Everyday People

by Stewart O'Nan

  “Show’s over,” Crest says. “Pops go to bed yet?”

  “He’s out on the couch.”

  They sit there, Crest in his chair, U on the wall, watching the news. Pirates won; Kevin Young plants one in the stands.

  “Go ’head, K.Y.,” U says, and Crest smiles with him. He’s so clean it’s hard to believe. Quit everything, not even beer anymore. Back in the day they’d sit here and pound down Iron Citys. Had a fly rap with the ladies, decked-out Impala he used to cruise Highland in, stylin threads. That’s all gone, and what’s in its place is something Crest doesn’t understand. And Crest in his chair; it’s the same, he thinks. They’ve changed. Where they’ve been no one can go. It’s like they’ve come back from different planets and they’ve got nothing to say to each other, or maybe they’re speaking a completely different language. Maybe they’re both fucked up. Maybe Bean got off easy. (No, that’s cold.)

  “U, man.”

  “Hunh?”

  “What’s up with Moms and Pops?”

  “They’re just fighting.”

  “Naw, man, it’s different this time.”

  “You think so? Well, I’m praying for them anyway. I pray for you too, Chris. Every day.”

  “Thanks,” Crest says, because there’s nothing else to say.

  “I pray for Bean too, you know? For all of us.”

  “A’ight, man,” Crest says, and they shake, and it’s almost like it used to be. But it’s not. It’s fine for U to pretend none of this shit happened, but Crest can’t do that. Wouldn’t want to neither.

  The weather chick is on, and he looks at U—at this new Eugene—and thinks of Tom Paris, how no one could tell the alien was inside him. And he thinks it’s like the real Star Trek, when there are two Captain Kirks, and one of them’s good and one of them’s evil. They look exactly the same, they talk exactly the same, they’re even wearing the same clothes, just one of them’s evil. You know they’ve got to fight it out, the two of them, and Spock has always got to choose which one is which. And every time—Crest is amazed by this—every single time he made the right choice. But what if, Crest thinks, what if one time Spock made the wrong choice? What if one time by mistake he picked the evil one? How would anyone ever know?

  A REAL, LIVE PERSON

  WHEN SISTER MARITA PAYNE hurt after listening to someone’s troubles, it was a good sign. If, alone in her apartment, she broke into tears while feeding Nickels, or if on the bus to work she had to crush her hankie to her face, she knew she’d done some good.

  They came to her about their husbands, their children, their money troubles. They came about their infidelities, their terrors, their failures, and in the basement of the East Liberty A.M.E. Zion, in the empty Sunday school room after choir practice, Sister Marita held their hands and listened, nodding in sympathy, trying not to interrupt.

  “I’m not sure about Harold anymore,” her cousin Jackie said, and though Sister Marita had never married, she knew precisely what Jackie was going through. How many countless husbands had strayed before him? And Harold, who’d always been quiet, a gentle man; she felt bad for him. She wouldn’t have expected it from him, he seemed so steady, such a good provider. But their younger boy, Chris, had had that accident, and now he was in a wheelchair. A young man, it was a shame. And Eugene just out of jail. Sister Marita knew what a burden that could be on a father. How much hope folks had in their children.

  “It must be hard,” she said, “with Chris like that. And Eugene just back.”

  “Maybe that’s part of it,” Jackie admitted, “I don’t know. He’s changed. He doesn’t talk. I haven’t seen him all day and then when I get home he completely ignores me. He never used to be that way.”

  “It’s all right, baby,” Sister Marita said, and handed her a Kleenex. “Men get like that. And Harold’s always been a quiet one, you know that.”

  “I just can’t help thinking something’s wrong.”

  “Then talk to him.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Well it just makes sense, doesn’t it? See what’s on the man’s mind. If he won’t tell you, then you know you’re in trouble.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I’m always right,” Sister Marita joked, trying to get a smile from her. She got half of one, and a sad one at that. “Aw, come on, Jacks.” She stood up and took her in a hug, rolling side to side, holding on. “You’ll be all right. He got you this far, didn’t He?” She pointed a finger up to the ceiling tiles. “Didn’t He now?”

