Nora Gail Bryant said you touched her breasts in the cattle-stunned heat of a summer when she was learning words—ambiguous, augment, assess—to be the first one in her family to get away from where we all got away from, all but you. Come late enough, by choice, to the new school, where nothing was decided and the unstained wood in the rain flared yellow, you stayed, a pioneer, intrepid. Nora Gail said you—
Oh, we couldn’t ever quite believe it. A little tepee of a man—white lashes, goggly eyes—how could you?
I always meant to ask.
Besides, you had a wife then, though for years we did not see that faint-colored woman with a paintbrush at her ear; we were looking at you, you in the middle of the horseshoed tables, waving at us papers with messages in red, words extravagant or cruel. We could see the grades you said you forgot as soon as entered there.
Only the student, marked-upon, remembers.
I am at the end of the horseshoed table, nearest to the board and to you and to where it is you turn to write—in your upslant hand—how much has been said. We are writing poems, and even before the day is out, you are calling to me, “Yes!” You headlonging down the hall after me with the news you like it—“Yes!”
In school, such things can happen as change a life.
You failed me for what I failed to write on Ammons’s poem, saying, “So what, impromptu …” Your expression as you spoke to me was bewildered; you retreating to your Shakespeare: “You reason as a woman—‘I think him so because I think him so’ ”; you, a teacher, after all, leaning against the blackboard, fanny chalked. You yelled, “Defend yourself!” Names, titles—your readiness to speak made me clumsy, and I resented you and everyone else, pointing: Look! Look at what they do in my house. A morning newspaper. odd magazines; only to Mother do the books collect like string; all kinds, she isn’t choosy: hardbacks on the high shelves, but paperbacks mostly—bookmarked with her bobby pins or broken and swollen in the places she thinks to leave them.
I read then.
I read a lot. Mostly poets, men poets, not handsome in their photographs but glistening to please—a sweaty, open-collared pose, an appearance almost anxious, a little mad and full of yearning, a little—should I say it?—like you.
“ ‘So country-alone, and oh so very friendly,’ ” you quoted someone, forever old and unloved. “Of course, love,” you said when I was no longer your student. “What else but love and God and dying?” you asked. By then only drinking coffee, you sometimes trembled just to speak, and yet I made our dates in bars and pulled olives off toothpicks with my teeth. Conspicuously buckled—links, chains—I tunneled my hand through the gap in my shirt. You told me what you wanted. But I, who had given in to so many with no regard to after, guarded my sweet sex.
We met in places far enough away from where you taught, kept a wife, slushed through the streets after rice, milk, salt; besides, that life—shelves of soups and chipped plates and umbrellas crimping in the closet heat—was not real, no more than were the children, yours and mine. “Boy or girl?” you had to ask—and ask.
But so did I.
“Rousingly disillusioning” was how you said it had been for a lot of us, and you sent me your poems where the vaulted classroom flickered warm-wood red. Your sentiment surprised me; besides, it was not like that. The ceiling was low and perforated—I remember—and the classroom’s plastic surfaces, slouchy modern seats and rounded edges, table legs like cue sticks, hollow tubes of aluminum; I could lock my legs around them, writing furiously on whichever Conrad it was in the years I had you. You were interested in islands, you said; the sea, your mother. I sat through our dates, thinking of that classroom and of us here in the middle of the country, no ocean in sight. Dry-level treeless expanse, the same we looked out on and out on from wherever you were staying then, getting well, you said, getting better than ever. Coffee, coffee, coffee. You were warming your hands on the mitt of your cup, sniffing at the vapors, palely seen. You, sick this way, I could and could not believe it. “Really?” I said to every disclosure. “I’m amazed. I didn’t know.…” Didn’t want to know. Your hands were very pale. Your fingernails were yellow. It was easy to resist you, to say no to you when you asked if you might.
I did not treat you well.
I never told you … turned away in the moment when it happened, you shutting your mouth on the tablet of her words—Dickinson, the flood subject. Death.
