The Family Unit and Other Fantasies

by The Family Unit

  “Buying or selling?” the man asked, getting right down to work. He had the kind of accent one didn’t hear much anymore.

  Rick was caught off-guard by the lack of formalities but quickly recovered.

  “I—buying.”

  “Category?”

  “Well . . . edifying, I guess. Is that a category?”

  “Sorry,” the man said, flatly and with a touch of impatience. “The closest I can get to that is probably Inspirational.”

  “Religious, you mean? No, that wouldn’t be right.”

  “Well, there’s two sub-cats: Inspirational-slash-Religious and Inspirational-slash-Secular.”

  Rick felt he wasn’t being given time to think. (Or to reconsider?) Maybe it was better this way. “The second one.”

  “Okay. Good.” Then the man said, as if to himself, “That’s Lot Number Twenty-Five.”

  Rick waited for him to approach the cabinet and offer up some choices, but that wasn’t the way it worked. First he was asked for whom he was buying—presumably people bought for themselves as well as others—and then with gruff tact what “the situation” was. Rick explained compassionately yet directly, and the man nodded once, immediately understanding (there were only so many reasons to replace the expression of experiences) and, after calculating silently, said, “Two days.”

  “But—don’t I get to hear—”

  “We choose for you. That’s our service. That’s what you’re paying us for.”

  The last line was Rick’s blunt cue to cough it up, cash only, and he did. There was no handshake—Rick awkwardly offered one before withdrawing—just a receipt stamped “Bought” and pulled from a pad not unlike a policeman’s ticket book. Maybe the man had gotten it from one of those friendly cops. (And who would want more than a cop to have other anecdotes than his own painful ones, Rick wondered?)

  “Thanks,” he said, but it was unnecessary. Still stupidly trying to ingratiate himself, he bought some shoelaces on the way out.

  Two days later, the little envelope arrived. It contained a packet filled with solution and a sort of syringe. A tiny booklet of directions—in English and in Chinese—was the only other item. Dutifully following the instructions—and looking at the surprisingly elegant, crosshatched illustrations—he performed the procedure. (He had stayed after the night nurse arrived, and while she read a magazine in the living room, he entered his mother’s dark bedroom. As the old woman slept, he gently rolled the nightgown sleeve up her scrawny arm. The vein was easily found and pierced beneath her wafer-like skin.) The booklet said to give it twelve hours to work, not so much for the new story to take hold but for the old to be subsumed. It was like colouring your hair, Rick thought, remembering concealing the grey in his own, though it took longer.

  The next day, he heard with trepidation his mother twice begin the usual story—“It was at a restaurant in Paris”—and each time get no further than the first line (the second time, no further than “restaurant”). Finally, on the third try, he heard her say:

  “I was on a crowded subway about twenty years ago. It was in February, around Valentine’s Day. A girl in her twenties came on and sat down next to me. She had a half-flat balloon decorated with hearts tied around her wrist. She had obviously come from an office party and was very drunk and not used to being so. As soon as the car took off, she got a distressed look on her face. Then she vomited all over the floor. People scrambled into each other running to avoid her and it. But I unfolded a page of the newspaper I was reading and carefully laid it down upon the sick. Then I put my arm around the ill—and clearly mortified—girl, and rode with her like that until her stop.”

  Afterwards, his mother’s face had the same self-satisfied expression she always wore after the Paris tale (as her voice had been just as smug during the telling). It was as if she had been dubbed by someone else’s voice in a foreign film, or had her lines changed and censored for a TV showing: her essential performance was still the same.

  Yet it didn’t matter, not to Rick. As he heard her story—and heard it again and again, for his mother’s memory hadn’t been improved nor her repetitiveness decreased, only the specifics of what she said replaced—he was moved. He was more than moved, he found himself feeling something he hadn’t felt for his mother in years, not since the days when he was young, his father still alive, and her acquisitiveness and shallowness were not so intractably in place—when she could still surprise him with a sudden show of warmth and kindness. He felt love.

  It was a lucky and last-minute love. As he helped her into bed that night, he sensed her slip beneath the silk sheets with finality: hers was like a body poured from a ship under the waves. She disappeared inside their liquid flutter, and before she fell asleep, she died.

  In the days ahead, as he cleaned out her apartment, Rick could not stop his tears. Inevitably now, when he thought of his mother, he thought of the one event—his mother and the sick girl on the subway—the one that was easiest to entertain, that had been worth every penny to place inside her.

  He inherited her money. He paid his considerable credit card debt with it and bought an apartment, an actual investment as opposed to his current worthless rental. As a tribute to his mother, the first thing he ordered for the place was a box set of the classic films of Jean Calot, called Ugly/Beautiful.

  His attachment to her grew; her selflessness soon made him feel unworthy of the legacy she had left him. It made him wait to unpack, as if he did not deserve to put his things in a home that she had made possible for him to own. The closed boxes, brought in by professional packers and movers, became symbols of his inadequacies—his laziness, selfishness, and hostility, some of which had been directed at his mother—all the flaws he had to hide.

