Authors: Jim Shepard
Todd nodded.
“Hey. Am I here all alone? You understand?”
Todd said he understood.
Bruno put the car in gear. They backed over something backing out. They drove to an Arby's in a better part of town and Bruno made him order a big meal even though he wasn't hungry. When the food came, Bruno went to the men's room behind the bar, and when guys came and went and the connecting door swung open, Todd could see him talking to someone on the pay phone.
N
INA
Over the last few months I told her about every possible group I could think of: the Serra Club, the Christian Mothers, the Ladies' Sodality, the CYO, the Rosary Society, the Parish Review Board, the St. Anthony's Women's Society, even the Knights of Columbus. Or it didn't have to be in the Church: there were bus trips I knew about to Atlantic City, to the mills in Fall River, to Broadway shows. Ida What's-her-name ran them out of her house.
I even told her about this martial-arts class they were running at the Bridgeport Y. I figured, you know, a woman alone.
Nothing. She didn't want nothing to do with any of them. Okay, I figured. This Gary thing'd take a while longer.
Instead she ends up with Mr. Bacigalupe.
I took Sandro's advice; I didn't push it. Let her tell me when she's ready to tell me. So we sat there like
chidrules
and it never came up. I even said, “You got something you wanna talk about?” She said, “No.” She was always like that.
I wanna tell her, You get involved with him, I'm wearing black. I'm in mourning. I lost a daughter.
So we're sitting there in the kitchen and she doesn't want to talk about him and she doesn't want to talk about anything else, either. I was telling her about my bursitis, which is awful lately. My shoulder, it absorbs the dampness at night. I feel like a sponge. She's barely listening.
I told her the house looked good and asked if she was having company. She gave me a look like what was I getting at, and I felt like saying, Hey, forget it, let's not talk, let's just sit here, all right?
I asked about Gary, had she heard from him.
I asked about her son.
The dog, we talked about the dog.
Finally, I go, “Joanie, I give up. What do
you
wanna talk about?”
She goes, “Ma, you're not helping any, you know?”
This is what she said to me, after I sat there for thirty-five minutes talking about things she could do to help herself. I felt like saying, Okay, maybe they weren't the best ideas, but I was
trying,
you know? I was trying.
It hurt, what she said.
They think you don't have any feelings at all, that you just come and go without them. We were over Lucia's the other day, she and Todd were outside the whole time. It looked like hell. I asked her if maybe she shouldn't come inside, and she came back at me so fresh I thought, Forget it, and went right back in the house. In front of her son, too.
Then she gets in these moods and it's like, Jeez, Ma, we don't see enough of each other. I just keep my mouth shut; I don't say a word. Every now and then, though, I tell her, When you want something, you have to work at it.
They don't wanna know nothing. They gotta learn the hard way, just like we did.
I can't talk to Sandro about it. The kid's fine. Gary's coming back. She'll work it out. Happy days are here again.
This morning we were sitting there in the breakfast nook, I was going through the mail. The Church was raising money again, like in the old days, for the orphans in the Philippines or Indonesia, the little kids with flies on their noses. And I started getting tears in my eyes. Sandro sitting there, thinking I'm nuts. And here's the thing: I was crying for myself. I was looking at poor kids who didn't have a pot to piss in and crying for myself, like seeing their faces was making me panic, making me think that there was nothing I could do to get out of my life.
T
ODD
In the toilet at Arby's I tried to figure out what to do. On the metal wall of the stall there was a sign:
IT ISN
'
T POSSIBLE FOR US TO CLEAN AFTER EACH USE
. Somebody scratched out enough letters so it said,
IT ISN
'
T POSSIBLE TO CLEAN AFTER U
.
My mother says when I was little and a kid had been beating me up on the playground, she found me one night going to bed with a hammer.
I had time to confess and make it right and I didn't. I had chances. I knew what the right thing was and I did the wrong thing. I had the Sacraments and all this training and I did the wrong thing, and kept doing it.
