by Brady Udall
“This room was for you, see?” Rosa said. “Nicholas got it all ready for you when he came back here. He did it himself.”
The room smelled of leather and machine oil and must. On the wall above the bed was thumbtacked a laminated map of the world, one corner of which had curled down so that only Australia and a few South Pacific islands were visible. On top of the desk was a stack of Big Chief notebooks and an unopened box of pencils.
“This is my bed?” I said.
“Only yours,” she said.
“Did I like cowboys?”
Rosa shrugged. “I don’t know. Nicholas liked cowboys. Why do all men want to be a cowboy? Only God knows.”
Feeling suddenly peculiar in my own body, I sat down on the creaking bed and leaned back. The rain had stopped and the leaves of the oak outside tapped delicately against the windowpane. Rosa stood next to the bed and shyly put her hand on my chest. In a voice so low I almost didn’t hear it she said, “Every day I missed you.”
That night, after I had a bath and Rosa enlisted a bunch of neighbor boys to help bring my wet trunk inside, we sat down to dinner under the glass chandelier in the dining room. The table was crammed with Ukrainian and Filipino dishes: spring rolls and sinigang soup and cabbage dumplings. I ate with a sweating, careless abandon; I was fond of casseroles, but no casserole I had ever eaten could compare to these pan-fried sausages and crunchy noodles laced with bits of onion and egg. Rosa wore a long dress full of crocuses and her hair was pulled back into a tight bun which shone from the back of her head like a spotlight. I helped her with the dishes and then we sat in the TV room and watched “The Rockford Files” and “Police Woman” while outside the green dark rolled down.
“We got a guest room upstairs with a foldout bed and bathroom,” Rosa said. “Okay for you?”
She sat in a plush velour lounge chair and I was sunk down in the loose springs of Nicholas’ old recliner, which smelled of Brylcreem and pipe smoke. I told her that I’d rather sleep in the room with the cowboy bed.
“Oh no, dusty!” she said. “Too much stuff everywhere!”
She looked at me, the blue glow from the television flickering against the side of her face, and she smiled. She went into the kitchen and brought back a half pint of butter brickle ice cream. “Okay. You eat this and I fix up your room.”
For a half hour I stared at the television in a trance and listened to the thumping and scraping overhead, the clatter of Rosa’s shoes on the wooden floor. When I had finished off the ice cream I looked out the window into the backyard. In the blue-green dark I could make out a small lawn bordered by whitewashed stones and the rusted skeleton of an old swing set from which hung four empty chains. All around, glowing yellow lights circled and hovered. For a time I stared out the window, spellbound, and then went out the back door and stepped into the unmowed grass. The air was dewy and thick and I walked toward the center of the lawn, brushing spider silk from my lips and eyelashes. The yellow lights seemed to orbit me, moving with a slow, underwater languor, flickering and blinking out and flaring suddenly in the dark grass. I heard the screen door creak open and then Rosa was at my side.
“I’ve never seen this before,” I said.
“Fireflies?” she said. “Nicholas told me the lonely ones, they’re the brightest. Every one looks bright to me.”
Back inside, I opened my trunk, which had done a fairly good job of protecting my belongings from the rain; the paper bundles at the bottom were soaked around the edges but my Hermes Jubilee had stayed high and dry. I took the typewriter and followed Rosa upstairs to my room, which she had swept and dusted and sprayed and polished. In the deep glow of the lamp it looked like a different room altogether, though the massive sewing machine still crouched in its place next to the window and there were bolts of fabric stacked against the far wall. The cowboy bedspread was gone, replaced by a sunflower quilt. The map of the world had been spread out flat against the wall, showing the continents and seas, and the newly waxed floor shone like the still waters of a pond.
Rosa helped me into bed and switched off the lamp. I thought I might type a little before I went to sleep but I didn’t want to be impolite. “We’ll get these other things out of here tomorrow. Anything else for you? Anything I can get?”
I shook my head. “I’m doing all right.”
“Nothing? Some water maybe?”
“Water,” I said. “Okay.”
