It is an old building. Built before the war, she tells me. Was once a clothing warehouse. I make a big show of inspecting the amenities. I open and shut the fridge many times. I put my hand in the freezer and let it stay there for a while. I don’t know why I do this, but I nod when I finish, as if pleased with my findings. I flick all the light switches and note the rows of naked bulbs overhead. I go into the bathroom and shut the door. I turn the lock. I flush the toilet and watch the water spin away. I run the faucet and the showerhead. I gauge the pressure. Pam shows me to the laundry room just down the hall. I inquire about direct sunlight. I ask about rain leakage. Are pets allowed? What utilities are included? I ask every question I think a potential renter might ask. I pretend that if satisfied with her answers I might say, I’ll take it.
I ask her if there is roof access.
“I’ll have to check on that,” she says.
We caravan. Her in her Camry, me in the hatchback, to another building on the other side of town, where I see a different rental. Afterward I thank Pam in the parking lot.
“You related to Kathleen Moretti?” she says, giving my hand a hearty pump while simultaneously looking over my information on her clipboard.
“My mother. Why?”
“No reason,” Pam says. With what appears to be sleight of hand, the clipboard is tucked into her bag, my hand is dropped, and I’m holding her business card. “I showed a few houses down Dobbs Ferry to a Kathleen Moretti last week.”
“Must be someone else,” I tell this Pam. “My parents have enough on their plates without throwing a new house into the equation.”
“If you say so,” she says as we part ways. “Let me know soon. These places turn over pretty quick.”
EASTER IS TWO weeks away, but my mother is in the living room, delicately lining the mantel with her treasured collection of elaborately painted ceramic eggs. I see two giant boxes of decorations at her feet. I start to open my mouth to ask if and why Pam Kittredge took her to look at houses, but think better of it. My mother gets extremely agitated when I bring up the subject of my moving out. She thinks I want her to lend me money.
“Little early, isn’t it?” I say to all the ornaments.
“You never know who’ll be stopping by to judge,” she says. “Helene Miller’s had her decorations out for weeks.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I’m starting dinner,” my mother says, but I’m halfway up the stairs. I pass Inez, our maid, on the landing. We exchange greetings. She has a duster in hand, no doubt on her way to the TV room to embark on her weekly cleaning of the entertainment center while my father lies supine, himself a piece of furniture in need of dusting.
I find two envelopes on the mattress in my room. The first, a monthly statement from Sallie Mae. I try to pretend it isn’t there. The second is a letter from my father, who’s fond of leaving notes instead of initiating direct contact. Messages from the next room.
I lie on the floor, listening to old country records. I have always held the slide guitar in high esteem. It sounds to me like wild animals crying atop windswept plateaus. A nameless city where there is no language, only intense glances and stares. A place where nods and gestures convey all human emotion.
This is what the letter says:
Calvin,
I always wondered why old people read the obituaries. Perhaps we are hoping to see other people’s ages when they bite it. I’m not afraid to die. I’m actually getting prepared. I’ll be fifty-five next year and all of this is tiring. I have a theory that as human beings get older, chemicals are released into the brain to prepare us for the end. Sort of like how the nurse lubes your ass up before the anus-cam. It makes the whole thing a lot easier to swallow. Easier, not enjoyable. We don’t remember birth. I don’t think we will remember our own death. Dying. What petrifies me about dying is the aloneness of it. I have always thought about dying in some hotel room, a million miles away from home. Utterly alone. I have spent more time in hotel rooms than I have at home. I need you to promise me, just you and I. Promise me that you will be with me, maybe holding my hand, when I go. I don’t care when or where, just get there and see me off. Don’t let me go alone. I promise I will try to wait for you. Find me. You’re the one that understands me.
Dad
I roll onto my back, look up at the ceiling fan.
Our house makes noises. It always has. The walls creak and settle. Wood splinters without warning. There are footsteps at odd hours of the night. Pipes sound symphonies from behind the drywall.
