Those days I was having a problem seeing my way out of whatever moment I happened to be in, and for a long time I lay on the bed, staring at your dead relations as if held in thrall. It seemed to me that the whole year would pass this way, you talking and me listening, you going on and on about people I didn’t know and would never meet. I saw myself in some warped translation of A Thousand and One Nights, held captive to your stories in and out of a year, yes, I was in for it, there was no escape, I saw you talking and talking and talking, and a dread settled on me, I saw myself swallowed up, my own life erased and yours written all over it, I saw these things as truths and as self-evident, which they were: indeed, that year, this was pretty much what happened.
Those first weeks of school, during which we both failed to make other friends, we fell into the habit of sitting together for hours in the cafeteria at a table by the window. How we loved that cafeteria! Other students stopped there to eat as little and as quickly as possible, complaining all the while about the food in loud voices. “I’m supposed to eat this?” they said, stabbing their fork into blocks of lasagna, peeling layers of cheese off the tops of casseroles to inspect their insides. “This is bullshit!” But for you and me that cafeteria was some kind of dream. One could sit and eat to one’s heart’s content; one could eat, for instance, bowl after bowl of every kind of sugared cereal known to man, bowls topped to the brim with the coldest, whitest, wholest of milk. And we did. We sat there eating cereal until closing. I was up and down a dozen times refilling our bowls. Gimme some of that Cap’n Crunch, you’d say. Go get me some of that marshmallow cereal, you know, the kind with that faggoty leprechaun mascot. Go get me some Sugar Smacks, some Corn Pops, some Froot Loops, some Honeycombs, some Trix.
You talked the whole time we ate. Your favorite subject was the folly of passersby. Don’t she think she something, you’d say of a girl walking past wearing some ridiculous outfit, an argyle sweater and a pair of crisply ironed khaki shorts, a set of pearls, a pair of tasseled loafers, a giant ribbon in her hair. Walking around like she Miss America or something. Please. There were groups of people walking everywhere at all hours, out enjoying themselves, off to concerts or movies or bars or volleyball games, to chess club and choir practice and keg parties, a never-ending parade of people walking past the cafeteria window, and you mocked them all. When groups of boys walked by you liked to ventriloquize them in a voice so surprisingly not your own, so deep and precise, so white, that I could hardly believe it was you. What kind of asshole are you? you’d have one say to another.
I’m the kind that likes to torture small animals. As a kid I used to sit in the driveway frying ants with a magnifying glass.
I’m the kind, said the first, with a limp little dick. But I’m so rich someone will marry me anyway.
I’m the kind, said a third, who’s gay but won’t admit it. I’m going to run for office so I’ve got to find somebody here to pretend to be my wife.
Let’s go drive our convertibles, said the first.
Yes, said the second, and then let’s go polish our money.
After that, said the third, let’s go buy some more khaki pants. I don’t have anywhere near enough khaki pants.
Mostly I left things to you but now and then I’d mutter something cutting. “That girl,” I’d say of a trotting bucktoothed blonde, “is what happens when a horse fucks a rabbit.” And you’d say, I knew it. You one of those quiet types who got all kinds of nasty things to say, I knew it the minute I saw you. Once you even raised your glass to me.
Each night we stayed and ate until everyone was gone but the janitors, those skinny black men in their blue coveralls, who brought out the mops and buckets, who turned the chairs up onto the tables, who slopped that cold gray mop water all over the floor, as if it did anything. Everyone, everyone working those service jobs at the university was black, and you liked talking to them. They were, you said, your people. You spoke to them in a country accent so thick I struggled to understand it. Hi you doing, you said to them, and I sat turning that phrase in my mind, wondering if it was a clever shortening of “Hi, how are you doing?” or if someone somewhere had misheard the word “how” and started going around saying “hi” in its place. While I was thinking about this I was also thinking about how hard you would laugh at me if you could read my mind.
Your conversations with these men were all more or less the same, and acknowledged in one form or another that life was an undertaking to be trudged through, and trudged through, against great opposition.
