Everyday People

by Stewart O'Nan

  She was. She knew she couldn’t run from it forever, pretend it didn’t affect her every hour. Like Harold straying, it needed to be faced before she could gather her courage and go on. She needed to know the worst before she could overcome it. And she would. Hadn’t she gotten used to cleaning Chris, dressing him, lifting him into his chair?

  No, not honestly. She liked to think she had, but like Harold she was afraid of his skin, his dead legs. She wondered what was secretly going on inside of him, how it was possible that only half of him was alive. Once, propping him on the bucket-shaped stool in the shower, she’d barked his shin against the edge of the door; he didn’t flinch, and then the blood welled up and overflowed, ran in a line down his calf. The water was already on, and he concentrated on the spray, eyes closed, holding a towel across his lap out of modesty. When they were done, the cut was just a lip of skin, bloodless, a nick on a piece of furniture.

  But she was used to draining his bag, if not how the catheter needed to be greased to fit up into him. She was accustomed to toweling him down after his shower, the backs of his knees growing dimpled with fat. She found Cheez-It boxes tucked under his bed, orange crumbs in his sheets. He didn’t laugh at the TV the way he used to, just stayed in his room all day, drawing on the walls, reading books Vanessa brought from the library. What frightened her was how fast he’d turned into this different person, as if her Chris was gone, her Smiley buried inside him like the memory of his legs.

  Singing, she wondered if the others were right, if she should even be here. Lately her worries followed her everywhere, and rather than being a sanctuary, practice was just another reminder of how everything had gone wrong. She was fine as long as she was singing, but when she had to wait for Sister Turner to straighten out the tenors (like now), her mind wandered and found nothing but troubles.

  Harold had to come back to her, that’s what it came down to. She could see her turning into her mother—bitter, despising her mindless work, going through the days without hope.

  And there was no one to talk to since Marita’s little dog died. Wednesday Jackie had processed the check herself, read it like a telegram bearing bad news. Nine hundred dollars to bury him. Jackie had gone over that night, but her lights were out and it was late. She hadn’t seen her since then, and when she didn’t show up at practice, Jackie thought she understood that too. She’d been so tempted to give up, to hide herself away from everything (again, her mother in their falling-down house, screaming at the Meals on Wheels lady, calling Daphne three times a day). It was not possible, she’d found. Her heart kept pumping. The world did not stop.

  The three songs they were going to sing were “I’ve Got to Praise Him,” “He Is My Rock,” and “O Happy Day.” The first two were staples; the last they were learning new for the ceremony. It didn’t seem fitting, with Martin Robinson in the hospital, but they’d been practicing for weeks, and it was too late to change. Reverend Skinner said it was even more important they show their support for him now; the Courier expected a big turnout, all four TV stations.

  “Sopranos,” Sister Turner called from the piano, “it’s ‘When Je-suh-hus waa-haashed,’ not ‘waa-haa-haashed my si-ins away,’ all right? Two syllables, not three. And give ‘washed’ a little hesitation just a scoosh behind the beat and really make it swing. Get up there and stay up there. Better than the record, all right? All right, one two three four.”

  Sister Turner knocked out a few bars of intro and they all joined in. “O happy day. O happy day.” Jackie had always liked the song, fell into the groove of it with the rest of the row, clapping, moving foot to foot. “When Je-suhhus waa-haashed, O when he waa-haashed, when Je-suhhus waa-haa-haashed—”

  Sister Turner banged the keyboard, breaking them up, drowning them out. She jumped up from behind the piano. “So-pran-os!” she scolded. “What did I say? How many syllables?”

  No one dared answer her.

  “Two, I said. Two, not three. It’s two all the way through.” She stalked back behind the piano. “Let’s see if you remember it this time. One two three four.”

  They did until the second chorus, when someone—Mildred Tolliver or Vivian Broadus, to Jackie’s ear—stretched it to three again. Eventually they got it, swinging it high and hard, but still Sister Turner kept them after dismissing everyone else.

  “Sopranos,” she lectured them after a long pause, “are supposed to be our strong suit, if you follow me. Tenors come and go, and altos. None of you are new. I know it’s a new piece, but it’s not a hard piece. You’ve been hearing this song thirty years, some of you. I do not want to go out there tomorrow and hear what I heard tonight. I don’t think that would be respectful to Martin Robinson or to the rest of us. All right, tomorrow at ten. We’ll meet here and walk over, and I want all of you sharp. How many syllables?”

  This time they all answered.

  Eugene was waiting for her in the front hall, in his suit. It was shiny around the shoulders and elbows; she’d been meaning to take it in to the cleaners. He’d been talking with Reverend Skinner about getting some city money for Chris’s mural now that Martin Robinson was ill. No one was showing up for his meetings, and she knew it hurt him. She recognized his desire for a saving faith—his need—as her own. How she wanted to tell him: For every hope in this world there was an even greater disappointment waiting (oh, wasn’t that her mother’s voice she heard?). But he was an adult, he had to know that by now, had come to grips with it the same way she had. She was pleased he had something solid to build his new life on, not like Chris, who seemed to be betting everything on Vanessa. Harold she could see was lost all this time. In the end it came down to faith.

