What's Important Is Feeling: Stories

by Adam Wilson

“What’s gonna happen?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s bad, right?”

  “It’s not good.”

  I walked back down the stairs looking for him. It was already too late when I saw him aim at me from above. One shot from the sniper rifle, and I was done. My screen filled with blood.

  “You learn fast,” I said. My father put down his controller. His hands were shaking like he’d really shot me.

  “It’s best of five,” I said.

  “I have to do some work,” he said, and left me there. I sat by the window and watched for his car to leave. It stayed put that night.

  The next morning Ramona said she was sick and didn’t get out of bed, so I went to school without her. When I got there, everyone knew except me. Apparently he’d shown the tape to his brother, who’d made copies and distributed it to a bunch of sophomores. There’d been a screening at Joe Bort’s house on his big TV.

  “Why does everyone keep looking at me weird?” I said to Weinberg.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Your sister made a sex tape with Matt Poncett. Everyone’s seen it.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “There’s supposed to be some kinky shit on there.”

  “We got to get a copy of that tape,” Mike said.

  I punched him on the arm.

  “That’s my sister, you douche.”

  “I heard she deep-throats him,” Weinberg said.

  “That’s not kinky,” Mike said. “Impressive, but not really kinky.”

  “There’s other stuff too,” Weinberg said. “She’s wearing her cheerleader outfit.”

  “I heard he’s hung like Mark Wahlberg,” Mike said.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said.

  “It’s not really his dick in the movie,” Weinberg said. “They used a prosthetic.”

  Ramona was in her room and wouldn’t come out. My mother was in the hallway, pleading at the door. Father Larry sat silent on the stairs.

  “Just talk to me, Ramona,” my mother said. “That’s all I ask.”

  Ramona didn’t reply, but we could hear her crying.

  “She’s been crying all day,” my mother said.

  “It’s okay to be angry,” my mother said to the door. “Anger is a healthy stage of grief. I’m angry myself. But maybe if we talk about it we can start to come to terms with it.”

  “I don’t think that’s what she’s upset about,” I said.

  “Of course that’s what she’s upset about,” my mother said.

  Ramona yelled something. It sounded like “Go away,” but you couldn’t really tell.

  My mother turned to the priest. “You try to talk to her. Maybe she’ll listen to you. You’re so good at this type of thing.”

  “That might not be the best idea,” I said.

  Father Larry stood up. When he opened her door, she started shrieking.

  “Get the fuck out,” she yelled.

  Father Larry walked in and shut the door behind him. The shrieking continued.

  When he came out he said, “I don’t think she wants to talk to me right now. Sometimes you have to give a person space to make peace on their own.”

  The shrieking went back to being sobbing.

  “I can’t bear this,” my mother said. “You try, Zach. Try to talk to her. She looks up to you.”

  “She doesn’t look up to me.”

  “She does,” Father Larry said.

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re her big brother.”

  “So?”

  “Just try,” my mother said.

  “Leave her alone,” I said, and went up to my room.

  Eventually my mother stopped banging on Ramona’s door. She and the priest were probably in the living room. He let her cry into his palm. He told her about Job, about Jesus.

  When my father came home, Ramona wouldn’t talk to him either. She didn’t come down for dinner. The priest was still there, and we had pizza. Father Larry took the last slice of sausage and pepperoni. “You guys can’t eat pork anyway,” Father Larry said.

  “We don’t keep kosher,” I said.

  “Maybe we should,” my father said. “Maybe then God would like us more.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

  “I’ll bring a couple slices up and see if Ramona wants any,” I said.

  She didn’t answer when I knocked, so I opened the door and let myself in. I didn’t see her at first. She lay on the floor behind her bed with her legs together and straight ahead, arms folded across her chest. She wore a frilly nightgown that I hadn’t seen in ages, since before she got breasts, legs. It was only a few years ago that she was a kid, that we both were.

