Dispensations

by Randolph Thomas

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “One day I’m just going to kill myself.”

  “Nonsense,” Art said, from the stove. “So, you’re another year older. It happens to everybody.”

  “You don’t understand,” Roxanne said. “There’s nothing I even like anymore, nothing I care about, and I don’t see things changing anytime soon.”

  Her red eyes widened. She put down the toilet paper and held her hands up in front of her as if she were defending herself from an attacker.

  “I’m just going to keep wearing that uniform. Night after night, it’s going to be the same goddamn thing until I die.”

  “Come, come,” Art said. He rounded the corner of the sofa with two mugs. He handed one to Roxanne, who took it in both hands. He held the other up and raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Java, Kitchen Shit?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Roxanne took a short sip of coffee, winced, and put the mug on the table in front of the sofa. Art sat down beside her. She sniffled, and he put his arm around her. She clung to him and spoke in whispers.

  “When I was a kid,” she said, “I used to lie awake because I was afraid of going to heaven.”

  “Why were you afraid of that?” Art said.

  “Because heaven never stops,” Roxanne said. “I couldn’t go to sleep because I kept thinking about it. I was terrified.”

  They were commiserating in a way that suggested privacy, so I stood up from the chair and walked over to the door. I waved to get Art’s attention and said, “I’ll just wait outside.” Art gave me the thumbs up as I opened the door.

  “I knew then something terrible was going to happen to me,” Roxanne was saying. “And what happened to me was nothing at all. Nothing will ever happen to me.”

  Roxanne’s words followed me down the stairs and onto the street. I continued to chew on them as I sat on the hood of Art’s car, lit a Doral and tried to identify what was stale about it. How had Roxanne known it was stale? Roxanne had been acting differently towards Art, warmer and more encouraging than ever before. Maybe she had the hots for him. It came to me that Art might get lucky tonight, despite his hot girlfriend, who was hotter than Roxanne, even the way Roxanne looked tonight. I didn’t have long to consider these questions. Before I’d even finished my smoke, Art came out of the building, looking drained.

  “How’s Roxanne?” I said, as I threw my stale Doral into the street.

  “Another year closer to eternity,” Art said. “But sleeping like a baby.”

  My father, too, was fast asleep, slumped over as I’d hoped. Carson was long over, and even Tom Snyder was winding down, talking about pictures flying through the air. I cut the TV off, but as I covered my father, his eyes popped open.

  “You’re late,” he said, chewing the last morsels of sleep.

  “We got slammed.”

  “Smells like you got slammed by a carton of cigarettes.”

  “Everybody I work with smokes,” I said. “That kitchen’s thick as an opium den.”

  It was a poor choice of words. My father sat up straight and sniffed the air loudly. His eyes were bloodshot from sleep and beer.

  “At least I don’t smell any pot,” he said. “Unless you’re smoking cigarettes to cover it up.”

  “I don’t smoke pot,” I lied.

  “Your mother will worry if she finds out you’re smoking. You don’t want your mother to worry, do you?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  He looked at me a long moment and said, “What the hell do you do with yourself? Do you even have any friends?”

  I gave him nothing, not even a shrug. I was getting tired of making up excuses and having to answer every question.

  “No smoking anything,” he said, pointing his finger. “Now get to bed.”

  Hands in my pockets, I shuffled back to my bedroom.

  The next night I showed up early for work. Although everybody at Marlon’s knew I smoked, it was strictly forbidden for me to use the cigarette machine because I was under eighteen, so while nobody was there to see me, I bought a pack of Camels. That was the day I smoked my first fresh cigarette. The Camels I’d bought were filterless and much stronger than the Dorals. After I smoked the first one, my stomach was a little queasy. I felt confined sitting at the break table, and wanted to get up and go outside into the fresh air again. When I tried to stand, I felt woozy, so I kept my seat, slowly sipping my Coke, chasing it with ice cubes I sucked and crunched on. While I sat there, Roxanne came in looking guilty, her eyes darting right to mine. It didn’t take a genius to know what she was afraid of. All night long I waited for the opportunity to tell her I wouldn’t embarrass her, that her secrets were safe with me, that, in fact, I believed I understood and sympathized. When the three of us, Art, Roxanne, and I, were finally alone at the table, I saw how the previous night was to be dealt with: Art thumbed through the newspaper complaining in favor of striking miners, while Roxanne stared at her nails and said the miners probably wouldn’t be satisfied if the owners gave them the company.

  A week or so later my mother found the opened carton of Dorals hidden in the basement. Even though I could honestly tell my parents that I’d put the Dorals behind me, I didn’t say a word while my mother cried and told me that smoking would kill me one day. She said it was a filthy habit, blaming my father because of the years he’d smoked in front of me. My father stepped in then and threatened to ground me, even from work, if I didn’t wise up.

  “I’ll get fired,” I said.

  “So what?” he said. “It’s not a good job. Any dumbass can clean plates.”

  “Let me keep my job at Marlon’s,” I pleaded. “That’s all I ask.”

  “What’s so important about Marlon’s?” he said. “You’re not buying pot there, are you?”