  “He says they only take applications once a year,” Eugene said on the van. “The deadline’s the end of January.”

  “That’s not far,” she said, because, really, it wasn’t. Still, he seemed downcast, as if he’d hoped to start tomorrow. He worried about Chris as much as she did, and she put her arm over his shoulder. “Be patient. You’ll get it done.”

  “I know but …”

  “Everything takes time.”

  They were coming up to the busway. It was like a moat circling East Liberty; at some point you had to cross it. The bridge had a chain-link fence on both sides, the top curled over the sidewalk so you couldn’t throw things. It had been a bridge like this one, she supposed, the boys using the fence for a handhold, the toes of their sneakers slipping on the wet metal. What did they think they were doing?

  “You want me to come with you tomorrow?” Eugene asked.

  “That’s all right.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes,” she said, then wished he would ask her again.

  When they got home, Harold wasn’t there. She tried not to be surprised, but her first thought was that he’d left for good, skipped like her father. How long, she thought, did she have to live her mother’s life?

  Chris said he’d gone out a little while ago, during Millennium. She figured the time, imagined what two people could do in twenty minutes. Anything, everything.

  “Remember,” Chris said, “I need my shower early tomorrow.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” she said, and went into the kitchen. He wanted to be clean for Vanessa, and Jackie worried that he’d be hurt if she decided to leave him again. Because she might, a good-looking girl like that. A nice girl too. Chris couldn’t ask her to stay, he had to know that.

  He did. Of course he did.

  She ran a glass of tap water and was standing at the sink drinking it when Harold came in, jiggling the key. Eugene stepped out of his room in his shirtsleeves like there might be trouble. Harold had a gallon of milk and a box of doughnuts.

  “For tomorrow,” he said. “I know everyone’s getting up early.”

  He seemed so pleased with himself she couldn’t tell if it was a lie. He could walk to the 7-Eleven in five minutes, leaving him ten, maybe fifteen to meet someone. If they had a car, then a full twenty minutes in a parking lo
t somewhere. She’d grown so tired of checking up on him that it was easier to believe he was lying about everything. It was his job to prove his innocence, not the other way around.

  “Good night,” Eugene said, and closed his door.

  “Good night,” Harold said to the door, and she could see the two of them would be like this for a while. She wanted to tell Eugene that his father had not hurt her—or that him hitting her was nothing compared to how she felt. She had honestly wanted to kill him that night; now she wondered if she’d been insane. He wasn’t worth it. But wasn’t he everything, wasn’t her entire life with him? If only she could care nothing for him, the way he felt about her. It was unfair. That’s what hurt the worst: that he’d tricked her into loving him, and now he’d disappeared. Twenty-five years, and every one a lie.

  She looked in on Chris again. He was in bed, saving his strength for tomorrow’s walk in the park. She was tempted to sit down beside him, tell him not to get his hopes up so he wouldn’t be crushed, but how could she truthfully do that when Harold was waiting for her?

  She wanted to be wrong—she was not her mother.

  “Sweet dreams,” she said, and he said it back, a reflex. What did he dream of—running, driving a car? She cut the lights in the living room, then the kitchen.

  “You all done in here?” she called, and Harold said yes.

  He was already brushing his teeth, wearing the bathrobe she’d given him for Christmas. They were shy around each other now, their bodies no longer common property. It might have been exciting if she didn’t know the reason why.

  Stop, she thought.

  “You just decided to go out and get some doughnuts,” she asked despite herself.

  “We needed milk anyway.”

  It might have been a real answer. He might have actually done it out of boredom, just to get out of the house, away from all the reminders of his life with her. Every time she imagined his girlfriend, she saw an airy apartment with hardwood floors and slanting light, jazz seeping from the stereo. No children, no bills. They made love all day in clean sheets, ate gourmet food she fixed for him buck naked. Now here he was in the bathrobe she’d gotten on sale then hidden in the closet for six months, the bow gathering dust. And she wanted romance?

  While he covered himself with a lover’s sense of privacy, she kept to herself out of shame. He didn’t want to see her body, its sags and pouches, its heaviness. She only shed her robe as she slipped between the cold sheets, and then she didn’t search for his warmth, thinking instead of the doughnuts, why he didn’t get them earlier. Just once she wanted to come home and find him right where he said he’d be.

  Cattin’, her mother called it. “Man starts cattin’ around, you got to lock your door on him.” That simple. But her father was long gone by then; she was locking the door on nothing. Wind.

  She thought of Marita, how she needed to talk to her, and then of her little dog. She’d have to go see her. They could lean on each other.

  “Hey,” Harold said softly in the dark, “you going to be all right tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. Like you care.

  His hand crept across her stomach, and she rolled away. He let it rest on her ribs, stilled. “I’d like to come with you.” But the way he said it wasn’t convincing. It tempted her to make him go, rub his face in it.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “You go ahead and do whatever it is you do.”

