Tell Me One Thing
Page 4
Jamie loves his chosen profession. He will readily admit that there may be nothing else in his life that isn’t compromised, thwarted, distorted, or unfulfilled, but the knowledge that he has found his true calling keeps him going.
He searches through the stack of essays for Colleen’s and pulls it out. Her topic sentence is “The Miracle Worker is a play about finding your special gifts in life.” Ah, better! Interesting take. Colleen, you’ve saved me, he thinks as he settles back to read her essay.
By the time the light has mellowed into dusk, Jamie has read more than half of his students’ essays and written them lengthy notes that he suspects very few of them will even read. He’s seen them. They flip to the grade and then quickly stash the paper in their backpack, where it disintegrates in short order and joins the other wads of trash at the bottom of the bag. He gets up and stretches his back. He’s stiff from sitting in one position for so long. Ah, creeping middle age, he thinks, as he often does these days. Once you pass forty, there’s no denying middle age.
He checks in on Ellen, cracks open the door to see her sleeping like she’s in a coma. He smiles in recognition. All the O’Connor siblings sleep that way—through anything, oblivious to noise, a survival technique they all learned early on in a household that was perpetually loud and had no detectable schedule. You were as likely to see a toddler with a full diaper wandering around at midnight as you were to come across one of the boys snoring on the basement floor at twelve noon.
Jamie figures Ellen is out for the night. He’ll see her in the morning before he leaves for school, waking her up if he must to tell her he’s going.
He heats up some leftover soup for his dinner and sits at the dining room table to tackle the rest of the Miracle Worker essays. It’s a Sunday night like countless other Sunday nights he’s had since moving to San Diego. If he had stayed in Buffalo, he’d probably be at some neighborhood bar right now with friends from high school or one of his brothers and they’d be spending the evening watching whatever game was on TV, probably basketball this time of year, and there’d be a good deal of drinking and boasting and storytelling and betting on the game. Does he miss all that? Sometimes, mostly the easy companionship that asks little and expects only that he stay the same Jamie they’ve always known. That last part, that was the part he couldn’t fulfill. The Jamie who drank too much in order not to feel, the Jamie who was quick to argue as a defense against being steamrollered, the Jamie who needed to constantly declare himself lest he feel like he was disappearing—that Jamie was abandoned in Buffalo. The Jamie who settled himself in San Diego needs far less from the world and wants only quiet, predictability, and the safety of no demands.
ELLEN STRUGGLES THROUGH THE SLUDGE of her exhausted sleep and pushes herself awake. She has no idea how long she’s slept. The bedside clock tells her it’s 10:35, but she’s not sure if it’s nighttime and she’s just napped a bit or whether it’s the morning and she’s slept right through. She opens the door quietly and pads in bare feet to the archway that defines the living area of the condo. Immediately she sees her brother, bent over, elbows on the dining room table, writing copiously with a red pen. A pendant lamp hanging straight down in the middle of the table illuminates its surface but casts shadows on her brother’s face. The lighting, the sparseness of the room décor, the intensity with which he’s writing remind Ellen of one of those cop shows where the accused is being forced to hurriedly write out his confession in a tiny room with a single bulb hanging overhead.
“I hope you’re staying home because I’m here and that this isn’t your normal Sunday night routine,” Ellen says as she walks in. Her face is creased from sleep and her difficult hair is now flying about her head like exclamation points.
He gestures at the stack of essays. “I teach five classes of English. This is pretty much where I am most nights.”
Ellen sits down, points to the empty soup bowl. “And that was your dinner?”
“Mexican black bean soup from Whole Foods.”
“Pitiful.”
“Actually, it’s quite good.”
“Is there more?”
• • •
ELLEN EATS HER SOUP. Jamie grades his papers. There’s the companionable silence of siblings who have spent thousands of hours together. If Jamie weren’t such a tight ass now, Ellen thinks, she’d reach for a cigarette. Instead, she begins to talk. No preamble. She simply continues the story she had begun at the café.
