Why Did I Ever

by Mary Robison

  367

  I drop onto the bed, grab a magazine from the nightstand, gape at the cover, set the magazine down, reach and unlace my boots and flip them off, scoot back on the bed, plump a pillow behind me, balance the little blue phone on my lap, elbow up and position the phone back on the stand, get up off the bed and pad barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen, slide open a drawer, feel around and find the nutcracker, flap open a cabinet and snatch the bag of pecans, carry it to the bedroom, stand gazing for a second, flick on the overhead fan, sit cross-legged on the floor and pop open the bag of nuts, get back up and fetch the little metal wastebasket, sit down, jump up and clasp the TV remote, punch the power button, get seated.

  “Your wife divorced you and remarried while you were still in a coma, isn’t that correct? It must be hard to describe the feelings,” says the TV.

  I scoot around so my back’s to it, hold the remote over my shoulder and work the mute button, close the bag of nuts and twist its end.

  368

  I say to the cat:

  “And don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.

  “And don’t you try to pull any tricks.

  “You better open your ears, little lady.

  “And don’t you give me that insolent look.

  “I’ve got bigger things to worry about than you and your shenanigans.

  “I better not have to chase after you again.

  “Haven’t I tried to teach you obedience? Do you even know the meaning of the word?

  “You stay in that spot until I’m through speaking.

  “I’ve warned you and warned you and this time you’re going to learn.”

  369

  What did you go out to the desert to see?

  A frond swayed by the wind?

  —luke 7:24

  From Paulie I learn he’s been relocated again.

  He tells me that each of the hotels where they hide witnesses has been spilling over with protected guests.

  He says that every morning, crowding the elevators and bustling out of the lobby, are a hundred persons dressed in court clothes and accompanied by agents and plainclothes cops.

  370

  The Nightmare Snake Parts Criminal has friends and associates stalking Paulie. Or so it was heard along the grapevine at Rikers Island. Where there are undercover people who find out things and who tell.

  371

  He would tie Paulie up and hang him some way or other. Take him down and rape him. Hang him up and take him down.

  372

  Paulie is not supposed to talk about things, or think about things, or try to fill in anything he’s forgotten. He’s to do no writing. Anything written down is evidence that would have to be shown to the defense.

  373

  Whereas, the results of the Spitwad Criminal’s HIV test may not be used as evidence in a trial.

  This Is What Takes So Long

  Paulie looked real for a moment, when I was there at the table wanting to talk to him. But something disturbed him and his gaze switched sharply as if he were catching part of a terrifying weather report.

  375

  Still, he woke me one night to show me something through his telescope.

  I had forgotten how beguiling is Paulie.

  And Yet

  My sun porch TV says, “I can tell you it’s a marionette. Who would walk with strings just like on the show. With a wooden body . . .”

  I Should Get Going

  Good, the cop behind me is a child. Those may be his hornrims, that may be his real nose, but the mustache, fake as could be.

  I wonder if the young officer is planning to give me credit for however many of those orange cone things I’ve clipped because, come on, man, I got most of them.

  378

  Stores! Stores! So what is there to go in and buy? A yellow something? Another briefcase? Sugar Babies?

  Look at these phony people, driving four and a half miles per hour in the school zone. Theirs is the same Chevy I saw in the alleyway, zooming ahead to hit dogs.

  Jeep, stop tailgating. Do you imagine this speed is convenient for me?

  379

  Sixty seconds inside Super-K and I’m faint from the fumes of the cleaning fluid with which the alcoholic workers are overdosing the floors. Also, the two aisles leading to the Electronics Department are roped off and I can’t go evaluate any of the electronic crap I shouldn’t buy. Twenty-four-hour store, my butt.

  380

  I haven’t done my laundry and I’m down to garbage-picker clothes. These other late-night shoppers however are far, far too well attired for this store.

  381

  I’m in another all-night place, seeing if it’s any better. It is, and I would especially like to own these one-hundred-eighty-one-dollar trousers. These are nice, worsted-wool, great trousers. Pen out, I draw a little “S” through that first digit and make it a dollar sign.

  382

  Driving home, I’m seeing this dirty fucking sack of trousers on the seat. Now I’m a person who steals.

  383

  I don’t go anywhere, I’m merely out here practicing going somewhere, cruising the neighborhood, and I can’t imagine what people think. I’m neither a cop nor, at the moment, someone with a pet missing, yet here I am.

  384

  I stick in this Bob Marley tape and men are making U-turns and others running out of their homes to get to know me. A word to the wise.

  And Don’t Call Me Doll Baby

  With his hands on his hips, Hollis shouts at the cat, “You come back here!”

  I’m close by, in the breakfast nook, forcing myself to eat a grapefruit. “That doesn’t work the same with cats,” I say.

  He huffs into the living room, throws himself onto the recliner and shoves back, raising his legs with a clunk. He says, “She knocked the whole g.d. stack of Progressives onto the floor, and I just had them sorted. Look at that! And there’s two more she already clawed up. Hidden behind the couch or wherever she takes them.”