  At last, if only to get a glass to fill with obliterating wine, he opened up a box. He pulled out a long-stemmed flute and hastily tore away the newspaper in which it was wrapped. As he was casting aside the yellowing page—from his home, he assumed, and sports, he noticed—he saw its date.

  It was, strangely, from around the time of his mother’s inspiring story, twenty years before. He saw that a corner of it was encrusted with a dot of dried-up liquid-solid mix.

  Rick sat on the floor, though a chair and couch were available; he didn’t even think to have that wine. It had been he who had placed the paper on the subway floor and saved a page as keepsake, he who had helped the sickened stranger.

  He scrambled to open another box, and then another, until he found his folder of meticulously kept bills and receipts. In the middle was a familiar looking, shabby ticket from the shoe store, dated from two years before and stamped “Sold.”

  He had dealt the anecdote when he was strapped for funds—when he was poor and yet still principled enough to turn down his mother’s cash. The selling—a reverse procedure, an incision and withdrawal performed under vaguely unsanitary conditions in the store’s back room—was meant to take away his memory not only of the incident but its removal. This was why the shoe store had seemed familiar. It had been a faulty process, and left him with a shard of knowledge.

  Had the shoe repairman remembered his face and returned the story to him? Was that what he had really been “paying us for”? And how many other such incidents of charity had he hocked?

  Rick didn’t know. He only knew that it was his own good will he should have been celebrating. Whether he inherited her wealth or not, he was as far away from his mother as the living were from the dead. With new tears—the “cry for happy” kind he’d heard so much about—he began to unpack for real, to fill the empty space with the things of himself, those of a man who could show love to others and so was worthy of receiving it.

  It took several weeks until the rooms were fully furnished. In that time, he took two steps to truly right his life: made inquiries about starting a foundation for the poor with his inheritance and asked out a bright, attractive woman who worked in the city agency he
had approached.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been on a date,” said this Sandra, who was a saucy type. “I’m rusty. I’ll have to remember all my charming anecdotes.”

  “I’m looking forward,” Rick said, “to hearing them.”

  He was to meet her for dinner that night. It was his first date in months as well, too many months for him to count: he felt nervous and excited.

  To calm himself, in the half hour before he left, he surfed TV. Then he saw something sitting beside the set: the unopened box of Jean Calot’s old films.

  It seemed amusing and appropriate to pop one in. He chose the best known of the actor’s many hits, a film considered classic that he was convinced he’d never seen: La Derniere Histoire, made forty years before.

  The black-and-white print was pristine. Even though Rick had neglected to turn on the subtitles, the story started simply. In Paris, a young and handsome, mug-faced Calot was commuting home from his labourer’s job. When he boarded a train, the good-natured hero saw a pretty girl seated opposite him. She wore a balloon on her wrist and a pleasant but queasy expression. As she suddenly and unsteadily rose, her face grew grim and her eyes wide. Rick saw the newspaper folded beneath Calot’s arm. He rushed to hit the stop but hit the pause instead and, before it could occur, froze the incident forever.

  Rick sank to his knees and covered his face to escape the truth. The newspaper had belonged to the movers; its stain was food from some forgotten meal. He had never behaved—never cared enough about another person to behave—in such a way. He had been touched and inspired by an incident from someone else’s mind, sold a story from a story, lived in other people’s glossy dreams. And if he had marketed other such instances, they had been similarly purloined.

  He was a creature from his mother’s lap, the little dog that she fed scraps. It was the story, the only story, of his life.

  NOTE: Anecdote currently available. Ask for Lot #731. Categories: Family/Values; Funny/Sad; Ugly/Beautiful.

  VERSATILITY

  She heard a bang, a clap, a spank—something—from outside in the hall. Her eyes opened and she rose from where she was, reclining on the couch. Then Lee opened the door.

  The doorman was there, the new one, the young one, the one all the girls made excuses to hang around. He was delivering the mail in the old-fashioned way it was still done in her pre-war building, by dropping it before each door.

  He looked at her, a pile of mail held in his arms, cradled, with seeming kindness. Yet he had just dropped a big piece of it—a magazine? A catalogue? Something heavy enough to make a sound—so he was capable of being callous, too. He was a combination of both, was soft and sadistic: she’d heard that that was sexy, imagined it would be, like, what was his name, Martin Brando in the old movies, though this kid could have been Brando’s baby brother. In truth, he didn’t look like Brando at all, but maybe he would be better than Brando who had ended up so fat.

  “Did I scare you?” he asked.

  “You woke me up,” she said.

  The exchange was insinuating, suggestive, and—despite their being in a northern city—southern-seeming, as in The Streetcar Driver, or whatever the movie with Brando was called. Each knew what the other slyly meant, neither was in the dark—though the boy actually stood in the dim, beneath a blown-out ceiling bulb that had been unattended for too long. Lee would have to speak to the super about that; it made the hall look shabby, even seedy—and she stopped and forced herself to focus on the doorman, the doorboy, who was younger than anyone she’d ever been attracted to, but ageing altered your interests, right? Turned your “type” into someone else (into anyone available?). Loneliness made you indiscriminate; the door was closing for her, that’s what they said, your opportunities for impregnation were dwindling, and so you grabbed at anyone in sight. Even demure women who always waited, who sat by the phone on Saturday night, who seldom took the first step, now grabbed at—stripped and straddled!—the first plausible partner before the door closed, a door she imagined was like an electronic garage door that could cut you in half if you didn’t roll out from under it. Not a front door, an apartment door, like the one that stood open at her side as she looked at the doorman—boy—she was aware was waiting for her to say something else, something after, “You woke me up,” which she had said spontaneously, for it was true, and which had sounded sexy and clever but had really been unintentional. She begged herself to focus, and tried to, but she had been sedated and was so thrown, made so nervous by him that the most she could manage was to take her mail and give him a little nondescript smile before she quickly shut the door.