  I shook my head and made the case that my job at Marlon’s was a responsibility, and that I was at a turning point in my life when caving on responsibilities was something I should avoid. From the way my father looked at me, I figured he thought I was either a liar or an idiot, but he let me keep my job.

  One Friday steak night Roxanne didn’t show up for work. A few months had passed since her birthday. By that time, when the restaurant was dead and the coast was clear, Art and I would head out the back door, stand beside the dumpster, and take hits from the small pipe I’d begun to carry. Art told me what he knew; Roxanne had moved to Ohio, where she was originally from. She’d gone to live with her older sister, to go back to school, and to help care for her sister’s child. I remember being bummed and that my feelings were a little hurt that Roxanne hadn’t even said goodbye. Art said it was the unwritten rule of Marlon’s that everyone moved on eventually, once they’d gotten their shit together.

  Before long, Art left as well, having finished his degree, to go in search of a real job. There were never any going away parties at Marlon’s. About a week before employees left, Marlon started acting bitchy, and it was the same way with Art, maybe worse because Art had been a kitchen manager. During his last week, Marlon kept coming in and complaining about the floors, marching around, inspecting and making us clean again and again, sometimes taking the mop out of Art’s hands to show him how to do it right. As we sat at the break table on his last night, Art shook his head over the newspaper and pronounced the world’s doom.

  “But you’re a likable enough shit to make your way,” he told me. “You won’t be a kitchen shit forever.”

  “One day I’ll graduate to management shit?” I said.

  Art laughed hoarsely, coughed, and rolled another cig.

  It was only a few days before the end of the school year and the next day, or the day after that, I bought a half-ounce of supposedly ultra-wicked pot from the college student who drove through the high school parking lot at lunchtime. At the first opportunity, I was behind the bleachers, smoking a few bowls with Robert LeSalle, a tennis player whose mother was an art teacher at another school, and Tom Gill, who’
d been in trouble since we were in the first grade and whose father worked at the same plant where my father was a guard. I’d never been friends with either of these guys before I’d started to get stoned, but they’d been friends forever, and now we were all on the same side in the on-going battle against the assistant principal and anybody else who was un-cool.

  This spring day was windy and overcast, and the pot was laced with something that made us extra giddy and made me jumpy and aware of everything, right down to the tingling of my fingertips. The rest of the school day was chaos. In French class, Robert threw a penny at the back of my head, and when I picked it up and looked closely, Lincoln’s lips seemed to be moving. I glanced behind me, and Robert, red faced from suppressed laughter, was whispering something to the hot girl sitting next to him, who glanced at me, nodded, and laughed.

  After school, still feeling fucked up and wanting to avoid the home front, I walked to work early. There was Marlon’s Steak House, the former Dreamland Skating Rink. I could easily imagine my father hanging out in there with his ducktail, a cig behind his ear, trying to think of something witty to say that would impress my mom. There was the sign advertising Friday steak dinner. The metal hinge of the sign creaked back and forth in the spring wind. When I closed my eyes, the slow grinding sound filled up the parking lot, the town, the universe.

  I kept telling myself this shitty time would pass like all the rest if I’d just hold on, if I’d tough it out. At Marlon’s, I’d slip into a shirt that was a few sizes too big, sit at the break table, smoke cigarettes, drink soda, and read the newspaper until it was time to clock in. I’d fall behind if there was a rush, but I’d catch up, soaking wet and filthy, having burnt myself on a pan or two. I’d listen to the waitresses complain about the steps to the beltway, about the damage they were doing to their feet and backs. I’d take breaks—I had lots of time to sit, to get my head together—and before long I’d give in to what people had been telling me for a long time, to lighten up and not take shit so seriously. I’d be okay joking around, making time talking to whoever else turned up, whatever it took to move the night along until Marlon showed up to take the money and send us on our way.

  TO LIVE BY THE LAKE

  I grew up in the mountains beside a natural lake that covered about fifty acres. My father drowned in the lake a year or so after I was born, under circumstances that were never completely clear to me. Throughout my childhood, my mother forbade me to go near the water. Like many of the families that lived by the lake, we had a pier, but after my father drowned, my mother put a chain across it for my protection and the protection of anyone who might wander onto our property.

  In the garage was a long green aluminum boat that had belonged to my father. It too was forbidden to me, and my mother kept it piled with old flowerpots, newspapers, a birdcage, and boxes of old magazines and books, anything she could think of to hide it from view. At times, she talked of selling the boat but kept putting it off. I hoped she would never sell the boat. When I was very young I would stand and look at it for hours, memorizing the texture and hue of the paint, which was worn down and chipped away by many long-ago trips into the water. Sometimes I gathered up courage and touched the boat. The bow felt cold like it still held the temperature of the lake water. I imagined what it was like to sit in the boat as it slid into the water and it came to rest on the water’s surface. I could feel the oars in my hands and see the sky over my head while I drifted.

