Alone With You

by Marisa Silver

  “This is it, Mom,” Helen said. “This is the place. We just have to walk a few more steps and then we’ll be there.” But just as she was about to put her arm around her mother, Dorothy drew herself up, somehow guided back to herself by her daughter’s confidence, and started forward on her own.

  In the New World

  TOMASZ STOOD FIFTEEN FEET DEEP INSIDE A NEWLY DUG SHAFT. He smelled the wet, sweet musk of the earth around him, felt the close darkness as a kind of comfort. When he was a child, he had been terrified by the idea of being buried, and he had cried passionately at his grandmother’s funeral at Powazki Cemetery until his father had hissed, Cicho! and told him that he was making a spectacle of himself. But now Tomasz saw that the inside of the earth was like the underwater world, a comforting place, where time was stretched and slowed, and sound pressed in like puppies against their mother’s belly. He realized that he would die in America. It was an idea so obvious he had not bothered to think it before.

  “Ready, boss?” It was Gustavo, calling down the shaft. In the five years he’d been in the States, Tomasz had built up a small construction company and Gustavo was his most steadfast employee. Often the two worked alongside each other on jobs where the profits would be eaten up by more laborers. Gustavo was usually teasing and jocular, a showman bent on getting a laugh out of Tomasz at any cost. But his tone was gentle as he spoke to his employer from above. When the two men had met at the site that morning, Tomasz admitted that he had hit his son the night before. The boy had a black eye and a fractured arm. Gustavo, twenty-three and a new father, had grimaced slightly at the news but had said nothing, sensitive to Tomasz’s remorse. Still, Tomasz could tell by his expression that the younger man could not imagine taking a hand to his child, that he did not see himself as that sort of man.

  Tomasz shoveled dirt into the bucket. “Okay,” he called out. Gustavo pulled the rope and the pail rose unsteadily, banging against the sides of the shaft, sending a soft rain onto Tomasz’s head. Sweating, Tomasz leaned on his shovel and waited for Gustavo to lower the empty pail, and then he began to dig again.

  “How much longer, do you think?” It was the wife standing at the lip of the hole and calling down to him. The sun was behind her and Tomasz could not see her face, only the outline of her body, the way her legs were planted a half foot apart, the better to balance the weight of her heavy pregnancy. The small figure by her side was her daughter. As he looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun, Tomasz imagined that the wife’s face bore the carefully polite expression women all over the city offered when he showed up to build their fourth bathrooms or convert their garages into exercise gyms. In their excessive graciousness he smelled their fear. He had done well in this country in a very short time, well enough that he and Eliana had been able to put a down payment on a small home. Their son had become practically American. Teo refused to speak Polish, and had managed to shed his accent. The ends of his sentences rose up uncertainly in the fashion of American teenagers, as if he wanted to shirk responsibility for his thoughts. But despite his success, Tomasz knew he appeared suspect to his employers. He spoke English poorly and with a heavy accent. He broke the language as if it were a stick over his knee.

  “I just …” the woman said in an apologetic, childlike voice, “my husband is anxious.”

  Tomasz had met the husband, once when he came to see about the job, and again when he came to collect the up-front money he required before beginning work. The man had a shaven head and affected a confidential manner meant to erase the distinction between himself and Tomasz. Still he complained about having to pay before work was begun. Tomasz had learned that the richer clients were more unscrupulous. They would claim some mistake, point to where a bathroom tile was not perfectly square, complain about a natural imperfection in a granite countertop, and refuse to pay for the work. Tomasz had no recourse. To take a client to court would be impossibly expensive and would put his reputation at risk.

