Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  She’d thought it was so clever of her, fixing him up. But now she felt twinges of something having been not quite right. Maybe it just didn’t work that way. Like how her grandmother could never eat the food she herself cooked, never enjoying a meal as much as when someone else cooked it. Maybe it was impossible to look at your own creation the way Phan’s girlfriend looked at Phan from her seat behind the counter in the video store, mute with admiration.

  In the bottom of her linens trunk she found a set of sheets, pale green and purple flowers, that she couldn’t remember using with Rudy. She changed her bed, throwing the old sheets in the wash. It was almost midnight. He still hadn’t called.

  She watched The Godfather until Moe Greene got it in the eye, then put on clean pajamas. The pajamas refreshed her, as did cleaning up her apartment and watching Moe Greene get it in the eye.

  She lay in bed listening to the bass thrum from a passing car seven floors below. Her windows looked over the busiest part of the busiest street in Adams-Morgan, what some hopefully called the “Greenwich Village” of the District. It was a stretch, even Pru had to acknowledge. There was no Cluck-U Chicken in the Village, as her friend Kate McCabe never tired of pointing out. Kate was a true New Yorker who happened to have grown up in Ohio, two streets over from Pru. A couple of times a year Pru would take the Chinatown bus to see Kate, or Kate would visit Pru. Between D.C. and New York it was only $14 each way, and someone always gave you a greasy homemade dumpling in a paper bag.

  The phone rang. Pru saw Rudy’s number come up on her caller ID display, and something she’d been holding in her belly seemed to settle. She put the handset on her chest, and let it ring again. She knew he would call. Knew it. Knew Rudy really wouldn’t leave her.

  After all, that was the whole point of Rudy.

  She let her voicemail pick up, waited a decent interval, then dialed the voicemail access number. This would be good for them, she thought, listening to the mechanical voice telling her there was one new message. The ebb and flow, the up and down of the grown-up relationship. It was something Rudy had only very limited experience with. He’d see how going through a rough patch together, swallowing their pride and forgiving each other, could deepen their relationship. They’d see the tender goodness in each other, how they were each, in their own way, doing their best.

  She wondered what she should say. Should she call him right back and forgive him tonight, or wait until tomorrow? It depended of course on his apology. He’d absolutely have to find another therapist, that was the first thing . . .

  “Hey,” said Rudy’s voice, “how are you? It’s Rudy. Listen, I forgot to ask you about the TV. I know you don’t use it much, anyway, and it set me back a couple K. I guess I could pay you for it, if you wanted. It’s used now, but, well, let me know what you’d want for it. But I’m also happy just to come and take it off your hands. I know you don’t use it much anyway. Okay, hope you’re well. Bye.”

  She punched the button to delete the message, hung up the phone, and turned out the light. Then she sat up and turned the light back on. She threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. She shuddered, although the room was hot and stuffy. How stupid she had been. What a fool she’d been.

  She threw on her bathrobe and slippers and took the elevator down to the basement. She found the moving dolly stored there for new move-ins, and wheeled it back upstairs. The thirty-seven-inch plasma TV Rudy had given her for Christmas stood in its place on the far side of her living area. “A couple K.” Had he always been like that?

  She yanked the TV’s electrical cord out of the wall socket, unhooked the cable, and hoisted the set onto the dolly. She pulled it into the elevator, through the front lobby, and out the front doors of her apartment building. She barely noticed that it was after midnight and she wore almost nothing under her robe.

  How would anyone ever love her again? she thought, bumping the dolly down the front stairs. They’d find out, sooner or later, that she’d slept with him—indecent, unkind, ridiculous Rudy Fisch. They’d be walking down the street, she and her new love, and they would run into Rudy, bouncing along happily. “Who’s that?” the new love would say, and she’d be forced to admit it: “An old boyfriend.” Whoever was loving her until that moment would suddenly see her in a new light and think, Is that who I’m to follow? Does she have no standards at all? What does that say about me? No, it was impossible. Rudy Fisch had ruined her life forever. She felt as if he’d left her with some kind of horrible disease.