Sallie Mae has informed me my loan payment is due in two weeks. I am someone who does not like to delay pain gratification, so I write out a check immediately. It’s startling how much of my salary is sucked up by this debt. Four years in the undergraduate incubator plus the four-month failed social experiment I like to call “grad school” plus off-campus housing plus many, many burritos equals over $45,000 to repay. At my current income, I’m looking at full financial independence at around age sixty-seven. Between music (I try to buy only vinyl records these days) and weed and pharmaceutical drugs and movie tickets and cell phone bills and credit card bills and video rentals and trying to have a normal social life, I struggle to save a few measly dollars a month.
I navigate the computer’s Internet browser to my online bank statement and assay my current finances. I shuffle fifty bucks from checking to savings, bringing the total up to a whopping $567.88. I consider moving another fifty but quickly remember the list of albums I want to purchase over the weekend at the record fair at SUNY Purchase and how happy this will make me. How it will help to (briefly) make me forget just exactly where I’ve wound up living once again. I need to maintain some level of quality of life in the present, in addition to saving for the future. I vow to buy all the records on my list ASAP. Mental health is crucial. Not just for the children. This is something we are told at John W. Manley School staff meetings all the time.
I delete a few out-of-date porn bookmarks from the toolbar and play online Scrabble for ten minutes before quitting in disgust at a string of extremely low-scoring word combinations.
I resume lying on the floor. I listen to records. I listen to Jailbreak. I listen to Peace Sells . . . But Who’s Buying? I listen to Shake Some Action. I grab the Moleskine notebook from its place under my pillow and flip it open. The first ten pages are dedicated to the ever-growing list of movies I’ve watched. Since college, I’ve recorded, in high OCD fashion, the date and name of every film that passes before my eyes. I flip past this part. I flip past the section of notes concerning my father, all the bizarre things he’s done in the past eight months:
1. Watering the flowers in front of our house at three in the morning.
2. Crying during telephone commercials depicting long-distance romances.
3. Twenty-one-hour-a-day sleep cycles.
4. Sitting at the kitchen table staring at old flight logs for hours.
5. Unfurling massive Jeppesen aeronautical charts across the living room floor and following navigation lines with his fingers in delicate, precise increments.
6. Constant proclamations of “I’m dying” and “God help us.”
7. His encounter with one of the immigrants working for our landscaping company: “If they have to put me on dialysis, I’m going to shoot myself with this gun.” “Sí, señor.”
I flip past these passages. Past the section listing, verbatim, every forehead-slap-inducing thing my brother has recently said in my presence, along with estimated dates.
Some highlights:
• “Don’t worry, the woman I marry won’t be allowed to work.” —9.25.04
• “What do you think about these cowboy boots?” —3.29.05
• “How much would I have to pay some faggy artist to do a portrait of me dressed like a samurai?” —8.10.05
• “Calvin is such a liberal.” —10.14.04, 11.2.04, 12.23.04, 12.24.04, 12.25.04, 2.13.05, 7.16.05, 11.01.05
• “I need to hit the gym double
-time from now till Halloween so I look authentic in my Spartan costume.” —9.08.05
• “I know my sneakers are a size too small. It’s because I don’t want my feet to get any bigger.” —6.18.04
I flip beyond all of this. To the back of the notebook.
A column of numbers is listed:
0
125.23
245.36
369.76
446.32
517.88
I cross out the 517.88 and write the new figure, 567.88. I close the notebook and place it back under my pillow. Somewhere in the depths of my head, down the long corridor of what seems like eternity, I can see a small flicker of light, a pinnacle of happiness. It looks like $2,000. This is the modest sum I’ve calculated I’ll need in order to secure an apartment of my own. To rejoin the outside world. Ten months to a year is my projected deadline. This financial time frame, of course, does not figure in birthday and Christmas donations from family members, which could speed things up.
