by Lee Martin
They were on their side deck, and Bart had his telescope trained on the northern sky in anticipation of the comet ISON, which was supposed to be visible soon. He was bent over the eyepiece trying to see what he could see.
“A killer?” he said. “Who? Jim? Seriously, Tippy?”
She’d always tried to ignore the fact that he had a way of making her feel small, as if she and everything she said didn’t matter. Sometimes, like now, she felt so insignificant when she was with him, so tiny. He might be looking right at her, and she’d have the sense he couldn’t see her at all.
“Yes, seriously,” she said. “You know what he did that night Dinah was here.”
“I know what Dinah told you.” He’d never liked Dinah. Tippy knew that without having to ask him. Dinah, the roller derby girl, was too big of a personality for Bart to tolerate. He had to feel like he was the show. “I also know that Dinah likes to embellish,” he said. “Something happened and she made a good story out of it. Jim, a killer? Nah, I don’t think so. Spend a while talking to him like I have and you’d never make that kind of accusation.”
“I wasn’t accusing him.” Tippy knew her voice was shrinking, and she hated herself for that. “I just said I wondered. I didn’t know the two of you were such good pals.”
Bart straightened up and turned to look at her. Although the night was cool, he wore cargo shorts and flip-flops. The hood of his black sweatshirt, which said AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE in yellow letters, covered his shaved head. She hated it when he looked at her like she didn’t have the right to an opinion.
“I talk to him sometimes when you’re at work. I go walking by his place, and I say, ‘What’s up?’ and he tells me.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Stars mostly, telescopes. He’s into astronomy.”
“He told Glory he was looking at the stars that night she found him lying in the street.”
“That’s right. He likes to stargaze.”
“But he can’t do it lying in the street. That’s crazy.”
Bart nodded. “I said, ‘Dude, what if a car comes?’ He said, ‘I see its headlights and I get out of the way.’ Cause and effect, Tippy. Sounds pretty logical to me.”
“Ever heard the word ‘premeditated’?” Tippy said. “Sometimes killers know exactly what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it. They plan it all out. Logically.”
“Not Jim. He’s a little odd, but that’s all. One look around his house and you’d know there was nothing to be afraid of.”
“You’ve been in his house?”
“Once. He was having a hard time getting his front door unlocked, so I helped him—his key was bent—then he asked me in.”
“Asked you in?”
“Why so shocked? He was just being neighborly.”
“I guess I never thought of him as the neighborly kind.”
Bart said, “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the world. Everyone making up their minds about everyone else before they have the facts.”
“And the facts are?”
“Geez, Tip. Everyone’s a mystery.”
“Really?” she said. “All right then, Mr. Know-It-All. Why don’t you enlighten me?”
Bart went back to his telescope, and for a while Tippy thought he wouldn’t oblige her. Then, bent over the eyepiece, he started to tell the story of the day he went inside Jim’s house.
“It was quite a surprise,” Bart said. “I can tell you that. Nothing like we’d always pictured.”
Tippy had to admit she’d always imagined the inside of Jim’s house to be a mess, cluttered and dirty: stacks of newspapers and pizza boxes, dirty dishes and piles of unwashed clothes, nests of rubber bands and bread ties, dust thick on the furniture, mud tracked in on the floors.
“It was pristine,” Bart said, and then he went on to describe what he saw. Studio portraits on the walls of the entryway—photos of Jim when he was a boy, some with his parents and some of him alone: Little League baseball, junior high science fair, high school graduation. Golf trophies on display on shelves in the family room. An afghan neatly folded over the arm of the couch. Countertops bare except for a ceramic teapot and a vase of fresh flowers—lilies, Bart recalled—and a bowl of potpourri.
“Totally Martha Stewart,” Bart said. “Just like, you know, a family lived there. Not a killer, Tip. Really.”