  She had almost gotten the TV down the front steps of her building when she got stuck. She was hunched over as far as she could, but the dolly wouldn’t budge. Hell, she thought, just let it go. She was about to let it smash into fifteen thousand pieces, when, suddenly, there were feet on the other side of the dolly, and the television’s weight was being eased from her straining back. She looked up and saw a face attached to the feet. It was a man’s face. She knew him from the neighborhood, but in her overwrought state she couldn’t remember exactly where. She let go as the man took the dolly and eased it down the last step. “Funny time to be moving,” he said. He was wearing a pair of stained, baggy chef’s pants. They made him look like a half-dressed clown.

  “Thanks,” Pru said. “I can get it.” She took the dolly from him and dragged it to the curb.

  “Are you just going to leave it there?” he called after her.

  “It belonged to my boyfriend,” Pru said, over her shoulder. “My ex-boyfriend.”

  A battered old Chevy Impala sped by, slowed, then backed up. The Impala’s back fender hung at an angle. The car stopped and two young, lean guys got out. They nodded in a brisk, professional way to Pru, picked up the TV, and put it in the car’s trunk.

  “Hey, wait a minute.” The man in the chef’s pants started to move, but Pru put up her hand. She said, “No, let them.” She felt like Sonny Corleone.

  It was as if everything had been pre-arranged. The two guys got back in the Impala and drove away, Rudy’s TV peeking out of the trunk.

  Suddenly, Pru was exhausted. She remembered the puzzled look on her mother’s face as Pru was opening the enormous box on Christmas morning. A television wasn’t considered a proper gift in the Whistler family. Rather, it was one of those necessities that couldn’t help being as awful as it was, like the toilet plunger. Still, Nadine was hopeful about what such a costly thing must mean. Finally, a serious prospect, for Pru. Not just another one of those losers she seemed to attract, like flies at a barbecue.

  She stood in the neon light of the flashing Cluck-U Chicken sign, watching the Impala bounce away. She could feel the glare of the bantam rooster behind her, mocking her. It was a rather shallow victory, after all. Rudy would just buy another TV. But she would never get back what she had lost. Everything she thought she was working for, gone. No job, no boyfriend. And no babies, anytime soon. Her hands went to the belt on her bathrobe. Was she even dressed? She couldn’t remember.

  The man in the stupid pants was still standing there, watching the Impala’s rear lights fade in the distance. “Do you think he’s going to be upset?” he said, turning to her.

  “I certainly hope so,” said Pru. Her eyes and nose were beginning to burn. Oh no, she thought.

  “Hey,” he said. He was looking at her with concern. She realized what a figure she must cut, out there in her robe and slippers, her glasses slipping down her nose, with its layer of grease. “Gee, I’m sorry,” he said gently. “You must have loved him a lot.”

  “No.” Pru shook her head. “Not really. Not hardly at all.”

  Then, to her horror, she burst into tears.

  Four

  Of course, she had cried when her father died.

  She just hadn’t cried at the cemetery. While her mother and Patsy wept, without restraint and copiously, on either side of her, Pru’s attention had landed on a nick that ran down the left side of her father’s casket. The nick wasn’t there before, when they showed her the casket at the funeral home. Leona
rd wouldn’t have cared about it at all, himself. But Pru couldn’t hear a word of her father’s eulogy, she was so troubled by the thought of him going to the hereafter with a nick in a casket that had cost almost a thousand dollars. As her sister and mother sobbed and clutched at her hands, Pru sighed deeply. There was nothing she could do about it now. She straightened up and put one arm around her mother and the other around her sister, then turned them slowly away from her father’s grave and to the graveled path that led back to the cars.

  Now, standing out on the street under the glow from the Cluck-U Chicken at midnight, wearing her old bathrobe, she started crying for her father all over again. She cried so hard that she couldn’t breathe. She gulped noisily. Then she cried because Rudy had deserted her and her boss had fired her for no good reason. She moved on to cry about those babies which wouldn’t be happening in the imaginable future, and because there was no one anywhere to take care of her. Finally, she cried because her niece Annali didn’t have a father and because children all over the world were starving. It felt like she had to cry for all the things she hadn’t let herself cry about since the last time she’d cried. This was why Pru didn’t cry often, especially in front of other people. It was such a wracking, gruesome affair.

