Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  “Thanks, Elle,” I say. “But lots of people aren’t my brother.”

  “My Aunt Zelda was mentally ill—you knew that, didn’t you? When I was young, she would tell me she’d laced all the silverware with poison. Honestly, that woman could scare Jesus, and I think her house was haunted, but that’s an entirely different story. Every time I saw a fork on the table, I thought, I’m going to die if I touch it. Mom always said, ‘God, Ellen, don’t touch the silverware. You never know about people.’ ”

  “I’m glad we can still make light of things,” I tell her. “Humor, after all, is a healthy defense mechanism.”

  “Please,” Elle says. “It was hardly funny. We were scared of Zelda. My poor mother tried to take care of her, but she was miserable and all of her kids, including me, were miserable in the process.”

  “Elle,” I say. “Are you trying to nettle me?”

  Elle ignores this. “Eventually, Zelda jumped from the second story of her house, broke her leg, and died of a blood clot, and my mother nearly had a breakdown of her own, she felt so guilty. At her funeral, my mother told everyone Zelda loved children. Compensation, yet another defense mechanism, Bud. Think about it.”

  “I’m thinking,” I say, and I peer below the line of foggy glass. “I don’t think you ever told me about Zelda.”

  “I’m an open book,” she says. She turns the heater up to high and rubs her hands together. She scans the streets we pass, looking for signs of Georgie.

  “I don’t see him,” I say, and I crank the window. At this hour, the streets are quiet. Cars are parked. The lights in the long line of homes are extinguished. “He might get to Memphis yet.”

  “A dream come true,” Elle says, with a hint of bitterness. “Happy ending. Unlike Zelda.”

  “What the hell is your point, Elle?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “Just talking. Just saying my mother thought she could handle things, and really it didn’t help her, or her kids, or Zelda. Everything just fell apart anyway, despite all her good intentions.” She folds her arms, waits, thinking. Then she adds, more tentatively, “Did you know there were times when Georgie first came to live with us that I’d stay at work longer so I didn’t have to come home?”

  This surprises me. “I thought you were doing inventory.”

  “I think Georgie indirectly earned me a promotion,” Elle continues. She leans back and pens circles with her pinkie again.

  The sky is pitch black, and a heavy rain pelts the windshield. All night, it has been raining, alternating between chilly downpours and slow, damp drizzles. I search for the moon, the great gaping hole shot through the night, but it is gone.

  I would like to tell Elle, if I could, that she should have seen Georgie before he started these trips to Memphis. I would like to tell her that it wasn’t always like this, looking out for Georgie, bringing him home, placing two pills in each compartment of the week-long pill dispenser, only to empty and fill the container again. It wasn’t always about yelling and fights and broken knickknacks and holes in the walls. There was a time—Georgie and me, my mother and father—when all of us were happy, when we sat together at dinner and talked about school and our day, when we vacationed in Florida and picnicked on the beach, our toes buried in the hot sand. There was a time we held no grudges, no hatred. But Elle would only smile, and her smile would say—as her smile most often seems to say—that she had heard enough. She should have seen my brother, though, I might insist, when he was still well enough and strong, when during the last football game of the season, he broke through the stronghold of the opposing players and bolted down the field to score the winning touchdown. He took off his helmet, his face red and moist from exertion. The crowd clamored in a raw, energetic way, “We Will Rock You” reverberating through the bleachers, and my heart swelled as Georgie, gap-toothed, grinned and raised his arms in victory. His teammates crowded around him and hoisted him in the air. They carried him from the field. Georgie ambled home that night, drunk on cheap beer, a cheerleader on his arm. My brother said, “You want some of this, Buddy?” I could only grin, wanting everything that my brother had.

  I would like to tell Elle all of this. “He’s my brother,” I say instead.

  I drive slowly. What is the rush, really? I look for Georgie. He has managed to escape our subdivision and drive out, past the local grocery store, the nail salon, and the car wash where he once worked. This is progress in clearly delineated terms, and this thought, as well as others, squeezes at me until I feel I can no longer breathe. “Truthfully, I don’t know how my mother took care of him,” I say.