God's supposed to forgive you if you're sorry. I'm sorry.
Also in the toilet in Arby's I said an Act of Contrition. I got off the toilet to say it.
Someone came into the bathroom and I had to get up. It was an older guy and he gave me a look when I opened the stall door. I don't know what he thought I was doing in there. My knees were wet from the floor. My eyes were like I had an allergy.
Part of me is glad. Glad that someone knows, glad that something's finally going to happen.
My dad'll hear about it in the paper, or maybe from a relative when he calls like a month later.
There was this kid I knew in third grade. He always, always got in trouble. He would only get hit between classes. Sister would take him to the office then, so he wouldn't miss anything. I remember the way, on the days he was in trouble, he spent the whole period at his desk, sitting up straight, his hands folded, waiting.
J
OANIE
My mother and father argue about directions. They have fights over what's faster, this or that road. Which has more traffic. My mother'll say, Why you going this way? You coulda gone that way. As a kid, I sat in the back and had to listen. Even then I knew they were arguing about this decision instead of the other ones. How they ended up
here,
how they got
here.
Instead of where they ended up in general. I mean with their lives.
My mother's turning into one of those old people who think the rules are going to hell everywhere, the kind who hang around the pool at condos watching for rule violations. Reporting the kids without towels, the kids who do cannonballs.
But then I'll see, like this morning, that she left some stuffed shells for us, wrapped in that careful, housewifey way, and my heart'll go out to her.
I don't want to hurt her about Bruno. When I was with him, it was like my head was saying no but my mouth was saying okay. Which is about the way the two normally operate.
A month or so after Gary left, Todd and I were sitting on the floor in the living room one night, listening to the radio. We were in a kind of stupor. The TV was broken. It was hot, and Todd kept rubbing his forehead with a wristband he was wearing. It reminded me of the summer he was always drying his sweat with a hand towel he carried around. We were listening to an oldies station. They played Petula Clark's “Downtown.” Todd hummed along. He sang the last part to himself at the end, and I remember thinking that maybe we'd be all right, maybe we were going to make it.
All these days since the car thing have been the same, like ugly cabins along a swampy lake.
I never tried to be Queen of Heaven, but I did want to be a good woman, a good mother. It turns out I didn't know how.
I wake up every morning with my heart racing, like every day will be the day that things work out, or at least get resolved.
The sisters used to say, You don't get exactly what you pray for, you get what God thinks is best. So I used to figure I might as well just wait for that, anyway.
My mother said to me once, just in passing, impatient about something or other, “Well, when were you
ever
happy?” It stuck with me. I should have said, Easter Mass, when I was little. With my white dress and white gloves. My candy to look forward to, the sun on the lawn in front of the church, the air fresh in my nose, the trees with the birds I didn't know, talking, calling things like Red key, Red key, or else So Soon, So Soon.
What would she have said? She probably would have said, Oh, you weren't even happy then. But I was, I think.
I just want it all to stop. This morning, after Todd went out, I sat on the sofa with his peeled-off sweat shirt, like it was the last warm thing of his I'd touch.
B
RUNO
The way to get respect is to treat people like dirt. It's surprising how many people hold this view. I'm told this often. People say this to me; I say no. But I'm no professor. Many times I'm wrong. Often I'm wrong.
People surprise you. People disappoint you. Sure, you say to yourself, so-and-so was a disappointment, but this person,
this
person I
know.
And look what happens.
A more dispassionate man would have said, She doesn't respect you. My friends said this.
You have to have the ability to see the facts without being sidetracked by the history. By your expectations. What
are
expectations? Rehearsing your own lack of imagination. Joanie's not
like
that. Joanie'd never
do
that. Please. The Japs would never attack Pearl Harbor. John Hinckley was such a quiet boy.
Distance. What you need is distance.
What you do is you keep clear who your friends are. Who treated who like what.
Altruism is fine. Altruism is sweet. But you have to think of yourself. Because who else is going to?