My mother knows a sage, this truly bizarre woman who goes by the name Brigitte DeMeyer. Since the illness started, she comes over a few times a week for “wellness sessions” with my father. At her request, they’ve begun to tape pieces of paper, marked with elaborate drawings of the letter S, all over the house. S’s on the washer-dryer, S’s under paintings, on the toilet. S’s above every light switch. Fancy red S cards dangle on the chandelier in the dining room, float above the dashboard GPS system in the SUV, stare out from ornate mirrors.
“When you see an S, it means smile,” Brigitte has told us. “It means you can feel safe. Secure. These are words to embrace, to live with,” she says. “Shelter,” she says.
My dad walks around the house forcing his mouth to react to these little scraps of paper. I’ll find him in front of the flat-screen in the family room watching reruns of Law & Order.
“Real murder trials are just like this,” he’ll tell me.
“Don’t forget to smile,” I’ll say, pointing to the large purple S hanging from the television.
He’ll turn his head, look at me for a moment, and do this weird thing where he smiles, then frowns in rapid succession, his mustache twitching above his lips. Then he’ll usually fall asleep at the commercial break.
MY MOTHER CALLS Brigitte her “spiritual adviser,” her “healer,” in touch with both this world and the next.
“She sees things,” my mother tells me. “She sees more than we do. I have a feeling when she’s around.”
“Her hand in your pocket,” I say.
“Everything is connected,” my mother says.
My father is skeptical and reluctant, but he doesn’t put up much of a fight when my mother brings Brigitte around to help him maintain a positive outlook during this time of spiritual complexity. Dressed like a Gypsy, gems dangling from her ears, shawls and scarves and kerchiefs wrapped about her, this Brigitte will approach me with open palms on her way into the house.
“I’m waiting for you to come talk with me,” she will say.
“I don’t really know what you want to talk about.”
“There is so much to discuss. When you’re ready. Whenever that may be. I’m waiting. The aura in this house needs to stay strong for him. All of you must stay strong.”
“Stay strong,” I say. “Got it.”
<< 3 >>
The gun is a single-action Colt .45. Holds six bullets and can be used to play Russian roulette. He carries it around with him. Keeps it tucked in the folds of his bathrobe or the billowing pockets of his plaid pajama pants. He believes something is going to happen.
He has a mustache. He has always had a mustache. It’s a pilot thing. An unspoken code they all follow in order to identify one another across bars in foreign hotels, in strange cities, in fog-shrouded hangars, in waiting rooms, at the supermarket. Every time they blow their noses, they are reminded of who they are. It is the sort of solidarity I look for everywhere but am without.
“I missed you today,” he says to me.
“Missed me?”
We are in the TV room, waiting for my mother to scream, “Dinner!” at the top of her lungs.
“I went hiking up around Fahnestock,” he says, fingering the mustache. “Your mother let me fire five shots into a sycamore. I thought of you. You would have had fun.”
“Is it entirely legal to fire your gun in a state park?”
“I doubt it,” he says. “The blowback is exhilarating. It has the smell of hot metal. It makes me happy. And your mother and that witch doctor, Brigitte, believe in happiness. They believe in its healing powers. As do I, but to a much lesser extent.”
My father unmutes the television as Law & Order returns from a commercial, and the room is filled with the sound of lawyers. I feel the presence of the paper S’s hanging around us.
When it first started, he took pictures with a digital camera, to chronicle the loss of his hair, posting them on a bulletin board he’d hung on the door of the upstairs bathroom. Day one showed little, if any, development, but following the pictures and imagining them playing out like a flip book, by day fourteen, one could witness an interesting pattern forming around the crown of his head. Wrapped in his trademark bathrobe, not even bothering to dry off, he brings down clumps of hair from the shower to show us. He gathers the fallen curls in a cereal bowl and examines them. Defying all logic, the mustache survives.