  Elle angles her head and studies me. She says, “Your mother knew what she could and couldn’t do, Bud. That’s the first step in caring for anyone. And, anyway, he wasn’t as bad then, with your mother.”

  “So you’re saying I make things worse?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Elle tells me. “He’s just worse, that’s all. Who knows why.”

  ABOUT TEN MILES from our house, on a winding stretch of road that leads to the Blue Route, I spot Georgie’s souped-up Jetta with its one white door, an otherwise blue exterior, and bumper stickers that say Supporter of the Fraternal Order of Police and Drug Free America. The car has skidded off the embankment and hit a tree. The hood is clipped, pushed in. Black tire marks snake out from the rear wheels. George is off, at some distance from his car. Down the road, he walks under streetlights, an overhang of trees.

  “Jesus,” Elle says, surveying the scene. She shifts irritably, then rummages through her purse for her cell.

  “Don’t,” I say, as she flips open the phone. I rest my hand on her thigh but she brushes it away. “It’s nothing. We can handle it.”

  “Handle it?”

  “You want the police involved?” I ask. “So we can add another two hours out here?”

  She seems to consider this before closing her phone. My stomach flutters, and it’s as if there is, somewhere deep inside me, a great frenzy of bats set into motion. My heart beats wildly. Down the street, my brother appears nonplussed. He’s abandoned the car, abandoned Winston, who is in the backseat nervously barking and scraping at the window. The leaf blower is anchored around Georgie and he blasts it full throttle, creating a whirring noise that I am certain will wake the people in the neighboring houses. I pull the Bronco off into the gravel, shut off the engine, get out, and call to my brother. Winston whimpers, barks. “Christ,” Elle says.

  “He’s fine,” I say of the dog.

  “Nothing is fine,” Elle says. And it’s true: Winston has thrown up his pepperoni. He whimpers more when Elle opens the door, and then makes a mad dash toward the tree to relieve himself. Elle’s brow furrows. “I’ll clean up this mess if you take care of the other one,” she tells me. “Just go get your brother. Just go and leave me the hell alone.”

  With that, she is all dexterity and action. She climbs into the front seat, which is grimy and littered with candy wrappers. From the glove compartment she retrieves a box of tissues.

  I walk toward Georgie. Wet leaves fall from the trees and dart around him in a restless way. The streetlight burns brightly, and in the rainy wind his jacket balloons behind him like a cape. Behind him there are houses, mostly darkened now. I call out, but if he hears me, Georgie refuses to turn around. Even in illness, my brother is all single-mindedness. He has left a discarded Coke can behind him, a slip of paper; he only cares about rocks. He moves the blower left to right, right to left. The rocks skip to the curb. What is left is the gleaming asphalt, slick with rain, broken on the edges.

  I call again, louder, and this time he turns but doesn’t release his grip or disengage the motor. He is dressed in a ratty wool blazer, a wrinkled shirt and jeans, old sneakers. The rain plasters his dark hair against his face. The muscles of his jaw clench. His lower lip protrudes, registers his disappointment at seeing me here, here again, ready to bring him back home.

  I raise my hand, as if to stop him from yelling, which he often doe
s. I circle wide, then come in closer. At first, it is always the same—just Georgie and me on the road, the two of us staring at each other as if we are strangers. It’s true that Georgie looks like someone else, someone too fat to be my brother, too bloated from medication, puffy around the eyes. His face is dour. And, worse, what strikes me about my brother is how alone he seems. Could I tell Elle or Dr. Mulvaney that now—looking at Georgie—he intimidates me, he terrifies and saddens me, in his aloneness? “Georgie,” I yell. “You’ve got to stop doing this thing with the rocks and Memphis. You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days.”

  He turns the blower low, and I survey his broad face. A small cut, already clotting, juts from his eyebrow. The wind lashes against him. He says bitterly, “You’re just waiting, fucker.”