When Miriam went to the Giant Eagle to pick up a few things and saw the women’s carts stacked high with turkeys, cranberries, dinner rolls, pie crusts, cans of pumpkin filling, whipping cream, she remembered the Thanksgiving meals she used to prepare. Now she had a hand basket with a loaf of whole wheat bread, a jar of Sanka, and a bunch of bananas. The woman she used to be seemed so distant to her. She barely remembered her family’s life before that call from Texas.
What was more familiar to her was the feeling of being on the outside, the same feeling she’d had as a girl when her mother had gone away to the hospital because she started to hear voices. It didn’t take long for word to get around, and by the time her mother came home, most of the little town where they lived already knew that Daisy Wright had gone around the bend. From that point on, Miriam knew that people were watching them, talking about them, judging them. She knew that there were normal families and then there were families like hers. The shame was so deep and lasting that when the doctor in Austin asked if there’d been any mental illness in her family, she lied and said no, none at all.
This Thanksgiving, she and Tom would drive to Jim’s and, if he’d allow it, take him to the MCL Cafeteria where they’d eat, and privately Miriam would give thanks that they’d all survived another year. It would just be the three of them, Miriam praying for a few moments of contentment.
She carried her hand basket toward the checkout line, but stopped when she felt someone behind her grab her sleeve.
“Ma’am, I’ve been calling after you.” Miriam turned and saw a woman she recognized from Bay Meadows Court, the woman who lived across the street from Jim, the one with the black hair and her hands and wrists and ears and neck heavy with jewelry. Her husband was in the business. He drove that little sports car. “I saw you drop this,” the woman said. Oh, what was her name? Something that started with a “G.” Glenda? Gloria? No, Glory. That was it. The woman’s name was Glory.
She was standing there, her hand held out, something so ordinary—a coupon for Cheerios—resting on her palm. Seeing it there, knowing it had fallen from her coat pocket, Miriam felt like an impostor. She wasn’t a woman who could pour herself a bowl of Cheerios, sprinkle them with sugar, maybe add some strawberries or sliced peaches, a little milk, and take her time facing another ho-hum day.
Nothing was ho-hum in her life. When she and Tom came to look in on Jim, she shied away from Glory and the other women on the court for fear they’d find out that she was an impostor, someone pretending to be a woman without a care when, really, she was scared to death.
“Thank you,” she said to Glory, and she reached out and took the coupon between her fingers.
“Any little bit helps, doesn’t it?” Glory said.
Miriam nodded. “The way prices are these days.”
“Oh, isn’t it the truth?” Glory nodded. She even reached out and touched Miriam on the shoulder. “It’s the men who have no idea what it costs to feed a family, but we know, don’t we?”
The two of them stood like that for a moment longer before Glory took her hand away. Miriam felt her heart sink at its leaving. How wonderful it felt to be touched like that, to be drawn into this intimacy.
“Yes,” she said, “we always know.”
She closed her hand around the coupon, trying to hold on, just a moment longer, to the notion that the most pressing issue in her life was the cost of a box of breakfast cereal. She imagined herself being that sort of woman, one who could grouse about the most trivial things because she had no other complaints, because everything else in her life, if not entirely hunky-dory, was at least unremarkab
le. She pictured herself lying down at night on freshly ironed sheets. She tried to remember what it had been like to wake in the morning with a lightness in her heart.
Then Glory said, “Wait a second. I know you, don’t I? Your son lives in my neighborhood.”
Just like that, Miriam came back to her life, her real life, the one she tried so hard to hide.
“On Bay Meadows?” she said, as if she were trying to place Glory, as if just that second she’d begun to recognize her. “You live across the street, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Glory said. “From your son, I mean. I see you visiting from time to time.”
“We come by,” said Miriam, trying her best not to sound defensive. “We’re not so far away. Just in Upper Arlington. Not so far at all.”