“I keep on keeping on,” the janitors said.
And you said, You gotta keep rolling on, that’s right.
“You know how we do,” they said.
You just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
“No one stopped me yet.”
Ain’t nobody can.
“I tell you what, I dare somebody.”
That’s right.
Whenever it came time to introduce me you always claimed we were sisters. This here’s Mary, you said. My twin. Which always got a laugh.
“If you twins,” they said, “so’s me and the president.”
You know it!
Something started to happen in my mind whenever I heard you talk to those janitors. When you talked to them it was like music, and like music it played in my head for hours after. The quick back-and-forth of it, the understanding and agreement—I’d never been a part of anything like it. In my family everything was terse, accusatory. And I wondered what I would sound like, who I would be, if I talked like you. Early one morning I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and said, ever so quietly: “Hi you doing?” And answered myself: “I just keep on keeping on.” But it was ridiculous, from my mouth it sounded ridiculous.
It got so that your voice was in my head all the time. I had a job that year working at a sad, failing place called Donut Land, weekday mornings from five to ten, and all through my shift, even though you were home sleeping, I could hear you making comments, putting down the place and its patrons with your two favorite words: Pitiful! Pathetic! Indeed everything about Donut Land was pitiful and pathetic. The Donut Land uniform—a short-sleeved white shirt and brown pants, a brown visor that said “Donut Land” in pink and red—had been copied more or less exactly after the style of our national donut competitors across the street, thriving, whose name we didn’t speak, absolutely did not speak, as if speaking its name would stop our hearts. The owner of Donut Land, a fat woman with oil-slicked hair and beady black eyes and rotten teeth named Deborah McGhee, left every day during the morning rush and walked over to Dunkin’ Donuts to study their wares. “They got black-frosted donuts over there with little orange jimmies on ’em,” she said one October morning. “Halloween Donuts. We got to get us some Halloween Donuts to keep ourselves competitive.” This was her soul’s sole preoccupation, the keeping up with and eventual surpassing of Dunkin’ Donuts. Never once did she strike preemptively against them; at Donut Land it was always a matter of catching up with whatever move was made by our betters. “They got themselves special napkins with their names printed on ’em,” Deborah always said, staring out the window, grief-stricken. These napkins, they were Deborah’s greatest sorrow. “We should get ourselves some Donut Land napkins is what we should do, but the printers want an arm and a leg, I’ll tell you.” She said this ten times a day. The fact that she had said it only moments before did nothing to stop her.
My job was to run the cash register and keep the coffee brewed, and I grew to hate it like nothing else I had ever hated before. The kind of person who preferred Donut Land to Dunkin’ Donuts was the kind of person who liked to wallow in his own sad sack, the kind of person who stood at the register talking of his ex-wives chasing him down for child support, about the refrigerator college he was planning on enrolling in which would change his life immeasurably for the better. These people were, in short, my people, and I hated them. All the while I was there and half the time I wasn’t I felt this hatred throbbin
g in my veins. Donut Land! I thought, a thousand times a day. Fuck you!
I had a problem with washing my Donut Land uniform, which is to say I never washed it. The shirt was crawling, thick as skin, smeared over with icing and coffee stains, a map on whose surface was marked the grim terrain of my days. Deborah kept telling me to wash it, threatening to fire me if I didn’t, but then backing off on the grounds that she wasn’t likely to find another person so steady as me in my dedication to Donut Land, my ability to come in at five in the morning: no one else in her seven years of running Donut Land had shown up so dependably for so long. “Most people,” she said, sighing, “can’t be counted on for more than a week.” A person who would show up every day to a job like that (in that kind of person dwelled levels of foolishness and desperation and self-hatred in just the right measures, shifting, hydraulic) wasn’t easy to find, she said, sighing again, no it wasn’t, to find someone like that, someone like me, it surely wasn’t easy.
