The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  Corey leaned back on the sink, took his hat off and spun it on his finger. “She’s your mom. I don’t see what she’s gonna do to us.”

  “You’ll see. You can stay here if you want, but I’m leaving.”

  “You’re running away, bro?”

  Just then they heard a car outside and Adrian said, “Uh-oh. Here we go. Guess who.”

  The front door opened and a woman’s voice sang, “A-drian!”

  She bustled in and Corey saw Mrs. Reinhardt for the first time, a winter-coated figure wearing big eyeglasses and a helmet of lustrous chestnut hair. She was carrying a heavy lady’s purse, shopping bags hanging from her arms, and a cardboard file box in her hands. Corey wanted to help her, but something stopped him: the fact that Adrian wasn’t saying anything. She set her things down. When she looked up, Mrs. Reinhardt saw her son.

  “I called you!”

  “I answered you. You must not have heard me. You must be going deaf. There could be something wrong with your brain.”

  “Oh, Adrian!”

  She took her coat off. She was wearing slacks and a sweater and a wide shiny belt with a huge square buckle like a buccaneer. The chestnut hair was a synthetic wig.

  “Hi, Mrs. Reinhardt. I’m Corey. I’m Adrian’s friend.”

  She didn’t respond. Dropping her coat over a flower-patterned chair, she descended to the living room and strode to the white couch, which faced the claw-footed stove. The polished floor of the living room was canted away from the kitchen as if by continental drift.

  “Adrian, can you come here?”

  “What for?”

  “I need your help.”

  “How do you know it’s something you need my help with? Have you tried to do it yourself yet?”

  “Are you going to help me or not?”

  Adrian sighed.

  “What is it?”

  “I want you to move the couch for me.”

  A discussion began. She wanted him to move it an inch. Adrian didn’t want to do it. Corey listened to the mother and son negotiating for Adrian’s labor as if he were a crane operator and she needed him to hoist a Jacuzzi onto the penthouse roof.

  Corey offered to help—“I’ll do it with you and we’ll knock it out in one second”—but both Adrian and his mother ignored him.

  Finally, Adrian bowed his head and moved the couch an inch. He acted as if it made him very tired.

  Corey asked, “Is that thing a monster? Is that the kind that has a bed in it? A sofa with a secret?”

  “Are you satisfied?” Adrian asked his mother.

  By now the windows had darkened and it was nighttime. Mrs. Reinhardt turned the chandelier on. She climbed up on the raised dais above the living room. “Thank you, Adrian!” she called down. “Thank you, boys!” She turned to Corey. “We’ll have to have you to dinner. I love having dinners with Adrian’s friends! They’re fascinating!”

  “I’d love to have dinner, Mrs. Reinhardt.”

  “He doesn’t have time,” Adrian said. “We’ve got to go.”

  He hurried Corey out of the house and walked him to the grassy traffic island, as if seeing him off on his way back to Quincy. But once they were away from the house, Adrian wanted to talk about physics.

  “I don’t see what’s so awful about your mom,” Corey interrupted.

  “Trust me. You don’t know her.”

  “No, really, I don’t see the problem. Why do you care if I eat dinner with her?”

  For the second time since he had known him, Adrian turned hostile, stating that he wasn’t interested in the opinions of people who didn’t know what they were talking about.

  Corey said, “I’m heading home.” His friend said nothing. The rain had stopped, but when the wind gusted through the trees, there was a hissing disturbance that sounded like water turning into steam. Corey walked away, the ground wet underfoot. Behind him, Adrian said something indistinct—something bitter and sarcastic.

  Corey glanced back and saw him in the gloom, feinting at a tree.

  On the T, he replayed the exchange and realized that his friend had just threatened to knock him out again.

  * * *

  —

  He went home and asked to borrow his mother’s laptop and searched for Fighting gyms near me. A map of the South Shore unfolded on his screen, dotted with flags. He zoomed in. The details of the terrain appeared. For some time, sitting on the edge of his bed, he moved his Google Maps eye around the state, looking at the names of mixed martial arts training centers, biting his lip. He drew the coastline in his notebook, filled in roads, marked an X—a place to sail to.