It was true. She and Tom came by to look at Jim’s mail, to see what sorts of bills might need paying, to bring him sacks of fast food from Wendy’s or Burger King—it was all he would eat—and to get some sense of his emotional state, to make sure he was taking his Abilify and his Zoloft. He always forgot to put out his garbage. Even though he was clean and tidy, for some reason, he stored his garbage bags in the garage, never quite remembering to put them in the Toter and push it to the curb. After a while, Tom would hire a man to come in his pickup truck and haul the bags to the landfill.
“Jim,” Glory said. “That’s your son, yes?” She didn’t wait for Miriam to offer a confirmation. “I worry about him. Lately, he’s been acting strangely.”
“There’s nothing strange about Jim. Nothing at all.”
Already, Miriam was turning, heading back up the aisle.
Glory called to her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry…” But Miriam didn’t want her apology. She’d long ago grown weary of saying she was sorry to people because of Jim, and, therefore, she neither expected nor would accept any kind of apology in return. She remembered a T-shirt that Jim liked to wear. It said, YOU CAN STUFF YOUR SORRIES IN A SACK. Exactly. Sorries never changed anything.
She turned back to face Glory. “Has he hurt anyone?”
“No,” Glory said, “but I…”
“All right, then.” Miriam cut her off. “All right.”
Glory carried the story home to Artie and, at her next hair appointment, to Tippy—the story of something she recalled from months past, when Miriam and Tom were visiting Jim.
“Remember when the ambulance came?” she said to Artie.
“Did it come to this house?” Artie said. “No. Then why in the world would I remember it?”
She’d looked out the front windows one evening and seen the red lights flashing.
“You remember that, don’t you, Tippy?” she said.
“I sort of do,” Tippy said.
It was Miriam. The ambulance had come for her. She’d slipped on the front steps and fallen. At least that’s what Tom told Glory when she saw him at the mailbox the next day and went out to ask him if everything was all right. Oh, yes, he told her. Everything was fine. Just a little slip. Just a little bruising of Miriam’s face and a sprained shoulder. An overnight stay in the hospital. Nothing to worry about.
“She had her arm in a sling the next time I saw her,” Tippy said. “Sure, I remember.”
“I never thought a thing about it until I tried to talk to her about Jim at the Giant Eagle.” There was something about the way that Miriam looked at her when she asked her whether Jim had hurt anyone—some dread—that made Glory wonder whether Miriam’s injuries had really happened the way that Tom said they did. “She had the look of a woman who’s afraid.”
“You don’t think,” Tippy said. “I mean, do you, Glory?”
“I told you someone was going to get hurt,” Artie said when she was finally able to make him really listen to what she was saying. “Geez-a-loo.”
The night before Thanksgiving, Tippy was at AussieFit working out with Bart. Just some time on the elliptical and then a few light sets of arm curls and lat pulldowns and bench presses. Just enough to keep her muscles toned the way Bart liked.
For some reason, he was pushing her harder than usual. “C’mon, Tip, one more rep. Thanksgiving’s tomorrow. Turkey and pumpkin pie. You don’t want it to turn to flab.”
“Enough,” she finally said, refusing to do just one more arm curl. “That’s enough.”
“C’mon, babe. You can do more. Push yourself.”
“I said no.”
She slapped her towel down on the weight bench and stormed away. Her heart was pounding inside her chest, and she felt something rising up in her she couldn’t quite call anger. It was more embarrassment, she decided, because she’d let her temper get the better of her.
“Jesus, Tip,” Bart said in a low voice when he finally came to her. “Let’s go home.”
On the drive to the house, she tried her best to make small talk, to get beyond the ugly moment at AussieFit and get things back on track. Bart responded in kind, and they filled the drive with comments about the weather (cold with a chance of snow), Dinah’s wedding (Tippy was a bridesmaid), and the comet ISON (Bart hoped he’d finally get a glimpse of it).
