by Steve Toltz
“What happens on Sundays?”
“We’ll be happy on Sundays.”
“Deal,” Aldo said.
“You sure?”
“Positive. You?”
“I’m in.”
Aldo punched the air. “I can’t wait for the next time some fucker says to me, ‘Unless you’re a parent you can’t understand.’ I’ll be able to wave my fucking baby in his face—”
“And you know what else I think we should do? Let’s get married!”
“Hey now, one monumental decision at a time,” he said. There was a long silence in that cold spring twilight. How had she come to this absurd conclusion? What did one thing have to do with another, in the twenty-first century? It was almost illicit! He was beset by a crazy moment of suspicion—had this been her endgame all along? He said nothing, and said it for so long, Stella grew sullen. He embraced her and whispered in her ear, “Listen, Stella. Whenever I hear that someone has stayed monogamous for forty years it reminds me of when you see in The Guinness Book of Records that someone has walked a thousand kilometers with an egg on his head. I mean, I admire his endurance. But what the fuck did he do that for?”
• • •
Three months later, despite Stella’s dreams of an ambush of confetti and a rose-petaled waltz up the aisle on the stiff arm of her uncle, they were married in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it ceremony in the fluorescent-lit gloom of the registry office with only six guests: Francesca, Leila, Uncle Howard, Tess, myself, and Sonja. There was nothing time-honored about it. After the ceremony, at Stella’s insistence that their loved ones share in the total bliss of the occasion, the six of us went with the happy couple to—their first ultrasound. Aldo was terrified the baby would turn out to be missing a lung or already fossilized or Siamese twins joined at the face. He was in a hyperactive mood, fidgeting in his chair. He turned to the technician. “What did they use before ultrasounds—watercolors?”
“Aldo,” Stella said, “let her do her job.”
“There’s its heartbeat,” the technician said, and though we couldn’t really make out anything human, everyone crowded around to praise the softly throbbing center of this bewildering blur. I thought: For a puppet in a horror film, you could do worse. Howard was looking at the technician’s legs; Leila squeezed my hand; Tess held Sonja up to the screen and whispered in her ear; Francesca narrowed her eyes in obvious envy; Stella looked relieved and rapturous; Aldo was frozen solid and turning the air electric with his anxiety and rotating nightmares. All the fears he’d ever had about himself metastasized to that little aquatic creature. The specter of illness just got personal. Everything that went wrong in his life from now on would have something to do with that baby, he thought.
He was wrong.
• • •
Leila’s mortgage was unable to be refinanced, a writ had been issued by the bank to take possession of the property, and the sheriff was coming that very afternoon to forcibly remove his mother from her home, Aldo told me in a panic on the phone. I told him she could claim hardship, what with her loved ones dead, her island sunk, her culture decimated, her language extinct, her body failing, her money spent by her surviving child—
“We tried that. She got a stay of execution of the writ, but only for a period of seven days. That was six days ago.” Aldo went on to tell me that the judge had had an annoying scolding tone, spelling things out in a condescending manner, and had said that not only did the lender have every right to take possession of Leila’s property, but if the property was sold for less than the amount of the loan, she may be liable for the remaining balance.
“It’s inevitable then. You should voluntarily surrender the property and avoid court costs.”
“She won’t. She won’t go.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Just be there when the sheriff comes.”
I hung up and thought: Sons may suffer the sins of the father, but it is mothers who suffer the sins of the son.
• • •
Hurry up about it, we’re already late! Aldo shouted to a heavily pregnant Stella in the Annandale Hotel. He knew she’d chosen this inopportune moment to swing by and pick up her last check because she dreaded the afternoon ahead even more than he did. While Stella spoke to the manager, Aldo pretended to use the toilet. He splashed himself repeatedly with cold water and had a quick tearless cry. He came back out just in time to see a pregnant woman toss a drink in Stella’s face and storm away.
“What the fuck was that?”
“She asked me about my birth plan and I told her I don’t have one, and she said it would be such a shame if you let them do a caesarean, and I said well, whatever it takes, right? And she said no, no, having a natural birth is the most primal experience a real woman can have, so whatever you do, don’t let them give you a caesarean, so I said you’ve already failed the first test of motherhood, you know, by putting your own experience of being ‘a woman’ over the wellbeing of the child. You may be a woman, but you’re no mother.”
Aldo sniffed Stella’s clothes. “Southern Comfort.”
“I can’t take it anymore.”
“You’re doing great.”
“I feel like I’m three hundred weeks’ pregnant.”
“It’s been hard.”
“And my obstetrician keeps telling me I’m having a dream pregnancy.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“And I’ve got no more gigs booked! None!”