As things progress, he has turned to nature, to apocalyptic survival. He reads things like Wilderness Survival for the Modern Man and Prepared magazine and The Great Outdoorsman. He has turned the garage into a bunker, bursting with stockpiled bags of rice, an arsenal of bolt-action rifles. He has purchased multiple tents and sleeping bags—each designed for various weather conditions—lanterns, a drum of 87-octane gasoline, flashlights, snakebite antivenom, collapsible pots for cooking in the wild, strike-anywhere matches, a water filtration system. He has arranged everything carefully. He keeps inventory on a clipboard and makes daily inspections to assure that in the event of an emergency, a flash flood, a mustard-gas attack, or nuclear annihilation, he will be able to carry on. The cancer started on his spine.
At dinner, an argument erupts between my siblings.
“The woman is a racist,” Chip (short for Charles) says. He is holding a piece of sausage in his hand, waving it around.
“Because she made you buy a ticket?” Elissa asks.
“No. Because I’m white and I needed to get home and my monthly had just expired the day before and I didn’t have time to get a new one and she saw an opportunity to exert power over the little world of the commuter train where she thinks she’s queen.”
“Wally Czerkowski was there and he said you were acting like an asshole,” I say.
“What’s that guy doing on the train?” Chip asks. “He doesn’t have a job.” My brother stuffs the hunk of sausage into his mouth. He chews in a very precise manner. His teeth are whiter than cocaine, thanks to three hours spent recently in the dentist’s chair. They sparkle when he talks.
“People can ride the train and not have jobs,” I say. “People do other things.”
“I’m on that train every day,” Chip continues, ignoring me. “I work. Every day I see this woman. We have looked in each other’s eyes at seven in the morning. She knows me. It’s not like I’m a scumbag trying to scam a free ride. It’s because I’m white. And I commute and I wear a suit. She resents that. I need to ride the train. It’s a necessity. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy spending a hundred and sixty-three dollars on that train pass. It had just expired. I was gonna buy a new one that night. Most people would let it slide. It’s called courtesy, humanity, empathy. Not this woman. She’s going to ask me to pay the ten dollars for a ticket?”
“Like you empathize with her position?” Elissa asks. She huffs.
“What position?”
“That’s her job,” I say.
“It’s her job to racially profile me?” Chip throws up his hands, confused.
; “Please don’t tell anyone outside this family that you think you’re being racially profiled,” Elissa says.
“Thank God Mrs. Stone and Mrs. Cunningham were there to defend me when she called the cops,” Chip says with a look of concern.
“Oh, Mrs. Stone is such a wonderful person!” our mother says suddenly, very loud. “And so beautiful.” She looks around the table.
“Those are rich, white suburban housewives. You’re talking about first-world problems,” Elissa says. She impales some string beans on her fork, eats them. “I feel bad for that poor train conductor, that’s who I feel bad for, she’s probably a single mother. And she has to put up with you every day.”
“Why does she have to be a single mother?” I ask. “Because she’s black?”
“Look who’s the racist now,” Chip says.
“Please,” Elissa says.
“Please,” our father says.
“She called the cops,” Chip says. “She used her little walkie-talkie to call the cops. She was going to have them throw me off the train.”
“She called the cops because you refused to pay for a ticket,” Elissa says. “If you get on the train, you have a ticket or you buy one. It’s not optional.”
A platter of sausage, meatballs, and braciole smothered with gravy sits in the center of the table. It is surrounded by bowls of steamed vegetables.
“Why do you cook so much meat if Chip is the only one who eats it?” I ask.
“Your father likes the smell,” our mother says.
“No, I don’t,” our father says. “I like the smell of gunpowder. And mesquite chips. Emergency blankets, that sort of thing.”
“I’m going to write a letter to Metro-North, that’s what I’m going to do,” Chip says.
“Maybe you should,” our mother says.
“Reverse discrimination,” Chip says. “It happens all the time.”
“I would like everyone to stop talking about the incident on the train,” our father says. “I tire of hearing about it.”
He reaches across the table and jabs at a sausage.
“James,” our mother says.
The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac Page 2
