an ill man, a crazy man, a man who has a penchant for driving me crazy too.

Outside, Winston barks. Elle moans and says, “You’d think at least the dog would know better.”

I remind her that Winston was never what you would call a savvy mutt, particularly in matters of food or trust. About a year ago—right before my mother died and we inherited Georgie, along with the doilies and the grandfather clock—we marveled at how Winston scarfed down his food at the pound, ran in indeterminate circles when we tried to make contact, and then promptly threw up. “Nervous stomach,” the pound worker said, shaking her head in an apologetic way. “You’ll take him?”

Elle and I looked at each other, and hesitated. “Yes,” Elle told the woman finally. “We’ll take him.”

It will be a miracle, frankly, if Georgie or the dog even makes it to the Blue Route. We live outside Philadelphia; Tennessee is more than a thousand miles away, and all the roads to Memphis are ridden with rocks—bits of broken asphalt laid there, according to my brother, by the government, in an effort to impede his progress. This paranoia is only one manifestation of his illness, and though I often tell him that his beliefs are untrue, that all of Pennsylvania’s roads are simply broken, my disagreeing with Georgie does nothing to brighten my brother’s outlook or mood.

The Jetta’s engine guns in a furious way, and I worry once again about noise ordinances in the neighborhood, the quiet night suddenly ruined. Georgie speeds up the road that leads away from our house and drives up past the neighboring houses with their neatly trimmed lawns and hedges. He screeches the car to a halt. After a few moments of silence, the engine guns again.

Did I mention I am tired? It does not help to worry. It does not help at all.

“Good riddance,” I say.

Elle sighs and slips her head out from under the pillow. She turns on the light and squints at the alarm clock. She moans again. It is after midnight. Still, she sloughs off her covers, gets up, and pulls her long tangle of hair back into a twist. She collects our clothes from the floor and says, “You don’t really feel that way, Bud. I might feel that way sometimes, but you don’t.”

I do feel that way, and it is the wrong way to feel, but Elle, who is generally soft-hearted, is still too nice to believe that I am mean, too nice to let me mean any of this. Instead of arguing the point, I dress. I dress even though it is sheer futility, it is absurd to keep bumbling around in search of my brother. Tomorrow if I am late for school again on account of Georgie and his antics, the principal will be angry, possibly he will take disciplinary action against me, as he has threatened to do in the past. I work at a prep school, teaching American history and English to gifted students who go on to prestigious colleges, enjoy successful careers, marry, and have expensive children and houses. The principal, a self-indulgent prig of a man who is
hardly
a pal, expects those students’ needs to be met daily, without flimflam and excuses. Unlike Georgie, I do not have the luxury of work or no work.

Elle is already dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. She throws a shirt at me. She says, “You get slower each time.”

“Of course I get slower each time,” I say. Does it really matter if I am slow? Does it matter if, perhaps, I grab a cup of coffee before I go out in the rain and retrieve my crazy brother? I tell Elle both coffee and slowness are options, that there are, indeed, a great many options in life.

Elle huffs at this. I ignore her and consult the calendar I keep bedside, a calendar I keep for Dr. Mulvaney to chart Georgie’s “progress.” To date, this is the twenty-fifth time Georgie has tried a road trip to Memphis. Each time he heads south, puts no more than thirty miles on the odometer, and, confused, agitated, he stops every time his car hits a stone on the road, one maybe the size of a pea, one just large enough to be felt under a tire. “Progress,” I tell Elle. “It’s all in the name of progress.”

Elle stands with her hands on her hips. “It would most assuredly be progress if you finished dressing,” she says. “I’ll put on some coffee, but Christ, Bud, make it quick. I don’t have all night, either.”

“Sure,” I say with a flutter of fingers. “I am on the case.” But of course I am thinking what neither of us will say, what neither of us will talk about: This is just the start of things. When we bring Georgie home, we will inevitably spend the rest of the night listening to one of my brother’s tirades about how Elle and I are co-conspirators against him. Georgie will storm through the house. And when I argue with him, when I attempt to inject any sort of reasoning into the discussion—Georgie will appear confused. He will shake violently. He will punch holes through the daisy-printed wallpaper that Elle loves, just as he has done before. He will kick furniture. Turn over the TV. He will break
things. Small things. Things like Elle’s Hummels, those perfect-looking children, so idiotically pastoral I can’t say I blame him. And Elle, who only agreed to this arrangement because Georgie is my brother, will probably smile thinly and remind Georgie that the Hummels were a gift from her mother who lives in Florida. Elle will probably tell him that she always did think the statues looked too happy for their own good, and anything that happy deserves a good downing. She will say all this, and a hint of sarcasm will creep into her voice again. Can I blame her for this tone? They are her things, after all. She cares about them in a way she does not care for Georgie when he glowers and tells her simply, as if it explains everything, “Fuck you.”