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

  I kept my job at the hospital. Worked there on weekends. They assigned me to the adolescent unit mostly: boys who had lit fires or tortured the family pet; girls who had attempted suicide or were taking the slow route via eating disorders. And then one night—Christmas Eve it was; I was covering for another orderly who wanted to be with his family—I met a new arrival who’d been admitted because of a holiday meltdown.

  Siobhan was a pretty seventeen-year-old with auburn hair and pale skin. She’d been a competitive Irish step-dancer until a torn ACL had brought all that to a halt. She was type A all the way, and a big reader. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: the kinds of books that, back in high school, it had been torture for me to get through. Siobhan told me, straight-faced, that she was misplaced in time—that she should have been born in an earlier, more romantic era. Fashioned herself as a tragic heroine, I guess. We weren’t friends, exactly—that was against hospital policy—but we were friendly. I liked her sarcastic sense of humor and she liked mine. And believe me, humor was in short supply at that place. She nicknamed me Heathcliff—because of my “dark, swarthy looks,” she said. My “big, soulful brown eyes.” One time, she asked me what kind of a name “Oh” was, and when I told her, she wanted to know why I didn’t look Chinese. “Because I’m Italian, too,” I told her.

  She reached out and touched my face when I said that. Studied it so intently that I had to look away. I was, at the time, an insecure, blend-in-with-the-woodwork twenty-year-old, not used to such focused attention. “Now I can see it,” she finally said.

  “It?”

  “The Orient. It’s in your eyes. It makes you uniquely handsome, but I suspect you already know that.” Handsome? Me? I laughed. After that exchange, she stopped calling me Heathcliff. Now I was Marco Polo.

  Sometimes, if things were slow on the ward after I had cleared away the dinner trays, I’d play Scrabble or Monopoly with her and some of the other patients. More often than not, Siobhan would win, and after a while I figured out how. She’d cheat. I didn’t call her on it. Didn’t really give a shit who won. But she knew that I knew. “Better watch out for that one,” one of the old guard nurses warned me. “She’s got a crush on a certain someone.”

  At the nurses’ station one night, Siobhan’s chart was out on the counter and I took a peek. It read: “Manic-depressive disorder. Psychomotor agitation during manic phase that manifests itself as oral fixation.” The latter wasn’t surprising. For one thing, Siobhan smoked like a chimney. And when she was out of cigarettes and couldn’t bum them, she would put other things in her mouth and chew on them: hard candies, pens and pencils, the cuffs of her shirts. The covers of her paperbacks were crisscrossed with teeth marks.

  One February night I was doing bed checks, and when I went into her room, no Siobhan. I walked down to the rec room to see if she was there and found her running in circles, gagging, blue in the face. We’d been trained to give the Heimlich, so I got behind her, put my fists under her diaphragm, and yanked. Out popped the plastic Checker she’d been sucking on. It had gotten lodged in her windpipe. As soon as it came out, she started crying, taking gulps of air, clawing me and hugging me so hard that, for a few seconds, it was like I’d just saved her from drowning. When she tried to kiss me, I pushed her away. After that, she started referring to me as her “knight in shining armor.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” I’d say. “I was just doing my job.” But secretly I was pleased. And when, at the next staff meeting, Dr. Dow presented me with a certificate of gratitude, I went down to Barker’s discount store, bought a frame, and hung it on my wall.

  After Siobhan was released, she started contacting me. I hadn’t given her the name and number of my dorm, but she had gotten it somehow. “Hey, Orion! Phone call!” some guy would shout from down the hall, and I would walk toward the phone, hoping it wasn’t her. She kept asking me to meet her for coffee. Begging me. The one time I agreed—met her at the Dunkin’ Donuts just off campus—I was nervous as hell. This was the kind of thing I could lose my job over if anyone from the hospital saw us together. That didn’t happen, but something else did. She was acting manic for the hour or so we sat and talked. Chewing on her coffee cup, talking a blue streak, lighting one cigarette after another. After my second cup of coffee, I told her I had a test to study for and got up to leave. That’s when, out of the blue, she asked me if I was still a virgin. It wasn’t until later that I thought of what I should have said: that her question was inappropriate, out of bounds. But what I did say was, “Me? Pfft. Not hardly.” It was a bluff. The sum total of my sexual experience up to that point had been a drunken encounter with a so-so looking girl I’d danced and made out with at a dorm mixer and then taken upstairs to my room. Groping her in the dark, I’d kept trying to figure out how to undo her complicated underwear until she had finally done it herself, put me inside of her, and said, “Go. Move.” I was done in under a minute, so technically I was not still a virgin. But Mr. Experience I wasn’t.

