And with that, I am done with Mr. Warrington forever. I toss his letter into my garbage can. I fish a jar of cheese salsa out of my refrigerator, an opened jar which has definitely gone bad by now, unscrew the lid, and dump the congealed contents directly on top. There. Floss that.
I believe I might be in a good mood.
I never did finish my portrait of Moises, but he's a different person now without his hair. I settle on the couch, flip my sketchbook to a new page, and turn the television to a music station. I'm happy. I hum to the songs while I let my charcoal pencil meander over the page, drawing whatever it wants to. I have flowers and birds and some really nice vine designs, that I quite like, which repeat themselves and loop back over themselves, creating a continuous border. I fill the page, then I fill another one. Two hours elapse in such a way that passes for contentment, before my forgotten stomach begins to wake up from its nap and rattles its bars, demanding to be fed.
I frown and exhale loudly through my nose. And so it begins again, I think. How am I supposed to start a new regimen of walking – walking with a coach (or hobbyist, right?) while I am still eating like this? Something's gotta give. Either I give Moises the boot from my life and go back to my old ways, or this is a tiny little lifeline to begin mending my ways. I already have a head start – I am sure I've lost a few pounds this week. I realize all of a sudden that I do not know Moises's last name.
Not that this matters.
I get up and pad to the kitchen, thinking I'll just eat something quick. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich maybe? My stomach doesn't nix the idea so I go ahead and slap one together, eating as I walk back to the couch. I usually make several, and the one I eat while I am walking doesn't count, but I'm just not quite my old self. After a few bites, the discomfort in my side flares and I have to stop. Well. This might be a problem after all.
I probe at my side with my fingers but I can't find a specific spot – too much of a wall of flab between me and it. A wall? An ocean of flab. I go back to my couch and try to recapture my mood. I'm done drawing, and I flip through the television channels. ESPN News. No. How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Done that. Mean Girls. Definitely done that. Wheel of Fortune. Maybe. I'll come back to it if there's nothing else. Family Feud. America's Funniest Videos. All repeats I know. World's Smallest Pets. Diary of a Mad Black Woman. Huh. That could be good. Pawn Stars. Ghost Adventures. House Hunters International. That 70s Show. Seen 'em all. Designing Women. Now there's a blast from the past. The Last of the Mohicans.
Okay, so I don't feel like watching television. I take a minute to stand back up, thinking maybe I'll stay on my feet for a while again. Healing happens faster when you keep your blood pumping. You know what, maybe I'll walk up and down the hallway myself. It's mid-afternoon – not a time I am likely to run into any neighbors.
I talk myself out of it by the time I get to my door. I may have a good amount of walking in my near future – I'll save it for then. I walk back into the kitchen. Maybe something that's not solid. Like a smoothie. I'll blend a smoothie. I pull my blender away from the wall and get it plugged in, and toss in vanilla ice cream, almond milk, and a few of my fruity yogurts. I have a bag of frozen blueberries buried in the freezer somewhere. I root around in the back of the cold shelves, standing up to catch my breath, and bending again to reach and rearrange.
Got them. Into the blender they go, and the rumbling and motoring sound fills my kitchen while I wipe down my counters. I am doing okay. I will be okay. The pain is there but not yelling at me. Just a crack in a rib. Give it time, let it heal. I will be okay. I will not need to call a nursing agency.
*
Laundry service day. A day I both look forward to and dread. When I roll out of bed this morning, I take the pillow cases off all my pillows. I release the corners of the fitted sheet, all four, walking slowly from one side of my bed to another. I roll my way into the kitchen, feet and ankles protesting bearing my weight, get a trash bag from a drawer (the big kind – Lawn & Leaf) and roll on back to my bedroom, trying to loosen my ankle joints by pointing my toes a bit as I walk, ballerina-style. I gather the comforter on top, inch by inch, feeding it into the bag as I go, thinking of a boa constrictor getting its mouth around a baby hippo that's much too big for it, an image that's stuck with me since I saw it on a nature show. Next, the blanket. Keep eating, trash bag. Next, the fitted sheet, sprung from its corners, and somewhere in there the flat sheet comes too. Last, the pillow cases.
