Carry The One

by Carol Anshaw

  Nick noticed his mother go into the kitchen. He followed and, seeing they were alone, waited until she finished getting herself some ice and water from the refrigerator door.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if you could help me out a little.” For once he wasn’t hitting her up for drug money. Cleaning up his act, along with his apartment, his wardrobe, and getting the dents in his car bumped out, had put him a little behind the eight ball.

  Loretta pursed her lips in a schoolmarmish way, a little kiss of disapproval before she pulled an embossed leather checkbook out of her purse. She still wrote checks for everything. She would be the last person in human history holding up a grocery-store line to write a check for two Lean Cuisines. Nick loved the checkbook, also his check, the amount written against a background of pastel cats playing with soft balls of yarn.

  Heather came into the yard and got tripped up by Tater—Rob and Carmen’s new dog. (Not a replacement for Walter. No dog could ever take his place, Carmen would say, but it did seem she was taking to this little guy.) An inglorious entrance. Carmen went over.

  “It’s great you could make it.” Heather was in town just for the weekend. Her mother’s birthday was yesterday. Heather visited her at an ashram in northern Indiana, where she had lived for several years now, practicing a life of keeping still.

  “Crispy shrimp?” Alice passed by, holding a trayful in her good hand. She loved playing waitress at parties.

  Heather had mellowed. After the business with her and Gabe—which left him hurt but determined not to show it—she began college then started dropping weight again. For a while she was mostly in and out of clinics, scaring the hell out of them. And then, suddenly, she just got normal. She turned nineteen and took about a pound of metal jewelry out of her ears and nose and privates, let Rob cut her hair. She still had the buzzing bee by her eye, but that was no longer a deterrent to progress in the straight world. She never went back to school. She currently lived in Manhattan and worked for a high-end realtor. The service Heather performed was staging—buffing up apartments for sale to show them to their best advantage. She ordered sets of pale, high-thread-count bed linens, filled large ceramic vases with sprays of exotic flowers, put Pillsbury rolls into the oven set to warm, lined the rim of the bathtub with white votive candles. She brought with her an array of fragrance sprays (summer cotton, sea breeze), and a batch of mood-setting CDs. Heather also replaced the worst of what the client had hung on the walls with what she called “neutral art.” She took flak from both Alice and Gabe about even the concept of art that was neutral. Give me a break, she would say.

  For these services, Heather made a percentage of the agent’s percentage. With Manhattan real estate prices, this added up to quite a bit of money, which she socked away in mutual funds. Her troubles, which seemed to run so deep, turned out to be fleeting, adherent to adolescence, a kind of emotional asthma. And Carmen knew she should be happy that Heather started eating like a regular human and dropped the black eyeliner and got a job. And she was, happy. But she also feared for someone—so very like herself at that age—who had all her ducks in order. As if there was any reliable way of ordering ducks.

  A chainsaw rip and a rubber whine preceded a motorcycle coming up the driveway out of a turn made so sharply the rider’s shoulder nearly grazed the ground. Gabe had arrived.

  Alice turned to watch him dismount in a choreographed sequence of movements. He was extremely aware of how he presented himself to the world. All through high school he had run, worked out with weights, kept an eye on his body mass index. He got this from his father; he and Matt worked out together at one of those new gyms that had a prison flavor. The desk up in his bedroom was piled with giant plastic containers of supplements he bought there. Protein powder, something called Steel. Whey in a plastic jug big as a tuffet.

  He was about to graduate and head off to art school. He had a terrible girlfriend. Donna. They all hated her in a lazy way, the assumption being that she was temporary. For the summer, he was working part time for a sign-painting company, making art in his off-hours. He had pretty much abandoned his own painting, and now performed spontaneous pieces in public areas. Alice assured Carmen he would get past this, that he was not going to be forty and still eating tapioca in a clear plastic box on Michigan Avenue in his underpants. But neither was he the person Alice so hoped he’d become. She’d been expecting someone sweetly shy, but instead he’d turned out to be a little brash. He still wore glasses, but now with frames that called attention to themselves. He had a little of his father’s puffy self-importance. Also a little of Carmen’s challenging manner, and it was usually Carmen he was challenging. Striking distance was about as close as he got to his mother these days. Carmen, so tough in every other way, dissolved beneath his acidic gaze. Today, though, he came out of his helmet grinning at his mother, even gave Heather a quick, cautious hug, then headed straight toward the guest of honor.

