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

  Getting a pay-by-the-week room in Three Rivers is easy; I manage that in about an hour after I arrive. But getting a job is harder. There’s a Friendly’s on East Main Street, but when I go in there to fill out an application, the manager says he only wants experienced waitresses. That’s what I am, but it’s not like I can put down Winona Wignall as a reference. Shop Rite says they don’t need any grocery cashiers right now, but they’ll put my application on file and maybe call me in a month or so. A month? I can’t wait that long. My room costs forty dollars a week, and between the money Priscilla gave me and my own money, I only have thirty-three dollars left. And anyway, how are they supposed to call me when I’ve left the space for my phone number blank? A sign in the window of a dress shop says SEAMSTRESS WANTED. Too bad I can’t sew. I go to the library and read the want ads. Some business is looking for a typist. Too bad I can’t type. A drugstore wants a part-time clerk and delivery boy. Too bad I’m not a boy and don’t have my driver’s license. Two days later, there’s a new ad. A “café” called Electric Red is looking for dancers. Okay, I think, I can dance.

  The catch is: you have to dance topless on a little stage across from the bar. But my week’s rent at the rooming house is almost up. I’ve been living on peanut butter, Wonder bread, and tap water all week. Forty bucks a night plus tips, the manager tells me. His name is Rusty. He’s the bartender, too. Dancers get an extra dollar for every cocktail they can get the customers to buy them between sets (when you can put your top back on), an extra two dollars if the guy buys another drink for himself, too. “I give you girls ice tea instead of liquor, but the jamokes who are running up a tab don’t have to know that,” Rusty says. “Another girl just gave her notice, so I can start you tonight.” I’m hesitant but desperate, so I decide to give it a try.

  My shift goes from nine o’clock until 1:00 A.M., but we get breaks. There are three of us dancers. Gloria is kind of flat-chested, but she’s a wicked good dancer. Rusty’s girlfriend, Anita, is the other one, even though she has stretch marks and is kind of thick in the middle. “Some guy starts getting grabby with you, I’ll give Rusty the signal and he’ll handle the situation,” she’s promised. The sound system blares sexy disco music: “Rock the Boat,” “Get Down Tonight,” that Donna Summer song “Love to Love You Baby.” My dancing is awkward at first because I’m so nervous and self-conscious about my boobs showing. But it helps that the spotlight on us makes it hard to see any of the men who are watching us. Older men, mostly, which somehow makes it easier. After a while I use my technique from before: thinking of things I’ve memorized to take me someplace other than where I am: the Commandments, the Religious Mysteries, old TV jingles. Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed . . . Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile . . . It’s not so bad. By my third night, I’ve made enough money to pay for two more weeks’ rent on my room and go grocery shopping. But on my fourth night, while I’m in the middle of dancing to that stupid song “Afternoon Delight,” I look out at the crowd and can swear I see my cousin Kent out there among the old coots. I keep dancing but I’m freaking out, not concentrating, and I fall off the front of the stage and twist my ankle. The music stops and when the lights go on, I can see it’s not him—that it doesn’t even really look like him. But that ends my dancing career.

  After the swelling goes down and I can walk on my ankle again, I go looking for other work. My luck is with me, and I get two different part-time jobs on the exact same day. In the daytime, I’m a fry cook at Josie’s Fish & Chips. At night, I work the shoe rental counter at Three Rivers Ten Pin. Both jobs leave me kind of smelly, from cooking grease and from the antifungal spray you have to squirt into the bowling shoes after people hand them back in. I’m grateful for that spray, though, because sometimes those shoes come back smelling like the jar of Limburger cheese my father used to take out of the refrigerator and spread on crackers. But hey, work is work. Every once in a while, one of the bowlers asks me out, but I always say the same thing: “Sorry, but I already have a steady boyfriend.” I’m not that interested in men, or women either for that matter. Mimi, one of my coworkers at the bowling alley, brings me to a women’s bar one night, but all the public affection—kissing and dancing crotch to crotch—makes me uncomfortable. “Not my scene,” I tell Mimi the next time she asks me to go with her. Priscilla and I are still in touch, though, and when she visits me those two times, we do stuff. But then she gets a steady girlfriend, a welder at Electric Boat named Robbin, and we lose touch.