  “Hey,” I said. I put the plate of pizza on her desk. She wasn’t crying anymore, just staring at the ceiling.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I’ll eat it if you don’t want it.”

  “Do whatever you want,” she said. I took a bite.

  “I assume you heard,” she said.

  “I heard.”

  I had been planning to give her a piece of my mind, let her know how embarrassing this was for me, how stupid she’d been. But looking at her on the floor in that nightgown I couldn’t.

  “Everyone will forget about it by tomorrow,” I said.

  “They won’t.”

  I leaned against her bed. Her phone vibrated.

  “You gonna get that?”

  “Leave it.”

  “You know what the good thing about high school is?” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s only four years. Then it’s over.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You only have two years left,” I said. “And it’s almost summer. Everyone will go away and forget all about you.”

  Ramona started crying again.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said. I knew she knew I didn’t mean it, but I said it anyway, and she let me say it. “It will all be okay,” I said.

  Father Larry was over every day now. He’d be there in the morning when I woke up. He made the coffee, burnt the toast. He always had the Sports section, so I’d read the Living/Arts instead. You couldn’t say anything because my mother was right there. She was going to die soon; you weren’t allowed to complain. No one said this specifically, but we all knew. Ramona even went back to school.

  People called her Deep Throat behind her back, and sometimes to her face; they called her Ramona Jameson, Ramona Does Dallas. If I were at all tough I would have punched a few lights out, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I mostly stopped going to classes and got high in the woods or in Weinberg’s Jetta. I knew Mike had a copy of the tape.

  I’d stopped masturbating entirely. Every time I started I would picture Ramona getting it from behind in her cheerleader outfit. In my head, she would be crying, makeup dripping like blue paint onto the floor, spreading all over the walls and ceiling, tinting everything deep blue, so blue it was almost black.

  In real life, she seemed to be handling it okay. She got new friends, bad-girl friends. She was a celebrity. She got to be Lady Macbeth in the school play; everyone said she was right for the part.

  I didn’t have much interaction with Ramona or any of them. My mother was busy meditating with her priest, reading poems about ficus trees, telling herself that every living thing dies. She wore Indian saris, and in the evenings she would burn incense. She’d been losing weight. It mostly showed in her face.

  One night she came to my room and looked like she was about to say something important, but she just said, “Zachary,” as if it were not yet my name but still a single sperm that had spilled from my father’s body into hers and rattled around like a pinball, or a recurring dream, before settling into that place she no longer had, growing slowly and deliberately of its own accord.

  Father Larry gave her a cross. She wore it on a chain around her neck that also had a Star of David and a tiny
amethyst. Father Larry held her hand; I was glad he was there. I didn’t know what happened when he was gone, when I went upstairs and my parents were alone together in their bedroom.

  At some point, my father returned to his nighttime excursions. He’d stopped for a couple weeks after my mother’s news, but it didn’t take him long to get back to it. Things seemed close to normal. Ramona got a new boyfriend. He was one of the popular kids.

  One night, I picked Ramona up from play practice. It was May now, and the stars were almost as bright as the glow-in-the-dark ones on my ceiling. With the window open, you could smell charcoal and propane. The air smelled like baseball; it smelled like what I imagined sex would smell like. I didn’t ask Ramona if I was right.

  We drove through the center of town, past the icecream place and the local sports bar. On benches outside the former, middle schoolers sat in gender-segregated groups. They pushed hair from their eyes, inched toward each other like weak magnets. Behind a streetlamp, brave tongues danced beginner’s tangos, shyly at first, gradually growing comfortable, learning to dip and dash, braces clinking and scraping like braking trains.

  Next door, on the patio, men loosened ties, wiped frost from their mouths. They held cigarettes at arm’s length so their wives wouldn’t smell it on them. I imagined Ramona was watching them out the window, wondering if her husband would be the same, or if she’d ever have one.

  “How’s the play going?” I said.

  “It’s whatever,” she said.