“Miguel was supposed to be my savior.”
Jamie looks up at her, puts his pen aside, settles back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, content to allow Ellen to spool out her story as she can.
“Spain is good for me. I love the pace of it all. The sense that time isn’t demanding anything of you, simply that you are passing through it. The weather is wonderful—no more Buffalo winters. That’s enough to lift my spirits permanently. And Tracy is there, you know. Do you remember Tracy Keppinger?”
“Donnie’s older sister?”
“Yes, she was in my class at Immaculate Heart. Do you remember her? Tiny with all those blond ringlets? She sort of looked like Little Orphan Annie.”
Jamie nods. He does remember her hanging around the house when they got to be teenagers. He had thought she was kind of cute but never acted on it.
“When she was in college, she went to Malaga for her junior year abroad, met Rafael, and never came home. They’ve got four kids now. All of them have those curls. Anyway, she’s been telling me for years I had to come over, and when I hit thirty-five and looked at my life in Buffalo, I thought, ‘Why not?’ Things couldn’t get any worse.”
“What was so bad?” Jamie asks her.
“What wasn’t? I had been working at the same kind of deadend job for over ten years. It didn’t really matter what construction company it was—it was essentially the same job. Bob Wardlow called me his bookkeeper. Keith Lutz called me his right-hand man. Tony Stradello called me his office manager. Whatever, all it meant was that I had to sit in a filthy office, or worse, a construction trailer that was an oven in the summer and an icebox in the winter, answering the phones, making sure the bills were paid and that the guys got to the right job site on time. Hardly taxing on my mental abilities.”
“No,” Jamie agrees.
“No chance for advancement.”
Jamie nods.
“And putting me in close proximity to exactly the wrong kind of guys for me.”
“Which were?”
“Guys who drank too much. Guys who were married. Guys who thought an endearment was ‘Fuck me harder.’ ”
Jamie laughs out loud and Ellen smiles back at him. Now she can make jokes about it all.
“In other words,” Jamie says, “guys we grew up with.”
“The very same.”
Ellen puts her forearms on the table, laces her fingers together, and looks at her hands. It’s quiet for a minute. Jamie feels Ellen shift into another, more somber, gear. “I somehow found a way to pick the very guys who would infuriate me. Who would scream at me so that I could scream back … A lot of yelling … A couple of smashed car windows …”
“Someone deliberately shattered your car window?”
“No, Jamie, I did the smashing. I was always so angry … and there wasn’t any way to get rid of it.… Oh, of course, if only I hadn’t picked guys who treated me so badly, who disappointed me before I even learned their last names …” She trails off, doesn’t finish the sentence.
Jamie nods. He understands the “if only” part of it. “If only” their father hadn’t beat the crap out of them. “If only” they didn’t wake up every morning with that worm of fear twisting in their intestines. “If only” victimhood hadn’t been fed to them with their Lucky Charms and Jell-O Pudding.
“Remember Mickey Fogarty?”
“Big guy with that eagle tattoo running down his forearm?”
“Yep. He was the last straw.”
“I never really liked—”
“And then Tracy called from Spain just to check in and asked me again when I was going to come visit and I said, ‘This weekend.’ Just like that. It popped out of my mouth and I didn’t take it back and so I packed up all my clothes and flew to Malaga.… I was thirty-five and I thought it was my last chance.… I thought if I stayed in Buffalo I would either have killed some guy or he would have killed me.”
“Come on, Ellen,” Jamie says, standing up now. He doesn’t want to hear this. He doesn’t want to believe his sister could have had so much violence in her. “You always exaggerate. Can’t you just say you went to Spain for a fresh start?”
She looks at him as he gathers up his papers into a neat pile, clears the dishes off the table, and loads the dishwasher. When he comes back to the table with a sponge in his hand to wipe it down, she puts a hand on his wrist, stopping him and forcing him to look at her.