You had a problem with my working at Donut Land, with my alarm going off at four-thirty, then four-thirty-five, then four-forty and four forty-five, with my slapping around at it like some deranged drunk. But then again there was a fringe benefit to my employment—there was the dozen chocolate-frosted donuts I brought home each day, which we ate in the evenings after the cafeteria closed. The thing about Donut Land, you said, licking your fingers, was that its donuts were actually better than Dunkin’ Donuts’, but no one would ever know because no one would ever go there on account of what you called the cheapness of its imitation. You could turn a phrase, when you wanted.
Carson, I wonder what might have happened if you had put the least bit of effort into your studies. You hardly ever picked up a textbook and when you did it was during a commercial break from one or another of the soap operas you followed with the passion of a saint. You’d read for a minute, sigh, read another minute, sigh again and toss the book on the floor. You had intended to major in business, then open up a restaurant, but you couldn’t for the life of you figure out what one had to do with the other. What a business needed most, you said, was a sense of style, a personality, and there was nothing in those books worth looking at or getting to know.
Instead you devoted yourself to the careful study of checkout aisle magazines, which your mother sent you every week in a fat envelope. Magazines devoted to things bizarre and surreal, things defying physics, things which the government attempted to cover up in vain. Your favorites were the magazines devoted to the glory and scandal of Hollywood celebrity. Best of all was People. You sat reading it front to back to front again, keen and hungry, as if some secret to your future wealth and happiness might be found there. You didn’t know how or why, but you saw it happening, saw yourself smiling on the red carpet, saw your name in lights.
By November you were failing all of your classes and word had spread up through the ranks. I took messages for you from various academic officials offering their help. One of the people put on your case was our resident assistant, a pale and skinny senior named Belinda Wimpy who was, at the age of twenty-one, still a Girl Scout. She had her own troop of Brownies and was always going around campus with them. They walked in a line, holding hands, their brown sashes crossing their chests, their little caps tilted on their heads, and even these Brownies, six years old, appeared to sense already the lameness of scouting, indeed to be seen in this kind of procession caused them to look down at their feet in shame. But not Belinda. How proudly she wore her green sash, how thoroughly covered it was in badges and pins. She wore the Girl Scout’s green beret, as though she were some kind of secret operative. On Wednesday evenings the Brownies crowded into her room or sat outside the dorm in a circle. One Saturday they even slept outside in little orange tents.
In a different era Belinda Wimpy would have been the kind of woman to volunteer in a military hospital. She would have nursed men through the last agonizing moments of their lives, would have convinced them they were bound for heaven. But since this was peacetime she was merely a troop leader and a resident assistant, and the person she was charged to save—to assimilate into the habits and glories of university life—was you. Several times a day she knocked on our door—two enthusiastic taps—and then opened it without waiting for us to respond. “Hello, ladies!” she’d say. “I was just on my way out for a nature walk and wondered if you’d like to join me!” Or, “I’m off to study group! Free pizza! Any takers?”
Every time she asked us out you had some clever answer. I’d love to, you said, nodding toward the TV, but I’m staying tuned for an important message from our sponsor. Belinda’s face always flickered with disappointment, but then broke out in a hopeful smile. “Maybe next time!” she’d say.
Next time for sure, you’d say. After she’d closed the door you’d add, Next time for sure I’m gonna turn you down again. Behind her back you called her Thin Mint. As in, Go lock the door so Thin Mint don’t come barging in here again. There was a comfort in mocking her. Maybe we weren’t thriving, maybe other girls on the hall only talked to us when they needed to borrow a stapler, or use our phone because theirs was being hogged by an inconsiderate roommate, maybe there weren’t red carpets unraveling at our feet, leading us toward bright futures, but we could count on one thing: We were better than Belinda Wimpy.
One Sunday morning you announced it was your birthday, and to celebrate we took the bus down to Shoney’s all-you-can-eat, six-ninety-nine breakfast buffet. For the sake of frugality we agreed to eat off the same plate. When the waitress come, you told me, just say you ain’t gonna eat. Look at you, ninety-eight pounds soaking wet, a drowned rat if I ever saw one, anyone gonna believe that. Then you eat off my plate and we only pay once.