And here's something else nobody knows: the week before she got married, I sat in her mother's kitchen three nights in a row until two in the morning, four in the morning, later than that. I wanted to know, out of curiosity, Did she think Gary was ready for something like this? Did she think she was? I was telling her over and over, He's a good man. Fine. We know that. All's I'm saying, Is he right for you? And she said, a little sad, but mostly smiling, Bruno, you haven't given up, have you? I said, Forget me. Forget me. I'm talking about us. And she said, There is no us. There's only you.
I kissed her good night that last night. She didn't want to, but that was all there was to it. I had
tears
in my eyes. When I was up close to her, I whispered in her ear. I said, “You know this is wrong.” And when I let her go, she said, “Sometimes you gotta do the wrong thing.”
This is what she said to me after all our time together.
The morning of the wedding, I went over to see her again. This is how much pride I had. She was doing her hair in her mother's bedroom. Her mother was thrilled I was there. I said I had an emergency message, coming through. All the way up the stairs, she's trailing behind, tugging on my jacket flap. I had to hit her hand away. And I knock and peek into the room, with the mother standing behind me in the hall, and there she is, sitting there in her white already, three hours early, doing nothing, hands in her lap. And she goes, “What are you doing here?” What am I doing here. How many years, Christmas, New Year's, Easter, I been coming over here? How many years I'd come over, I'd spring for something?
Tonight on the phone, Joey said, “That didn't teach you, nothing'll teach you.”
He said, “
Now
do you believe me?”
I feel bad sometimes. I know I haven't lived the right way. I know sometimes people got hurt. They'll always be people like me, people who're glad to be the way they are but also think, now and then, that maybe a vaccination somewhere didn't take. Maybe it's that simple. I read once, I think it was Meyer Lansky, he said, Some people just never learn to be good.
Joanie spent the time Todd was gone poking through his room. The dog wandered in to check on her, shouldering the half-closed door open and unhurriedly nosing around before leaving. She waited until the dog was gone and then pulled out everything he had hidden. The box of letters under the board games in the closet (
Phalanx!, Goal!, Storm at Dieppe
), the little red spiral notebook, the round candy tin his father bought him on their one trip to the Caribbean (Zombies: Coconut Chocolate Clusters). She knew where everything was. She'd found everything cleaning at one time or another.
The candy tin was filled with photos. Bruno mugging for the camera with his hands curled like a movie monster's. Gary with a new ten-speed and long hair, a photo she'd taken when they'd first met. Audrey on the sofa. Audrey under the willow, a tennis ball in her mouth. Gary pushing Audrey down a snow pile in some kind of king-of-the-hill game. A picture her mother took of the three of them at the beach, Gary holding Todd's boogie board and looking off, Todd holding her hand and staring straight at the camera. Gary painting the garage.
Near the bottom of the tin she came across a Polaroid of the three of them and felt a lurch, like she'd stepped on a loose rug. One side of the image was smeared the way Polaroids sometimes got. The photo was three years old. Bruno had taken it, in their kitchen. She and Gary were at the kitchen table, and Todd was standing between them. The overhead light, a fake Tiffany thing, was prominent. Todd was holding a coffee-table book Bruno'd just given him on football called
The Gladiators.
He was looking directly at the camera. Gary was lifting the salt shaker with two fingers and a thumb, and watching her in a sidelong way. He looked unhappy. She had her eyes on the table. Minutes before the picture had been taken, she'd collided with Bruno in the darkened living room. He was coming from the upstairs toilet, she didn't remember why; she'd been going to get something to win an argument. Gary and Todd had been in the kitchen. Bruno had stopped her with his arm after their bump. His fingers had pressed her neck forward. He'd kissed her, softly, like he was putting a daughter to bed, and she'd kissed him.
Now, with the photo on the rug in front of her, seeing after all these years that moment, Gary's face, and Todd's expression, she thought, Had they known?