The bag is full to bursting and I cannot lift it. I never can. I play oversized soccer with it, kicking and nudging it until it's next to my door.
When Teeny Asian Man comes, he will have my linens from last month, including a different comforter and blanket set. He delivers them nicely folded, pressed too, in a clear plastic vacuum-packed bag. My favorite part of this day is releasing the seal and watching my clean linens take a huge, fresh breath and re-inflate themselves with all their new oxygen. Whoosh. I have clean sheets.
But not yet.
He does not come for several hours, during which time I dread him, and dread even more the work involved in remaking the bed. When his sharp rapping happens, I am almost relieved to get this over with. I am already on my feet, feeling a little light-headed, and I open the door.
Every single time, he starts to bob his head at me, that leftover bow that Asians cannot quite forget when they come to America and realize we don't greet each other in such ways here. But he cannot even bob his head – he catches himself and his mouth turns downward. I am not worthy of a respectful head bob. He doubly-aborts his bow, really – first he downgrades to the Americanized head bob, and with me, he downgrades further to the bare incline of his head. His ancestors probably flip once, then twice, in their graves. He does his best to look down his nose at me, which is a fun angle to see him on since I am nearly a foot taller than him. He curves his entire spine backwards to look up at me, but keeps his face on an angle to look down. Really, such gymnastics just to convey to me how beneath his dignity I am. I get it.
And yet I am polite to him. Why? He's the only laundry service in the zip code. Or in any of the surrounding zip codes.
And, because I would probably be polite to him anyway. I have always been polite to people, even as they called me names.
"You … have your shits!" he says, cutting me off as I say hello. His questions are all phrased like angry exclamations.
"Yes, right here, of course," I reply, my smile fixed on my face. I motion to the bag that's right next to me, which he regards like it's indeed a bag of shits, as he does every time. "Here you go," I chirp, relentlessly oblivious to his scowl.
"Ching chong phooey chow mein," he mutters under his breath, or something. I swear I am not racist. I just can't transcribe his Chinese insults with any remote accuracy, so I get to do it my way. Kung Pao. Moo goo gai pan.
"You … paid online!"
"Yes I sure did. My account is all up to date. And here's your tip."
He takes the ten with the tippy-tip-tip of his pointer finger and thumb and pushes it carefully into his pocket, while he leans forward and drags my bag into the hall. He tosses the vacuum-packed sheets to my feet, bends over, and hoists my dirty ones to one shoulder, stalking down the hall without another word or look.
"You too!" I call after him, suddenly brave. I am always brave when people walk away. "I sure will! See you next month!"
I close my door hard enough to express myself, and nudge the new sheets a little further into my apartment. I hold onto the door frame, put one foot on top, and push hard – the sheets skate down the hallway towards my bedroom, like a big flat air hockey puck. I catch up with them, balance myself with one hand against the wall, and push them forward again.
This is fun but I am really lightheaded. I leave them on the floor while I lay down on my naked mattress. I'll save the hard part for when the room stops spinning.
Chapter 15
I think I actually slept, and for hours too, because when I awaken
the sun is on its afternoon angle through my bedroom windows. I am disoriented. I am laying on a bare mattress with no memory of where the day went. I am not even in my usual position. I sit up, aware that I feel dizzy, and hungry in a half-nauseated way. I stand and find the wall for support. I take inventory of myself – I think I am okay. What a strange, long nap. I shuffle to the lamp and flip it on, to take away the long late afternoon shadows stretching across the room, and while I am at it, I pop the seal on the new sheets. Whoosh.
I move to the living room, turning on lamps, and enter the kitchen. I grab a soda. I drink Diet Coke, which I am aware is ridiculous. Would you believe I prefer the taste?
Television on, ass on the couch. I fire up a Bejeweled game on my laptop while I listen to the news, just to try to wake up my brain. I feel all kinds of weird. I always feel weird after a nap, but I'm paranoid that something is wrong with me. But, it's not like I really hit my head or anything – a cracked rib isn't going to make me woozy. I wonder how many hours total I have played Bejeweled in the past few years. I could easily measure the time in weeks. Months. I wonder how many solid months of my life I have played Bejeweled if I strung the sessions end to end contiguously. Candy Crush was all the rage when I left Facebook – I never tried it out but it's next on my list.