So when the waitress came that’s what I said. Nothing, thank you. And though the waitress could not possibly have cared less whether we paid for one plate or two, whether I ate or not (anyone could tell she had her own problems; apart from working at Shoney’s she was what you liked to call poor white trash, with bruises all up her arm, even thinner than mine, about the size of a mop handle, and her two front teeth missing), you weren’t quite satisfied. You wanted that waitress to know we were absolutely not planning on both eating from a single plate. You said to her, Don’t you think she should eat something? Look at her. She pitiful. Tell her to eat something.
The waitress rolled her eyes. “Juice,” she said, “or coffee?”
You took your time going through the buffet line, picking up a link of sausage with the tines, examining it, turning it this way and that under the orange glow of the heat lamps, then placing it back and choosing another. You heaped your plate with meat and eggs, with fried potatoes, with fat triangles of Texas toast, all of it slick with grease.
The trick was to take bites off your plate when no one was looking, and we made a game of it. I ate like Charlie Chaplin ate, a thief stuffing food in his mouth as soon as the grocer turned his back, stuffing in those morsels with the quickest, nimblest gestures. Hold up, you’d say. Here come the waitress. You liked to believe she was monitoring our every move, you liked the thrill of it. When the waitress slapped our check on the table you told her, I couldn’t get her to eat nothing. I tried, I tell you, I tried and tried but she stubborn all right.
For a while we sat in our booth, painfully stuffed, watching people standing in the buffet line like nuns queued up for communion: solemn, reverent, intent. They stood in their Sunday best, polyester slacks with elastic waistlines, button-down polyester shirts with winged collars and swirling paisley patterns, brown leather shoes scuffed at the toes. It seemed to me that everyone there was wearing the same clothes, and working the same jobs, and aching the same aches that they had worn and worked and ached twenty years before, and with horror I saw myself, having dropped out of college and committed myself full-time to Donut Land, standing in the same line twenty years hence. I had the feeling that the same thought was passing through your mind. “I better get back,” I said, “and study.”
Me to
o, you said. I’m in some kind of mess. Your voice was low, deflated. This was the first time you had spoken of your struggles with any measure of regret. I guess if I don’t hustle they’re gonna kick me out.
But the last weeks of the semester went by and still you didn’t crack a book. You were quiet for long stretches and lay in bed watching television, falling in and out of sleep. You started to talk about leaving school, about not returning after break. I don’t know, you kept saying, what’s the point of all this. You said when you opened your restaurant, Carson’s Cafe, you’d be back in the kitchen, cooking and plating food, and who needed a degree for that? Here’s your college-educated pot pie, you said. Here’s your business-major chicken salad with a history-minor side of fries. You said, Please.
It wasn’t until the very end of the semester that you started to ask about me, as if it had only just occurred to you that I was a person. The last night before you left for break, after we’d turned out the lights and gone to bed, you asked: Don’t your folks ever call you? Don’t they ever send you nothing?” I tried to explain about my sister, how she’d left home the day after she graduated high school and we hadn’t seen or heard from her since, not once, not a single word. I tried to explain about my mother, how she wasn’t the type to call or write, being too busy with her own pursuits. I explained about the four husbands and all the boyfriends in between. Each husband I tried to sum up in the briefest, coldest demographics: first husband Michael Murphy, white male, eighteen years old, high school prom date, blue tuxedo with ruffled shirt, shotgun wedding, degenerate drunk, missing in action; second husband Michael Collins, thirty-something, high school history teacher, Knight of Columbus, Old Spice cologne, left brokenhearted; third husband Bud Francis, white male, late thirties, appliance salesman, Tom Collins with a swizzle stick, capped teeth, gold rings, left my mother during a family vacation when he discovered her in bed with a younger man; fourth husband Walter Adams, black male, fifty-three years old…
Elegies for the Brokenhearted Page 9