  We were coming to our street. As I turned the corner I saw my father’s car zip off in the other direction.

  “Where do you think he goes?” Ramona said.

  “Let’s find out. I’ve seen how they do it in movies. You just have to stay two car lengths behind.”

  “He’s getting on the highway,” Ramona said.

  We passed a string of side-of-the-road motels. I kept expecting him to pull into one, into a space he knew by heart. Ramona and I would linger in the shadows. A door would fly open. A woman would be standing there, eyes alight, silk robe slipping open. My father would approach; the woman would take him in her arms like he was a lost child. They’d disappear into the room. The blinds would close.

  He kept driving. I followed.

  “He’s getting off,” I said. We were in Waltham. We got on another, smaller highway heading toward Lexington. In the distance I could see Wal-Lex, a rollerskating rink. Everyone used to have birthday parties there when we were kids. It looked open. I wondered if they got a big nighttime crowd, nostalgic adults skating two by two.

  My father signaled and pulled into the Wal-Lex lot.

  “Dad’s going rollerskating?” Ramona said.

  “Maybe he’s meeting someone here.”

  When we got inside it was pretty empty. There was a lone skater, a woman in a low-cut black cocktail dress. At a table, a chubby guy ate pizza and watched her. Everything looked smaller than I remembered.

  “Over there,” Ramona said. She was pointing to the arcade area. “I think I just saw him go that way.”

  We walked over cautiously, stopping behind a pinball machine to peer out at him. He stood at one of the games. I think it was Street Fighter II. From his pocket he pulled rolls of quarters. He rested them in the nook between the screen and joystick.

  Dad inserted coins and began to play. His hands moved across the buttons carefully, not desperately like most people’s do. He played the way he stood in the rain, with a focused intensity, unaware of his surroundings, gazing deeply at the pixilated men who tore at each other’s bodies like crazed dancers or violent lovers.

  On the day of the funeral I brought tulips from the front garden to put on the grave, but by the time we got to the cemetery they had already wilted. Everyone was there: cousins, aunts, uncles. The usual people said the usual things. “She was so young,” they said.

  Ramona stood next to me wearing sunglasses and a black dress. Her hair was pulled back, jet-black. She looked like a young wife at a Mafia funeral. My father flanked me on the other side. He kept his eyes closed the whole time. I thought: this is my family now, we are three now, we wear sunglasses, we close our eyes.

  Father Larry spoke. He said she had a big soul; it was too big for her body, for this earth. When he said it I looked straight at the sun to see if it would make me blind.

  Tell Me

  People from the halfway house come into the store. One guy in particular. I think his name is Richard. He never buys books.

  “I came in with this,” he says, raises a paperback like Moses with the commandments.

  Richard thinks he’s funny. He’s funnier than the other methadone addicts, who aren’t even a little funny. The house is truly halfway: five blocks east to landscaped lawns, five west to boarded-up brownstones. People say they like this city’s slippery thresholds, the way the neighborhoods bleed into one another. Those who say they like it live far from the bleeding.

  I say, “You.”

  “This guy,” he says.

  “You,” I say.

  “I never buy books. Don’t know why I’m always coming in here.”

  “For the conversation?”

  “What conversation?” he says, which makes me sad.

  Molly and I are a thing again. That’s what my sister calls it. A thing. Sounds like some kind of swamp monster. All it means is I’m back to bringing Molly home for holidays.

  Molly doesn’t like that I’m always almost asleep. I don’t like being woken.

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “I’ll keep watching.”

  “I don’t want to watch if you’re asleep.”

  How to explain the peace I get, TV on, this drift, curled into armpit?

  “Don’t leave me alone,” she says.

  There are other things Molly doesn’t like about me.

  Her roommate, Chandra, goes by Chan, pronounced Sean. Sexy, considering Sean swigs bottled beer, belches, ashes into teacups. You aren’t supposed to smoke in the living room. I’m not supposed to smoke ever.