“I’m not exaggerating. I’m telling you what my life was like then and what I was afraid of. You need to believe me.”
But he shakes his head. He doesn’t want to. He won’t. It’s too painful for him to believe that their father’s legacy of violence has infected this sister just when he’s reminded of how much he loves her.
“I need to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a school day. Do you think you can go back to bed?”
“Not now,” Ellen says, clearly disappointed that Jamie is bailing out of this conversation.
He hands her the remote from the living room coffee table. “Knock yourself out, only keep the volume low.”
“Yes, sir.”
She watches Jamie walk down the hall and hears him enter his bedroom. She needs to slow down, she tells herself, or he won’t hear her and she hasn’t even gotten to the difficult part yet.
WHEN JAMIE GETS HOME FROM SCHOOL, HE finds that Ellen has decorated his house. There are fresh flowers in vases he doesn’t recognize on the dining room table and the bookshelf in the living room. There’s a deep blue bowl piled high with symmetrical yellow lemons on the breakfast bar, the contrast of colors somehow perfectly right. And the living room couch, a deep utilitarian forest green, now boasts striped and patterned pillows in corresponding hues of yellow, blue, and cream.
He stands with his back against the front door and takes it all in, briefcase in hand crammed with more student essays.
“They’re all removable if you don’t like it,” Ellen says, coming in from the patio. Jamie gets a wave of cigarette smoke before she closes the sliding glass door behind her. “The flowers will die, the lemons will rot, and the pillows can be stashed in a closet.”
“Well, there’s a happy thought.”
“I just mean, this is all temporary if you need to go back to the monk’s cell you favored before.”
“It looks nice, Ellen.”
And she grins at him, relieved. “Good.”
They look at each other—What’s next? “I usually take a run when I get home …?” He lays it out there as a question.
“Go,” she says, “I’m cooking you dinner.”
“You don’t have—”
“Go—”
IT’S ON JAMIE’S RUNS THAT HE SORTS things out in his life. He takes a route that follows the water, passing a few other runners, maybe a mother or two with a stroller, or a couple of people walking their dogs, but that’s fine because most simply nod and he can avoid eye contact and keep running.
What does he think about this impromptu visit by his sister? On the one hand, she seems to be doing so much better, and that cheers him. She’s laughing and has that blunt honesty he always admired. On the other hand, she seems to be on a mission. Is that crazy? Does he need to be saved? Maybe from the outside it looks as though his life is sparse, barren even. He’s sure many people see it that way, but from the inside of this life he’s constructed a continent away from the turmoil of his family, the choices he’s made feel lifesaving.
Of course, there’s been a price to pay. And there are times when he aches with the losses he readily acknowledges. Those brothers who once felt like his second selves would never embrace this West Coast Jamie. And he knows it’s his lack of nerve that has kept his friendships here at the most superficial of levels. Something happens when you shut down, Jamie thinks as the path curves and continues around the bay. And the fact that he’s single, the fact that the women in his life up and leave him—he takes responsibility for that as well. They want more. So does he, but he knows that what they want is locked too far away to give.
Yes, there’s plenty Ellen could latch onto in this campaign she seems to be embarked upon. Will she listen? That’s the question he asks himself. Will she believe him when he assures her he sees the perimeters of the bargain he’s struck with himself and he’s made peace with them?
• • •
WHEN HE OPENS THE FRONT DOOR forty-five minutes later, sweaty and winded, it looks like Armageddon in his kitchen. Dirty pots are piled in the sink and across the countertops. Does he own all those or did Ellen buy some? Used plates and bowls are piled on every available surface and the floor. The bright red skins and pulp of tomatoes are smeared across a wooden chopping board like bloody entrails. Part of a chicken carcass rests, inexplicably, on his breakfast bar next to bowls of mussels and shrimp. On the stove some kind of sausage—chorizo, Ellen tells him later—is sizzling away at too high a heat and suddenly his smoke alarm goes off with a deafening shriek. And in the middle of all this, Ellen turns around, grinning with manic goodwill, and greets him, “Welcome to paella Espagnia!”
