The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  “How could this happen to me?” she asked. “What did I do wrong?”

  After their call ended, she put her head against the pillow and shut her eyes. At one in the morning after she had drifted off, her cell phone rang and woke her up. It was Leonard again.

  “There can be many causes,” he said into her ear. He had already done a great deal of research. “It can be sporadic, or it can be familial. Familial would mean that someone you share genes with has it too. I’m assuming no one in your family has it. You would have told me. Your father died of heart disease, I think, so he’s absolved. I’m not sure about your mother. Sporadic means it just pops up. There’s a higher rate among smokers and Gulf War veterans, neither of which would be you. So that means there’s something in there that we’re not seeing, probably a tiny molecule that goes bad. Something in the environment sets it off. The thing that’s fascinating is that, mathematically, there has to be a single domino that starts it all. One domino goes down, and it sets off a pyramid effect that takes out everything.”

  * * *

  —

  The turtleneck-wearing social worker had given Gloria a folder with her appointments in it and told her she needed to mark them on a calendar. She had to follow up with the neurologist and her primary care doctor in August. She was going to meet with a physical therapist beforehand. She had a note to contact the patient services department to ask an important question, but she couldn’t remember what the question was and had to find where she had written it down; she had a Post-it somewhere. Also the social worker had strongly advised her to contact her insurance company to learn about her coverage. Did she need a letter from her primary care doctor? Did she need referrals? Did her insurance cover DME, which meant durable medical equipment?

  It struck Gloria that the story of her death was beginning as a homework assignment.

  At school, she’d dropped out in stages. She’d seen the end of her schooling coming; she’d watched it happening. All throughout this progressive breakdown, she’d taken the position that the school was an unreasonable authority and that she was trying to do something that mattered more than her assignments. Wasn’t it possible, she liked to think, that her bad grades and run-ins with teachers and administrators were part of a larger story, the formation of a rebellious and independent mind? When a college counselor warned her that she was headed for trouble, Gloria sat through her lecture and promptly headed outside to smoke a cigarette, aware of herself as a misunderstood and embattled figure in the story of her own life. If a fellow student asked why she’d failed a paper, Gloria would say, “I had to work. I had fucking rent. I’m sorry if Mister Ivory Tower Professor doesn’t get that.”

  But she would live to repent her choices. Sometime after dropping out of school, she’d painted a picture of a woman: face, arms, shoulders, ribs. Under a shower. Mouth open. Arms held up under the chin in a cringing, self-protecting posture. Forearms flattening the breasts. Hair dripping blue paint. The oil paint applied to the canvas with a knife. Clumps and streaks of dark oils—black, gray, purple—thick pigments visibly laced with threads of crimson. A woman emerging from the swirl through hints of contour, nakedness, falling water. The eyes blotted out by the shower falling on her head.

  The painting was a self-portrait. Naturally, the woman in the shower, made of oil and canvas, couldn’t speak. The point of her seemed to be to express through her physical bearing a suffering that rendered her mute. But if she could have spoken, she might have told you that all she could think about was dying as a way of escaping sadness.

  But this was long before Gloria knew that she would die of ALS.

  * * *

  —

  Rather, it was after meeting Leonard. She had met him on a crisp fall day in 1993 when she had been supposed to write a paper. Fleeing from her assignment, she had ventured onto the MIT campus by accident, partly abetted by a wish to trespass on the elite university, marched into the student union, put her Doc Martens on a chair and tried to read The Female Eunuch. Seconds later, a man had told her, “I find you very attractive,” and her life had changed forever.

  His fascination for her consisted in all he knew. A security officer with the keys to all the rooms, he let her into things she’d never thought of, like approaching the humanities from the standpoint of mathematics. What if there was a formula for feminism—or for her self—and, through him, she could figure it out?

  They broke up very soon; they didn’t even last six weeks. He simply dropped her, as if she were defective, which she knew could not be completely true. Then she spent the whole next year thinking about him, which meant that there was something to him even if he’d broken her heart. She dreamed about having him and the formula, if it existed.