  “Yes,” Jackie agreed.

  “All right then.” And there was that smile that said everything would be fine. She could always get it from Jackie, from way back. She’d scrape her knee skating and her cousin Marita would be there to pick her up, brush the grit from her skin like her grandmother did and blow on the open cut. Nothing had changed.

  But then, as she rode home on the 76 Hamilton, the tightness that struck Sister Marita’s heart when her love went out to whoever needed it never came. Nothing but a tingling in her fingers she’d noticed lately, especially at choir, after clapping all practice, or sometimes walking Nickels, the leash squeezing off her circulation. It was like her fingers fell asleep, the way her legs did when she read something on the pot. She kneaded her hands in her lap, looking out the rain-spotted window at the stores pouring by, the shiny streets, the cars flipping their wipers. Real Pittsburgh weather, everything gray. She wondered how Jackie was, how her talk with Harold would come out, and if she’d really helped her. Maybe not.

  At home, Nickels warned her not to open the door, barking long after he heard the key in the lock. He was slowly going blind, his dark eyes milky under the surface.

  “It’s me, dummy,” she said, and bent down so he could lick her hand, his Scotty’s beard tickling her. “All right, let’s get you outside so you can do your business.”

  She put the mail on the counter, then opened the door and followed him out to the curb, holding the umbrella above him while he piddled. Across Spofford a shopping cart lay on its side in the high weeds. Nickels sniffed at the base of a sycamore; the street was covered with smashed seed balls.

  “You got anything more, you better get it done now,” she said.

  He looked up at her.

  “That all you got for me? That it?”

  It was.

  “Okay, but I better not find any surprises when I get home tomorrow.”

  At the door, she stopped and set the umbrella upside down on the porch to dry, setting him into a frenzy, his little tail motoring. Mr. Andre wasn’t home yet, a dry-cleaning flyer sticking out of his box. It was the third night this week; maybe he was working a double shift. Sometimes they asked him to do that. Which was good, Sister Marita thought. He worked at Kaufman’s downtown, selling suits, and he dressed well. Smart, a sharp talker. One of these days one of James French’s girls would snap him up.

  Nickels pointed at the door.

  “Who wants a treat? Who wants a treaty-treat?”

  She pushed the door open just a crack and he shouldered through and bolted for the kitchen, sliding on the linoleum.

  “Okay, okay.”

  There were three kinds of treats, and she gave him the biggest, listened to him crunch it as she went through the mail. The chicken on the stovetop had thawed, and Nickels followed her around the kitchen as she made dinner. Carl’s conch shell sat on the sill above the sink, the inside pink and shiny.

  “And what did you do today?” she asked Nickels. “Lie around the house all day?”

  He cocked his head as if he didn’t understand.

  “Lying on my couch, I bet.”

  She looked at the phone and thought of calling Jackie, but it was too soon, and if Harold was home he’d be suspicious. Who would it be, she thought. Someone from work. Not church, certainly.

  So quiet you never knew what he was thinking. Some women liked that type.

  “Harold, Harold, Harold,” she said, shaking her head above the chick
en, and she thought she hurt a little bit for them. So many years together and now this. And the children still at home.

  When the chicken was ready, she filled Nickels’s bowl with kibble, then washed her hands good. He waited for her to get to the table and say her blessing.

  Lord Jesus, we ask in your name, please keep us ever mindful of your love and of the hearts of others. Amen.

  “All right,” she said, and he tucked in.

  While she was eating, her hand began to tingle. She put down her fork and flexed her fingers like a pianist, rubbed them together. Pins and needles. The sensation wasn’t quite painful, and in a minute it was gone.