“Turn the burner off!” Jamie shouts.
“What?!”
And he does it himself, switching off the gas, moving the frying pan away, and then ripping the batteries out of the smoke alarm. The sudden quiet is like a slap in the face.
Ellen sneaks a quick peek at her brother’s face and knows she has to quickly salvage this. “I had it all under control until that damn thing went off.”
“That ‘damn thing’ goes off when you’re in danger of burning the whole place down.”
Ellen takes a deep breath. She doesn’t want this evening to start off with an argument. She gathers her calmness around her with a second deep breath. Firmly, without rancor, she tells him, “Go take a shower and I’ll finish up here. You’ll be amazed when you get back.”
He grunts and goes.
When he comes out of his bedroom twenty minutes later, his black hair wet, sleeked back and curling around his neck, barefoot, wearing a pair of comfortable jeans and an old T-shirt, he sees a large platter of just-finished paella resting on the dining room table. It smells amazing. New straw placemats hold his old white dishes. Patterned napkins Ellen must have also bought—Jamie would never buy anything with a pattern—finish the place settings. A bottle of red wine and a round loaf of crusty bread he recognizes from Sweet & Savory take up the middle of the table. It all looks so sumptuous, so lovingly prepared, that his heart melts. He scrupulously avoids looking into the kitchen.
“Wow,” he says softly.
“Sit down,” Ellen says, “I’m going to feed you.”
And she does. She spoons out the paella, cuts the bread, pours him some wine. He feels taken care of in a way he hasn’t since Nicole left three years before.
When they were first dating, Nicole would cook for him, but by the time the relationship was in trouble, six months later, the cooking had stopped. There is no upside, she had told him, to giving to someone who isn’t giving back.
The thing is, he was giving, only not nearly enough for most reasonable people. Why didn’t he confide in her, she asked, or “share his feelings” about anything important? He couldn’t explain beyond the imperfect and inadequate “That’s how I am.”
He wouldn’t agree to have her move in, and he needed to be alone too many nights a week for her to feel truly wanted. At first she had thought she’d
win him over; hence the cooking and the acquiescence to his need for nights alone. But when nothing progressed, when she felt as though they were still in week three of their dating, she began to complain and then push him to argue, but he wouldn’t. He knew what was coming and he wouldn’t try to talk her out of it. He simply shook his head when she told him she was leaving.
“Say something!” she threw at him. “Argue with me. Tell me you need more time. Convince me there’s really a loving, giving Jamie trapped in old habits! Speak to me! I’m walking out the door here, Jamie.”
“I understand” is what he said so quietly she almost missed it.
She stared at him in disbelief and then, when he didn’t say another word, the sorrow that flooded her pretty face made him turn away. “Pathetic” was the last word he heard before the slam of the front door.
After the paella, Ellen serves him coffee and a caramelized pear tart she bought along with the bread. It’s then that she picks up her story from the night before.
She says, with a grin to acknowledge that she’s quoting him, “So I went to Spain for a fresh start.”
“That I understand.” Jamie is playing along.
“And at first it felt like that. I stayed with Tracy for a few weeks while I found a job and a tiny room. I took Spanish lessons. I walked around the city a lot on my own. It all felt sort of pure, you know? Like, the simpler the better. No entanglements. Just me getting through each day, learning the city a little more, learning Spanish a little more. Seeing Tracy and Rafael but really no one else. It all felt manageable and I felt like I was calming down. I didn’t call Mom or Dad. I e-mailed them occasionally, but part of my recovery, I realized, was scaling those old relationships way back.”
“Why do you think I’m three thousand miles away?”
“I get it, Jamie. I never questioned your move away, did I?”