  Then he seemed to remember himself. He cleared his history and returned his mother’s laptop, saying, “Sorry, Mom. I lost track of time. I was just looking up some bio stuff for school.”

  13

  Welcome Day

  Since Leonard’s fight with Corey, the two of them had barely spoken. Leonard had been watching the development of Corey’s new persona, in silence.

  And Corey had been watching Leonard. During the same period, Leonard’s pattern was as follows. He was working a day shift at MIT. At night, he parked on Sea Street, came in from the winter’s cold, dropped his cop bag on the floor and took off his black nylon parka and other zippered jackets—he dressed in layers for warmth—sometimes revealing a uniform shirt with epaulettes on the shoulders, which was unbuttoned and untucked. Under it, he wore a sleeveless wife-beater undershirt like the neighborhood bookie.

  From night to night, the uniform shirt changed its color and cut—gray to blue to white. Once, Corey glimpsed a patch that said MIT Police on the shoulder. But the patch wasn’t always there. The shabby trousers’ pinstripes flickered from red to blue to nothing. Handcuffs dangled from Leonard’s belt some nights, alongside a chrome key chain, and other nights disappeared. He never wore the Sam Browne utility belt that cops carry their guns in. Leonard explained, under MIT police department policy he had to leave his sidearm in the armory at night, but he carried a backup weapon in his cop bag for protection—in case he ran into a crime in progress off the job. He wasn’t allowed to show his personal firearm to civilians.

  After getting settled, in his open shirt, hat and tinted glasses, he went to the kitchen and cooked for hours. Late at night, he showered in Gloria’s bathroom and came out in boxer shorts, the undershirt steamed through and clinging to his white chest.

  He’d put the fedora back on after showering and wear it for the trip from the bathroom to the futon.

  Around the futon, he’d built a little home away from home of Roche Bros. and Walgreens shopping bags containing clothes and socks, prescription medications, garlic, packages of crackers. He kept everything in bags in lieu of a chest of drawers.

  The signs of his presence expanded over time. He left his toothbrush out to dry on the corner of the coffee table. In the beginning, he put it away after it had dried but eventually began leaving it there permanently. Soon his soap, shampoo and conditioner had joined it—Vidal Sassoon hair products in black cylindrical squeeze bottles with gold lettering. The expansion of his campsite meant his possessions floated out in their world and some of their belongings floated into his. Sometimes Corey would see a book from his mother’s milk-crate library had been left lying near the futon in among Leonard’s toiletries, and he would rescue it.

  At night, to sleep, Leonard unfolded the futon—an operation that demanded moving the coffee table. Leonard had soon begun to forget to refold the futon when he was done with it and put the table back. Corey adopted a standing policy of refolding it whenever he saw it open and returning the coffee table to its proper place. Leonard wanted his bed left alone, as he made plain by the rough way he yanked it open after Corey had closed it. This tug-of-war over furniture caused the first conflict between them since the car incident.

  “My
mother can’t close that herself if you leave that open,” Corey told his father one night in early March.

  “I beg your pardon?” Leonard said. “Excuse me, was I talking to you? Who the fuck told you to open your mouth?”

  “Leonard!” Gloria protested.

  “No, it’s okay, Mom. I don’t need protection. Let him talk.”

  “Get the fuck out of here before you’re sorry.”

  Corey began shaking inside but said nothing more. But he made up his mind to show greater strength around his father. The next night, for Leonard’s benefit, he swaggered around the house, deepened his voice and put on a careful show of manhood.

  He saw Leonard gazing at him through his amber glasses.

  “What is it?”

  “What’s what?”

  “You look like you want to say something to me.”

  “Want to say something to you? What would I want to say to you, Corey?”

  “I don’t know. You’re looking at me.”

  “Corey, if I wanted to say something to you, you’d know it.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Is that a smart remark?”