  When Tomasz arrived that first day, he followed the couple through the house. It was a modern home with tall plate glass windows looking out onto a deep canyon. The white rooms were practically bare—a few carefully placed pieces of unwelcoming furniture, a child’s toy here and there, a single flower in a vase the shape of a woman’s torso sitting on a glass coffee table. African statues with large, protruding phalluses were positioned with their backs to the living room, as if they were taking in the view and peeing at the same time. In the little girl’s room, the wife pointed out the disarming cracks in the ceiling, and Tomasz could tell she was unused to adversity, and that a fissure in the plaster suggested a world of lurid possibilities. While Tomasz and her husband conferred, she cleaned hair from a plastic brush as if this little bit of housekeeping would make the greater problems disappear. In the kitchen, the man pointed out where the wall had separated from the floor by almost an inch and a half. Tomasz was quietly alarmed.

  “This isn’t much,” the man said. “A little settling. Natural on a hillside, right?” Tomasz took a coin from his pocket, crouched down, and set it on its edge. He flicked his thumb the way he had learned to do as a boy playing marbles against the schoolyard wall. The couple watched in silence as the quarter picked up speed, making its way down the perceptible incline of the drastic floor. The little girl scampered after the coin and grabbed it. Her father told her not to steal and made a show of instructing her to return the coin to Tomasz, as though it were something Tomasz couldn’t do without. Tomasz told the couple that their house was pulling away from the foundation and was at risk of sliding down the hill.

  The woman’s hand floated to her rounded belly. “We’re ruined,” she said.

  “You’re being overdramatic,” her husband said.

  “You have a job,” she said to him. “What do I have? I have nothing.”

  Tomasz did not understand. Even after five years in America, he still struggled with the new language. English words felt awkward in his mouth, and he knew he was never saying precisely what he intended. He spoke well enough to get along, but there were still moments in conversations when someone put together a series of words that seemed to add up to meanings altogether different from what the individual parts suggested. Then he was lost, as if the crumbs laid down in the forest of communication had been devoured by small woodland animals.

  “He’s … we’re just curious about the time frame,” the wife said now. She had shifted her position so that she was blocking the sun. Now Tomasz could see her face clearly. She was pale skinned, her cheeks soft and flushed. The expression on her face made her look as though she found everything remarkable.

  “One week,” Tomasz said. “Maybe little bit longer.” Her question irritated him. On the rare occasion a job ran over, he paid his workers out of his pocket.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. But she did not move from where she was standing. “It’s very hot. It must be sweltering down there.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Some juice? I think we have pink lemonade. That’s Alicia’s favorite. Anything pink.” She laughed awkwardly.

  “We are fine,” he said.

  “I should have asked before. It’s this pregnancy. I don’t know where my brain is.”

  He repeated that he and Gustavo were fine. Her nervousness made him self-conscious. He preferred jobs where the clients were not at home during the day. When the men were present they felt a need to confer with Tomasz, as if they wanted to appear involved with the manly work of taking care of their own houses. The women smiled foolishly whenever they caught Tomasz’s eye. They pointedly instructed their children to say hello to the workers or they tried out their meager Spanish, unaware that he did not speak that language.

  The day grew hotter. Tomasz and Gustavo worked quietly, speaking only to discuss the requirements of the job, which were to fill three thirty-five-foot shafts with concrete and then bolt these pylons to the existing foundation and anchor the house. Tomasz and Gusta
vo paused occasionally to drink water from Gustavo’s bright orange cooler or to empty their bladders into the bushes. At four o’clock, Gustavo drove away in his car, which made a grating sound as its low-slung belly kissed the pavement, and Tomasz set out cautiously for home.

  The night before, he and Eliana had been talking in the kitchen. She stood at the sink washing the dinner dishes while he leaned against a wall, a beer in hand. Teo appeared in the doorway.

  “You’re gonna get a phone call,” the boy said.

  “Too much skateboarding! Too much computer!” Tomasz said, assuming Teo’s grades were slipping again. Tomasz and his wife spoke Polish to one another and to Teo, but the boy insisted on responding in English. “Every time your mother or I have to go to a meeting at your school, we miss work. We lose money. Do you understand that?”

  “It’s this girl,” Teo said. “She’s pregnant.”