  I ignore this and turn back to where, down the road, Elle and Winston stand next to the car, waiting for me, for us. Elle holds a hand up to her forehead to protect her face from the rain. She gestures to me, then pets Winston, and something in my heart constricts. I breathe deeply, turn back toward Georgie. For a moment, the cold feels good, intensely honest, though it’s true that under my jacket I’m sweating. I hold my breath and count to five. It is a stupid thing, counting to five, a childish thing, a thing Georgie and I used to do when, as children, we passed through tunnels lined with long rows of lights that glistened like lost treasure. When I finally expire my breath, I ask, “What happened to the car?”

  “Man, what the fuck do you think happened?” He kicks a stone, kicks it down the street, past me. Winston barks nervously. Elle yells, “For Christ’s sake, do something, Bud, or I will.”

  My brother’s face burns scarlet. He surveys his progress, glancing up and down the street. The downstairs lights in one of the nearby houses flicks on, then, in a few moments, flicks off.

  I shove my hand in my jean pocket, fumble for the quarter that is buried there, the stick of gum, the balled-up lint. I speak slowly, as if I am speaking to an imbecile, which of course my brother is not. I say, “You’re soaked through, Georgie.”

  “I am,” he says. “Great observation, Buddy Boy.”

  I force a smile, my only goal now to get Georgie into the Bronco, to get him home.

  I say, “There must be a hell of a lot of rocks between here and Memphis.”

  “No shit, Bud,” he says. “Any idiot knows that. Every fucking time it’s the rocks, then you.”

  “That’s hardly the issue now,” I tell him. “What we need to do is head back.”

  “Don’t be coy, fucker,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere anymore.”

  I walk a few steps toward him. I turn the quarter over in my pocket. I say, as if trying to joke and trying to console my brother at the same time, “Coy? I’m not a fish, Georgie. And I work for the school district.”

  A white Geo speeds by us, gunning its engine. Two teens stick their heads out and scream. I flick the Geo and the teens the finger. What do they know? They haven’t ever been stuck out on a solitary road, trying to persuade someone to come home. They haven’t stood where my brother and I are standing. I bend down and search for a stone, angry at the absurdity that’s become my life, angry because I’m tired, and angry at Georgie, because of his illness, and because, I realize, there is not a single damn stone to throw at the Geo, all because of him. I think, Sure, go ahead and laugh, all you fuckers. Then I tell Georgie in a mean way that, in his future travels, he might at least pick a location closer to home so that we don’t have to go through this every time. I tell him the supermarket is good because it is only down the street from our house, and when he’s there he might pitch in and do a little shopping. I tell him if he needs something fancier, he might try the Liberty Bell and get out of my hair for good. I say, “Both of these options are better than Memphis. And why the fuck do you want to go to Memphis, anyway?”

  Georgie says, “You know.” He aims the leaf blower at me like a weapon.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But I’ll tell you what I do know, Georgie. I do know that this isn’t progress. I do know that.”

  “Memphis,” he says, and it is as though I am not even here, as if my brother is seeing past me to a whole different world. “Because it’s sure as hell far away from this place. Memphis, because I threw a goddamn dart and that’s where it landed.”

  I consider this. I think, What’s the point in arguing? Finally, I say, “You’ll never get there on your own, Georgie. Never.”

  “Not with that traitor wife of yours,” Georgie tells me. I turn and Elle is on the cell phone. I yell to her but she ignores me. Still talking, she coaxes Winston into the back of the Bronco.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Georgie says. He shivers, pulls his jacket close. And it is as if he couldn’t care less that I am standing here, wet, soaked through and shivering as well, or that I am tired, or that he’s even had an accident.

  So we wait. We wait until a few minutes later a siren disrupts the quiet, and then another set of tires hits the gravel and crawls to a halt. Lights flash. I hear a walkie-talkie buzz to life, an officer calling in the location and license plate of Georgie’s car. I don’t need to turn to see Elle is most assuredly standing there beside the officer, explaining the situation and explaining my brother. Probably she is using Dr. Mulvaney–speak, as though she is in charge of the outlook and situation, and finally all is well. After all, she’s probably saying, she had a sick aunt once that her mother took care of for a time.

  “She’s a fucking piece of work, that one,” Georgie says. He’s breathing hard. “Did Mom even like her?”