  When she ran out of things to cry about, she stopped and looked around. She felt quite calm. The guy in the chef’s pants was still standing there, staring at Pru as though she were a car that was giving him trouble.

  “Is that it?” he said, hopefully.

  “I think so,” she said. She did a little check, to see if another sob was on the way. When one didn’t come she said, “Yes. Seems to be.”

  “Well, I don’t know what your ex did, but whatever it was, he must be a jerk.”

  She wanted to agree, to give him specifics on exactly how much of a jerk Rudy was. But somewhere in her gut she knew that Rudy hadn’t been entirely without good reason for dumping her. Not entirely. Something was lacking in their relationship, something he probably deserved. She was too tired to think about it now. Later, when she would sift through all this, she’d have to look at it then, and she had the feeling she wasn’t going to be too thrilled with what she saw of her own behavior.

  “My name is John Owen,” the man said, putting out his hand. Pru looked at his face for the first time. Small eyes and a square chin, a bit of stubble. Of course, he’d be handsome, in addition to being kind. She relaxed a little when she saw the wedding band on his finger. If she was going to meet a handsome man in this pathetic state, best that he should be unavailable.

  “Prudence. Whistler,” she added, because she didn’t know if “Owen” was a double first name, or a last name. She shook his hand. “Thanks for stopping to help me.”

  “You’re welcome,” said John Owen. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah. I never watched much television, anyway.” She hadn’t gotten to finish The Godfather. That was a loss, right there. Well, she could get the DVD and watch it on her laptop, in bed.

  Bed. It seemed that she couldn’t wait another minute to get there. She turned and walked up her steps, with as much dignity as she could muster, in her ratty old slippers.

  JUST BEFORE DAWN SHE WOKE UP FROM A DREAM WHERE she was falling from the sky. In the dream, she had jumped out of an airplane only to discover that the pack on her back held not a parachute, but a bologna sandwich. She watched in horror as the bread and the bologna floated away, the slice of yellow American cheese falling uselessly to the ground like a thick yellow blanket. It was a dream Rudy would have loved.

  Pru got up and opened the window, letting in the humid night air. It was raining lightly. She could hear the bums below having an argument. Their voices were drowned out by the rumble of a passing bus, the peel of its wheels on the pavement. She remembered that her sister Patsy had gone around the house burning some kind of herb when her boyfriend, Jimmy Roy, took off for the Antarctic, just after Annali’s second birthday. Pru hadn’t seen her doing this, but it wasn’t hard to conjure up the image of Patsy stomping around their mother’s little house waving the smoking sheaf of dried leaves, in the military boots and overcoat she preferred at the time, looking like some kind of New Age angry villager.

  In general Pru found her sister’s belief system to be a bit specious and random, a sort of half-baked mishmash of pseudo-Oriental beatnik mysticism, but right now watching something go up in flames didn’t sound so bad. And if it drove Rudy’s presence out of the apartment, all the better. She went into the kitchen, but all she could find was some old garlic salt and a bottle of Mrs. Dash. Somehow she didn’t think you were supposed to burn Mrs. Dash in your apartment to rid it of ex-lovers’ spirits. And anyway, it had been Rudy’s. He liked to sprinkle it on his scrambled egg whites. Since becoming hot, Rudy watched his weight with the vigilance of a teenage girl. Egg whites, not yolks. Brown rice, not white. Sauces on the side, please. He’d grown more and more vain, spending long hours at the gym, looking askance at Pru when she ordered the occasional cheeseburger and fries.

  “Please,” she would say. “I happen to know you were raised on Hostess Ding Dongs.”

  “Exactly,” said Rudy. “Which is why our kids will eat nothing but spelt.”

  “And no TV, right?”

  “Oh, no. There’s nothing wrong with television. Why, that’s the best part of being a kid!”