  Eliana turned off the water and looked at Teo. “You mean you got this girl pregnant.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  Tomasz felt rage shudder through his body. His head filled with static. He could barely hear himself speak. “You’re fourteen years old. How could you get a girl pregnant?”

  “You want me to explain it to you?”

  “Don’t be rude,” Eliana said.

  “Whatever,” Teo said, and Tomasz hit him. Teo lurched backward and then put out his arm to break his fall.

  “Well, that solves the problem,” Eliana said, as she and Tomasz lifted Teo and helped him into the living room and onto the couch. Polish and English knitted together as she reacted to her husband’s violence and tried to pacify her sobbing child. Tomasz held Teo as Eliana fashioned a splint out of cardboard she ripped off the back of a pad of paper, fixing it to his arm with masking tape. She had been a nurse in Poland and now worked in the emergency room at County.

  Teo cried deep, uneven heaves, his face splotchy, his mouth making all sorts of shapes, the way it had when he was little and fell down, hurt as much by the fact that the world had betrayed him as by a scraped knee. Tomasz felt as he did in the aftermath of a drunken night or when firing a recalcitrant worker, the surge of self-righteous energy replaced by a sense of his own puniness. Still, he was grateful to have his fingers laced through Teo’s dirty hair, to stroke the boy’s arm and mutter apologies, to have finally landed on something that connected them.

  On the way to the emergency room, Teo sat between his father and mother in the front seat of the truck. Eliana tried to keep his arm steady while holding a plastic bag full of ice to his eye.

  “So, you think you love her? This girl? This Amber?” Tomasz said.

  “I don’t even know her that well,” Teo muttered.

  “You don’t know her?”

  “We don’t hang out.”

  Tomasz tried to remember what this meant. He remembered about “hooking up,” a phrase which made him think of the carcass of an animal hanging from a beam at his father’s butcher shop, but which Eliana had explained meant sex. It was a joke between them at night. He would murmur, “Chcesz hook up?” and she would laugh and place her expert hands between his legs. But hanging out? What was this? He could think only of Piotr Danielewski, the idiot boy who had grown up in the house next door. His tongue hung from his open mouth as if it were a wilted flag. Tomasz wished Teo had said he loved the girl or that he couldn’t live without her, that if his parents tried to keep them apart, he would run away with her. Tomasz could forgive his son for trying on adult passion like a child playing a game of dress-up. But it was as if the boy wanted to deny his emotions air and water until they dried up and fell off.

  Tomasz pulled into the driveway of his house, turned off the engine, and sat in the dark. He and Eliana had not yet spoken about the previous night. By the time they had gotten home from the emergency room it was nearly two in the morning. After putting a drug-woozy Teo into bed, they both fell asleep in their clothes. He could easily imagine what she would say to him now. Her years of working in public hospitals had rendered the world blunt to her. You had a tumor, you cut it out. Your husband beat you, you left him. You didn’t fool around with herbal remedies for the cancer and you didn’t go home and believe your husband when he said he’d never do it again. She had no patience with justifications and excuses; she was not entirely sure about forgiveness.

  Eliana was in the bedroom, taking off her purple scrubs. Tomasz found her nursing outfits unexpectedly sexy. The shapeless shirt and drawstring pants hid the softness that he knew existed behind her expedient and commonsense demeanor. It had been her idea to move to the States after she’d read about the abundance of nursing jobs and the better pay. She was the more pragmatic of the two and she had easily put their life in Poland behind her. Tomasz’s memories of home danced around his consciousness like floaters in the eyes, appearing when he least expected them. He had grown up the youngest of ten children, three of whom died in childhood. Tomasz’s father was a square, unsmiling man who saw the world as a giant drill might see it: something hard to bore through. When Stefan, the last of the three children, had been buried, Tomasz watched with horror as his father leapt into the hole before the bearers lowered the small casket, as if he thought the drop too great for his child to manage on his own. Eliana was not sentimental about her youth, but Tomasz’s own history drew him backward as though it were an unanswered question.

