I’d feel sorry for Mama and ashamed of myself for wanting her to stop saying the room was there. To stop believing in it. On hot summer days and nights, with all the windows open, we would gasp for cool air that might have been in the secret room but wasn’t in ours.
And time did pass. I graduated from high school, went out on my own and worked a day job and took classes at night, gave money to Mama, and I did well, I was always good in school, I just tuned everything else out, and then I got my MPH in another night program, it took years, and I ended up . . . in one of the smaller mountain-buildings, in my own little place, with my beige sofa, my good table and chairs, my red easy chair, my pale green bookcase, my Chinese rug. I can look out my windows, facing only west, not toward the lake—right over the city, toward where I grew up. I haven’t been out there for fifteen years. Desmond comes to see me, brings his two daughters to see their aunt. His wife is very different from him and me, but we all get along. Under the fading sky after I’ve watched the sun go down far away beyond the endless streets, I imagine all of us, back then—the way, back then, I imagined the secret room that I actually come home to now. (Except I don’t have a piano.) The only one of us I find, when I get here, is me. When I think of Mama holding Bobo, and of Zulie and Jean, and Desmond and Donald, and me too, once upon a time, and some cousin or friend of Mama’s on the cot at night sometimes, all of us getting on each other’s nerves but just doing what people do—working, living day by day in that old way, birthday parties with mostly just us, and wishing for more, maybe imagining, and willing to give something, for some room they can’t see and can’t find that would make life so much better, sometimes I feel like—
Small Business
Into the ground-floor, storefront office, past the three staff—the secretary (“Hello, boys, he’s in his office—”), the accounting clerk (who is always annoyed at anything like this), and the assistant manager (who doesn’t even notice them)—to the manager, come the two twelve-year-old boys.
The manager is rumpled, bent over his desk, scribbling something on a pad.
“Hi, Dad, can you give us some money to go to McDonald’s?”
“Hey—two hungry men at large, alert all kitchens.” (Without looking up from his desk.)
Then he does look up and adds, “Why? Don’t you have any money?”
“No—we want to go to McDonald’s.”
“It’s four o’clock, you’re going to be late for your game. Did you take the bus here?”
“No, we’re not.”
“Don’t you have to be there by five?”
“It’s not till five-thirty.”
“Oh. Did you take the bus here?”
“So can we have some money?”
“Don’t you have any left?”
“We were going to go to the bank, Keith was going to get some out of the bank, but it was closed.”
“Keith—you have a bank account?” (The manager is surprised, curious.)
“Yeah. A savings account.” (He is, in fact, holding a little blue book.)
“Oh.” (To his son:) “Am I picking you up at home? You have to get your game stuff, right?” (He’s still holding his pen.)
“Yeah. But McDonald’s?”
“You have money at home, right? I’m only loaning. How much have you got at home? When you go to McDonald’s with friends, it’s on your allowance, right?”
“At home I’ve got eight dollars.”
“OK, here.” (He counts out bills from his wallet.) “Take these eight, and now you owe me your eight. How did you get here?”
“Well, Mom owes me five, so you could just get the five from her, and I could give you three at home.”
“She owes you five?”
“Yeah. Could you just give me ten? You have a ten?”
“What does she owe you five for?”
“Because she didn’t have all my allowance on Saturday, and she still hasn’t given it to me.”
“That’s not the way I remember it—I thought she was holding back five dollars for the comics you weren’t supposed to buy.”
“No—I don’t have to pay her back for that, she said. Didn’t she tell you?”
“No.”
“She said that was OK, because after I finish reading it again I’m going to give it to Brian. He’s in the hospital with a broken leg. He broke it really bad.”
“OK, but if you have eight dollars at home, you already owe them to me, because remember I’m still waiting to get back the twenty dollars I gave you so you could pay for the jersey to replace the one you lost at school, and you spent it on something else instead. That kind of thing—”
“That was on school supplies—remember, Dad? And you told me that was OK.”
“—is important—to be responsible for your money, right?”
“You told me it was OK.”
“I did?”
“Well, could we have ten dollars, Dad?
“So if I give you ten now, how much do you owe me?”
“Will I owe you something?”
“Yes, of course you will!—you’ll owe me the ten bucks, I’m only loaning it to you, like I said.”
“Yeah, but that was before we talked about the school supplies. You don’t remember stuff sometimes, Dad, like the twenty for school supplies.”
“No, I think I would remember that.”
“Please? You’re going to get the ten dollars right back! Mom’s going to give you the five she owes me, and Keith’s going to pay me back tomorrow for his half.”