  The baby, the fetus, she didn’t want and had that taken care of. And doing so, alone, at the women’s health center, made her angrier at her mother and father, who were traditional and religious, than at him.

  In 1995, she ran into him again while working at a coffeehouse in Central Square, where everyone from MIT came for coffee, which she had known when she got the job.

  They fell back together immediately without courtship, waiting or flowers. She didn’t believe in those things. She believed in the truth of her feelings, which were as real and valid as anything in the Bible.

  They began their second affair in the winter. Sometime that spring, before the end of the semester, she dropped out of Lesley, where she had been hanging on so long now by her fingernails, for good, thinking this was the ultimate rebellion.

  That fall, after some psychological trouble, she had Corey, alone, at Mass General.

  She lost school, love, family, pride, trust in human beings, her apartment in Mission Hill. Her man from Malden had misused her and ditched her yet again! The portrait of depression dated from this time.

  But if she thought she’d gotten rid of Leonard, she had another think coming: Now that she was a single mom, he came around to see her. They didn’t live together—she lived in Mission Hill, Cleveland Circle, Dorchester, JP, and other places, including her hatchback—but he was part of the city and kept coming, at times of his own strange choosing, to sit in her chair and discuss the origin of the universe while she breast-fed her son in front of a changing cast of roommates, one of whom was Joan.

  Finally, she had moved to Quincy in oh-seven, had been here since.

  It had gone like this with him all throughout the time that Corey had been alive, fifteen years now, and Leonard was ingrained in her.

  Corey resigned from Star Market and, the next day, hiked up the hill away from the water with his hammer and met Darragh at a house on Albatross Lane. There was a thirty-yard dumpster out front where the roofers were throwing out shingling and a one-ton stack of pine two-by-fours in the yard.

  It was seven a.m. and Darragh was hauling tools out of his truck. When he saw Corey, he said good morning and took him to the stack and explained: He was going to pull each two-by-four, measure half its length to find its balance point, mark it with a pencil, hook a rope around it, and let the roofers pull it up. Two boards were already leaning up against the house as skids to protect the siding.

  Darragh gave him a tape measure and a carpenter’s square-tipped pencil. Corey tried tucking the pencil behind his ear. It fell out right away and he put it in his pocket. He laid his hammer on the grass.

  The house looked like a pretty house with blue siding and white trim. The walnut front door had a shiny knocker. Through the living room window, he saw a ship’s lantern and other nautical motifs. Only the roof had been taken apart, giving the effect of a human face with the skull open for brain surgery.

  Carrying the boards exhausted him. They were very long and heavy. In his fatigue and inexperience, while turning away from the pile, he struck the house with the end of a board and came within an inch of breaking a window. He looked up at the roof and saw Darragh s
taring down at him.

  “If you can’t do it, just say so. I’ll get someone who can.”

  “I can do it.”

  When they took their break, Corey trudged up to the DB Mart alone. He was standing in the parking lot eating a ham sandwich, his arms and shirt filthy from wrestling the boards, when Tom drove up in his Ford and hailed him.

  “How ya making out?”

  “Great!” Corey hurried over and shook the hand that Tom extended.

  “What’s he got you doing?”

  “I take these two-by-fours and tie a rope to them and they pull them up on the roof.”

  “You been up on the roof yet?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder how fast he’s going. He tells me he doesn’t have the best crew.”

  “I hear them. They sound like they’re having a good time. I’m down in the yard by myself.”

  “He says they’re slow. Ya never know. It could be him. He’s a touchy guy. How is he—Darragh? You getting along with him?”

  “Oh yeah!”

  “He’s got a way of losing his cool sometimes.”

  “Really?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. He comes around eventually. I always used to think it was funny to see him lose it when me and him worked together. One time, I seen him take a guy’s snap line and throw it across a fence.”