Rosa got me a tall glass of water and I drank down the whole thing. “I used to wet the bed,” I told her.
“I know,” she said.
She took the glass and kissed my forehead and told me she’d see me in the morning. After she closed the door behind her I lay under those clean sheets and listened to the branches against the window and the shouts of children in the faraway night and the strange electrical buzz of cicadas. I couldn’t help myself; I got up and went to my desk. In the thick darkness, I found one of the Big Chief notebooks and ripped out a page. I rolled the sheet of paper into my Hermes Jubilee and typed a paragraph or two of happy nonsense before I slipped back under the covers and, for the first time I could remember, went to sleep in a bed that felt like my own.
ROSA AND EDGAR
AROUND ME THE events and dreams of my life have settled like layers of sediment. Stacks of paper line the walls, spill out of the closet and crowd the desk. Like a geologist studying the strata of metamorphic rock I can read the epochs of Edgar’s short existence: from St. Divine’s, the light blue paper of old ECG readouts the nurses let him use; from Willie Sherman, the brown, gritty theme paper he stole in bulk from the supply room interspersed with the thick, cream-colored school stationery he lifted from Maria’s office when he felt like treating himself; from the Madsens’, the reams of recycled mimeograph paper, often smeared with violet ink, that Lana brought home from her office. Showing themselves occasionally within the larger formations are smaller deposits of black, ink-soaked paper from those times of difficulty and sadness when pounding the keys, blotting out one page after the other, was Edgar’s only comfort.
On one side of my desk, water-stained, crumpled and dog-eared and bound with twine and rubber bands and kite string and electrical wire, is the record of my life before I came to Pennsylvania. On the other side, typed exclusively on twenty-pound bond the color of alabaster and arranged in rows as orderly and white as the columns of a Greek temple, is the humdrum daily narrative of my last thirteen years.
Thirteen years. That is how long I have slept in this child’s bed and typed at this child’s desk. That is the span over which Rosa begged me to move into the guest room, where my feet wouldn’t jut off the end of the mattress and my knees wouldn’t thump the underside of the desk when I sat down to my typing. But I could never bring myself to move out. It was simple: this was my room, these were my things, and I wasn’t about to give them up.
For the first year or so, when I actually still fit in my bed, I did not leave the house much. It was as if I was in recovery from a sustained illness or a near mortal wound suffered in combat: I took my breakfast in bed, napped several times a day, mowed the lawn in my pajamas, showered only when the mood took me (not very often), watched TV until I felt like I was going blind. Every week I went with Rosa to the city library and checked out the limit of half a dozen books, which would usually take me no more than three or four days to finish.
Eventually, I began to venture out more. On Monday nights I would accompany Rosa to Bingo Night at the Community Fellowship Hall, a moss-green Quonset hut that sits off the old state highway in a stand of towering elms. We would take Garland Street, walking side by side under the blue globes of the streetlamps, past the elementary school and the abandoned Burnside Girls’ Academy, and then on to the crumbling highway flanked on both sides by piles of glittering coal slag from which have grown countless stunted birches, their trunks slender and bone white. From Youngstown Bridge the fellowship hall would slowly rise into view, lit up at both ends like a spaceship taking off into the n
ight.
For Rosa, Bingo was no pastime, it was business; she would spread out five tickets in front of her, a bingo stamp in each knobbed hand, her face set with concentration, a tiny bulldog Filipino woman ready to win come hell or high water. When she won, which was more often than not, her piercing little girl’s voice would ring out, the call of “Bingo!” rebounding off the ribbed ceiling of the hall like the cry of a wild wetland bird, and the whole room would deflate, you could almost hear it in the mumbling and sighing and the crumpling of tickets: Not her again.
Afterwards, walking home in the dark, Rosa would count her money and snap her purse shut with a final click. “Those people in there, they think it’s luck,” she would say, shaking her head. “It’s not luck, no no no. It’s prayer.”
