The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  Instant karma’s gonna get you—gonna look you right in the FACE

  You better recognize your BROTHER and join the HUMAN RACE!

  One Sunday afternoon when Thomas and I drove down to visit Ma, her bed was empty. We found her in the solarium, illuminated by a column of sun coming through the skylight, sitting by herself among clusters of other people’s visitors. By then, the chemo had stained her skin and turned her hair to duck fluff—had given her, once again, the singed look she’d had that day she emerged from the burning parlor on Hollyhock Avenue. Somehow, bald and shrunken in her quilted pink robe, she looked beautiful to me.

  Thomas sat slumped and uncommunicative through that whole visit. He had wanted me to stop at McDonald’s on the way down and I’d told him no—that maybe we could go there on the ride back. In the solarium, he pouted and stared trancelike at the TV and ignored Ma’s questions and efforts at conversation. He refused to take off his coat. He wouldn’t stop checking his watch.

  I was angry by the time we left, angrier still when, during the drive home, he interrupted my speech about his selfishness to ask if we were still going to McDonald’s. “Don’t you get it, asshole?” I shouted. “Don’t you even come up for air when your own goddamned mother’s dying?” He undid his seatbelt and climbed over the front seat. Squatting on the backseat floor, he assumed a modified version of the old duck-and-cover.

  I pulled the car into the breakdown lane, threw her into neutral, and told him to get the fuck back in front—that I was sick and tired of his bullshit, fed up with his crap on top of everything else I was trying to juggle. When he refused to get up, I yanked him up and out of the car. He pulled free and bolted, running across the interstate without even looking. Horns wailed, cars swerved wildly. Don’t ask me how he made it across. And by the time I got across the highway myself, Thomas had disappeared. I ran, panic-stricken, through woods and yards, imagining the ugly thump of impact, Thomas ripped in half, his blood splattered all over the road.

  I found him lying in the tall grass at the side of the highway about a quarter of a mile up from where the car was. His eyes were closed, his mouth smiling up at the sun. When I helped him up, the grass was dented in the shape of his body. Like a visual aid at a crime scene. Like one of those angels he and I used to make in new snow. . . . Back in the car, I gripped the wheel to steady my hands and tried not to hear and see those cars that had swerved out of his way. In Madison, I pulled into a McDonald’s and got him a large fries, a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a strawberry shake. If he was not exactly happy for the rest of the trip, he was at least quiet and full.

  That evening, Nedra Frank picked up on the first ring.

  “I know you’re busy,” I said. I told her what Ray had just called and told me: that my mother’s condition had gotten worse.

  “I’m working on it right now, as a matter of fact,” she said. “I’ve decided to leave some of the Italian words and phrases intact to give you some sense of the music.”

  “The music?”

  “Italian is such a musical language. I didn’t want to translate the manuscript to death. But you’ll recognize the words I’ve left untouched—either contextually or phonetically. Or both. And some of the proverbs he uses are virtually untranslatable. I’ve left them in whole but provided parenthetical notations—approximations. Now, I’m preserving very little of the Sicilian, on the assumption that one weeds the garden. Right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Whatever. It’s the English I’m more interested in, anyway.” She sure didn’t have a whole lot of use for Sicily. “So . . . what’s he like?” I asked.

  There was a pause. “What’s he like?”

  “Yeah. I mean, you know the guy better than I do at this point. I’m just curious. Do you like him?”

  “A translator’s position should be an objective one. An emotional reaction might get in the way of—”

  The day had been brutal. I had no patience with her scholarly detachment. “Well, just this once, treat yourself to an emotional reaction,” I said. “For my sake.”

  There was dead air on the other end for the next several seconds. Then I got what I had asked for. “I don’t like him, actually, no. Far from it. He’s pompous, misogynistic. He’s horrible, really.”

  Now the silence was coming from my end.

  “You see?” she said. “Now you’re offended. I knew I shouldn’t have relinquished my objectivity.”