  “His snap line?”

  “The string they use to snap a line.”

  “Oh yeah. Right. Why’d he throw it?”

  “Because it was the wrong color. It’s supposed to be orange. It’s a carpenter thing. Whatever. Ha!”

  “Why does it have to be orange?”

  “So they can see it better. They make them other colors, but you’re only supposed to have orange. The guy had green or something. Darragh’s like”—Tom grabbed an invisible object from Corey and tossed it—“ ‘Fetch!’ We were laughing. He’s all right, though. I never seen him miss a day of work.”

  That was commendable, Corey agreed.

  “Thanks for getting me the job.”

  “I’d rather see you work than some kid who doesn’t appreciate it.”

  Tom went into the minimart and came out a minute later with a shopping bag of wet, cold Gatorades and Dasani waters from the cooler. He mounted his truck and plunked them in the footwell.

  “For your guys?”

  “Yeah. We’re in the rafters today. It’s a sheet metal shed, so it’s hot as balls.” He cranked the ignition. “Going back to work?”

  It was his way of saying goodbye. Corey promptly nodded yes and went back down the hill.

  * * *

  —

  Back home after work, Corey was taking a shower, the white sunlight coming through the small window, half-open to a wilderness of backyard marsh grass like the hairs in a giant lion’s mane. His arms showed up very tan in the bathroom, contrasted against the tub, the white vinyl tile. The tile was peeling, the porcelain discolored, the faucet encrusted with salt, soap scum, mildew. The green shower curtain with frogs on it was attached by cheap plastic rings to the bar, some of the rings tearing through the plastic. The water ran coolly over him, and he felt very alive and cool after working in the hot sun.

  He heard someone arrive when he was in the shower. He turned the water off and listened through the wall. It was Leonard—visiting their house for the first time in quite some time. He was having a long talk with Gloria about her disease.

  Corey walked out in a towel to get his jeans. Leonard had his back to him, and Corey saw his sallow face in profile.

  “You’re all alone out here in Quincy, aren’t you?” Leonard said. He looked out Gloria’s window at the distance to the Boston skyline up the coast. He glanced around her sun-filled house and listened to the tranquil silence of the marsh.

  He left around four o’clock, saying he had a shift. He wasn’t in uniform, though he could have been planning to change at MIT. He was wearing a pair of charcoal slacks, a fedora like a detective, and a white undershirt. Corey followed him outside. The daylight was coming from the west but still beamed hot and bright on the shore. Leonard’s polarized sunglasses responded by darkening, making his eyes impossible to read. The glasses were expensive. Corey would see them on sale at a LensCrafters in the Braintree mall for $350. His father’s car was waiting on the roadside. He drove a Mercury Sable, a shadow widening under the wheels on the graded asphalt. The kind of gym bag a lot of cops carry sat in the front seat.

  He asked his father what he would be doing when he got to work.

  “I’m doing a plainclothes investigation. There’s been a string of campus burglaries.”

  Corey noticed that he was carrying a set of police-issue handcuffs.

  It was the time of year when the days are long and you can’t see the evening coming. When you did, it was just a brief pretty postcard as people went off to the bars before an aggressive summer night began.

  Leonard got in his car.

  Her car was a red hatchback from the 1980s. The red had faded out. She called it “Scarlatta” as in Scarlet. The day after Leonard’s visit, she took it north along the shore, across the bridge into Mattapan, a ghost town. She passed a Baptist church and saw huge dark trees behind the sunlit wooden buildings and not a soul in sight. The road became the Arborway. She reached Jamaica Plain.

  It was Sunday and everyone was holding hands in Jamaica Plain. A rainbow flag hung outside this church. Couples in sunglasses and straw fedoras were licking ice-cream cones together in the sun. Mop-headed children in hand-me-down dresses ran through the crowd and drew chalk spirals on the sidewalk.

  Gloria parked and joined the throng. She had a burlap shopping bag with a heart on it. She went into an organic grocery.