Was he expected?
Were you in any way prepared?
The students gathered at your desk said you were teaching or had finished teaching the famous poem when it happened. But I am not acquainted with these students and cannot ask what it was they heard, children still. Yet every year I greet them, as you did on your Great Lawn, versions of the same faces.
I begin to know how old you were. Death, death apparent everywhere—and you dying too soon for us to talk about it.
HIS CHORUS
The girls had their own versions, of course, which they told, calling her by his name for her, Margaret, saying, “Margaret, we knew your brother. He wasn’t bad.” Then what? she wondered, and Margaret came upon them again as she had come upon them. Long days, taking the washed streets home from work, Margaret had come upon them, the girls and her brother, bunched under the portico of the night-abandoned embassy, all shiny blacks and chains before a match, another match illumined their sprung faces—surprise!—or else they did not see her, and they argued. Margaret had heard their girl voices in the muffle of the huddle, asking, “Share, will you, please? I’m cold.” In the unhinged season this had been, already dark, when the wind off the river rolled barrels down the promenade and banged the padlocked gates of shut-up shops. “Coming home?” Margaret had asked him, and her brother had answered, rolling his shoulders to say, “I don’t want it—fuck off, you mother!”
The brother was a shrug, a glance, a long, stooped back, rough hair belted in notched garbage ties—and gone before he was gone: This was Margaret’s version. She told anyone at all about the resinous stains on his fingers, the slept-in folds of his shirts. The jeans he wore so long unwashed were oily with his dirt. No coat, no socks, shoes curled witchy and split at the seams, her brother at the lip of things—the door, the curb, the dock—was licking at the fogged face of his kiddie-face watch.
Do you know what time it is? If she could only ask her brother again—do you have any idea what time it is? Margaret folded laundry, pinching at her collar bath towels still warm yet coarse against her chin. What else was there to do? she asked. Margaret told the girls, “I waited up for him at night. I washed the floors.” From upstairs came Martin’s calling, “Margaret, look at the time!”
Four, five, six in the morning when the sky pearled and others, early wakeful, moved, she guessed as she did, to hoard the spangled outlook, Margaret did not care by then that her brother’s bed was empty. “Not one of you girls in it,” she said, “and I bet you thought I didn’t know, but he told me.”
On the nights he did come home, he spoke of the girls. Crouched in the collapse of his bed, he gave his version of the girls to Margaret. How their hands brushed over the new hair under his arms—as though it were high grass and they walking through the field of him. “My brother,” she said, “he told me what happened some nights after you abandoned the abandoned embassy.” The sucked-down candies he proffered on his tongue. The brother was talking and Martin was calling “Margaret!”—when who was this Margaret? She sometimes forgot herself with the boy—the boy huffing on his watch and scolding, “Fuck Martin! Margaret, it’s me who needs you.”
She told the girls, “I had no babies of my own.”
And another time, when they would speak to her of him, she asked the girls, “He did tell you about us, didn’t he?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” the girls said, which made her wonder then what her brother might have said about her.
He might have said Margaret was his mother, even when their own was alive and making a living at night. He might hav
e described a sister of stout and rounded back, despite that she was young; she was working. She was working dirty jobs in dirty clothes—for him. For him she was broiling cheap cuts done for dinner. For him she bargained; for him she wrote: “Please excuse this lateness. He wasn’t feeling very well. He didn’t mean it. He didn’t know. He didn’t understand.”
The ways she thought to love him! Draping towels over his bent head at the mouth of the steaming pot—to help him breathe when he was croupy—such was her mothering. Margaret was the person he thought first to see when they picked him up for thieving. She never made him promise to quit his ways, but listened to him promise he would try to be better—especially around Martin—no more stripping through the kitchen, drying himself with his shirt. He would not cough when Martin was talking or in the man’s presence snipe at her for money. The rinds and open cartons behind the milk—sometimes even a plate, fork and knife crossed over it—empty dispensers and unexpected bills, late-night lockouts and bust-up girls: There would be, the boy promised her, no more surprises.