  “I’m not offended,” I said. “I’m just impatient. I just want it to get done before she’s too sick to enjoy it.”

  “Well, I’m doing the best I can. I told you about my schedule. And anyway, I think you’d better read it first before you decide to share it with her. If I were you, I wouldn’t talk it up just yet.”

  Now her lack of objectivity was pissing me off. What right did she have to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do? Screw you, I wanted to tell her. You’re just the translator.

  Ma’s third round of chemo made her too sick to eat. In February, she landed back in the hospital weighing in at ninety-four pounds and looking like an ad for famine relief. By then, I’d stopped bringing Thomas to see her. The incident on the highway had scared me shitless, had kept me up more nights than one.

  “This may jab a little going in, sweetie pie,” the nurse said, her intravenous needle poised in front of my mother’s pale face.

  Ma managed a nod, a weak smile.

  “I’m having a little trouble locating a good vein on you. Let’s try it again, okay? You ready, sweetheart?”

  The insertion was a failure. The next one, too. “I’m going to try one more time,” she said. “And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to have to call my supervisor.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I mumbled. Walked over to the window.

  The nurse turned toward me, red-faced. “Would you rather step outside until we’re finished?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I’d rather you stopped treating her like she’s a friggin’ pincushion. And as long as you’re asking, I’d just as soon you stop calling her ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie pie’ like we’re all on fucking Sesame Street or something.”

  Ma began to cry—over my behavior, not her own pain. I’ve got this talent for making bad situations worse. “Later, Ma,” I said, grabbing my jacket. “I’ll call you.”

  Late that same afternoon, I was standing at the picture window in my apartment, watching unpredicted snow fall, when Nedra Frank pulled up unexpectedly in her orange Yugo, hopping the curb and coming to a sliding stop. She’d parked half on the sidewalk, half in the road.

  “Come in, come in,” I said. She was wearing a down vest, sweatshirt, denim skirt, sneakers—clothes I never would have predicted. She carried a bulging briefcase.

  “So it’s finished?”

  “What?” Her eyes followed mine to the briefcase. “Oh, no,” she said. “This is my doctoral thesis. The apartment house where I live was broken into last week, so I’m carrying this wherever I go. But I’m working on your project. It’s coming along.” She asked me nothing about my mother’s condition.

  “How did you know where I live?” I asked.

  “Why? Is it a deep, dark secret or something?”

  “No, I just—”

  “From your check. I copied your address down before I cashed it. In case I had to get ahold of you. Then I was just out for a drive—I’ve been so stressed out lately—and I just happened to pass by your street sign and I remembered it. Hillyndale Drive. It’s such an unusual spelling. Was someone trying to be quaint or something? Faux British?”

  I shrugged, jingled the change in my pockets. “Couldn’t tell you,” I said.

  “I’d been meaning to call you anyway. About the manuscript. Your grandfather used a lot of proverbs—country sayings—and they don’t lend themselves to translation. I thought I’d just leave them as is and then paraphrase them in the endnotes. If that’s okay. I mean, it’s your money.”

  Hadn’t we already had this conversation
once? She was just out for a drive, my ass. “That would be fine,” I said.

  I offered her a beer; she accepted.

  “So why are you stressed out?” I said.

  For one thing, she said, the two undergraduate classes they made her teach were certifiably “brain-dead.” They didn’t want to learn anything; they just wanted A’s. And for another thing, her department chair was threatened by her knowledge of Dante, which was superior to his. And for a third thing, her office mate had disgusting personal habits. He flossed his teeth right there at his desk. Manicured his fingernails with a nail clipper that sent everything flying over to her side. Just that day she had found two fingernails on her desk blotter, after she had told him. . . . She was sick to death of academic men, she said—sucking, forever, on the breast of the university so that they wouldn’t have to get on with real life. “What do you do for a living?”

  “I paint houses,” I said.

  “A housepainter!” she groaned, flopping down on my couch. “Perfect!”