“Look, just take the eight dollars and we’ll talk about it when I get home. You have a little more time than I thought, but you make sure you get yourself home and get your stuff together, and be ready to leave by ten after five, Mom and Dougie are picking me up, then I’m dropping them off at his peewee soccer practice, so I’m just stopping the car in front and honking the horn, and we’re going straight there, OK? OK?”
“OK.”
The boy grins winningly at his father, who smiles back at him with instantly helpless love and exasperation, and then he looks at the papers on his desk, to remind himself what he had stopped working on.
Keith has not said a word. But he whispers to the manager’s son as the two boys turn to go out, and the manager’s son stops and asks, almost over his shoulder, “Are we ever going to get the car radio fixed?”
The manager does not look up from his papers. He says, “I don’t know—get one for your bike.”
“Yeah.”
The two boys grin at each other and go out the manager’s door and past the assistant manager, the accounting clerk, and the secretary, who at her desk that’s too small for her piles of work, is balancing a checkbook she’s holding in her lap. She doesn’t notice the boys at all, and they don’t notice her. The manager calls after them, “Hey! How did you get here? Did you take the bus?”
On Assignment
The little boy whom I’d last seen about two hours earlier, the one wearing a tattered T-shirt and raggedy jeans, came up the dirt road carrying on his back a huge load of long sharp-edged leaves that had been tied in a bundle with lengths of vine. He was maybe seven or eight. Bent over. Holding the vine-ends with both hands at the back of his neck, his little dirty elbows sticking out in front of him. In a tree overhead a bright red and green bird was whistling its ideas about everything. A kind-faced priest wearing only snake-skins, sneakers, and a skirt of feathers blessed the boy as he went by, and then took another sip of his Pepsi. At the top of the slope, a shiny Hummer with a flatbed trailer hitched to it was waiting, and it seemed like this boy’s bundle was the last that was needed, because one of the three soldiers there—who were wearing work gloves, while the boy had none—took the bundle from him and threw it onto the load, and the three of them got into the Hummer and drove off, spewing mud and gravel behind them. The boy came back down the slope, standing up straight now. I was ashamed and stepped out from where I’d been hiding. The look in his eyes was wary—fully as much of m
e as of the soldiers. It was early afternoon, and he had to be hungrier than I was. Everything around us was growing fast in the hot wet narco weather, and inevitably he would have to grow, too. The priest never said much. Who knew what he was thinking? I’d learned he wasn’t allowed to show up back at his strange kind of group house till dusk, or they would punish him. Clean water hadn’t been reinvented yet. I was writing everything down on white lotus blossoms and floating them away on the muddy stream nearby, and keeping a mental photocopy for myself. I was making something like a tiny model story of the real story, I was making believe, making do, making up what I could never make up for.
Dead Man’s Things
Well, change from a dead man’s pockets, for instance—a quarter would be a powerful frightening object to have in your hand when we were kids if it came from the pocket of a dead man, like that guy shot by police whose change spilled onto the sidewalk when he fell, that time.
Somehow these coins were more powerful than the money of a man of no power who wasn’t dead yet, but only dying, like that Nigerian student who came to Chicago and sold ice cream from a truck in the summer evenings and who was shot in the neighborhood and people called 911 and waited and waited till the police and an ambulance came after a while and he had bled out onto the sidewalk while some kids darted up now and then to take ice cream and money from his little truck.
You had a dead man’s hat for a while, bought at a garage sale for two dollars, a beautiful gray Stetson with a rattlesnake-skin band. He hadn’t been wearing it when he was killed in a car crash, and his brother didn’t want to keep it.
You have some things of a dead man who was your kin—your uncle—and whom you loved because of what he was and what he had done even though you only saw him a few times in your life. An old small Persian rug, that he had bought in 1930-something from a stranger who’d come to his door and asked your uncle if he’d give him five dollars for it, which he did. That man too, dead now too, certainly.
You have only one thing from your uncle’s father—your grandfather—which is the way you used to set the knights on the chessboard, facing not ahead toward the coming battle in which they are likely to perish but at their queen and king, like he taught you when you were little.
You’ve got some clothes of one dead man—a few things given to you by his son, pretty worn out now. You didn’t know him well but you admired him. When you put that red wool shirt of his on, you sometimes think of him and thank him for helping you onward after he stopped coming with the rest of us. And other clothes—even a coat, the most sacred of all clothing, given to you by the widow of another man, a friend who was another uncle to you and whom you loved.