  “Take it however you want.”

  “What does that make you, a tough guy?”

  “Tough enough. I ain’t a bitch.”

  “You must be a real success. I bet your life is going really well for you.”

  “My life’s going great. I got a hundred homeboys who’ll tell you that.”

  “Sure you do. Corey, I’d be surprised if you had a single friend.”

  * * *

  —

  The day before Corey’s spring recess, it rained. That evening, he took his mother to the grocery store—the Stop & Shop in Quincy instead of the Purple Cactus in Jamaica Plain. They entered through the garden center. He got his mom a shopping cart. She hooked her cane on the rail and they moved slowly down the aisle under the yellow ceiling.

  She had pages of claims against her private medical insurance. She hadn’t gotten disability in time to cover herself from a slew of charges. The amounts were bankrupting. And every time she saw the doctor, someone else billed her. The physical therapist had billed her for the dumbbells she no longer used. Her checking yo-yoed up and down between her monthly pay and zero dollars. She had less than two thousand dollars in savings. Corey knew some of this.

  She knew her son liked Subway’s, but a prewrapped sub from Stop & Shop was cheaper. She wanted him to have one.

  “Mom, I don’t need anything. It’s okay.”

  He wanted to buy a jumbo jar of peanut butter, which weighed two pounds.

  “You can’t live on that, Corey.”

  “Yes, I can. It’s a good investment.”

  They bought mac and cheese. She chose a pack of tofu. In the spirit of saving, he said, “Mom, isn’t there a cheaper brand?” and she got upset and said, “Fine, I guess I don’t have to have it. What difference is it anyway, right?”

  “No, Mom, I was wrong. I was wrong. Let’s keep the good one.”

  They were stalled in the aisle when a guy in a yacht club sweatshirt with a package of ground meat in his basket tried to push past his mother. Corey put up a hand to stop him. The ship’s wheel on the guy’s chest ran into Corey’s hand. The man’s eyes opened.

  “What? She’s my mom, you know what I’m sayin’?” Corey said.

  Gloria apologized: “He didn’t mean anything. He’s concerned for me, is all. I’m ill.”

  The man shook his head at him and went away.

  In the night, as it rained, Corey stood hidden in the kitchenette listening to her on the phone with the insurance company, hanging up in frustration, trying to reach a real person at the twenty-four-hour number.

  “It’s all a big mess,” she told him when he came out and asked what she had learned. “If this keeps up, we might wind up on charity.”

  * * *

  —

  First thing in the morning, Corey told his boss he had the week off school and could work full-time.

  Blecic told him he was letting him go for lying on his time sheet.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Please. I don’t have time for bullshit.”

  As they were arguing, Dunbar strolled up, greeted Blecic and went to work. Corey looked at his boss and said, “I didn’t lie to you.” The Slav would not relent. Corey had to walk away with the other men watching, get in his mother’s car and leave.

  Blecic kept Dunbar working.

  That night, Corey saw his friend on the street on his way to Point Liquors. He shook Dunbar’s hand, embraced him and said, “I didn’t rat you out.”

  “Good looking.”

  And for the rest of the recess, Corey hung with Dunbar and his boys when they had time for him. He didn’t tell his mother he’d been fired. He loitered outside the job site, behind the port-a-johns, pretending to be just happening by, trying to catch Dunbar’s attention. When the latter snuck away, Corey would be there to hook up with him and they’d speed down to Weymouth in the Nissan. Dunbar told his friends, “This kid’s a stand-up guy.”

  Corey picked up there were two levels of life being lived among Dunbar’s friends. A billboard in Weymouth urged all citizens to call 911 if someone overdosed. Another said: “Save a Life: Carry Narcan.” A lot of people, including Dunbar, had normal jobs but also dealt and used drugs. Steroids were popular. Dunbar took his shirt off and demonstrated radically improved muscles thanks to Decabol. His pectorals had white striation lines where they stretched the skin. He told Corey he ought to take a cycle. Anthony the hairdresser was a real dealer who could get you ’roids, meth, coke, Bizarro, X, smack, and oxy. In the wake of his firing, Corey let it be known he was open to selling drugs for Anthony. As soon as he had said this, he felt oppressed by a sense of gathering doom and loss of control.