  “You the man.” Gabe high-fived his uncle, who responded off the beat and they wound up whacking into each other’s forearms. A white-guy high five.

  “Cool bowl,” he said, nodding, clueless, toward Nick’s trophy.

  He had brought Nick a present, which he pulled out of his messenger bag. A small, sentimental landscape, a meadow backgrounded by an unlikely volcano. He had painted Nick into the meadow, peering through binoculars at a part of the sky Gabe had painted black then salted with stars. This was pretty much the only sort of artistic painting Gabe did these days, the ironic insertion of friends into cheesy paintings he found in junk shops.

  “This is so excellent,” Nick said.

  Gabe idolized his uncle. He saw Nick’s addictions enhanced by rock star lighting. Nick was his private Kurt Cobain.

  A few stragglers trickled in. Nick’s mentor, Bernie Cato, proud as a parent. Jean brought a guitar and sang “Fly Me to the Moon,” to Nick, who seemed not at all embarrassed. She also brought Vincent, a wiry guy wearing a T-shirt that said COLLEGE. Carmen knew nothing about this person. Jean had not mentioned him, but from the way he sat next to her and watched in a focused way as she played and sang, Carmen assumed he was a boyfriend. A boyfriend who was not Tom Ferris. A fairly stunning development.

  They had chicken kabobs, grilled tofu for the vegetarians, and Greek salad. Someone hauled out the croquet set and there was a while of wooden balls thudding off the ankles of people in lawn chairs. A little after five, a consensus gathered up about leaving. Carmen looked around and thought, with Horace absent and Alice not manifestly lovesick and Nick sober and Loretta subdued and Gabe not witheringly dismissive, these people could actually add up to a happy family.

  “Hey,” Alice said to Jean when she found her alone getting a couple of Cokes out of the cooler. “I think I saw Tom driving by the house just now. I was getting something out of my car. He went past twice.”

  Jean didn’t seem surprised. “He’s being stupidly tragic. He has no right to tragedy. His marriage broke up. His son turned out to be queer. That bothers him. Really. His cholesterol is too high. Who cares? Do you care?”

  “Sean? He’s queer?”

  “Tom heard him talking with a bunch of his friends at a party. He was saying ‘Whatever happened to the fourth Pointer Sister?’ And Tom couldn’t come up with an example of any straight guy saying that.” Jean popped open one of the Cokes, took a drink, then said, “So let him drive his go-cart round and round the track.”

  “This thing is new then?” Alice tilted her head in Vincent’s direction, pushing in a thin end of the wedge to open the conversation.

  “Kind of new. Kind of nice. We go places together. He’s not married. He can stay over as many nights as I want. Imagine that.”

  Nick needed a lift home. His car was in the body shop. Alice’s burnt fingertips still hurt; she had to hold the wheel gingerly.

  “Mmmm.” Nick ran his hands along the center armrest. “Fine Corinthian leather,” he said in a Ricardo Montalban accent. He never missed a chance these d
ays to jerk her chain about having bought a Mercedes, and not a reverse-chic beater like her old one. This one was brand new.

  “Looks to me like your butt is enjoying that leather quite a bit. Your butt isn’t embarrassed. Your butt isn’t longing for a hard plastic bus seat. But I’ll keep the critique in mind. Next time, I’ll get something with vinyl upholstery. A Yugo. A used Yugo.”

  “I don’t think there are any of those still on the road. I think you’d have to get a Pacer. I saw one of those still puttering around the other day.”

  “You doing okay?” she asked.