Was that how he thought to tell the girls it was among them—a sister, a brother, a brother-in-law—in a strip of rooms made smaller if the brother had company?
Because, she told the girls, she was not so old as to forget some sensations; she recognized the knock of the bed and the yeasty smell of yearning. Her brother’s broken, coaxing voice—she knew the sound of that: his please and won’t and will you. The sore places near his lips and his lips, so split and glossy, were some of what it was about him—must have been—that made the girls say yes, grind their heels against his back, ask, “Doesn’t this hurt, what I am doing?”
“No, no, no, no, no,” the girls insisted. “We were not like that,” and they didn’t call her by her married name, but spoke familiarly. “Margaret,” they said, and they described her brother as sullen. They had seen him elbow clingy girls, seen him shawled against the chills, seen him counting his money. The way he left the bathroom with his beery piss unflushed in the unseated bowl, the girls laughed to tell it, although Margaret had seen it, too. Suddenly, the brother was leaving his mark in the rooms through which he passed.
“No,” she said. “He wasn’t such a beast as that.” He spent time uptown on the high grounds of the garden with the scrolly gates. “He could be sweet,” Margaret told the girls. “He was not indifferent to his surroundings.” He looked at trees, at how in spring the new leaves were so many of them spiked. He had his places—that much she said she knew. He sometimes went for drugs. “But, Lord,” she said, and looked hard at the girls, “we all of us sometimes need it.”
The grassy smell of him come home on an evening when the sky stayed white, Margaret remembered him with blades of grass pressed against his back and with muddy, open shoes. He brought home a smell of something she had forgotten, with Martin in the broad bed crying out, “Margaret!”
Of course, there were resentments, she explained, Martin’s version of things, what he called “assaults by that punk-mouthed brother of yours,” then added, “Yours the family with the fucked-up genes—lucky you can’t pass them along.”
“My fault,” Margaret said to the girls, hands cupped between her legs. “My fault he was my brother. I could not scold him. I liked to kiss him instead. I liked to rub my thumb along his front teeth, sit in his room and watch him sleep.” In sleep, his body was newly heavy and unmarked—breath fluttering the hollow of his neck. She said, “I was meant to see him, but not like that.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” Margaret cried, but when the girls appeared confused, she said, “Remember who saw him last.”
Late night or early morning, the hallway narrowed to a tunnel in the light from the end where he stood. He was returned but about to leave. His loose clothes undone confused her, but his sideways moves she understood. She had experienced before the unexpected charge of his unexpected smile, the hands lifted as in blessing: good-bye, good-bye!
But wait!
She had been waiting for him; she was awake, brushing aside other versions of his story—the one with the coroner’s instruments or the one where the heart gave out softly, and she pointed to that place on herself.
“My brother’s heart,” she told the girls. “I have heard its tricked beat. I have kept him company here,” Margaret said, and she opened the door for the girls to see his bedroom, the sheeted windows and the cutouts, things tossed, tented or on a tilt—in some ways just a boy’s room, no matter what was written on the wall. Impossible to make out anyway, his aggressive urban scrawl, his tag—whatever was his name—he wrote it where she walked from work past the diplomatic row, the promenade, the padlocked buildings. His bullying design was everywhere she looked.
His face, too, his wounded face—the bruised hollows of his eyes and his eyes so thickly lashed and sleepy—was the first version of his face Margaret saw. Here the skin’s imperfections, summer-oiled and over-wrought, were more pronounced than in the colder seasons when confronted with the smallness of his face behind a scarf. Outside, or on the way outside, the brother’s skin was close in winter, blown clear, cheeks a wind-scratched rouge. Yet she did not move to touch that face or the others that occurred to her out of order but up-to-date. Margaret told the girls, “Of the little boy he was, I remember less and less.”