I played Tetris a while ago until the obsessive part of my brain latched onto it and started puzzling out the tiles on the bathroom floor. I had to stop playing that one. I played every version of Mah Jong ever created, along with online Scrabble games and some weird version of Boggle. Nothing beats the Boggle I had when I was a kid. Tiny hour glass, big chunky wooden dice, a satisfying deafening sound when you put the lid on and shook them all up. I shook and shook, wondering what words briefly appeared and then were slammed out of existence a second later. Computer Boggle can't hold a candle to the real thing.
I played Mastermind as a kid too – where you lined up colored pegs and your opponent had to guess what they were. Waterworks was a card game where you matched up pieces of pipe, and threw down a little metal wrench to fix leaks – the same wrench as in Clue, almost. I had a dorky, awkward romance in high school with a clarinet player named Abe, who always wanted to play Backgammon with me. Backgammon. I never knew why. He won, usually, too. Maybe there was a strategy that went further than moving the ivory discs around and hoping you got kissed.
We also had a game I never really wrapped by brain around, called Pit. It had something to do with the stock market and I mentally lumped it with Monopoly – too boring for words. Too grown-up. Stuff my parents played when they had another couple over for dinner and laughed over their wine and hors d'oeuvres while I watched television in their bedroom or read my books. I loved the nights when my parents had company. The house was full of cheer and food and talk and laughter and yet I was left completely and perfectly alone. I got the vestigial happiness but all the privacy. I dutifully greeted everyone, accepted the compliments on how tall I had gotten, how bright my eyes were, how long and curly my hair was…. These are fat kid compliments, by the way. I need someone who was a skinny kid to tell me what they got complimented on. I know my parents' friends were always searching for something nice to say to me. What did my cousins hear, from my aunts' and uncles' friends? I should ask them. I should send an email to the darling curly Aimee, or glamorous Tess, and type, Just want to know. When you were a kid, and your parents were entertaining, what did the guests compliment you on when you showed up to raid the buffet table? Your prominent knee caps? Your slender wrist bones? The breathtaking way your jawline and cheekbones glimmered though your perfect skin?
I need a drink. Like, a real drink. Why do liquor stores not deliver? I need a shot of whiskey, stat. I need an entire bottle of red, sour wine. I need a frozen margarita, with salt on the rim, served to me by a cabana boy on the deck of a pool, while I lounge in my bikini and look at him hungrily over the tops of my sunglasses.
I do not need the doorbell, and yet that is what I am getting. I sigh. Moises is ready to walk with me, apparently.
I use the button on the remote control.
"Yes?"
"Mrs. Jam!" I hear. "You need to make a friend." He is laughing. I can hear a girl laughing too. "Okay, I need to make a friend. I did make a friend. Will you buzz us up?"
I process. Moises is here with a girl. I think. I consider. I paw through my brain for excuses to not comply.
"Mrs. Jam let us up, really. You need to meet this girl." I hear his crazy staccato syllable of laughter, and her ringing one. "Her name is Halleluiah. I shit you not."
Well. He shits me not. What else can be done? I buzz them up.
And they are at my door. And I am opening it. And I am making friends with a girl named Halleluiah.
"It's so nice to meet you," she gushes, grabbing my hand and pumping it hard. "So you know Moises? I don't know anyone who knows Moises. He's, like, such a recluse."
She pounds him on the upper arm and he guffaws. She's a wild-looking girl – her skin is peeling from a sunburn and her black eye make-up is smudged. She looks like she slept in it. Her hair might be naturally dark, but has been bleached to a couple different shades of orange and blonde, and it falls past her shoulders, except where it is cut shorter in front and falls in her face. It's none too clean either. She's wearing the shortest shorts ever invented, and knee-high black leather boots that look like they were worn in a war. She's a sizeable girl, too – no shrinking violet is this Halleluiah. She grins at me and cracks her gum. My god, she has dimples. Huge ones. Craters in her dirty cheeks.