  My parents had only been married for two or three years when my father drowned, and my mother parted with most of his things easily. She got rid of his guns and fishing gear, his old army uniforms and other clothes, but there were still pictures of him around. A photo from my parents’ wedding hung above the stairs, and there were a few of his army, fishing, and hunting pictures hidden away. I would eventually discover those, along with pictures of my mother’s other lovers and friends from her life before she came to live by the lake. There was also an old army surplus cot in the garage, and I sometimes unfolded it and lay down on it. My father’s tools were in the back room of the garage. I would open his toolbox and go through it, taking out the tools, examining them and playing with them carefully when I knew my mother was out of earshot.

  I claimed even then to remember my father, although my only memory of him comes from a time when I was so young it may have been imagined. It was in the evening, and my parents were entertaining friends. They were in the next room eating and drinking. Maybe they were playing a game or watching television. All I know is that I heard their voices. I was in a playpen in my room with a girl, a child of the people who were visiting. The sides of the playpen were mesh, and hearing the adults, I grasped the mesh and called out. The adults came into the room. I stared up at my mother, at the two people I didn’t recognize, and at my father, the man who had to be my father, darker than my mother, with dark hair slicked back. He stared down at me and smiled. He made his hands into fists and told me I had to fight. I shouldn’t let anyone push me around.

  No one was pushing me around, I wanted to tell him. It was just the girl and me in the playpen, and she was doing nothing, just playing with some plastic stars. I called out because I was lonely for the people I knew best. Not because I was afraid.

  “Don’t be a sissy,” he said. “I won’t raise a sissy.” He put his fists up in front of him like a prizefighter, and the others laughed. My mother laughed.

  During the day, my mother helped me load my dump truck with gravel. She clapped her hands when I emptied it. When she waxed the floor, I rode on the mop. She pulled me across the hardwood floors. We got up early every morning, listened to the farm report on the radio, and ate breakfast. The house smelled of bacon and coffee.

  By the time I was five or six, when my mother could no longer deny me playtime, I’d slip into the woods, come to a place at the edge of the evergreens behind the big rocks, where I could watch the lake. Mysterious items, trash and dead animals, lay along the shore. I longed to go closer and study them, but there was no place close to the water where I was out of view of the house.

  Sometimes even then I dreamed about the lake, about riding in the green boat, but more often of floating on my back. Whenever I submerged, I felt dizzy and disoriented, too weak to fight my slow descent under the water, which appeared gray in some places from shadows of clouds and birds and the moon. And worse, scarier shadows in the lake, darkening the water below the surface, hiding things that stayed down there, hiding the bottom. My arms and legs were dead weight, my body grew heavier, sank deeper, and I could not, with all my strength, lift myself.

  My grandmother, who was tall and stern with thick glasses, came to stay with us to watch me while my mother worked. My grandmother liked board games, but she accused me of cheating. When she read the newspaper at the kitchen table, I sat under the table looking at her long legs. When I rode on the arm of the couch, she saw me through the window. She came in the house and said, “What are you doing that for?”

  I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure myself.

  My grandmother said I really shouldn’t do that, and if I ever did, I should make sure to do it where no one else could see me. I should never do it in public. She patted my head and said it would be a secret between the two of us.

  My grandmother talked about the lake while I was in bed, getting ready for my afternoon nap. She talked about swimming in the lake.

  “What’s it like?” I asked, although I was afraid of what she might tell me.

  “The water is refreshing,” she said. “If it’s hot outside, the water cools me down. I can sprinkle it on my arms and legs. I can lie still and float. I can swim.”

  At night I dreamed about my father under the water. I saw his hair moving in waves above his body. I saw his gray, leathery skin. I ran to my mother’s room, woke her up, and she held me in bed beside her.

  My mother always bathed me at the sink with a washcloth, but my grandmother lifted me into the tub. I sat between her legs while she fill
ed the tub. The water was warm. I started gasping for breath when it began to rise around us, but she sprinkled the water over my head, on my skin.

  “Trust me,” she said, as she held me between her legs. She brushed her fingers over me, rubbed them between my legs. The water heated me up. When we got out, the water stayed on us. My grandmother rubbed me with the towel. She said I was not to tell my mother.

  “It’s sad, her fear,” my grandmother said. “Your father, what happened to him, all of that is long over.”

  Despite my grandmother’s asking me not to, I told my mother what she had said and done. In the morning, as my mother was putting on her make-up, I lay in bed and watched her while I spoke.

  My mother said she couldn’t do anything about it now. She was in a hurry to leave, but I didn’t have to do the things my grandmother said. In fact, I should play in the woods as much as I wanted today.

  I did as my mother suggested. I stood in the woods and watched my grandmother call me. When I was so hungry I had to return for lunch, my grandmother wanted to know where I’d been. She appeared worried and asked me to stay close to the house in the afternoon, but I ran into the woods as soon as I’d finished eating.

  My grandmother left abruptly, after a tearful, awkward goodbye. She seemed to want to tell us something, to make a parting statement, but feared my mother, who might send her away at the wrong word without any goodbye, and might cut her off completely. I was sorry and not sorry for what I’d done. It was what I’d felt I had to do, and I stood stiffly by my mother, holding her hand, as my grandmother kissed me and went away.