At least three times a day Rosa would kneel in her icon corner, the place in the living room where icons of saints and prophets and martyrs were clustered on the wall above the radiator in their stiff, awkward poses, gazing steadily into the middle distance with eyes a thousand years old, their heads encased in halos of tarnished gold. She would light a vigil candle and chant and read from the prayer book, sometimes prostrating herself, talking to God insistently and a little loudly, as if He was in the other room trying to read the newspaper.
It took her more than a year to convince me to attend liturgy with her. The Joy of All Who Sorrow is situated in the very center of downtown Stony Run, on the corner next to the post office, and it was built at the turn of the century by Slavic immigrants who came in droves to mine the beds of anthracite upon which the town had been built. Before she and Nicholas were married there, Rosa converted from Roman Catholicism and, until I began to attend church on a regular basis, was the only dark face in a congregation of white-skinned, fair-haired Slavs (upon my arrival in Stony Run, Rosa told anyone who asked that I was the son of a distant relative, come to stay indefinitely. Even though she and I looked nothing alike and had accents that marked us as coming from different corners of the world, everyone assumed that I was of Filipino descent—to the people of Stony Run a dark face is a dark face).
My first day at church I hardly knew what to make of the dim, candlelit room swirling with wreaths of incense, the acolytes and priests in their brocade vestments brandishing gold crosses and swinging censers, the choir chanting in some Byzantine minor key. It was otherworldly, nothing like the simple, spare Mormon chapels I had been in, and as alien to me—a native of sand and crag and oven-heated air—as these swelling Pennsylvania hills, more lush and green and overgrown than the Garden of Eden itself.
Midway through the liturgy came the “kiss of peace” and suddenly everyone was kissing everyone else, me included. I had never been a part of so much kissing in my life. These people kissed the priest’s robe, his hand, the jeweled Gospel book as it was carried by in procession, and then without warning they were kissing each other, pressing in from all sides, reaching out to me with a kind of cheerful indifference, seeming not to notice that I was a stranger in that place, grabbing my hand and pulling me in for a peck on the cheek or neck. Those first few Sundays I would duck and bob and weave like a boxer trying to slip a jab, but they would get me anyhow—there were too many to try and fend off all at once—and eventually I gave in and began to return the hugs and handshakes, to kiss back. I kissed babies and mothers and men with lumberjack beards and teenage girls in short skirts and whiskery old ladies—I kissed them all.
To me, this is the beauty of it: there isn’t all that much to tell about these last thirteen years. I mowed the lawn. I played Bingo. I went to church and kissed perfect strangers. I shoveled snow, shopped for groceries, cleaned the gutters, locked myself out of the house. There has been very little in the way of epic event; no bloody accidents, no bedlam or treachery, no fires or beatings or fistfights, no suicides or untimely deaths. Nothing but the balance of days, the ten o’clock news, the light hanging in the trees like cobwebs, the frost-coated grass, the Sunday paper thumping on the porch before dawn, the dishes in the sink.
This is not to say there weren’t milestones. At eighteen Edgar got his driver’s license so he could prowl the hilly byways of town in a jacked-up orange Chevette he bought from Father Grinev’s son-in-law; at twenty he went on his first date; at twenty-three he lost his virginity to a woman he met in a bowling alley and never saw again; at twenty-four he smoked his first joint and came to believe he understood with perfect clarity the purpose and configuration of the universe and his place in it until he woke up the next morning with somebody else’s shoes on.
In the last thirteen years I haven’t become any wiser or better or stronger. In many ways, it occurs to me now, I have lived my life in reverse. In the first half of my life I had to make all the hard choices and ride out the consequences, while in the second half I have lived the sheltered and uncluttered life of a child. Every night I have been tucked into my child’s bed, every day I have sat at my child’s desk to read and type. I have had my hair cut in the kitchen with an old sheet tucked around my neck and Mentholatum rubbed into my chest during cold season. I have eaten a lot of cookies and milk.