  It’s okay, though. I like my uncomplicated single life—working during the week and going by myself to movies on weekends, or to the Laundromat, or to the art museum on Broadway. I go there every time they have a new show, and I’ll even go twice to the same show if it’s one I like. Sometimes if no one’s looking, I reach out and touch the paintings—the hardened brushstrokes. Lean in and smell them, even. I’m not even sure why, but I like doing that. Making contact with the art. Sometimes I think about how, if my mother hadn’t drowned and my father had not become a drunk, I might have gone to college and learned how to be an artist.

  One Sunday afternoon, when I’m doing my laundry—getting fidgety just waiting for my stuff to get dry—I leave the Laundromat and start walking to nowhere in particular. But two streets over, I start recognizing things and I realize that I’m back in our old neighborhood. I approach Uncle Brendan’s barbershop where my father used to work. It’s called something else now, Danny’s, and I wonder if Uncle Brendan died or just retired. I go up to the front window and look in. It seems pretty much the same, except there used to be a talking bird inside and now there’s no cage. I walk past the grinder shop and the little grocery store where Kent would sometimes buy me gum or Popsicles. Across the street is the car lot. It’s empty now; that dealership must have gone out of business. I force myself to look at the back wall that our station wagon went off of the night of the flood. I shiver a little, feeling again how wet and cold I was. Up against the wall we dropped off of is that garage thing that Kent pulled me onto the roof of. When I close my eyes, I can hear the roar of the water, and Gracie’s screams. Can feel her little body bucking against mine. . . . I open my eyes and tell myself not to walk up the hill to our old house, but then my feet start taking me there.

  A little girl is in front of our house, drawing on the sidewalk with chalk. Then her mother calls her and she goes running into our downstairs apartment. Standing there, I look at what she’s drawn—a house, a sun with spokes, a garden with flowers that are taller than the roof of the house. What if fate hadn’t made us get into our car that night and try to outrun the water? If my mother and baby sister hadn’t died? What would my life be like now? That’s what I’m wondering when I realize that the little girl’s mother is staring out at me from the screen door. “Can I help you with something?” she calls out, and I shake my head and hurry back down the hill. . . .

  On my way back to get my clothes, I think about what happened because we couldn’t outrun the flood water: how Kent started touching me. How I had to go to Sterling and live with my foster family—the first one, not the one I lived with after that. How Albie got me pregnant. I think about when I moved back here six months ago and worked as a topless dancer at Electric Red. Last week, when I went to Mr. Big’s and ran into Rusty and Anita shopping with their kids, I practically couldn’t even believe I had done that—that that was me dancing up on that stage, naked on top, with guys watching me and giving me tips. . . .

  The Laundromat is empty now, but someone else’s clothes are in my dryer and mine have been taken out and thrown onto the table in a tangled heap. And I’m pissed because some of my clean clothes have fallen onto the not-so-clean floor. I bundle them up and put them in my basket. Then, to fix whoever it was that took them out so carelessly, I open the dryer and it stops turning with a good thirty minutes left. That will fix them, I think, and
I leave and head back to my rented room on Chestnut Street.

  For the next two years, jobs come and go—the kinds that I either quit or get laid off from. But I’m a saver, not a spender, and so by the time I get hired as a presser at Skiba’s One-Hour Martinizing and Fur Storage, I’m pretty well established. I have a driver’s license now, and a used clunker of a car I picked out because it was yellow. I live in a two-room apartment on the top floor of a house on Broad Street which I’ve fixed up nice. I’ve bought myself some plants, and a little black-and-white TV, and furniture from the flea market: two yellow beanbag chairs, a coffee table with one rickety leg, and a mattress that I’m going to get a bed frame for when I’ve saved up a little more. I have a phone now, too. It rings every Sunday night when my brother calls me. I talk to him for a while, and then my sister-in-law, Mimsy, gets on and I talk to her. Donald has stayed in touch with our father, too. He says Daddy keeps asking for me, but Donald warns me that he’s usually drunk when he goes to see him. So whenever Donald brings up my visiting him sometime, I tell him no, not yet, but that I’ll think about it. . . . My name’s in the phone book now, at the top of a column on page 203: A. O’Day. It’s stupid, but sometimes I flip the tissue paper pages until I get to it. Make sure it’s still there.

  Mr. and Mrs. Skiba like me because I’m trustworthy and reliable. In the year and a half I’ve been working for them, I’ve never called in sick. And that time they overpaid me and I pointed out the mistake, they gave me a fifty-cents-an-hour raise to reward my honesty. One day, after Mrs. Skiba’s phlebitis has gotten worse, Mr. Skiba decides it might be good for business if a pretty girl waited on customers, so I’m taken off the steam-presser and told to work up front at the counter so that Mrs. Skiba can get off her feet. They trust me to run the register because they know I would never steal from them like that other woman who used to work there and they had to fire.