  She finished her beer, said yes to another. When I came back in with it, she was over at my bookcase, cocking her head diagonally to read the spines. “Garcia Marquez, Styron, Solzhenitsyn,” she said. “I must say, Mr. Housepainter, I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’d think a dumb fuck like me would be reading—what?—Mickey Spillane? Hustler?”

  “Or this,” she said. She took my boxed James M. Cain trilogy from the shelf, waving it like a damning piece of evidence. She walked over to the picture window. “Is this snow supposed to amount to anything? I never follow the forecast.”

  “It wasn’t forecast,” I said. “Let’s see what they’re saying.” I clicked on the little weather radio I keep in the bookcase. The staticky announcer said three to five inches. Oh, great, I thought. Snowed in with this supercilious bitch. Just what I needed.

  Nedra picked up the weather radio, looked at it front and back, clicked it on and off. “So you’re a real fan of weather?” she said.

  “I’m not a fan of it,” I said. “But you need to know what it’s going to be doing out there when you’re in the painting business. In season. You have to stay on top of it.”

  “You have to stay on top,” she repeated. “God, you men are all alike.” She laughed—a fingernails-down-the-blackboard kind of shriek—asked me if I wanted a beer. If I was planning to feed her or just get her drunk and then push her back out in the snow.

  I told her I didn’t have much of anything, unless she liked chicken broth or Honey Nut Cheerios.

  “We could order a pizza,” she said.

  “All right.”

  “I’m a vegetarian, though. If that changes anything.”

  The kid from Domino’s arrived two beers later. I’d ordered a large mushroom and olive, but ours was the last stop before his shift ended, he said, and all he had left in his vinyl warmer bag was two medium pepperonis. “I’m sure it’s my retarded manager’s fault, not yours,” he said. Snowflakes lit on the fur collar of his jacket, on the brim of his dorky Domino’s hat. “Here,” he said. “Free of charge. I’m quitting anyways.”

  When I closed the door and turned around again, I saw my quilt draped around Nedra Frank’s shoulders. Which meant she’d been in my bedroom.

  At the kitchen table, she picked off all the pepperoni slices and stacked them like poker chips, then blotted the tops of the pizzas with paper towels. We opened a second six-pack.

  It must have been a Thursday night because later Cheers was on—a show Nedra said offended her politically because all the women characters were either bimbos or bitches. She’d come late to feminism, she said, after having been daddy’s little girl, then a majorette in high school, then a slave to a chauvinist husband and a Dutch colonial on Lornadale Road. “I had to go into therapy for three years just to give myself permission to get my Ph.D.,” she said. “Take this!” She aimed the remote control at Ted Danson, deadening the TV.

  “My wife was in Ms. magazine once,” I said. “She and her friend Jocelyn.”

  “You have a wife?”

  “My ex-wife, I meant. She and this friend of hers organized day care for women welders down at Electric Boat. Then they got the honchos down there to put into writing a policy about on-the-job harassment from the male workers. It was a year or two after EB started hiring women to work in the shipyard.”

  “You were married to a welder?” she asked, a smirk on her face.

  “Her friend was a welder. Dessa ran the day care center. ‘Kids, Unlimited!’ it was called. Exclamation mark at the end.”

  “Fascinating,” Nedra said. Except she didn’t sound too fascinated. She was attacking that pizza like the shark in Jaws. “My ex-husband’s a psychiatrist,” she said. “He’s an administrator down at the state hospital.”

  I almost told her about Thomas, but didn’t want to encourage any wow-what-a-small-world connections between the two of us. Besides, she’d made that crack about my grandfather being “schizo.” I kept hoping she’d leave before those bald tires of hers closed out leaving as one of her options. It frosted me a little that she’d just gone into my room and taken the quilt. Who knew what kind of liberties she was taking with my grandfather’s story? What else she was weeding out of that thing besides his “peasant Sicilian”?