Then he turned down Saddlehorn Drive and fell in behind a slow-moving Subaru wagon that Tippy knew belonged to Jim. It had a bumper sticker on it, a quote from the Dalai Lama: THE PURPOSE OF OUR LIVES IS TO BE HAPPY. She’d seen that bumper sticker on Jim’s car many times, but something about seeing it tonight, after her moment with Bart at AussieFit, put a lump in her throat. She fought back her tears and turned toward her window so Bart wouldn’t notice. When was the last time she’d truly been happy? Maybe when she and Bart were first starting out, but that all seemed like a long time ago. Now the days were all the same. She went to work and came home, and Bart spent the nights looking at the sky through his telescope. When had he stopped looking at her, she wondered. When had he stopped seeing her? When had she become only muscles to be made in the image that he manufactured?
And yet she loved him. She couldn’t deny that. The thought of a life without him was impossible.
“There’s your killer,” he said. Then he laughed.
If it were some other night, Tippy knew she might be able to laugh along with him, laugh at herself. But not tonight, not after Glory’s story about the time the ambulance came for Miriam, nor after the ugly exchange with Bart at AussieFit. Tonight, she finally said what she’d never known she wanted to say.
“Look at you,” she said. “So smug. You think you know everything, don’t you?”
“I was just having some fun.” Bart sounded wounded. “Jesus, Tip. Can’t you take a joke?”
“I don’t think it’s funny,” she said. They drove the rest of the way home, creeping behind Jim’s slow-moving Subaru with the Dalai Lama bumper sticker, and they didn’t say a word.
Down the street, Artie was saying plenty. “I mean it, Glory. I’m going to find his parents and I’m going to ask them what’s what.”
“Don’t, Artie,” Glory said. She was standing at the window in the dark, looking out at Jim’s house across the street. The porch light was on, as was a light in an upstairs window. All of his upstairs windows were half covered with paper, so she could only see the light in the top half. “Just leave them alone. I mean it, Artie. Something tells me they’ve had enough to deal with.”
“But, Glory, is he the sort we want living across from us? He’s dangerous. We have a right to know why he’s living there alone. All his neighbors have a right to know what to expect.”
“Artie, I said don’t.”
At that moment, in Upper Arlington, Miriam was sitting in the dark in her living room. She was alone because Tom, as was his habit most evenings, was in his basement lab working on something new. He invented apparatuses that were used by welders. That was as much as Miriam understood. He made things to help people hold other things together even while everything in his own life was fractured.
At least, that’s the way she chose to think about it on nights like this, when she was alone, worrying ov
er what she might have done differently. Of course she should have admitted to her mother’s mental illness, and maybe, yes, she should have left Jim in Austin and let the doctors there do what they could for him. But all of that was ancient history. Miriam tried to believe that much was true. She spent her evenings arguing with herself, second-guessing each decision and then coming up with rationales that assured her she’d done exactly what any mother would have done to make sure her son was near to her.
She got stuck, though, when she recalled the day when Jim, in a fit of rage, pushed her down the stairs. Lucky she hadn’t broken her neck. Lucky she’d only sprained her shoulder and got some marks on her face. She couldn’t make sense of it, though, the memory of Jim’s face twisted in anger, the growl of his voice just before he reached out and pushed her. At the emergency room, she knew she’d reached the bottom of something. She knew she was weary with loving her son. She’d wanted him to have a home. All along, that’s what she’d wished for him, that he have a home and a family.
“Jimmy, you understand what you’ve done, don’t you?” she asked him when she came back from the hospital.
He nodded his head. He was contrite. He looked lost the way he had when he was a boy and he did something to disappoint her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
What had they argued about? The paper he’d taped over the bottom half of the upstairs windows. “Do you want the neighbors to think you have something to hide?” she said.
“I don’t want anyone looking in.”
“What are you afraid they’ll see?”
“My heart. The inside of my head. My soul. They can’t have that, Mother. I won’t let them.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous,” she said, and she started ripping down the paper. She was thinking about all that while Tom was in the basement. Finally, he came upstairs. Miriam was sitting in the dark. He turned on a light and found her in the living room.