I have not been able to live completely free of the adult world. At nineteen I got a job working with Mr. Oselskiy, a member of our congregation and the owner/editor of the only local newspaper in the valley, The Blind Canary. At first I made minimum wage filing records, emptying ashtrays and badgering lapsed subscribers over the phone, but Mr. Oselskiy began to see hints of my talent when he let me write filler pieces about the Association of Firefighters awards banquet or the rash of lawn-ornament thefts in Cutler Township (a few years back Mr. Oselskiy confessed to me that as far as he was concerned, everything in The Blind Canary is filler, besides the ads). It quickly became apparent that I had what it took to become a capable newsman: I am a stickler for detail, people feel comfortable talking to me, and I can type like a son of a bitch. Now I do sports, crime, the municipal beat and anything that smacks of “human interest.” I write profiles of bottle-cap collectors and one-armed war heroes and spelling-bee champs, I cover UFO sightings and the public outcry over seminude dancers at a local tavern. Occasionally, I provide our readership with home improvement tips or recipes or high-handed movie reviews, and every other week I write a shameless gossip column under the pseudonym “Bianca Walters.”
There’s nothing to it, really. I go out with my notepad and people spill their guts to me. I show up on their doorsteps and they offer their life stories, their small triumphs, their secret angers and regrets. I usually put away my notepad, which is just for show anyway, and listen patiently until they’ve said all they have to say. After that is the easy part. I go home, sit down in front of my Hermes Jubilee, and do what I’ve been doing every day for the past twenty years: I type up all the gritty details.
While I have found some fulfillment in my professional life, I can claim nothing of the sort when it comes to matters of the spirit. Though I have gone to church every week with Rosa, prayed with her over meals and before bedtime, stood with her through countless vespers and liturgies, and faithfully fasted with her the forty days of Lent, God and I have come to no real understanding. Unlike Rosa, I can see no divine purpose behind the tangle of this existence, no ordering hand. It is all a mystery, or more accurately, a mess. There are no heroes or villains, no saviors or demons or angels. Only those who have died and those of us who, for whatever reason, have survived. None of this will keep me from believing in God. I believe in Him, I just don’t know that I will ever have faith in Him.
So you might say God and I are at something of a standstill. I haven’t forgiven Him and I have no reason to expect that He will do the same for me. We are both accountable for our own abominations and that, I have come to believe, is the way it should be. There have been many times, walking down the dark wooden corridors of the church, that I’ve considered stopping by Father Grinev’s office to make the necessary confessions, to unburden myself of what I carry. I’ve wondered: could it free me of the nightmares I
have of Barry tumbling through a dark void, never hitting bottom? Could it relieve the guilt I feel not only for Barry’s death but also for everything else, for my mother, for Cecil, for Nicholas, all of whom, it seems clear to me even now, gave up their lives on my behalf? Maybe, but something holds me back. I will keep my sins to myself, I have learned to accept them as my own, and there is some small comfort in that.
And still there is happiness. In many ways, all I have been typing over the past thirteen years is one page of happy nonsense after another. I won’t say there isn’t the minor daily heartbreak of memory and what-might-have-been. The bad dreams and late night regrets. And the humidity around here is a torture. But I am not too jaded or proud to thank God for small favors, to count my blessings.
Every week I type a long letter to Art and sometimes we talk on the phone. I have to hold the receiver at least half a foot from my head so as not to risk permanent damage to my eardrums; the older Art gets the louder he becomes. For two years I have been seeing a woman named Mitzi Harrison. Mitzi has two small boys from a previous marriage and Art has become something of a surrogate grandpa to them. He sends presents and candy on holidays and makes sure I keep him informed about any major breakthroughs in motor skills or potty training. Despite a white-knuckle fear of flying and being confined to a wheelchair and needing a twenty-four-hour nurse, he makes periodical rumblings about coming out to visit.
I keep in intermittent touch with Sunny. After all these years we still share secrets; besides Art, she is the only one from my old life who knows the truth of my disappearance from the Madsen house. A couple of years after I left, the Madsens moved from Richland to Olympia, Washington, where Lana works with the park service and Clay runs a new construction company. Brain returned from a church mission to Bolivia awhile back and is about to enter graduate school at Syracuse as, of all things, a drama student. Sunny, married and divorced, lives in Denver and makes good money writing marketing copy for the Coors Brewing Company.