Of your other grandfather maybe you have the way you put out your hand when you say certain things, or maybe even the way you say them, who knows, you’ll never know, he died when you were two.
And from the man whose coat you used to wear only once in a while in winter, and that later you gave to someone else who loved him, too, you have the greatest thing—the words you speak if you read aloud from his books. And the shape of your breath and the beating of your heart as you read, and the space you’re inside when you’re in his work and away from everything else, or maybe his books take you into everything else; and you marvel at what he had and wonder where did he get that? Did dead men or women give him that? Which ones? Or who did he take it from, darting up near him as that writer lay bleeding out in one way or another from his body or his body of work before the police came to arrest him for having bled or readers standing around him turned their backs and said nothing? Did he grab a coin he took from a dying writer’s books and shove it in his pocket till it was his time to spend it?
Slow Motion
Once, quite a while ago, there was this guy at one of the pay phones, saying: “Yes, sweetie, what do you feel about that? Were you scared of the way Mommy was talking?” Everybody could hear his voice all over that corner of the hotel lobby. When you work with a system, you can get angry, but on the other hand you don’t have to make any effort at compassion—which is beside the point. If it isn’t doing its job, it’s not because something bad happened to it and it has to take care of its feelings, or you do. The guy’s voice was tender. But I could hear his resignation—he couldn’t change whatever was going on at the other end of the line. He said, “I’m going to be home the day after tomorrow, do you think you can get yourself ready for bed tonight, and then get up and go to school tomorrow, because then I’ll be home the next day, OK?” Some systems are stupid, some smart. If it’s down, that’s even better, that can be a gift to me from the company, not my problem, I’m not the one who fixes them. The man was saying, “Mommy is very tired, and she needs to be alone for a while, can you get ready for bed by yourself?” His cigarette—he pulled on it deep enough to suck the smoke all the way down into his legs. Then while he was stubbing it out in one of the hotel ashtrays he said, “I know you don’t want to, but you can do it, you’re a big girl now.” Even back in those days, the room reservations for the next hundred years were in the system, along with credit card numbers, phone numbers, addresses, company names, titles, and all kinds of stuff that nowadays has all been stolen from us, probably. Security, or doing the job, running a batch of updates for the next day, back then, if you knew what to do, was a piece of cake. No point being anxious about it. The guy looked at his watch, it was almost eleven p.m. where he and I were, he crumpled his empty pack and tossed it at the trash can and missed. So the kid had to be out west in Pacific Time. He was listening a long time. The only other person at the desk with me—I’ll call her Heather—was poking along. People come in, they want a room and have no reservation, they received one room and now they’ve had a fight and want two, or they went up to their room, put the key in the door and opened it and there’s someone else in there. You know. I had this problem with Heather—I still have it with everybody. “What did you want to eat for dinner? Did you want a peanut butter sandwich like I make for you?” He started fishing around in his briefcase and he found another pack of cigarettes. He whacked it on the counter a few times and tore it open with both hands while he held the phone in the crook of his neck, and he tapped the first few a little bit out of the pack and took one with his teeth and lit it with a match from the hotel matchbook lying on the counter beside the ashtray. Then he held the phone to his other ear. My problem especially with Heather but with everybody, and I can’t help this, this is just the way I am, I don’t do any drugs or anything, is that I’m always waiting on them to catch up to me. Just catch the fuck up. Back then you used to call information for a phone number and you’d sit waiting while this recorded voice says the numbers one at a time starting with the area code, so slow I could write it down six times while she says it once: everything else is in like slow motion for me, everything but me: I’m in real time and everyone else is going really really slow. OK—we don’t wait on the phone for phone numbers any more. But the faster things go, the faster we need them to go. The guy tucked the phone into his neck again as he got out of his suit coat one arm at a time—put the phone on the other side, held it with hunched shoulder, and folded the coat and laid it over his briefcase, which was standing on the floor, and all this while he’s listening. Then he said, “Yes, honey, I know you felt bad, I know you were worried, but you don’t have to worry, Daddy doesn’t want you to worry, everything is OK, you can go to sleep and have happy dreams, and then go to school tomorrow, and Daddy will be home the next day.” He lit another cig. I would run a routine on that system while I was showing Heather—jeez, I still remember that too-sweet smell of her shampoo—or somebody else how to do it and they just wouldn’t get it, and I’m supposed to show them how to do it so that I don’t have to be the one to do it, I’m supposed to be supervising, troubleshooting, not doing the daily runs. But for me it ends up being easier just to do it—faster, I mean, a lot faster, than it would be for me to go over it again with somebody new, and instead of doing the right thing