  In truth, Lee was not menopausal or even middle-aged; her anxieties made her feel older than her (thirty-three) years, made her identify with those whom age had slowed down, made demented or otherwise kept from normal social intercourse. The fact that she was even home today, at noon, was a measure of how much agoraphobia had reduced her normal way into the world (and pills and talking therapy and hypnosis had done little to ease it), how much it had thrown roadblocks, so to speak, onto entrances to heavily traversed highways and away from her own lonely road.

  It was travel that had finally waylaid Lee and forced her behind closed doors—and not even long distance travel but local travel, on mass transit and even between floors in her building. It was a final ordeal a few months back inside a subway car, one not even crowded but stuck between stations, that had sent her gasping for air above ground and to the nearest bus, which, moving at a snail’s pace, seemed again suffocating and shot her out onto the street where she walked for thirty blocks in a pitiless rainstorm toward her home. Even there, the elevator kept threatening to stop—it was going so slow—and she had suddenly pressed the button for “10,” surprising the one woman with whom she rode (and she had waited for a nearly empty elevator before getting on as she had let even moderately filled subways pass before taking one, turning a typically thirty-minute commute into a ninety-minute marathon), and then went on foot, wet and panting, the twelve remaining flights to reach her flat.

  The experience had ended Lee’s ability to work every day and she was now on unemployment (and maybe soon on disability). In fact, she hoped a check from the agency was among the pieces of mail the young doorman had just handed her, his eyebrows raising a little as he looked into her eyes, an intimacy she had very much enjoyed but allowed only briefly.

  Indeed the letter was there—but apparently it had been somewhere else first. Lee saw that the envelope had been torn open and taped shut, the words “Sorry—opened by accident” a jagged surgery scar on its white paper belly. She felt furious, but more she was mortified that someone had seen—knew about—her condition: how she had been stranded alone in her apartment (a rental she had once shared with and inherited from her parents), or at best in the lobby or nearby neighbourhood. Someone knew what woman her troubled mind had made her into and had been both cavalier about knowing and too cowardly to put a name to the confession.

  Since the envelope had been in the doorman’s bundle—his package, his pile; after she saw him everything had become an innuendo (like bang, clap, spank, she realized), everything was naughty or nasty, she noted with amusement; she had been alone a long time, everything was something else—he was the one she decided to confront. Luckily, she would have to go no farther than the lobby.

  “What’s up with this?” she asked, holding the envelope, realizing she had meant to say, “What’s the meaning of this?” but (her identification with those older suddenly irksome and unwanted) she had replaced it unconsciously with a younger, hipper person’s expression.

  “What do you mean?” He was alone at the front desk; she had waited unseen around the corner near the elevator until he was alone, until a UPS man had left after what seemed like interminable obscene male banter between the two.

  “This. This. Who opened my letter?”

  He looked at the envelope (she had already taken out the c
heque) with utter incomprehension. As he strained to think, he squished together his face, forced his forehead forward, altered his—perfectly pleasing and symmetrical—features, gave himself a sort of simian cast, which since it wasn’t permanent and his face immediately returned to normal, since it was just a split-second shift, like the skull superimposed on Anthony Pearlman’s face at the end of Hitchcock’s—what was it called? Her pills had made off with her memory—it was kind of exciting, cruelty and kindness again combining in him, and wasn’t that what you wanted? Well, as long as there was occasionally kindness, right? Lee was so inexperienced, well, not entirely, but almost, and wondered—as she stared at the doorman, tried to discipline her disobedient thoughts again: the ripped envelope, remember?—did he take her stare as interest? She couldn’t tell.

  “I mis-delivered it the other day,” he said defensively. “One of your neighbours gave it back to me. I’m sorry.”

  He seemed concerned that she might blame him, report him, even try to have him dismissed. But then he sighed, as if to say—she was almost sure—listen to me; why am I so weak? What the hell am I so worried about? His eyes closed and reopened, and to her his long lashes seemed like stage curtains, which ended one scene and then began another with a new character, which was strange since he then said, “Look, I’m not really a doorman. I’m an actor.”

  Lee was interested; it made sense, his being so young, good-looking, and incompetent. Yet she didn’t want to lose the upper hand or her authority or whatever it was she might have gained by grilling him. So she asked, as if only politely or even condescendingly inquiring, “And might I have seen you in anything?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” he said honestly. “I’m just starting out. So I’m acting all the time in real life. Right now, I’m playing the part of a doorman, if you know what I mean. And not too well, apparently.”