  “I am. And I’m serious about it this time; I scared the hell out of myself with that last bender. But still, it’s not easy. There are so many minutes in a day. You know. To get through unassisted. Plus the past. Now I have to carry that around all the time. No erasing it with a pill. I want to tell you something, something I want you to know. Just you. That night. I saw her. I saw her coming out of the woods, when she was still a ways up the road. All it would have taken was reaching out and jerking the steering wheel away from Olivia, taking the car off the road, into the ditch. We would have been a little banged up maybe. But the girl would be alive. But I was just so, so stoned. I thought she was so interesting to watch. I wanted to see what would happen to her. Like she was a character in some poignant movie.”

  “Jesus,” Alice said.

  Carmen was in bed. Rob stretched on the floor, holding above himself a sheet of diagrams given to him by his physical therapist. He had a terrible back. He was probably going to get spinal fusion surgery. He was holding out, hoping technology would outpace the degeneration of his discs and they’d be able to fix them with a laser, or something laparoscopic, replacements made of some unrejectable polymer or something. Carmen tuned in and out on the details.

  She was reading the latest issue of The Nation. Bush was claiming he was going to be the education president. He was going to leave no child behind. Right. What he appeared to be so far, in these early months of his presidency, was lazy. He liked to spend time at his ranch, whacking brush. Carmen wasn’t sure what about the brush needed whacking. Although she had been clenched since the election, she was starting to think maybe he would just be passive and nondescript. A nothing administration she hoped would be whisked out in four years.

  “Hey.” Rob was up and sitting on the edge of the mattress, holding a piece of her hair between thumb and second finger, a professional assessment. “Let me give you a conditioning treatment. It’ll only take ten minutes. Your ends are pretty dry.”

  “Okay,” Carmen said. Rob did not follow politics. He voted the way Carmen told him to. She couldn’t talk with him about her latent fears about who was actually running the show while the president whacked brush. She wouldn’t be able to get him revved up about the bad résumés of the new cabinet. The best Rob could bring to the table tonight was a conditioning treatment, and she supposed this was something. She still thought marrying him was a small mistake, but also that someone as fiendish on perfection as she was might need to make a few mistakes. She would say he was a mistake that had turned out surprisingly well.

  “We don’t deserve the luxury of our lives,” she told him.

  “I know. I know,” he said, sitting her up, wrapping a towel around her shoulders, ripping open a foil packet. The room filled with coconut.

  delivery

  Alice was in gear, making coffee, mixing paint. Sitting on her high stool, mapping out the day’s work while she had her usual energy breakfast, an Almond Joy. The morning outside was dazzling, pouring in through the windows and skylights.

  The phone rang. It was Carmen.

  “Are you watching TV?”

  “Well … No?”

  “You might.”

  “What’s up?”

  “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.”

  “Accident?”

  “Don’t think so. Gotta go. I’m trying to get Gabe to answer his cell. I know Providence is miles from Manhattan, but I want to—you know—hear his voice.”

  After another plane blasted into another tower, Alice decided she needed some company. Nick had the biggest TV of anyone she knew, maybe of anybody in the world, so she headed over. People were out on the streets, and for a while it still looked like an ordinary Tuesday. But then at Belmont, a small crowd was coming off the El and down the steps, as though it were six p.m. instead of ten in the morning. A reverse rush hour. No one wanted to be in the Loop just now. Alice didn’t feel frightened for her safety. If these planes were seeking out skyscrapers, the next one probably wasn’t headed for La Vida Taco or the dollhouse shop just up from where Alice turned left onto Clark. The sensation was more an eerie one, the vibration of huge events. Events of unknown origin with unforeseeable consequences.

  She pressed Nick’s buzzer a few times, then gave up and used her key. He was stretched out on the sofa in camouflage-print jockey shorts, not truly present to the morning. Clearly he was using again. The living room smelled of something bad masked with bayberry; melted candle stubs sat in saucers all around. She put on Channel 7 and found out that while she’d been biking over, one of the towers had crumpled to the ground. They were replaying it on all the news stations. She sat down in the guest chair Nick never used, the cleanest piece of furniture in the room.

  She flipped up and down through the channels. “Oh my God, two people just jumped. Together.”