I do the thing I just feel I can’t not do. “Honey?” the man said, “You need to go to bed now, sweetie, it’s time to go to bed—where’s Mommy now?” He looked pretty sad. My mother was crazy, and that’s no lie—she had to be as crazy as that guy’s wife. When I was eight years old she went for months of that year without speaking to anyone in the family. She pulled back so far from me, my sister, who’s older than me, and my father, and my father’s sister that lived on the next block over, that we almost got used to her that way, and we would talk about her when she was standing right beside us because since she wasn’t saying anything to anyone it was like she had gone away somewhere, like not only did she not speak to us, but we didn’t see her. The guy said, “I’m going to send you a big kiss through the telephone, OK, just like I always do?” He stubbed out his cigarette, listening, and exhaled a cloud of smoke, slow. “I’m going to send you a kiss, are you ready?” I remember the cigs especially, since I was still wanting them so bad myself, at that time. He smoked four, I think, while he was on that call. She didn’t even talk on the phone to other people, and we were having to say, week after week, that she couldn’t come to the phone or was out or was asleep. You can want something you can’t or shouldn’t have and it’s just up to you—OK. It’s so much worse, if people would only understand, when what you want isn’t up to you. She came back to us, that time, when I picked up the phone one time just before dinner and it was her old boss and I went ahead and asked her, like we always did, while I covered the phone with the palm of my hand—my father taught me to do that—did she want to talk to him? She surprised me and came and took the phone—he had called to offer her her job back, after she’d been home more than a year because the strain had been too much for her as he’d been losing business because of his own screw-ups. She was a good secretary and he realized he wanted her back, he was doing better, he was willing to have her, crazy and all. And I was amazed to be hearing her voice again—I had forgotten it, almost, forgotten what it was like when she did talk. I actually liked to hear her voice, I waited and waited for it, she had a beautiful voice, but there was something in it that I never got, that she never gave to me, and maybe she didn’t give it to anyone, certainly not that I ever heard, but I thought I could tell it was hiding inside her, not coming out all the way, when I heard her talk the way she did that night to her old boss. “Here it comes!” said the man on the phone, “Here comes the kiss, are you ready?” He listened for a few seconds and he said again, “Are you ready?” I really couldn’t concentrate. I can remember that whole conversation he had. I couldn’t do what I was supposed to do, and Heather was down the counter from me totally lost in something or other she was probably botching on the other terminal, I didn’t know and didn’t care. In those days I really didn’t. He said, “Here it comes!” and he made a loud kissing sound with his lips. “Did you get it?” he said. He had a huge smile on his face to make his voice sound cheerful to her, and it did sound cheerful, but she must have been crying, and he didn’t say anything but just held the phone to his ear for a while, listening to her, or maybe listening to the dial tone because she had hung up or had the phone hung up for her or who knows, but his face wasn’t smiling anymore. I’ve seen photos of me when I didn’t know I was being photographed, and I’ve got a very not-smiling face. This guy’s not-smiling face was also his usual face, I decided, except when he could blank all of this out and pretend to be enjoying his time with the business people he had to joke with to make a sale, or when he could get several drinks in him, or both. I bailed out and set the system back to ready, and this was weird—I remember for some reason that my arms felt so heavy. That whole scene I was watching had done something to me. Once in a while just like that something goes wrong, like you know there has to be a reason for feeling physically something’s wrong that’s not physical, but you can’t get to where you’d know what that’s about. I can’t, anyway. I saw the inside of some hospitals in my time, including mental—back when the day rooms with everyone in pajamas reeked of cigarettes and their hair was all goofus and the loud TVs—jeez I worked in a hospital once. “Data processing,” then. Where I never had to interact with a patient. Some of the administrators, too, in fact, were more or less batshit. The guy hung up. He puts his elbows on that old narrow marble pay-telephone-plus-ashtray counter, I’m talking about a while ago, no pay phones now, no ashtrays, and he puts his face in his hands. What did he care what other people saw. End of episode. Another one coming soon enough, no doubt. He was feeling it. I was feeling jumpy, feeling like everybody else was in slow-mo. I like the late shifts, but I had hours to kill, and—although I have an excellent memory for just about everything, a really unusual memory that is not in every way a blessing, let me tell you, and although I can still see that guy, can still hear those long pauses when he was just waiting, when he couldn’t do anything about it all—I do have a good memory, it’s almost like those people who remember everything, but at least it’s lucky for me that it’s not really that, and there’s nothing else about that night after he hung up that I remember.
An Orchard in the Street Page 5