  “Women,” Sean says.

  “Bitches,” Sean says.

  Richard’s indented the leather recliner. He’s in the indentation, eyes closed.

  “I’m not asleep,” he says. “I hear every word you’re saying.”

  “What am I saying?”

  “I know even if you’re not saying it. You’re thinking it.”

  One thing Molly doesn’t like is the six months we weren’t a thing. More specifically, she doesn’t like the other, almost-thing I was involved in. More specifically, she doesn’t like Janine.

  I meet Sean at Boat, a bar decorated in boat corpse. Sean likes the word pussy. She talks about getting it, then describes some she’s seen. The ones she describes don’t sound like any I’ve encountered.

  My cell’s upset with texts. My head’s on the table. Before I know it Sean’s pulling my bicep—sneaking a comparative assessment—directing me through traffic to Molly’s bed.

  “What did I say?” I say.

  When I wake Molly’s hooked in with headphones, watching murder on her laptop.

  I write a note, forget the spelling of Chan. “SEAN—HAVE YOU SEEN MY WALLET?”

  All these books are an avalanche in waiting. I want to pile them, climb, collapse, settle among the debris. Most of the time I want to sit down, which isn’t allowed. It’s not that the job makes me tired so much as it never forces me into full cognition. Richard thinks he’s psychic.

  “I can tell what everyone’s thinking about me.”

  “There’s some old umbrellas in back,” I say, because Richard’s shirt is soaked.

  Saturated. My sweat smells like coffee. Molly says, “What kind of person names their kid Janine?”

  Because Janine was in the bodega, bending for our benefit. But it’s more than that: Janine’s an easy name for an emptiness we can’t articulate.

  “David Bowie fans?”

  “I wasn’t asking,” she says. The awning isn’t enough. Rain fa
lls on our outstretched feet.

  “Break’s over,” I say, cheek-peck, stand, turn, barrel into halogen, situate. Molly walks away, wet. Janine had Molly in the ergonomics department but was mostly a mess. She said it felt metallic, like I was infusing her with lead.

  My wallet appears in the lost and found, still empty of money. Note taped to it says, “Thanks for nothing.” When it feels like I’m about to fall over I pluck chest hairs. Customers can’t believe we don’t have what will fix their lives.

  “It’s been out of print since ’86,” I say.

  “But this is a bookstore.”

  April ends at night. The barking dogs are beautiful again. Molly has her thumb and index around the base of my neck, stroking. I say, “Shit,” meaning, “I’m awake.”

  Because: The frequency with which she reaches under my shirt, circles my nipples with the bitten ends of fingernails. The way she says the word orange like it’s two words, “or unge?” The way she slices them into slim eighths, sucks the skins. Looks like she’s wearing a mouth guard. The way she still blushes when I look at her breasts.

  Rain returns, May begins, we’re running.

  Collapse into shower, bumping bone, bruising, singing (sort of ). I want to rise out of my asshole self, become some sweet specter, line Molly’s insides. The closest we come to saying I love you is “Baby, that feels good.”

  Another time, to test him, I say, “What am I thinking right now?”

  “You’re thinking I wish this boobjob would get out of my store.”

  “Boobjob?”

  Richard’s head is sparsely populated with hair like fish skin, silverish. The way hair gets before it gets going. I’m noticing new features on him always. Maybe it’s the program working, buffing, bringing out his shine.

  He says, “Used to be my job, anyway.”

  Janine kept me awake by making me wonder where she was.

  Sean’s girlfriend’s skin’s so pink I want to twist her wrist, hear her howl. The state of California’s inked into her arm. A reminder of home or the expression of a mind-set. Sean and I stop going to Boat Bar. Sean and Alice stand in the kitchen linked, ashing in the sink, elbowing each other in their taped-down tits, dimple-grinning, perched over our lifestyle, some advanced species of lover. Molly writes “Molly” on her carton of soy milk.