  He sighed and withdrew his hand, and then she wished he hadn’t. It only verified her worst fears—that he hated her even more now, that she was pushing him away. Didn’t he understand she couldn’t help herself, that she had to keep at least some of her pride? She’d let him lie to her for so long, even as she felt him moving away from her, escaping the gravity of their marriage, flying off to someone else. She’d lied to herself, pretending at first that it wasn’t actually happening and then that he would see things clearly and come back to her. Now she could see clearly that he had no reason to return to her, that his life would be so much easier without her, and by this kind of logic discovered why he’d strayed in the first place.

  Not that it was her fault, no, it was all his, but she could see his side of things, selfish as it was. Heartless. Sometimes at night she wanted to punch him in his sleep, stop his snoring by splitting his lip. Because that was how it felt, being blindsided and knocked out of your life, and not for anything you’d done. She had to be satisfied with a few elbows, an occasional knee as they rolled over, with pushing his hand away as it reached for her, and still she was just punishing herself.

  “Why do you give up so easily?” she asked now, and his hand reached for her again, on cue. She shoved it away. “No,” she scolded, sad. “I shouldn’t have to tell you.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “You shouldn’t have to try.” She wanted him to come to her desperately, like a lover, everything new between them. Why was she surprised when that didn’t happen?

  She needed to be won again, but he didn’t seem to know this. And even if he did, would he feel the need to? Could he?

  “I love you,” he said seriously, as if she could believe it.

  “You’re not in love with me,” she said, emphasizing the difference, though he continually refused to acknowledge it. Did it seem simple only to her?

  They did not talk beyond this, just turned the same circles they had for weeks now, knowing they’d be tired tomorrow morning, that it was pointless. Strangely, she felt most intimate with him then, in their shared failure, their admission of how important it was to find an answer to her problem. Because that was how it felt now, as if it were her fault for not letting him back in. That he was probably still seeing the bitch—that her paranoia could not be verified one way or the other—was conveniently ignored, forced into its own separate court in which he pleaded innocence while she threatened him, stormed, cried.

  They slept then, or lay awake, waiting for the release of sleep. The anger she’d felt all day dissolved into emptiness. Surely Daphne’s marriage had these loveless minutes. Everyone’s did. The hardest part now was looking back at those old beaus like Alvin Reese and Gregory Mattison and realizing they were phantoms. Harold was the one love of her life and she had lost him, he had betrayed her—it didn’t matter; whichever way you looked at it, she was alone now and would be for the rest of her life, unless—and this was ridiculous—she could win him back somehow. She felt powerless. Everything seemed to be in the past, nothing up ahead but days and nights she would have to fight her way through. For what, more of this?

  There was tomorrow, seeing where Chris had fallen. What else was she looking forward to?

  In her dreams she was running through an abandoned building, a school or an old factory, racing up the stairs and then down again, pursued by a mob she could only hear, and then she was in a car in Los Angeles (how she knew the city she couldn’t say, maybe from TV), riding along with the windows open, the summer air pouring over her skin, parked cars glinting, the scent of taco stands, then something about Harold’s fingers, the palms of his hands turned up to reveal his lifeline. In the morning, she thought she could almost make sense of it—something to do with her worries—but after her first cup of coffee she couldn’t bring back the connection.

  Did it matter? It wasn’t something hidden that was troubling her.

  Chris’s chair didn’t fit through the bathroom door. She had to wedge the shower stool in the corner of the stall and then, with Chris’s help, deadlift him across the few feet of floor and prop him on it—really a job for Harold. His ankles were tangled, and she had to bend down and reposition them, feeling the watery heaviness under the skin, as if they were filled with blood. He wanted a towel to cover himself, and she gave him one. She ran the water onto her hand, shielding him until it was just right—like making a baby bottle, she thought. He grabbed the soap and started with his chest, giving her a look that said she could leave. It went faster if she did it, but he didn’t like her touching his sk
in, stiffened when she reached behind him. She drew the curtain.

  “Let me know when you’re ready for me,” she said.

  It didn’t take long. There was only so much he could do.

  The steam rose up around them. She soaped the washcloth, keeping it between her hand and his skin. They’d installed a handheld showerhead with some of the insurance money, and she went over him with it (she could not stop the thought) as if watering a plant. She had not gotten used to the scars or to the wasted thighs, each week narrower, the knees seeming to bulge out further. He was heavy in the chest now, and his gut was round, his belly button a tunnel. Even his face was slowly becoming someone else’s; only his hands were the same, stained with Magic Marker, fingers slashed with ink. He turned away as she did his bottom; she rinsed him with the showerhead, then clicked it off, as if her efficiency had saved him some humiliation.

  But it did not stop there. She had to haul on his underwear and then his jeans, the legs baggy and then so tight at the waist they no longer buttoned. She tugged on his socks, fitted his feet into his sneakers and double-knotted them like a toddler’s. He could barely manage his shirt, and even that she had to pull down in the back, tuck into his jeans. There were no thank-yous, no bitter jokes as there had been at the beginning, just an abiding silence between them.

  Vanessa was right on time, with Rashaan in her arms. Except for a brief greeting at the door, Jackie stayed out of their way. Chris asked after Martin Robinson, who was in Western Penn where her mother worked. Vanessa shrugged, uninterested. Nothing new, she guessed.