  One afternoon, he cut class and met the hairdresser at an apartment above the salon where he worked, facing the glass-fronted gym where he trained. It had low ceilings, white stucco walls, a sliding door to a patio deck, which overlooked a mass of trees nestled around a white New England church spire. The surrounding streets were a medley of clean, smooth grays and beiges, some cool, some warm, like the khakis they sold at Work ’N Gear by the CITGO plant in Braintree.

  There were two easy chairs. Dunbar sat in one, Corey in the other. Anthony came in wearing a Cerucci jacket—a short, black iridescent high-collared garment with the collar turned up and a gold chain around his sweaty purple neck. He took the couch, which seemed like a single chair just big enough for his huge legs.

  “So this kid’s got a hairy dick now.”

  “He’s a good shit,” Dave said.

  “You got a driver’s license? Put it on the table.”

  Corey took out his driving license, bearing his full name and address next to the seal of the state of Massachusetts. Anthony photographed it with his cell phone.

  “This is like your first day at McDonald’s. Everything you do either speaks for you or against you. If this goes right, we can build things up. If you put money in my hand, I’ll put money in your hand. But if I catch any heat, Quincy’s a short drive. You heard? If I get hurt, you get hurt.”

  He pulled a ziplock bag of yellow capsules out of his jacket pocket and dropped it on the table.

  “What the fuck is that?” Dave asked.

  “Don’t touch. This is candy, motherfucker. He’s gonna sell it in his school. People want this. This product here will sell for a rack and a half, fifteen hundred dollars. Twenty pills, eighty bucks a pill. Here’s what you do. You let your friends know you can hook them up with this candy. Everybody gets one piece for free. You give away a couple. Don’t double up on anybody. Wait for them to come back for the next one, and then you sell them.”

  * * *

  —

  The
next day, Corey cut school again. “I’m a hustler,” he said, standing under the bus shelter in Quincy Center while it rained.

  Yeah, we get it, the others said—a mixture of kids and young adults who weren’t going anywhere either, except maybe on the buses, which came and went while they stood around and smoked. Most had dropped out of high school, some were working on it. There was an older guy among them, a twenty-five-year-old, who had stopped when he saw their skateboards, to tell them about his glory days, the risks he’d taken and fears he’d faced doing tricks and jumps and taking painful falls at the Swingle Quarry. He had a piercing in his lower lip, a girlfriend and a baby, which he could be seen pushing in a stroller through the station in the middle of the workday—he was unemployed—on his way to Dorchester to leave the child with its mama’s family, while he went to a community center very similar to the one Gloria worked at and asked for counseling and drug treatment and help getting a job.

  “I learned to deal with that fear,” he told the dropouts. “You will too.”

  Corey was holding a cigarette while it burned. He squirted saliva through his teeth at the wet pavement, and nodded at the older guy as he left them and went through the drizzle and into the station, passing the cop who was always posted there to watch the truants and street people.

  The parking lot faced the backs of stores—a line of connected buildings with dumpsters by their rear exits—a minimart, an always nearly empty Indian restaurant where white people went to drink, a coffee shop–hangout called Gunther Tooties, a law firm in the underutilized office suites upstairs. A short girl opened the back door of the café and ran through the rain to the bus shelter in her sweater and leggings and Uggs, her hair messy, her lighter in her hand. “Yo,” she said. “This rain sucks my dick.”

  She advanced on the cluster of young people, hitching her hip at them, skipping sideways, saying, “Gimme a cigarette! Gimme a cigarette! Gimme a cigarette!” One boy said, “I’ll think about it,” and gave her one, and she jumped up and kissed his cheek. Another was holding a dark brown pit bull on a chain, and she patted the dog’s wrinkled forehead.