A swatch of baby hair—shades lighter—and the slatted cage that was his chest, veiny threading everywhere.
Nails soft enough to bite off.
A new body very clean.
Shoes.
Hands again.
The sweated valleys between his fingers, his fingers ringed at the knuckles—and then not—but squaring at the ends to an older boy’s hands, drumming the kitchen counter.
“Hush with that noise! You’ll wake Martin,” she scolded, then asked, “What is it you want?”
The brother grinned his hungry face, the one he wore when the drugs wore off, and he propped himself against the cupboards. This face was a face she knew regardless of season—slack or sly, it was hard to tell—but his eyelids twitched and his speech slurred in its wavering volume of request. “Do you still—” he began.
“Still what?” she asked. “What?” She could not understand! “What is it you want?” she asked this brother again and again. “What is it?”
When anything, she told the girls, she would have given him anything—and he knew this.
He was spoiled.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” the girls said. They said, “Margaret, we’ve been there.”
“But he didn’t answer,” Margaret said. “That time he was in my arms—flat out on the floor I found him and pulled him up against my knees—his mouth stayed shut.”
“This was in the living room,” Margaret said.
“I have his watch. I took it off. I thought. What the fuck does it matter to you? Look at all this stuff of his I’ve got,” and she started opening his drawers—beer caps, rubbers, cans of spray paint. “Can you imagine,” she told the girls, “the bony rattle of the cans at night and Martin hollering for him to quit!”
“You must have known this about my brother,” she said, “surely,” and she threw away a plastic bag, burnt matches, some kind of stuck-on candy.
“Yes,” the girls said. “Yes and no.”
“We knew him first from the yearbook. We guessed his long smile was to cover up his teeth. We thought we would like him, and we did.”
“He found us names,” the girls told her—okay-sounding gang names from unflattering sources, from defects like moles or stutters.
“Spider was mine,” a dark girl said. “Can you guess from where he got it?”
But he was affectionate, the girls told her. He seemed hardest on himself—wedging his narrow body in any narrow space. He said he wasn’t smart.
“You are!” the girls had told him. “You only have to learn how to work!”
Margaret said, “I remember his crying. He woke me with his crying—how many times?”
“Yes,” they said, yes
to what she tossed before them: the pink and yellow bodies of the skin magazines, sticky tubes of jelly. “He only told us he was sad,” the girls said.
“What for?” Margaret asked. “What was ever denied him?” Margaret said, looking past the girls to see if she could see his knotted chest and arms and shoulders in his furious abandon—shoving, shoving himself against a loose shape whose head knocked against the headboard of the bed. The noise! The noise! The old masturbator from next door, crying out, he couldn’t stand it, Margaret; he couldn’t stand this fucking boy!
He was a boy.
He woke with his hands between his legs.
He cried out, “Is there anything to eat?” Doors slammed, or else he slunk past in his tired clothes. The light was afternoon light or later—and cool. All day he slept; skin flakes flew up when his sheets were tossed, also fingernails, hair—his hair was anywhere, as was the glass imprinted with his ghostly mouth.
“All this talk about this boy,” she said to the girls, when he was just a boy, who lived, a brother with his sister and his sister’s husband—in odd arrangement—but who did not these days?
GIOVANNI AND GIOVANNA
Oh, that these fervent thoughts we have of our dead would sift into their spirit world and warm them with the truth of how they matter to us still, how they are missed. Dale I remember, shy man, large, embarrassed nose and ears, how I often knocked against him, waiting for a ride to wherever it was I was going then, a child, sleeping over, the sheets always cold and a terrible thirst. The dry part of going away, my mouth open to it in the back of Dale’s truck, faced forward: all that green air, until I was so dry and beaten—lashed by my own hair—I was exhausted and sad, sad to leave him. I said, “I want to stay with you.” I said this to him, sometimes lying. I thought, as children do, that I was necessary, that Dale’s life without me was just a run-down house and a wife named Ida.
Nightwork: Stories Page 8