  “Todd’s crazier than the inmates, though,” Nedra said. “Vicious, too. It was sort of like being married to the Marquis de Sade, except that it was all pain, no pleasure.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Todd de Sade.”

  That screechy laugh again. I turned the TV back on. “God,” I said. “L.A. Law’s on already. It must be after ten. I can drive you back in my truck if you don’t want to chance it in this snow. It’s four-wheel drive.”

  “You tell time by the television shows?” she said. “Amazing.” I let her keep assuming what she assumed: that I was just some uneducated goober she could use to get herself through a lonely evening. Back when I was teaching high school, I never would have called a class “brain-dead.”

  “So do you want me to? Drive you home?”

  “Oh, I get it,” she said. “You’re the big four-wheel-drive hero and I’m the damsel in distress, right? Thanks but no thanks.”

  She lifted my quilt off her shoulders and tossed it on the sofa. “Let’s listen to some music,” she said. Before I could say yes or no, she hit the power switch on my tuner and went searching for a station. I’d have pegged her for a classical music type, but she settled on Tina Turner: What’s love got to do, got to do with it?

  She turned around and smiled. “Hello, there, Mr. Housepainter.” She walked over to me. Kissed me. Took my hands in hers and put them against her hips. Her tongue flicked around inside my mouth.

  “Is this a turn-on, Mr. Housepainter?” she whispered. “Am I making you feel good?” I couldn’t tell if she was being daddy’s little girl or a majorette or what. I pretended I was kissing Dessa, but she was thicker than Dessa, damp to the touch no matter where I touched. I hadn’t been with a woman since the divorce—had imagined it happening pretty differently. Had imagined being more a part of the decision process, for one thing. I found Nedra a little scary, to tell the truth. The last thing I needed in my life was another nutcase. I wanted my wife.

  “Um, this is very nice,” I said, “but sort of unexpected. I’m not sure I’m really ready for—”

  “I have one,” she said. “Relax. Touch me.”

  She slid my hand down to her butt, placed my other hand up under her sweatshirt. Then suddenly, right in the middle of kissing her, I started laughing. A few little nervous burps of laughter at first that I tried to swallow back. Then worse: full-throttle, out-of-control stuff—the kind of laughing that turns into a coughing attack.

  She stood there, smiling, humiliated. “What’s so funny?” she kept asking. “What?”

  I couldn’t answer her. Couldn’t stop laughing.

  Nedra headed for the bathroom. She stayed in there for a good fifteen minutes, long enoug
h for me to begin to wonder if a person could commit suicide by overdosing on Nyquil, by cutting her wrists with a nail clipper. She emerged, red-eyed. Without a word, she went for her coat and briefcase. I told her I’d just been nervous—that I was still getting over things. That I was really, really sorry.

  “Sorry for what?” she said. “For getting your kicks by degrading women? Don’t apologize. You’re born to the breed.”

  “Hey, look,” I said. “I didn’t—”

  “Oh, please! Not another word! I beg of you!”

  At the door, she stopped. “Maybe I should call your ex-wife,” she said. “We could commiserate about sexual harassment.” She pronounced it in that alternative way—William Henry Harassment.

  “Hey, wait a minute. You put the moves on me. How did I harass you?”

  “What’s her number, anyway? Maybe I’ll call her. Maybe she and I can have our picture in Ms. magazine.”

  “Hey, listen. All I ever contracted you for was an overpriced translation. The rest of this was your idea. Leave my wife out of it.”

  “Overpriced? Overpriced? That work is painstaking, you bastard! You unappreciative—!” Instead of finishing her sentence, she swung her briefcase at me, whacked me in the leg with her freaking twenty-pound doctoral thesis.

  She slammed the door behind her and I yanked it open again—scooped up some snow, packed it, and let it fly. It thunked against her Yugo.

  She gave me the finger, then got into her car and revved up for takeoff. Oblivious of the road conditions, she gunned it all the way down the street, slipping and sliding and nearly front-ending a honking city plow.