A Night at the Y

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by A Night at the Y- Stories (retail) (epub)


  Ellen smiles as we enter the bedroom that will be Tolstoy’s. Her eyes brighten; already she’s picturing the cheerful mural she will paint, a scene of bears and rhinos, Tolstoy’s favorite animals—we think. She sniffs happily at the air, but I detect dust and toxic molecular particles rising from the beige wall-to-wall carpeting. Peter walks to the window and parts the green curtain left by the former occupants who are still in the process of moving their last things out. Here and there boxes are piled up; my sense is of a family fleeing in chaos and ruin.

  “Bit late in the day now,” Peter says in the dim room. “But in the morning you’ll get a lovely light and a nice view of the street. The baby can watch the cars drive by.”

  “How nice,” Ellen says. “He’ll like that.”

  “If the molecular breakdown doesn’t make him too woozy to care.”

  Peter slowly lets the curtain fall back in place. He turns. His voice comes out a bit breathless and high. “What is wrong now?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing wrong. It’s just that the molecules break down in wall-to-wall carpeting and give off toxic particles that might give the baby a sinus condition. Asthma later on.”

  “You could take the carpet up,” he whispers. “Certainly. Why not?”

  He adjusts his glasses—a black, horn-rimmed type. He’s taller than I by several inches. I’m thicker, though, and I think I could take him if we went to the carpet. Could pin and pummel him. Though that might be an inappropriate thing to do to one’s realtor.

  Ellen’s shoulder dips again. “You never said anything about wall-to-wall carpeting before. But we could take it up. Good idea. I bet it’s pinewood beneath. I love pinewood.”

  A traitor in the family. I see that she and Peter have conspired against me. I must watch Tolstoy, see with whom he’ll throw in his lot. We’ll head south, find an adobe house with a couple of cottonwood trees. Hang a hammock . . .

  Peter gives a sinister chuckle. “This is your man, Frank. It’s a steal.”

  Ellen floats happily into the master bedroom; we follow as the toxic particles encircle us and waft about our heads.

  The bed is gone, but the imprints from the bedposts remain in the carpet. Soon our bed will take its place here and the years will pass as we live within the walls of this little yellow house. As my wife and my realtor exchange glances and the baby writhes like an eel in my arms, I am gripped again by the question that haunts me, the question that stalks me as I shave, sip my morning coffee, drive to work: Is this my life? Is this the life that I was meant to live?

  Nearing forty, one becomes aware that one can’t afford to make too many more mistakes, to take too many wrong turns. The possibilities, the options, narrow down. Choose one thing and it precludes another. At night I wake and lie trembling to the bone. I listen to the rise and fall of Ellen’s breathing and I wonder: Is this my life? Is this the life that I was meant to live? In the darkness, I slip to my son’s room and stand over his crib and listen to his mutterings and stirrings; it is a kind of awe and wonder and joy and sadness that makes me ask: Is this my life? I love. I am loved. Yet a younger me still roams the rugged foothills of Guanajuato, or steals through the night to the cantinas, called on by the ballads of lost men and saloon love.

  Instead we come to this. A little yellow house. Perhaps it’s the right move, the right turn to take. No doubt. On summer evenings the aroma of lawnmower oil and barbecued steaks will envelop our patio, call us to some higher purpose.

  Shall I plant saplings as my father did when he slowly turned our dirt plot to yard? Those trees are tall and sturdy now, the grass lush and thick, the dogs of thirty years buried near the garden, their graves neatly marked with stones. Oh son of mine, would you be happy in a little yellow home? Or shall we take our dough and split for Mexico?

  Tolstoy wriggles into his mother’s waiting arms, and Peter and I wander out to the backyard and survey the rickety cedar fence. It’s an overcast day with hints of an approaching storm. A breeze blows the brown leaves across the yard, and I sink my hands in the pockets of my windbreaker. Winter soon. We shuffle about, look down at our shoes. Peter clears his throat. “We can’t wait on this too long you know, Frank. It’ll slip through our fingers. I know it’s what your family wants.” His eyes bore into me. He isn’t the most successful real estate agent; his tweed coat looks a bit threadbare, and I fear his concern for my family may be tempered by his anxiety about meeting his own mortgage payment.