  They used to talk like that all the time. They’d already had fights about baby names. She wondered how much of that had been because they’d been unhappy. Had they really wanted children together, she wondered, or had it only become a way of filling up the empty space between them? She had a vision of Rudy and herself as George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, drunkenly shrieking at each other about their imaginary dead son. Except, of course, Rudy never drank anything stronger than chocolate Yoohoo.

  She tossed the Mrs. Dash bottle into the trash, then took all the bags of Rudy’s things she’d collected and threw them down the chute in the hall. She’d wait until morning and call Patsy to find out what herb it was she was supposed to burn.

  And that would be it for Rudy, she thought, getting back into bed. She’d been through this before. Five times in the last six years, as Phan had pointed out. She knew it would hurt for a few days or so, and she’d feel sorry for herself for a few days longer. Then she’d move on. These hadn’t been huge losses in her life. They had left her lonely, and blue, and with the sense that maybe she was going through all this for what had been not such a great relationship, to start with. Already, she was feeling she was over Rudy. She wasn’t longing for him. For someone, yes, but if she was being honest, she couldn’t say that it was Rudyness that she wanted, that she missed. McKay was probably having a harder time tonight without Dolly than she was without Rudy.

  Somehow, that wasn’t as comforting a thought as it should have been.

  “OH, YOU TOLD HIM RIGHT FUCKING OFF, DIDN’T YOU?” her sister Patsy yelped into the phone, later that morning. “Tell me you told him right fucking off!”

  “Sure, I told him right fucking off,” Pru said. “You know me. Just try and stop me from telling people right fucking off.”

  “God, it’s like an alternative universe,” Patsy said. “Rudy breaking up with you. I just never would have imagined it, in a million years. He was weak, Pru,” she concluded. “Beware of the weak. They’ll throw you overboard first, if you know what I mean.”

  Pru crawled into the window seat where she could look out onto Columbia Road. The neighborhood was just getting moving. One of the Manoushian brothers was opening the Manoushian Brothers carpet shop across the street. And today was the day they set up the farmer’s market in the bank’s parking lot. Soon the street would be crowded with people, shopping. With couples, shopping. She and Rudy used to be among those couples, vetting vegetables for Saturday-night dinner, holding hands loosely as they moved through the stalls.

  “What’s going on with you guys? How’s my baby girl?”
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  Patsy ignored her. “They hate it when your chi dominates theirs. It was bound to happen. You have to find someone who has chi equal to yours. Rudy’s chi was for shit.”

  “I’ll have to start asking if I can see a guy’s chi before going out with him.”

  Pru had waited to call until her mother’s Saturday-morning Senior Scrabble, but now she could hear her voice in the background, saying anxiously, “Rudy? What about Rudy?” Patsy had her own house, just down the street from the house where they’d grown up, and where Nadine still lived. But she was almost always there, anyway, doing her laundry and, Pru suspected, mooching whatever she could.

  “That pig,” Patsy continued, ignoring Nadine. “I can’t believe he took you to a movie first.”

  “You would have laughed. It was hilarious.”

  That’s what she’d decided to tell everyone: It was hilarious! The whole thing was just a big, comical spoof. With her family, it was always the best tack to take. There was no sense in getting everyone riled up. Patsy and Nadine were ready to be riled up at the drop of a hat, when it came to such things. Her father used to help keep a lid on their extremism, with a dry comment or two. Best to downplay things. Otherwise, she’d be hearing about Rudy Fisch when she was sixty.

  “What do you mean, hilarious?” Patsy said. “Yes, Mom, Rudy broke up with Pru.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t get her all worried,” Pru said. “Tell her it was no big deal. Tell her it was funny. What’s she doing there, anyway?”

  “She won early and decided to come home. She opened with ‘quartz’ on a double-word. And what do you mean, no big deal?” Patsy demanded. “I thought old Rudy was going to be my brother-in-law. I even started watching The Simpsons so I’d have something to talk to him about.”

  “Oh, Lord, no,” Pru said. “I was the sous-chef on this one. I just got him ready for someone else.”

  “Come on. You don’t have to be such a tough girl, for me.”