  When we were out in the parking lot, standing at our cars, Siobhan announced that she had made a big decision about us. “About us?” I laughed. She didn’t. She had given it a lot of thought, she said. She was ready to be “deflowered” and wanted her “knight in shining armor” to be “the one.” I stood there, shaking my head and telling her that was not going to happen. And when she didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer—started getting a little belligerent, in fact—I climbed into my rusted-out ’68 Volkswagen with the bad muffler, started it, and rumbled the hell away from her. Too bad I hadn’t acted as professionally the night Jasmine Negron invited me in and fixed me that drink. I could have spared myself a whole lot of trouble and shame.

  That was the last I ever saw of Siobhan, although for the remainder of my semesters as an undergraduate and well into grad school and my widening sexual experience, she occasionally starred in my masturbatory fantasies. But years later, after I had become a licensed clinical psychologist and landed the counselor’s job at the university, I thought I had run into her again—at the dry cleaner’s of all places.

  Not long before that, I had extricated myself from my three-year relationship with Thea and was still licking my wounds from that debacle of codependency. She and I had been living together for two years at that point. She was midway through her doctoral studies in Feminist Theory. The beginning of the end had come the night when, postcoitally—after a go-around that I had assumed we were both enjoying—she’d informed me that, in a way, Andrea Dworkin was right. About what? I’d asked. That heterosexual sex was a form of rape, she’d said, and then had drifted off to sleep while I lay there listening to her snore. It had taken me three weeks and a couple of sessions with my shrink before I mustered up the resolve to tell her I wanted her to move out. “Good riddance and fuck you!” the note she had left me said. She had placed it on top of the pile of my LPs she’d taken out of the jackets and snapped in half: Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Highway 61 Revisited. . . .

  That late afternoon when I hurried into the dry cleaner’s with my armful of dirty shirts and thought it was Siobhan stepping up to the counter, I stopped cold. Same red hair and pale complexion, same petite frame. But up close, I could see that I’d been mistaken. “We’re closed,” she said—with attitude. So I copped an attitude, too. “Really? Because the door isn’t locked and your clock up there says three minutes of six.”

  “Name?” she said, huffily.

  “Orion Oh. Doctor Orion Oh.”

  She was unimpressed. “Starch or no starch?”

  And that was how I met Annie, my second red-haired damsel in distress. When I left the dry cleaner’s that day, our hostile little exchange might have been the sum total of our interaction had I not noticed that the only other car out front, a beat-up yellow El Camino, had a front tire that was pancake flat. I waited until the lights went out and she emerged, purposely not looking at me. I pointed. “Shit!” she said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She burst into t
ears.

  I offered to change it for her. “Spare in the trunk?” I asked. She said the flat tire was the spare. And so I had jacked up the car and driven her and her wheel with the punctured tire over to the Sears at the mall. They said they were behind—couldn’t get to it until an hour or so—and so I’d taken her to Bonanza Steakhouse while we waited. You’d have thought that rib eye and Texas toast she got when we went through the line was fine dining. Which, relatively speaking, I guess it was. In the weeks that followed, I found out that she was mostly subsisting on Oodles of Noodles and SpaghettiOs, heated on the hot plate in her tiny rented room. That was the first meal Annie ever “cooked” for me: SpaghettiOs with these tiny little monkey’s gonad meatballs. “No, no, it’s delicious,” I assured her when she apologized, even as I pictured my Nonna and Nonno Valerio rolling around in their graves.

  Well, you sure can’t call Annie a damsel in distress these days, now that her work sells in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s something I never could have imagined back after the twins were born when she started making her shadow box collages. The last time I talked to Marissa, she told me that one of her mother’s pieces, Angel Wings #17, had just sold for fifty-five thou to Fergie. “Wow,” I said. “Did she pay her in dollars or British pounds?”

  “Not her,” Marissa said. “Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. When I got off the phone, I had to Google this other Fergie to find out who she was. . . .