  But the moment seems suddenly soft and intimate. Now Peter’s eyes resemble those of a therapist, and I find myself blurting out, “Have you ever wanted more from love, Peter?”

  “Beg pardon, old boy?”

  “The big splash, you know. The earth moving under you and all that, the stars spinning overhead, an out-of-body experience. Oh, it’s all fine, you know. It’s great. No complaints here. But that mystical thing? Do you suppose it’s all a myth?”

  He coughs once into the middle of his hand, gives a nod, eyes bright, moist. “Ever been to a pro, old boy?”

  We walk side by side, shoulders bumping, back to the patio. Peter taps on the exterior wall. “What would you say this siding is, Frank?” he asks, feigning ignorance to get me involved.

  “I don’t know. Some kind of cheap chipboard, I guess.”

  He grimaces. Through the rickety fence slats, the neighbor’s dog sticks its black muzzle and growls.

  “I don’t know if I want my boy living next to a brute like that.”

  Peter removes his glasses. He breathes on one lens. With his thumb, he wipes the lens clean with precise, circular motions. His lips twitch.

  “My father didn’t have siding like this. Our house was brick.”

  He holds his glasses up to the sun, sighs, puts them back on. “This is washable, Frank. That’s the nice thing. Besides, it’s only a starter home.”

  “Wouldn’t a starter home be more suited to someone a bit younger?”

  “People are buying later these days, Frank.”

  “Are they?” I frighten myself by the note of desperation in my voice.

  He lays a hand on my shoulder, and I momentarily experience a feeling for my realtor which is not too unlike love. “They certainly are buying later, Frank. Grown people live with their parents these days. I worked with a man fifty-eight years old, just moving out on his own for the first time. Found him a nice starter home. People are living longer, Frank. Plenty of time to upgrade.”

  The dog forces its paw through the fence; it whines with bloodlust frenzy and claws the air.

  “Could we meet the neighbors?” I ask.

  Peter brightens. It’s the kind of question a realtor respects. “Certainly, Frank. Good idea.”

  We walk around the side of the house to the front yard, cross a small yellowing lawn, mount one step, and ring the doorbell. I wonder what kind of neighbors they’ll be. Thieves? Eavesdroppers? Will they play their music loud and snicker as we stroll past with Tolstoy?

  “Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all.”

  “Wait,” he says, touching my sleeve.

  We hear a movement behind the door, and then a woman about my own age swings open the door and looks at us through the screen. She’s pretty, but tired looking. I hear the shouts of children playing.

  “Hello,” Peter says cheerily. “I’m a realtor. I’m selling the house next door.”

  “Oh.” She smiles at us. She glances back in the direction of all the commotion and chuckles. “Want to sell this one while you’re at it? Kids included.”

  Peter smiles. He puts his hand on my shoulder and kneads. “Frank here is going to be your new neighbor. He was wondering if you could tell him something about the neighborhood?”

  “Sure. What do you want to know?”

  “Is it . . . well . . . is it . . .”

  “Is it nice?” Peter asks. “Is it a nice place to live?


  “Oh sure. Yeah. It’s safe. Quiet. The people are friendly. It’s just . . . you know . . .” She shrugs her shoulders. “We bought it as a starter home.”

  I sigh. “And now you’re stuck.”

  Peter takes me by the elbow and steers me away. “Frank, Frank, Frank,” he breathes as he leads me across the driveway and back onto the front lawn of the little yellow house. “Frank, what is this attitude of yours?”

  “I’m just trying to get to the truth, Peter. If we make the wrong choice now . . .”

  “Frank.” He grips both my elbows, looks me in the face, his eyes glinty beneath the thick glasses. “Courage, Frank. These are nothing but ordinary pre-sale jitters. Stay the course, man. Remember the purpose. A home. For Ellen. For the baby.”

  But as he holds me I suddenly realize what it is that I want. Not a home, not a family, not love . . . What I want at the moment is loneliness, sheer hurting loneliness. The kind of loneliness that burns out the old self, that sets one a-spin in the universe, free to be broken and made anew.