  386

  Kids erupt from the elementary school building at Roger Taney, across the road, and a few dogs arrive to bark them aboard their navy-blue bus.

  387

  I don’t want to think about Paulie. I don’t want to think about Paulie. I don’t want to think about Paulie.

  Who Are You, Really

  “Not there, not there,” I tell the cat. “Sit on anything but my final William Morris check.”

  389

  “You think ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ is about what, coming out of the closet? I’m pretty sure I do,” Hollis says.

  He says, “And can I make a deal with you? Enough with the honeysuckle candle, all right?”

  I Know You, I Know Your Heart

  “So,” I ask myself, “what’s next?”

  “Ahh, you know perfectly well what. You’re to sort the travel receipts and take them to the accountant.”

  Asks the child inside me, my alter ego, “Couldn’t we do something else like a tea party or go race bumper cars?”

  “Well, no, we can’t,” I say. “Because I don’t have patience and tolerance for such stuff, for things that are, really, for children. For even an intense game of Chutes and Ladders, I do not have patience. TV is right on the edge.”

  “Then I guess there’s nothing to do but work.”

  “Your guess is correct,” I say.

  391

  I’m swallowing a new medication and Mev, standing before me, asks, “What dose?”

  “Don’t know,” I say.

  “Consult the bottle,” she says. “It says thirty milligrams.”

  “Whoa!” says Mev, rocking back on her shoes. “Are you gonna have the nightmares. I was freaking on seven point five.

  “That Neurontin they gave me
at the detox place? Oh, man. I couldn’t see. Plus it made my hair fall out.”

  “You don’t want be blind and bald,” says Hollis.

  “No,” says Mev, “but they just line people up at the nurses’ station and you have to swallow whatever’s in the Dixie cup. They’re mostly beige.”

  “Well, I would be too,” says Hollis.

  Voodoo for Windows

  I find a website for the NSA and send them an e-mail:

  Dear National Security Agency,

  what’s it like 2 work there. i think i might be available soon, if U R interested. Let me know if there’s a brochure U could send. Maybe I 2 could B 1 of U.

  And then I’m nervous as hell that some NSA bag of shit will think me immature.

  393

  Another attempt to teach my printer to do envelopes. This is my, what, seventh printer? They never learn. I might as well be asking my coffee pot.

  One effect of the new medication is a line of thought that goes, “Trouble always passes . . .”

  394

  “You don’t ever have to do without electricity, for Lord’s sake,” says Hollis. “If they ever turn it off, you just follow the line, take the cover they put on there, and throw it away. You never touched it, never saw it, you don’t know what it looks like. But what you also have to do is, you have to plug in the little two diodes or dinamodes or whatever they’re called.

  “And then,” he says, “just disappear back into your house.”

  395

  “Help me think like Bigfoot,” I pray.

  I’m staring at the page, at my pen, my moving hand. There’s thunder and I say, “I am Bigfoot.”

  Just Don’t Be Mad

  I was playing with the cat—throwing things and she’d chase after them—and by mistake, whomped her with a walnut.

  I’ve gotten onto my knees to apologize. I say, “I’ll buy you anything you want. Or I could take you someplace. Would you like to listen to music?”

  397

  “Something tells me I need a nap,” I say. “That would be your brain,” says Hollis.

  But, But, But

  Mev, at the door, says, “I heard about the cat. You want me to try and talk to her?”

  It’s drizzling out there and Mev and her bicycle, which she’s straddling, look rained-on.

  “Who could’ve told you?” I ask.

  “Missus Deaf,” Mev says, turning her face to the figure in the plastic poncho seated out there on the bench.

  “Come in,” I say, throwing the door open. “Just wheel your bike into the kitchen and I’ll towel it off.”

  “Where is she?” asks Mev, meaning the cat.

  “Up there. Sulking. Still sitting in the bathtub.”

  “I’m ripping drain all over your carpet,” says Mev.

  “Well, that’s to be expected, honey,” I say.

  399

  Paulie and Mev are half-brother and -sister in that they both have me for a mom. Mev’s dad is a Latin professor she doesn’t see often but he’s someone she likes. I like him and I’m sorry for what all went wrong.

  I don’t know about now but back then he was tall and his walk was slow and purposeful, one leg at a time, as if he were on stilts.

  400

  Whereas Paulie’s father, who was never my husband, died years ago of a crystal-meth overdose. His sister Donna phoned me with the news and I told her, “That’s too bad, Donna, I hope he went in peace.”

  “Well, again, it was crystal meth,” she said.

  401

  “I give fucking up,” says Mev, descending from upstairs, where she’s been trying to coax the cat out of the tub.

  Mev is shoeless now and showing the interesting Bugs and Daffy tattoo on the top of her bare foot.

  “Mother, my God,” she says, “for a woman who claims to have politics. You use mouthwash that’s made by Dow. Scope, you should buy. Those people are saints.”

  I say, “You’re so almost perfectly lucid on occasion.”

  We sit down in the living room. I offer her a candy slice.

  I say, “I thought of another little piece of parental advice. A suggestion. Whenever I’m cleaning or have some task, when I’m almost at halfway, but don’t want to think, guhg, I’m not even half through, I say, ‘There, pretty much done!’ and put all tools and equipment away.”