  Well, maybe now I can finally explore my creative side for a change. Do I even still have a creative side after all these years of tamping it down? Providing a service for others? To be determined, I guess. And though there’s probably not much of a demand for a middle-aged ex-psychologist who can probably still reproduce the likenesses of Smokey the Bear and Alfred E. Neuman from muscle memory, there might be other artistic avenues for me to explore. Maybe I could buy myself a nice digital camera and get into photography. Or try my hand at sculpting. My Italian grandfather was a machinist, but he’d done a little sculpting on the side. Miniatures, mostly. I still have the little soapstone dolphin he made for me. To this day, I’ll sometimes pick up that smiling figurine and hold it in the palm of my hand. Smile back at it. . . . I like to cook and I’m good at it. My immigrant Chinese grandfather was a hardworking, unsmiling restaurateur in Boston. And Nonna Valerio would sometimes let me help her make the sheet pizzas she used to peddle in the neighborhood. (Speaking of muscle memory, now that the traffic’s come to a complete stop, I’ve just caught myself, hands off the steering wheel, pushing pizza dough to the edges of Nonna’s scorched, warped baking sheets.) Maybe I could work up a concept, create a menu that combined Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. Open up a little bistro someplace. Call it . . . Marco Polo. But no, once the concept was figured out and the menu was fixed, running a restaurant would be full-immersion service work. Not unlike being a psychologist in that respect. People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them—to feed them or fix them. What are you going to be when you grow up, Orion? What are you going to be, Dr. Oh, now that they’ve booted your ass out the door?

  God, it’s been a brutal year. In January, Annie’s and my three-year separation ended in divorce. That same month, I learned that I was not, after all, going to be named coordinator of Clinical Services. It was a position I’d been ambivalent about at first, but one I’d been assured would be mine if I went after it. That was what Allen Javitz, the dean of student affairs, had said as we stood in line at the bar at some university social function. And after he said that, I did want it. Felt not only that I’d earned the appointment after twenty-one years in Psych Services but also that I’d be damn good at it. I’m an empathetic listener, an out-of-the-box problem solver. But when my director, Muriel Clapp, bypassed me in favor of the far more flashy Marwan Chankar, an addictions counselor newly arrived from Syracuse University, Dean Javitz reneged and gave Chankar the nod. When the announcement was made, I felt as if I’d been sucker punched. Still, I shook Marwan’s hand and tried my best to be philosophical about it. I reminded myself that not having to supervise sixteen clinicians was going to save me a whole lot of meetings, evaluations, and headaches.

  I began to look at my endgame. Made appointments with reps from Human Resources and my pension fund. Sat down with my calculator and crunched some numbers. If I stuck it out for another four years, I figured, I’d be able to retire at 80 percent of my salary. At which point, I could sell the house, move into a smaller place, do some traveling. Maybe by then I’d have met someone I wanted to travel with. Every time Marissa bugged me about trying one of those match-making Web sites, I’d assure her that she’d be the first to know when I was ready to start dating, which I wasn’t yet. And that, anyway, I was “old school.” I’d much rather meet someone in person than online. But truth be told, I was still holding out hope that Annie would come to her senses. Break it off with her flashy New York girlfriend and come back home. I’d even dreamt it once—had woken up laughing, relieved. Then I’d sat up in our empty bed. Even my dreams were sucker punching me.

  “Daddy, do you think some nice woman’s going to just ring your doorbell someday and ask you out?” Marissa had said the last time she brought it up. She’d texted me ten minutes earlier with a seven-word message: call me. wanna talk 2 U dude. I can’t remember when she started calling me “dude” instead of “Daddy,” but I got a kick out of it. Started calling her “dude,” too. “It’s the twenty-first century. This is the way people meet people now, dude. You just need to, like, reboot yourself.”

  “Really? Am I a Mac or a PC?”

  “I’m serious. And if you ask me, it’s not that you’re not ready. It’s that you’re scared.”

  “Hey, I thought I was the shrink. What am I scared of ?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. Being happy?”

  I assured her that I was happy enough for the present time.

  “Yeah, but the thing is, there are tons of women your age out there. My girlfriend Bree? Her mother was so repressed that, in all the years she was married to Bree’s father, she never even undressed in front of him. Then she met this guy on eHarmony, and now she’s into all this stuff she never would have done before.”

  “Like what?”