  I pull my arms free. “I’m not buying it.”

  As I take off walking, I have a recollection of a long-ago argument with my father, when I left him standing in the yard in a hurt, abandoned pose such as Peter’s. My father held out his hand to me and then let it drop in despair, as Peter does now. But I must not think of anyone else’s hurt now. I must think only of my own escape. I am leaving; I am leaving; I am going to look for my new life.

  Within two blocks, it occurs to me that this may not be the best place to begin searching for my new life. The neighborhood makes my spirits sink—the houses huddled on leaf-strewn lawns, teenagers on a front stoop casting sullen, dulled-out glances my way, a muddy drainage ditch in sight across a weedy vacant lot—a breeding ground for plague-carrying rodents. To the west, the sky has darkened to stormy black. By the next block, a squall descends, the wind whipping rain against the back of my neck. I raise the collar of my windbreaker and hurry on.

  Then Peter toots his horn and pulls up beside me. Ellen’s on the passenger side, her shoulder ominously dipped and stiffened. Tolstoy’s tucked into the car seat in back, his face turned toward me, eyes wide, astonished.

  I pick up my pace as Peter rolls alongside me, driving on the wrong side of the quiet street so he can talk out the window. “They’re hot to trot, old man. They need to unload fast. We’ll go for blood and ask for a point.”

  “You’ll have to catch me first.”

  Ellen looks anxiously at me and Tolstoy stretches out a drooly hand and grins, and I know that I am already caught.

  But I give a crazy laugh, crying out, “Catch me!” as I take off running down the sidewalk through the downpour.

  Peter keeps tooting his horn, a melodious sound as they roll alongside me. The rain drenches me, runs down my neck; cold and clean, it revives me. Peter calls out his window, “I won’t let you pass this up! You’re going to love it here once you get used to it!”

  I cut down an alleyway, but when I come to the other end Peter’s car charges up like a determined, feisty bull. “Steady, man! Stay the course. Build up your equity!”

  I dodge across a yard, hurdle a rose bush, trip on soggy turf, throw something in my knee. I stagger on, running for my life . . .

  MY LIFE AS A JUDO MASTER

  When I was eight, though I had never taken a single lesson, I discovered that I was a judo master. My gift was revealed to me shortly after my family moved across town when, during my first week at my new school, I was attacked in the corridor by John Mattheny, a boy whom I’d had a harrowing experience with back in kindergarten. He was a husky little boy, a budding sociopath, and to everyone’s amazement—my own, my classmates’, and John’s—when he grabbed me I pivoted and neatly flipped him over my shoulder, dropping him to the linoleum floor with an impressive thud.

  The kindergarten, where my troubles with John had started years before, was run by Brigidine nuns and located on their convent grounds. Originally a Spanish fortress, the convent was surrounded by a thick rock wall. Inside the wall, on the vast grounds, there was a small school building made of brick; behind the school, down a long grassy path the sisters sometimes took us on, there was a tropical garden and old colonial adobe buildings, a chapel, and the nuns’ residence.

  A curious shadowy image rises from the deep: I see myself wandering alone, lost, through the nuns’ house; there’s a maze of dimly lit hallways and doors. I open a door and find a nun (I assume) sitting in a tub shaving her armpits. Her great pendulous breasts sway as she turns her head and sees me. In the image, the nun screams and rises dripping from the tub. I stand frozen in place as her beefy arms reach toward me. The image fades. I have nothing to tell me whether it is fact or fiction or what happened, but I am struck by my terror, my inability to move, to act, as her body, incredibly waffled and blueveined, lurches wetly toward me.

  We lived in San Antonio and, enamored with tales of the Alamo, I imagined that the convent, the old Spanish fortress, actually was the Alamo. On some mornings I was Davy Crockett; on other mornings I was a spy on a mysterious mission; or sometimes I was Davy Crockett who was also a spy. This was a rather mystical Davy Crockett who knew something the other Texans didn’t, a Davy Crockett who was planning to get out alive.