  “You did this,” I say. “This isn’t what I wanted.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Bud!” he screams. Then he takes the blower off his back, lifts the entire unit and smashes it on the pavement.

  “Hey, hey!” the officer screams. He walks hurriedly over to where my brother and I stand. He keeps his hand on his holster. “None of that, George,” he says as he nears us, this twenty-something-ish kid cop, new to the force probably.

  I say nothing. I survey the mess, the broken plastic throttle of the blower, the bits of wire and metal machinery scattered on the road. If I were a better man, I would clean up all the messes in the world for Georgie. I would tell Elle that if she didn’t like it, she could call someone who cares. I would carry my brother home. If he needed, I would carry my brother forever. But instead I think: Everything changes. At some point which you cannot foresee, everything changes, and it is as though you are suddenly on the other side of your life, looking in on it as though it were a spectacle. I think, I cannot do this anymore.

  The officer stands next to me. He is careful in his speech, his movement. He’s probably received training in all this, I think. He probably thinks that all his training will help.

  As for me, all I can think to say to Georgie is, “Brother, you exhaust me.”

  He says bitterly, “You don’t know what it means to be exhausted, fucker.”

  “Your sister-in-law says you’re going to Memphis,” the officer says. “I think we can arrange for it, George. I think we can get you there tonight.”

  It is flimflam, it is mean, and I know it. I listen to the officer go on, his voice conciliatory when Georgie issues his complaints against the government, against Elle, against me. Then, when he grows quiet, I tell Georgie that we’ll all go together, that we’ll drive all the way to Memphis. I’d like to believe this, that we could take a road trip there, together, my brother and I. As if there were not any obstructions at all, just a breezy drive through the rainy night and clearing day, as if we could skip all the way there like a stone.

  A staticky voice comes over the walkie-talkie. The officer steps back, replies, says everything is in order, that everything is okay and that the hospital has been called, and he’ll be bringing Georgie in for evaluation.

  “So what do you say, Georgie?” I ask. “You and me, road trip?”

  My brother’s look is wild and sad. He hesitates, steps toward me, then stops.
He says, “Don’t fuck with me, Bud, you fucker.”

  “I wouldn’t fuck with you,” I lie.

  “You’re finally going,” Elle tells Georgie when we near the officer’s car. Her shoulders straighten. Her eyes clear. Possibly she can see across the whole year. I smile at her, but it, too, is a lie.

  Georgie glances up and down the street in a futile, searching way. The officer opens his car door, and Georgie’s anger is reduced to that of a child. He nears me then. He lets me put my arm around him. I can feel the warmth emitting from my brother, hear the working of his lungs, his breath.

  I whisper to him, “Memphis or bust.”

  Georgie looks at me. In the near-dark street, my brother is crying.

  A GOOD WOMAN’S LOVE

  It’s Friday night at Leroy’s Pub and, true to form, Charlie is drunk. I want to say something, but even after he’s had scotch, Charlie is one hell of a nice drunk. He is nice and I am nice. Sometimes I think that’s the problem, that neither of us can be mean or say what we’re really thinking. When I meet him for our date, Charlie looks up from his glass, then rakes his thin brown hair back with his fingers. He shifts in his chair and takes me in—the possibilities of the night, of us—and then he smiles, as if he’s still trying, after two weeks of seeing each other naked, to make a good impression.

  There are other things Charlie does that make me feel sweet about him. He pulls a chair out for me in the way a gentleman or a boyfriend might. He lets out a low whistle when I slip off my jean jacket and shimmy a little, showing him the chest that the Good Lord graced me with in this life. “Daisy,” he says, eyeing my sequined top and talking in that low voice I’ve come to love because it’s both raspy and tender. “You look beautiful.”

  “Thank you, Charlie,” I say.

  “The usual?”

  I nod and he gets up and goes to the bar. He orders a gin and tonic, and Leroy, a big ex-army guy, makes small talk about the start of the football season, and who will go all the way. Charlie collects the drinks and pays with tip; he’s never once asked me to buy my own drink.