  Yesterday, Leonard had told her to consume antioxidants. “That was my instinct all along! The yoga diet! And now to hear it from a science perspective!” she had marveled. He said she could beat this disease; it depended on her willingness to follow the correct solution, even if it hadn’t yet been ratified by conventional science, which was corrupt.

  She went to the vegetable bin and weighed a sweet potato in her hand. Her eye fell on lush wet greens brimming from a cooler. Did they have dinosaur kale? She went to check. On the way, she found powdered wheatgrass. They had lucuma powder too, a natural sweetener with a caramel taste that reinforces the immune system. The lucuma fruit has green skin, yellow meat, a large pit like a mango, and grows in Peru.

  “I miss your store!” she told the checkout girl, a woman wearing a kerchief in migrant-worker style.

  After paying for brown rice pasta and a dry pint of raspberries, Gloria took another turn through the market to see if there was anything she had missed. Past the vitamin aisle, there were books on alternative medicine: She read the titles on the spines.

  A bulletin board at the back of the store issued calls to action: protest the war; protest Harvard University’s expansion into Allston; protest Whole Foods, which was displacing minorities; protest the police, the city council, gentrification; join the Socialist Workers Party, create a fair and decent world, one that would not be ruined by our animal natures.

  The market had a back door. It led her into a high-ceilinged, blue-walled space. A wide staircase with an ornate balustrade led up. She climbed the stairs, carrying her burlap bag. A wood-carved golden lotus hung above the landing—a picture frame, which, instead of a painting, held a mirror in the center, like a third eye. A cold spicy, incense-y smell filled the air. On the next floor, past saffron curtains and a cubby full of shoes, she found a yoga studio with hardwood floors—a whispering place.

  She saw an advertisement for a spiritual retreat run by a guru—a Caucasian with a shaved head who had given himself a Hindu name. His flyer said he was a Harvard-educated doctor. You could spend a week with him in Telluride, Colorado, meditating and
praying, hearing him lecture—full immersion, $3,500 for ten days.

  The girl behind the counter at the yoga studio looked like a twelve-year-old boy. Gloria went to her, smiling, and whispered, “This looks so fantastic!”

  The girl whispered, “It is!” and gave her a brochure.

  “Can I take this home and look at it?”

  “You should!”

  She drove home, both hands on the wheel, centering herself, filling herself with serene breaths at the stoplights, the small engine running under her.

  * * *

  —

  Gloria’s summer went on—it wasn’t over yet. The date passed when Leonard had said he’d check back without any word from him. Corey kept going to his job at the house that needed a roof and coming home, suntanned and scraped-up, dirty and hungry and sleeping in his room across the wall from her. At his job, he heard the carpenter’s crew clowning on the roof. Day after day, she applied her makeup and drove up 93—to help people who had checked out of America with their drug problems check back in—now knowing what she had always claimed to believe, that there really was something far bigger than workaday life: death or life itself.

  A week into August, she went to her clinic day at Longwood. The neurologist held Gloria’s hands as if he wanted to dance with her and compared her limbs with his eyes. He slid his hands up her bare arms to the shoulders. She was wearing a gown. She thought she smelled his breath. He noted a pathological hardness in the thinning muscles of the left forearm beneath the soft bag of her skin. Spasticity, a classic sign. She looked away from what he wrote on his chart.

  In Gloria’s mind, she had a bad hand and a good hand. The disease was in the bad hand, the left one. It was now visibly, abnormally thin—and weak. She could barely generate any pressure with her thumb, her weakest digit, which severely limited what she could do. Her fingers were a little better, but not by much. She placed things in her bad hand instead of picking them up directly. Paying for groceries, she dropped her bank card on the conveyor belt and was unable to pick it up. She told the impassive checkout girl, “I’m sorry, I have a bad hand.” At home, unpacking vegetables, she ran cold water over her hand at the kitchen sink.