  Every morning I set off to fight a bloody pitched battle. Perhaps this concept sharpened the stomach jitters that overwhelmed me whenever my mother drove through the iron gate and parked in the gravel lot in front of the school. As she tried to coax me from the car, I clung to the inside door handle. A swarm of the black robes emerged from the building, flung the car door open, and tried to pry my fingers loose from the handle. Failing in that, other nuns took hold of my ankles and stretched me out like a rope. Their combined efforts, two or three prying on my fingers, two or three pulling my ankles, eventually wore me down. As my last finger slipped from the handle, I let out a terrorized sob and stretched my hand toward my mother, who slumped, guilt-ridden and teary-eyed, over the steering wheel.

  One day I was hustled downstairs into a cave-like room full of golden statues. Safe from my mother’s protective eyes, the nuns, perhaps sickened by my daily fits, pinched my nose and pulled my ears and pushed me about from one to another, my face seeking safety in the folds of their scorched-smelling robes.

  Through an arched doorway, an immense nun appeared. She lifted me in her arms, drew me up to her face, and stared with blue eyes that twinkled like chips of ice. I stared in horror at the huge mole on her cheek, from which sprouted long, thin, white hairs. Spastically I sucked in air; voiceless, I fainted.

  To the smell of incense, I woke in another underground room, which was small and bare with a marble fountain gurgling in the corner. I lay on a blanket on the stone floor in a patch of sunlight that streamed through a sole window high in the wall. A nun, this one with a broad gentle face, stroked my hair. She took my hand and led me upstairs to the dayroom, the quite cheerful dayroom with balloons hanging from the ceiling and stickfigure drawings tacked to the white walls. The children were watercoloring; at my entry they glanced up. Some whispered or passed the disquieting news with subterranean glances: here was one returned from the dungeon. Each felt a shiver of recognition and registered an early lesson: the dungeon awaited all who dared.

  The kind sister put paper in front of me and a jar of paint and dabbed my fingers in it. Sniffling, I smeared patches of blue on the coarse paper. (Some thirty years later my mother does not believe that I was roughed up by the Brigidine nuns in an underground room; she happens to be friends with several nuns who are indistinguishable, these days, from other women. They greet me with smiles and warm handshakes and appear to be splendid people, but in my heart of hearts I am still a little pissed off at them.)

  My reluctant daily entrances must have soured the nuns on me so that they didn’t object when John Mattheny took his daily naptime strolls atop my head. Eac
h day after lunch we spread towels on the cool floor. All about me, my colleagues, some twenty of them, whimpered their way to sleep with little cries and moans. In that time my eyelids flickered like a sentry’s in the dim bluish light. Rising across the way, as if through clouds of blue smoke and dust, John Mattheny clattered toward me, shod still in his black cowboy boots. I lay on my side, wincing, teeth gritted, as he stepped onto my head and balanced there, the heels of his boots digging into my ear and my cheek. He bounced. I only lay there, unprotesting, imagining that I was Davy Crockett who was pretending to be dead as the Mexicans mopped up the last of the Alamo defenders. Nearby a sister slumped in a tiny toddler’s chair, her knees stuck up in the air, a rosary draped over her giant lap, her broad buttocks drooping off either side of the small wooden seat. Her head nodded drowsily. She said nothing.

  Could this head stomping really have happened every day? So I recall it, though my mother does not believe me.

  I was horrified then when John Mattheny resurfaced in my life in the third grade. The bell had rung after recess. (I’d slopped chocolate milk down my shirt that day, which had made the children laugh and think me imbecilic; my silent mopey stares deepened the impression.) The khaki-uniformed boys and the plaid-skirted girls were swarming through the corridor, hot and flushed from play. Just outside our classroom, near the row of gray metal lockers, Mattheny came from behind and pushed me in the back. I lurched forward, bumping into the lockers and sliding off and blindly stumbling a few steps. I knew even as the hands had touched my back, knew before turning, that it was my old adversary. I’d noted him that first week at the new school, caught him watching me from slitted eyes across the classroom, but I had not given him a name. I had not called him Mattheny, head stomper, booted romper. I had tried to deny his existence. We shall not recall that time, I had thought, that time is smoke and dust. His slitted eyes had revealed: no, we will not recall that time here; that time is lost to smoke and dust, but we know that you are mine and I can walk across your head anytime.

 

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