  “What does that do?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. It feels more . . . positive.”

  Mev’s head is bobbing. She gives a little shrug. “I’ll try it,” she says.

  She says, “That cat’s like, suicidal.”

  402

  My second ex complained to everyone about me, “She would’ve taken the washer and dryer if they weren’t bolted to a wall!”

  I would say to that ex, “Let’s try and see if we can’t remember better, bitch. There was no washer. Now, was there. No dryer. Whatsoever. You didn’t, in truth, own a bar of soap.”

  Where Are You Taking Me

  They like me on the interstate, some of them. Not these drivers.

  404

  On the street here, it smells of bitter coffee, oranges, and the powdered sugar they put on everything. It smells of sex, bread pudding, of the river and the sea.

  A Few New Dents in the Fender

  All night long, Dix has been pestering me. Until I surrendered, crawled out of bed in the dark and came to sit way over here.

  I’ve lit two cigarettes, both for me. “Friend,” I say, “it seems that my sleep is keeping you awake.”

  “I just wanted to hug you!”

  That is not true. I say, “You skinny cracker fuck.”

  I say, “Permission, Dix. Like in school, when they gave you a hall pass.”

  He’s nodding, saying, “Agree with you, honey. I can abide that,” but speaking to there and there, because his vision is such and I’ve got the two smokes so he’s telling both of me.

  “Dix, Dix, Dix,” I say. “Touch me again and I’ll cut you.”

  “no money down,” says he.

  406

  It spooks me to look at the guy. Even now he is elegant and graceful, tall, and with dark, sweet-smelling hair. Put him in any jacket, any pair of jeans. One time he wore a scarf.

  407

  He left the TV blathering away, out in the living room, and from there its voice is yelling, “Actually, it holds a few cups! So you can stand at the ironing board for several hours and not have to refill.”

  408

  We walk to an all-night bar on Julia Street near where he lives. He sits in the booth with his legs outstretched and gazes at the toes of his shoes, which he’s patting softly together.

  “I’ll be watching my money,” he says as I make off for the restroom. Now some of the patrons are looking at me strange.

  The tile floor in here is a blinking checkerboard. The room’s crowded, shoulder to shoulder. The stalls, all in use, have hand-painted shrieking-pink doors. Over the sinks, a girl grips and fires an aerosol can.

  I have to remember to tell Dix, who’s only used to talking to women in bars, that some phrases, “Angel Tits,” for example, should seldom be used.

  I have to remember to tell him, more generally, that I’m sorry and it’s not working out.

  Why Stir Things Up

  “I’m a friend of your father’s,” says the voice of a caller.

  “That surprises me,” I say, fooling around. “I thought we were all still mad at him for leaving Mom.”

  “I don’t know about it. I don’t know your mother.”

  “That explains that,” I say.

  “Are you really Dilbert’s daughter? Have I got the right person?”

  “Two different questions,” I say.

  The man says, “I must’ve dialed wrong.”

&
nbsp; “No, it’s me, I’m sorry,” I say. “How may I be of help?”

  “Well, the first thing you can tell me is what hospital.”

  “For my dad?”

  “Yes, his leg’s broke.”

  “It is? How do you know?”

  “Ma’am, I come over this morning to deliver a pork roast. For which he already paid. And I find him lying out in his rose bushes unconscious with his leg broke. Both the dogs sitting there with him all night.”

  “How do you know that?” I ask.

  He says, “Ma’am, I know the dogs.”

  410

  The phone’s ringing again. I say to myself, “Out of the way, that’s for me!”

  Still Feels Like Something’s Missing

  “What is it you’re doing?” I ask, crabbing at Mev.

  “Looking through the trash at all this stuff you shouldn’t have thrown away. Holy kill-oh-lee, Mother, this is Grandma’s good pie tin or something.”

  “Actually, it’s not. Not Grandma’s and it’s a stove burner. And, Mev, that’s not your cigarette,” I say. “That’s one you stubbed out earlier. Your present cigarette that you shouldn’t be smoking is this one here burning the table edge.”

  I say, “I have to go see my father in the hospital.”

  “Nice way to tell me he’s sick,” says Mev.

  412

  I’m trying to get some travel clothes pressed in a hurry.

  “Oh, that’s not good,” I say. “Getting spray starch all over the animal.”

  Just Try to Hold It Steady

  I’ve stopped for the night, still one or two indistinguishable states away from my dad.

  414

  There’s a lot you can do with paper and scissors, if you have scissors.

  I don’t, and I don’t really look nice enough to step outside and walk across the gravel courtyard to the office of this motor inn to borrow a pair.

  But there’s a lot you can do with just paper. Folding it dozens of ways.

  And trick yourself out of thinking about anything over at the side of your mind, all the stuff that’s there throbbing, or whimpering, whichever’s worse.

  415

  Television, television! I’ll watch Remington Steele if it comes on. I’ll watch Matlock.

  416

  Nothing very bad is going to happen. I see that now. They’re selling Thom McAn shoes. Here’s an Eyewitness News Team.