  “What movie is this?” he said, establishing conversational traction.

  “Get a grip.”

  In between the news networks, stations with taped programming gave the appearance of being clueless, or insensitive. On the Food Network, a celebrity Alice didn’t recognize was cooking something Cajun. On another channel contestants were jumping up and down and squealing and trying to win a low-end convertible.

  “Man,” Nick, now focused, said when the second tower deflated in a thick cloud of ash. “Somebody’s really pissed off at us. We just took delivery on a big message.”

  “We’re so used to special effects. I have to keep checking myself, resetting my mind to this is real. There were people in there. How many? Who could survive that? No one will survive, will they? Not the people in the planes either. Not the rescue workers.”

  “Olivia might have been inside. She was in New York.”

  “That was a few years back. We don’t know where she is anymore.”

  “She could have been in there.”

  “She could have been flying the plane,” Alice said. “She is not a knowable part of this story, or any story.”

  “Right,” Nick said, and nodded as if Alice had said something immensely wise.

  Carmen came by a while later, having closed the shelter early. “My ladies—not unreasonably, I guess—have decided they’d rather be outside today than in a building. Gabe was in his studio when I got him; he’s okay. Rob’s in Venice, so he’s probably better than okay. He’s okay and eating really good spaghetti. Nobody’s mad at Italy.” She took off her jacket, got a Coke from the refrigerator and squeezed into the big armchair with Alice. Neither wanted to try the sofa. The sofa was a hazmat area. “I’m glad you guys are here. I don’t want to be alone just now.”

  “Mom called,” Alice told her. “She heard they’ve cleared the airspace above the whole country. They pulled down every last plane. Have they ever done that before?”

  “What’s up with the one that crashed in the field?”

  “Peter Jennings said it might be an unrelated crash,” Alice said.

  Carmen stared at her. “Right. And why are we having to rely on the bad guesses of news anchors? Where’s our government? Where’s our, like, president?”

  “They had a scratchy little clip of him earlier. He was flying around for a while; now he’s in an undisclosed location. Because he’s so valuable. Because when he comes out, he’s going to know just what to do.”

  “He’ll be wearing a little president jacket. The guy loves those jackets,” Nick said.


  “They don’t think this is a Timothy McVeigh thing, home-grown?” Carmen said.

  “No. They think it’s the same people who bombed the Trade Center before. The guys who put explosives in the parking garage. They think today they were finishing the job. Terrorists with a strong work ethic.”

  Carmen thought awhile. “This administration, their response will be military. These are old hawks in charge. They’re not going to be interested in low-profile police work, in ferreting out who’s responsible, going cell by cell. They’ll want to find a country to bomb.”

  Nick stretched to pick up the phone receiver on his coffee table. “Would you guys mind if I asked Andalusia over to watch with us?”

  “Don’t even touch that,” Alice said. “We are not keeping vigil through our country’s darkest hour with a ridiculously pseudonymed hooker.”

  Jean called, then came by. She’d been at her studio, trying to call Sylvie Artaud, her Parisian chanteuse, who was in New York playing a small supper club. “You can’t even get through. I think the lines are jammed with everyone calling their friends in Manhattan to make sure they’re all right.”

  “I wonder what Tom’s going to do with this?” Carmen said. “What song he’s going to write. Maybe about the towers falling? How it was so galling?”

  “Now America’s bawling?” Alice contributed. Jean was done with Tom. It was now safe to say stuff like this.

  “Actually,” Jean said, “he did call. Anything big, he still feels he needs to tell me. The weird thing is, I don’t think he’s terribly interested in a tragedy so big everyone else is in on it. He’s a tragedy snob. He doesn’t want to stand next to some NASCAR guy, both of them waving little flags. That’s what he said.”

  “Wow,” Alice said. “Well there you go.”

  They numbed themselves with replay, the loop of horror: the Twin Towers, the plane that hit the Pentagon, also the one that went down in the field in Pennsylvania. They heard about the cell phone calls from people on the planes, how the terrorists slit the flight attendant’s throat.