  Is it fate that brings Orion and me together that late afternoon when I’m trying to close? No, it’s just the fact that the wall clock behind the counter has started running five minutes slow and that, on my way to work that day, I ran over a nail and got a flat tire. My first impression of Orion when he points at the clock and insists that I wait on him because it’s five more minutes before closing time (which it really isn’t) is that he’s an arrogant Mr. Big Shot, the same as most good-looking guys who think they walk on water. “Doctor Oh,” he goes, when I ask him for his name, and I’m like, Oh please. Big whoop-de-doo, Mr. Monogrammed Shirts.

  But when I lock up and go outside, he’s still there. And now he’s nice. Either that or he’s coming on to me. When he says he’ll change my flat tire, and I tell him the flat tire is the spare, he jacks up my car and takes it off, puts it in his trunk, and drives us over to Sears. While we’re waiting for them to fix it, he asks me do I want to get a bite to eat and I say yes, because I forgot my lunch at home that morning and I’m starving. When we walk into Bonanza Steakhouse, which I’ve never been to before, there’s a life-size cutout of Hoss Cartwright by the front door. It makes me think of when I used to watch Bonanza with my brother, and how Hoss was my favorite of Ben Cartwright’s sons, even though Little Joe was the cutest. At this place, you go through a line, tell them what you want, and they cook it for you right there. My meal is delicious. It’s been ages since I’ve eaten steak. And there’s a salad bar with lots of choices. Pretty fancy. The salad’s so good that I go back to it a second time, which you can do without paying extra. What do I care if he thinks I’m a pig? He’s just someone doing me a favor.

  We talk, he asks me questions. How long have I been working at the dry cleaner’s? Am I Irish? I look Irish. “Yeah,” I say. “What are you?” He tells me he’s half Italian and half Chinese. I can kind of see it after he says that. He’s got a dark complexion and big Italian-looking brown eyes, but they’re kind of Chinese-shaped. He looks a little like that actor James Farentino on Dynasty. When I tell him that, he says, yeah, he’s heard that before. He wants to know if anyone’s ever told me I look like Sissy Spacek. I say no. Not only has no one ever told me that, but I don’t even know who that is.

  He’s pretty easy to talk to, actually. You’d think I’d be nervous in this situation, but I’m not. Well, I’m not until I ask him what kind of a doctor he is. A doctor of psychology, he says, and after that I get self-conscious about how, is he analyzing me? Reading clues about me, like that I was a topless dancer, or that my father is an alcoholic? Or that Kent said he wouldn’t tell anyone my secret as long as I didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. Which is stupid, I guess. He’s a shrink, not a mind reader. To change the subject, I ask him if he’s Chinese on his father’s side or his mother’s. His father’s, he says, although he never knew him. “Why not?” I ask, and he says it’s because his parents weren’t married and his father wasn’t interested in having him in his life. “Oh, sorry,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else. I look away from him, but when I look back, I notice that his eyes aren’t totally brown. More like yellowy brown. What do they call that color? Hazelnut?

  “When I was five years old?” I say. “My mother drowned in a flood. But at least I remember her.” I can’t even believe I’ve just said it. Not even Mr. and Mrs. Skiba know about that.

  “Rough, huh?” he says. I nod. Eat some more salad. “Hey, listen to us. Pretty heavy-duty conversation for a first date, huh?”

  Is that what he thinks this is? A date? Because it isn’t and he better not be getting any big ideas. I go, “I wonder if my tire’s ready yet.”

  “Only one way to find out,” he says. Slides off his seat, gets up from the booth. When we pass Hoss Cartwright on our way out, I smile at him and nod, almost forgetting that he’s only cardboard. What do I think? That we’ve just eaten at the real Ponderosa Ranch instead of at this restaurant? Not that the Ponderosa is even real. In the scenes where they go outside, the trees in the background all look fake. Hey, come to think of it, the Cartwrights’ cook, Hop Sing, was Chinese, too. Or Japanese. I always get those two mixed up. My tire is ready when we go back. “No, no,” I tell Orion when he offers to pay for it, but when I realize I’m six dollars too short, he has to chip in the rest. What I’ll do is pay him back next time he comes in for his shirts, and if he gives me a hard time about it, I’ll insist.