"So like. Moises says you guys almost nailed a bad guy," she says. "Like if he had just pounded him a little harder, you all might have caught him. It's unreal, you know?" She blows a bubble. I don't think I have blinked yet. "Like, he totally stole all your money. People suck so bad. I wish I could kick his ass."
She supplies my answer before I can even draw my breath. "Well Moises tried to kick his ass, but he was quick, the other guy. Wasn't he. Well I am happy to meet you. Moises told me all about that night. You were like, totally a victim of a crime. I'm glad to see you looking so well. Don't let the fuckers get you down, you know?"
I slide my eyes to Moises and wait for some kind of explanation, some kind of translation, as to what a girl named Halleluiah would be all about. He raises his eyebrows back at me and grins. Oh, my. She's for real, this girl. Moises looks happy, for the first time since I've met him. It's almost impossible not to be, with the girl keeping up a string of narrative. And she doesn't see me at all. She sees me, really, but not me. It's a weird feeling. I could be anyone standing in front of her.
I find my voice.
"So your name is Halleluiah?" I ask, charmed at the thought. Halleluiah – my goodness, her name is an anapest. Ponytail Man, somewhere, is choking on his weed with the thrill. Hall-le-LU-ia – if only her last name is an iamb, she will be a full anapestic dimeter. "What's your last name?" I ask. Going for broke. Why not.
She cracks her gum. "McBride," she says. "Why?"
Thrill. "Because your name is two anapestic feet, or anapestic dimeter. It's pretty awesome," I explain. "I used to know someone who would have bought you a drink, just for that." And then fucked you senseless, I mentally add, and then treated you like a dog to make up for his own weakness.
"Well, people call me Hallie," she said, "so I guess that ruins it, hey? Nothing's too special about Hallie. My mom hates it. She's a southerner," she adds, by way of explanation.
"Um … what?" I ask, while Moises's shoulders go up and down with a single gyeeh.
"She's like, all Southern and religious," she says. "She was all like, I can't get pregnant, I can't have a baby, I sinned too much, and then bam she has me. So she names me Halleluiah, which," she says, chomping on her gum, "isn't even that too uncommon in Louisiana. So when I go by Hallie she hates it. But, like, this is Maryland. Like, people actually think with their brains here, not their Bibles, you know? We moved here in middle school, so I've just gone by Ha
llie for a long time. Whatevs." She shrugs her shoulders. "Like Hallie Berry, only I'm a little less black. For me it's my great-grandpa no one wants to talk about. Ha! Ha ha!"
Holy shit, Moises. What have you found.
"So, why don't you guys come in and sit down?" I say. I pretend I am a normal person, which is made infinitely easier by this girl treating me like I am one. "Does anyone want a drink?"
"Lord, as long as it's not alcohol, caffeine, or, like food coloring," cracks Hallie. "Moises might fucking jump out your window."
Moises erupts into nearly two full syllables of laughter.
"Caffeine is a drug," he says, his smile at her not affecting his voice. When he talks, he's serious. "Sorry you can't see that yet. You're a kid. You'll learn. And food coloring, well actually, not that we've talked about it but there is this theory that certain dyes cause huge behavioral disruptions among certain kids, possibly very much to me, so while I know you're being sarcastic, there is actually a scientific basis, and a Doctor Feingold, who's worked with attention deficit kids and dyes and who drew a correlate—"
"Jesus god, shut your weird mouth," says Hallie. "I was totally just kidding. I know dyes are bad. Yes, Mrs. Jam, we will have water, please, as long as you have a filter on your faucet, and no ice, because temperature fluctuations are bad, mmkay?"
I watch enough television to know which animated school guidance counselor she's impersonating. I laugh. I can't help it.
"Two glasses of tepid filtered water coming right up," I say, and I walk into the kitchen. "Sit down!" I call over my shoulder. Oh my god, what a hoot. Hallie comes in like a breath of fresh air. I forgot what it was like to make a friend. Not that I am kidding myself. I am 47 – Hallie has got to be 18, tops. Moises isn't even 20 yet. I can't realistically call these kids my friends. But I don't know what else to call them. They feel like my kids.
Take a Load Off, Mona Jamborski Page 11