  He watched his wife as she pulled the shirt over her head. Her skin puffed out beneath the straps of her bra, and he had an urge to touch those soft packets of flesh, but he knew this would not be welcome.

  “How is the boy?” he asked.

  “He’s sleeping. He stayed home from school.”

  “Alone?”

  “He’s fourteen.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t leave him by himself right now,” Tomasz said.

  “He was not alone when he fucked that girl,” she said. “There are a thousand kids in his school.”

  Tomasz sat down on the bed. When they were first getting to know one another, he had mistakenly thought her impulsive. Within weeks of their first date, she was ready to move in. She was the first to announce her love, the first to discuss marriage. In fact, what he considered romantic whimsy was practicality. While he wrestled with the ambiguities of attachment, she spied their life in the distance and moved them toward it. Were it not for her, they might not be married, they might not have a child. They would certainly still be living in the dark apartment above a cinema, listening to the muffled soundtracks of films as they ate their small meals and made love. He was grateful to her. But sometimes her ability to see her way through a morass of emotions made him feel cheated out of his own feelings. “You’re not angry?” he said.

  “At who?”

  He knew what she meant.

  “When you hit him, you made it a problem between him and you,” she said. “You have nothing to do with it.”

  “He’s going to be a father at fourteen? What does he know? He knows nothing. This will ruin his life.”

  “Death ruins life,” she said. “He’s alive. He’s healthy. Except for the arm.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “Okay,” she said. She sat down next to him and rested her chin on his shoulder. “It was a stupid thing to do. It’s done. It can’t be undone. He will live with it for the rest of his life.”

  He did not know whether she was referring to Teo’s mistake or his, but he did not ask, preferring the relative safety of confusion.

  He walked down the hall and gently pushed open the door of Teo’s small bedroom. The person sleeping in the narrow bed seemed like an intruder—a dour, silent kid who had come to occupy what was once the sweet and pliant body of his beloved boy. Teo was blond like Eliana but he had inherited Tomasz’s heavy dark eyebrows, which made it hard to guess at his happiness. His lips were almost obscenely full, and it was easy to imagine what he would do with them given a girl’s willingness. He oozed a stink that advertised the body.
If Tomasz studied his son’s face closely, it was as if he were examining the grain of fine wood: he could see the rudiments of Teo—the pores and the eruptions that dusted his forehead, the patches of whiskers sprouting unevenly on his chin—and he was able to trick himself into believing he knew his son. But when he stood back and took in the whole of Teo, watched the way he slithered across a room like a snake bent on preserving energy for its survival, he had the impression Teo could be real, or he could be a remarkable imitation.

  He woke Teo, and the family sat at the kitchen table for dinner. Eliana cut up Teo’s chicken so that he could eat with one hand. It was hard for Tomasz to look at his son, whose cheek and eye were now a watercolor of yellow and purple. Teo ate with his head bent low, scooping up food with metronomic intensity. His T-shirt, emblazoned with an image of a hollow-eyed ghost, stretched across his new muscles. A bit of hair on his chin caught the light. Tomasz had given Teo a pack of razors and offered to show him how to shave, but Teo had not been interested.

  After dinner, Tomasz helped Teo take a bath. It had been years since Tomasz had seen his son fully naked and now he was taken aback by Teo’s penis, his thick nest of hair, the articulated muscles of his groin. He could imagine his son on top of a girl, his bare ass moving as he reached for some dumb, wordless pleasure. Bathing was awkward. Teo leaned out over the porcelain lip of the tub in order to protect his cast from becoming wet while Tomasz poured cupfuls of water over his hair to drain it of the shampoo and dirt that had collected there. He reached for a washcloth and started to clean Teo’s back.

  “Don’t,” Teo said, shrugging off Tomasz’s hand.

  “You can’t reach,” Tomasz said.

  “Get off me,” Teo said. “Please.”