  Back at One-Hour Martinizing, I hold Orion’s sports coat while he puts my wheel back on, tightens the bolts, and lowers the jack. “Well, I had a nice time,” he says. “Watch out for nails now. See you on Friday.”

  Friday? Wait a minute. Is he asking me out? “What do you mean?”

  “My shirts,” he says. “Didn’t you say they’ll be ready by Friday?”

  “Oh, right,” I tell him. I’m relieved and disappointed—a little of both.

  Later on at my apartment, I put on TV and it’s weird because Dynasty’s on and there he is: Dr. Nick Toscanni, otherwise known as James Farentino. It’s just a coincidence, I guess, but just the day before at the dry cleaner’s, one of our customers, Mrs. Chudy, said to me—I forget what we were even talking about, but she said, “My dear, there are no coincidences. That’s just God’s way of remaining anonymous.” And I was like, to myself not to her, yeah? How do you know? But hey, maybe she’s right.

  Anyways, after Dynasty gets over, I put on my pajamas and get ready for bed. In the dark, I lie there wide awake, thinking about Dr. Orion Oh. Is it some kind of weird omen that first I told him he looked like James Farentino, and then there James Farentino is on my TV? Except I can’t remember Orion Oh’s face, exactly; all’s I can picture sitting across from me in that booth at Bonanza is James Farentino. I’m jumpy, sort of, and I start thinking about Orion Oh kissing me, and me kissing him back. It gets me kind of excited, and I reach under my pajamas and start touching myself—something I’ve only done once before when I was in the tub, except I got embarrassed and stopped doing it. This time I keep going, though, picturing other guys I think are sexy. Tommy Ianuzzi from high school, Andy the UPS guy who tease
s me when he comes into the store, Little Joe Cartwright . . . James Farentino . . . It feels too good to stop so I don’t. I close my eyes and press my lips together and it’s coming, it’s coming. And then, oh god, I’m there. I’ve just given myself orgasm number three. Priscilla gave me my other two, but I didn’t even think about her at all while I was touching myself. It’s kind of confusing because, given my experiences with both Albie and Priscilla, I kind of thought I might be a lesbian. Which, maybe I am. But maybe not. Maybe I’m . . . what do they call it? AC/DC? Which, in a way, is a good name for it because sex is kind of like electricity going through you—in a good way, I mean. Well, whatever I am, if he asks me out on Friday when he picks up his shirts and I give him his six dollars back, maybe I won’t say yes but maybe I will.

  Except he doesn’t ask me. I’m waiting on someone else when he comes, and Mrs. Skiba takes his receipt, gets his shirts, and rings him up. “No more flat tires?” he calls over to me, smiling.

  “Nope,” I say, strictly business. And it isn’t until after he’s left that I realize I forgot to pay him back.

  But the next week, when he comes in with more dirty shirts, he’s also got a pair of dress pants that’s got a stain. “Salad dressing,” he says. “Think it will come out?” I tell him we’ll try. “Hey,” he says. “Do you like Woody Allen?”

  “What?” I go.

  “Woody Allen. He’s got a new movie out. I was wondering if you’d like to see it with me this weekend.” I tell him yes, okay. And after he leaves Mrs. Skiba says something about how I look like the cat that ate the canary, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Why am I the cat, not the canary?

  The movie is Manhattan. It’s kind of a coincidence that it’s about Woody Allen having a relationship with a younger girl. A high school girl. I’m not sure how old Orion is, but I turned twenty-two last month and he’s what? Thirty, maybe? Meryl Streep is in the movie, too. She’s Woody Allen’s snotty ex-wife who left him for a woman. AC/DC, I think. Except I relate more to the younger girl than to her. Mariel something. She has a pretty voice and a nice body. Nicer than mine, that’s for sure. In some of the scenes, she’s walking around in just a shirt and her underpants. I could see myself having sex with her, but not with Woody Allen. Yuck. Why would she want to? Probably because it’s his movie. In real life, I bet she’s got a boyfriend who’s younger and cuter. Near the end of the movie, after Woody’s broken up with her and she’s going off to Europe, Orion reaches over and puts his arm around me. Which I like. And which, come to think of it, my father used to do with my mother sometimes when they were sitting on the couch watching TV together. When the movie’s over, I get up to leave, but Orion wants to stay and look at the credits, so I sit back down. It was okay, not great. Or else I didn’t totally get it. Like, why was it in black and white? You’d think that for tickets that cost six dollars each, you’d at least get a movie that’s in color.