  “Peculiar,” she said, holding her hands in front of her. She thought it must be the new keyboards at work. For months they’d heard rumors that they were changing over to the new ITT system, and finally they came to work one night to find new headsets, new keyboards, even new monitors, all in the same blinding off-white, beads of Styrofoam still clinging to the seams. Maybe the new keypads were springier, harder on her fingers. She hoped that was it.

  She did the dishes, glancing at the conch Carl had given her so long ago. Another quiet man. Well, that was done with and no use crying over it. She watched the news. More fighting in Rwanda; God it was heartbreaking, all those babies. She couldn’t stand to look. She brushed her teeth and got ready for work, put out a bowl of water and spread an island of newspapers by the back door for Nickels. Lately he’d been having trouble holding his water. It was age, plain and simple. For all her teasing, she didn’t hold it against him.

  “All right,” she told him, and he stopped wagging his tail. He understood she was leaving, and she knelt down and petted him. “You be good now,” she said, and locked the door behind her.

  It was dark out, and raining the same, a drab, steady noise pimpling her umbrella. The bus was empty when she got on, a driver she’d never seen before. When the busway opened, the commute to East Hills would take ten minutes, but they still hadn’t finished the ramps, so now the bus nudged through Homewood and Brushton and out Frankstown Road, stopping every few blocks to let people on, most of whom she recognized from work. When she’d started taking the 82, it was full every night, all the cleaning people for East Hills Village, the security guards; now the mall was shut down, sitting like a giant haunted house in the middle of the parking lots, and everyone on the bus worked for Bell Telephone. It made the ride like a church picnic, a lot of hollering and carrying on, but Sister Marita missed the old days too, the excitement of so many people headed in one direction. So what if it was work? They were glad to have it, and they were all together. That was how she met Carl, one night on the 82.

  He was the night manager of the Thrift Drug in Brushton, and he was going home. He took the seat beside her, and all the women envied her, she could feel it. He didn’t have to wear a uniform like the pharmacist; he had a jacket and tie. When she talked to him, he let her go on and on, looking right into her eyes, nodding, getting every word. A wise man, his father told him, says little and listens much, and Carl had taken that advice to heart. Every night she kept an empty seat for him, and every night he walked past everyone else and sat beside her, his valise balanced on his knees. It took him a week to get up the courage to ask her out, and then he barely said a word over dinner. He’d been to Morehead, graduated fifth in his class. He’d spent three years in Ghana working for a relief organization, finally coming down with malaria. The government had to ship him home on an army transport, strapped to a cot, moaning incoherently. He’d been in Pittsburgh six months, and this was the only job he could find. His father was disappointed in him.

  “No,” Sister Marita said. How could that be?

  “He’s a judge,” Carl said. “He wants me to go to law school.”

  That was all she could get out of him about his family. When she took him to meet her family, her grandmother asked where he was from, and he paused as if it were a difficult question, then said, “Richmond. Also Baltimore.”

  At dinner, he ate everything on his plate and two slices of her potato pie, but never commented on it, just folded his napkin and smiled, satisfied. In the sitting room, she could see her grandparents were hoping for him to make some great declaration, but all Carl could talk about was his job, his responsibilities. They felt sorry for her, she thought, but only because they loved her. She was thirty-seven and had never been pretty, never would be. She knew they worried; she couldn’t ask them to stop.

  “He’s a strange one,” her grandmother said when he was gone, “isn’t he?”

  “But nice,” her grandfather said. “Very well mannered. You can see he’s from the right kind of people.”

  She never got to meet them. A few months into their courtship, Thrift Drug shut down the Brushton store and transferred him to Waxahachie, Texas. He wasn’t a letter writer, and on the phone his listening lost its intensity, became just silence, inattention, and after a while she dreaded his calls, the groping for something to talk about other than their mutual absence.