  “Kayaking, motorcycling. Last week they went to a nude beach.”

  “Public skinny-dipping? Good god, Marissa, now I really am scared.”

  She giggled. “And you know what else? Oral sex. Bree’s mom told her that letting her boyfriend go down on her was very liberating. And that giving him head made her feel empowered.”

  “And I bet she’d be thrilled to know that Bree is broadcasting these breakthroughs to the world. Has she tweeted it yet? Put it on YouTube?”

  “Enough with the jokes, Daddy. Mom’s moved on. You should, too. And don’t tell me you’re happy when I know you’re not.”

  “I said I was happy enough,” I reminded her. “Dude.”

  But I wasn’t. The finality of the divorce, the nonpromotion, both of them happening in the dead of winter when, by 5:00 P.M., it was already dark. I’d drive home, turn on the lights and the TV, open the fridge. The freezer pretty much told the story. I’d stare in at the frozen dinners and pizzas. The frozen top of the cake from Annie’s and my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the bottles of Grey Goose on the door, chilled and waiting. One microwaved meal and two or three vodkas later, I’d flop onto the recliner in the family room and fall asleep too early. Wake up having to pee a couple of hours later and then be unable to get back to sleep. So I’d read, walk around the house, watch a bunch of bad TV: televised poker games, infomercials for juicers and Time-Life music collections. The latter are always hosted by some unidentified woman and an icon from pop music’s yesteryear: Bobby Vinton or Bobby Vee or one of Herman’s Hermits. Of course, all of the coolest icons overdosed and died years ago, which is just as well. How depressing would it be to see a gray-haired Jimi Hendrix wearing a cardigan sweater an
d reminiscing about the soundtrack of the Summer of Love? . . .

  Some nights I’d end up staring, in disbelief still, at the empty coat hangers on Annie’s side of our bedroom closet, her gardening sneakers on the floor below them. Those sneakers were the one pair of shoes she hadn’t taken with her. There’s not a whole lot of gardening to be done, I guess, when you’ve relocated to a Manhattan high-rise. On other nights, I’d wander into the kids’ rooms, looking at the things they’d left behind on their shelves and walls after they grew up and moved away: sports trophies and good citizenship plaques, posters of Rage Against the Machine and Green Day, Garciaparra in his Red Sox uniform. On the toughest nights—the sleepless vigils that lasted until daybreak—I’d sometimes take out the family photo albums. Leaf through the old pictures of the kids and Annie and me—the ones of us at Disney World or Rocky Neck, or gathered around the dining-room table for some holiday dinner, someone’s birthday party. In one of my favorite photos, the twins, puffy-cheeked, blow out their birthday candles. Their cake has a big number five on the top. Annie’s standing to their left, holding baby Marissa. Back then when I took that picture, it wasn’t as if I was wildly happy. Jumping out of bed every morning and thinking, oh man, this is the life! But it had been the life, I realize now. I was one of Counseling Services’ young go-getters. I’d jog or play basketball with some of the grad students at lunchtime, run late-afternoon groups for undergraduates who were wrestling with anger management, stress management. I’d started those groups, in fact. Had won a university award for it. And after work, there’d be my own kids to drive home to: roughhousing and piggyback rides, Chutes and Ladders at the kitchen table. On the nights I got home in time, I’d bathe them and get them ready for bed, read them those same stories they wanted to hear over and over: Mog the Cat, Clifford the Big Red Dog. I drank beer back then. A six-pack would last me a week or more. I’d sleep soundly every night and wake up every next morning, reach over and find Annie’s shoulder, her hip. Cup the top of her head. . . . Then the kids grew up, Annie left for New York, and her side of the bed got occupied by books and journal articles I meant to read, clothes I’d ironed and laid out for work the night before. That girl Bree’s mother was straddling the back of a motorcycle, holding on to her eHarmony boyfriend and roaring through her newly liberated life. I was, on workday mornings, carrying my empty vodka bottles and microwaveable food containers out to the recycling box and then driving off to a job for which I’d lost my fire. All day long, I’d sit across from students, listening sympathetically for the most part, or feigning sympathetic listening when I wasn’t feeling it, all the while glancing discreetly at the circular wall clock behind them, floating above all of those troubled heads like a full moon. “Well, that’s forty-five minutes. We have to wrap up now.”