  They decided to take a vacation together—a last chance, a last time or good-bye. A last fling, she didn’t kid herself. Florida in February. Her grandmother didn’t tell her it was a sin, going down there unmarried. It was a time in her life when she thought hard about happiness and what it meant to her, what she would do to get it. Carl made love to her when they came in from the beach, the sand itchy between them. They ate dinner late, walking far out along the pier, taking a table by the rail, the water sweeping in beneath them, slapping the pilings. He found the conch on a long walk far into a bird preserve, brought it to her dripping and brilliant from the shallows. She looked both ways up and down the white line of beach and couldn’t see anybody, then pulled the straps of her top off her shoulders and together they gently folded to the sand, knees and feet mixed up. After, they tried to blow the conch like a horn, but neither of them could get even the smallest fart out of it.

  He never said he loved her. He never said it was forever. At least in his silence he was honest, and she was smart enough not to test him. He called her a few times after that, but each time Waxahachie seemed farther and farther away. He wouldn’t say they were over, he was that close-mouthed, that kind of man, and so she had to.

  “I guess we are then,” he said.

  “Like you didn’t know.”

  “Well,” he said, and then didn’t finish.

  “Well good-bye,” she said, and that was it.

  Nine years ago, and since then she hadn’t been with another man, as if she were waiting for him to return from somewhere. She knew what people said, knew the children who called her the widow Payne really thought it was true. In a way it was; sometimes she felt as if a death had been involved—besides her parents’, that ancient history of smashed glass and bad luck she refused to look at too closely, not wanting to blame her loneliness on them, no matter how obvious it seemed to everyone else. Sister Marita did not want to be a child again. She was a woman, and had been for more than thirty years. And a strong one, she thought. It took strength to live with disappointment.

  She’d wanted children and she would never have them.

  She’d wanted a husband.

  And still, she made an offering of her days to God. She tried to help others with her listening (yes, that was Carl’s gift to her), and in the choir she raised her voice in praise. She was thankful. She was grateful. But Lord, sometimes she was so tired. Give me strength, she said then. Give me the grace to think of others rather than myself.

  The bus cut through East Hills, rain thumping the roof, and Sister Marita looked out at the dark night, the newsstands and pharmacies closed, their steel shutters rolled down like garage doors. She flexed her hand, nails digging into her palm. Arthritis maybe. Not a heart attack. Her grandfather had lived to eighty-six, her grandmother to ninety-three. She had a ways to go yet.

  At work she punched in before she got her coffee, then waited behind Serena until it was time. At eleven the dinger went
off—like an elevator reaching the right floor—and Serena finished her last call and gave her the headset.

  “Busy?” Sister Marita said.

  “Not too.”

  Her seat was warm, and the mouthpiece smelled like the menthol cigarettes Serena smoked. Sister Marita cleared the screen of the last number before taking a call.

  “Bell Atlantic assistance,” she said. “What city, please.”

  They wanted Butler and Beaver Falls and Kittanning. They wanted McKeesport and East McKeesport and McKees Rocks. But mostly they wanted Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.

  “What is the name of your party, sir?”

  The mumbled names, the arcane spellings. The impatient callers and the ones who talked to her as if she couldn’t spell at all. She punched it into the new computer, careful of her fingertips. No listings came up.

  “Do you have a street address for that party?” she asked.

  They were actually looking for an address for them.

  “I’m afraid I can’t give you that information,” she said.

  They swore at her, called her this and that. There was a game the girls played, shouting it out when they got a good one.

  “Completely useless piece of shit!” Annette said in a nerdy white-guy voice, and everyone laughed and tried to top it as fast as they could.

  It wasn’t a hard job, and it wasn’t dull. There was always someone who needed help, and you were there to help them, to put them in touch with someone they loved, someone they had to talk to. “Please wait for your number,” you said when you found it on-screen, and then waited on the line, silent, while the computer spliced together the ten prerecorded digits. In case they missed it or had a question. It was a strange time then, Sister Marita thought, waiting for them to hang up. Your mind wandered all over the place, and then the line clicked and the dial tone came on, and you went on to the next call. Otherwise the job kept you busy enough so you didn’t think about yourself. Not like the bus.

  In the morning when she got home, the newspapers in the kitchen were wrinkled and tinted pink.