When they decided to keep the baby, Stella’s goal had been to set down at least eight songs and then not take “We don’t accept unsolicited demos” as an answer, give birth while the album was climbing up the charts, breastfeeding while on tour. Problem was, after the twenty-week mark, Stella had reptilian sweats and prenatal rage, was perpetually hungry and light-headed, beset with a hypersense of smell, extreme cramps, bleeding gums, the creepy feeling of heavy ovaries, and nipples so sore she couldn’t wear certain fabrics. Everybody told her to get as much sleep as possible, as if sleep could be stored up in the body like water in a camel’s hump, but due to her incessant discomfort, Stella had terrible insomnia. At thirty weeks she had to withstand the ubiquitous insensitivity of friends who told her she was abnormally small. When she popped, days were spent dodging citizens who believed it was socially acceptable to rub a stranger’s belly. Although he was learning not to voice every neurotic forecast, Aldo got rid of their cat in fear of toxoplasmosis, refused Stella single sips of wine, and forced her to consume vitamins to prevent spina bifida. They had sex for the last time five months in, when a little pool of blood sent them rushing in a hateful panic to the emergency room. Without the home remedy of sex, things grew unbearably tense, exacerbated by Stella’s inability to finish a single song; either it needed a bridge or had lyrical holes she couldn’t fill, or she wrote out of her vocal range, or she kept vacillating between keys. “My career’s going nowhere and it’s about to be put on hold!” she fretted. Then there was the additional problem of live performance. On stage, Stella wore a maternity dress and held the guitar to the left of her belly, which made it hard to play. She sounded weird anyway; her diaphragm space was taken up by the baby so she had to bring everything down an octave; hormones thickened her vocal cords and her voice was hoarser than usual. Her feet were swelling and frequent bathroom trips interrupted the set. Aldo was unhelpful. “Loud prolonged sounds contribute to prematurity and low birth weight. Is that what you really want?”
Stella, already stressing about her future, chose now to stand in the street, dripping with Southern Comfort, and let out a torrent of abuse, accusing Aldo of only worrying about realizing his stupid ideas and working on his failed businesses and never being truly supportive of her music or doing anything serious to help her.
• • •
Inside Leila’s apartment, the air bore a heavy odor of vintage colognes. Her friends—all members of the generation that took your arm with the force of a grappling hook—were there to lend moral
support and face-stuff vegetable samosas and catch each other up on the progression of various ailments and upcoming funerals. It felt like, in other words, the premature wake of someone planning to die overseas.
I spent the best part of an hour trying not to inhale a yeasty stench and listening to what a son of a bitch that Aldo is. Every now and then I looked at the window to see the street procession peering in. A couple of schoolgirls with knee-high socks. Faces that resembled two a.m. mug shots. Why would anyone fight to stay here? That Leila was going to be removed from this overheated apartment with its permanent shadows and peeping eyes didn’t seem like a tragedy.
Leila was standing by the bookshelf, holding a handbag in her own home. She wore heavy eyeliner and clownish red lipstick, and a burgundy dye stained her forehead like a watermark. She had gotten unbelievably old. Disconcerting folds of skin gloved her trembling bird-like hands. When she saw me she put her arms out and held them aloft. I weaved my way through a Hawaiian-shirted corridor of elderly guts and stepped into the embrace. Her dress seemed made from rough army-blanket material.
“Jesus Christ, this is so sad,” I said.
I was still scratching from the hug when I turned to see a priest with white hair and rheumy eyes staring at me. She introduced him as Father Charlie. He gave me a crawly feeling that may or may not have been his personal fault.
“Where’s that son of a bitch?”
“He’ll be here,” I said, wondering how long this bad-humored afternoon would last. It drizzled briefly and I could hear the cars on the wet streets. I had the strange idea that someone was going to suggest we all commit suicide together.
Around three there was a timorous knock on the door, and Aldo walked in with Stella waddling behind. He crossed the room to face his mother. “Where did you dig up these old fossils? Luckily I’ve brought my defibrillator. I’ll start with this side of the room and work my way across.”
Leila’s laughter rang over the gray voices. She loved him. It was an airtight love. He felt forgiven. He hadn’t meant to ruin her retirement.
Her friends gathered around and Aldo listened patiently to their wheezing admonishments and foamy critiques. Two plump women spun competing visions of Henry rolling over in his grave. An arthritic uncle misjudged the distance and finger-wagged him in the eye. I took a couple of steps backward, out of the blast radius. There was something gladiatorial about it. This was pure Aldo.
In his defense, he and Stella had made up a room in their house but Leila had refused it point-blank, not wanting to intrude. She wasn’t comfortable staying with friends either and so she was going to a retirement home. Her packed bags, I now noticed, were in an unsteady melodramatic stack by the door. This was pure Leila.
There was a hard knock and forty guests made forty petrified smiles. The sheriff was rattling the door handle, calling Leila’s name. “Mrs. Benjamin? Mrs. Benjamin. This is happening. This is happening today.”
Aldo stood on one of the chairs. “Thank you, on behalf of my mother and me, for coming here today. There has been some unseasonable weather in my luck.” He made a pointless gesture with his hands and laughed abruptly, like a serial killer trying not to sound diabolical to an indecisive hitchhiker. Two garbage men and the youths from the shelter next door joined the sheriff at the window and peered in, their shadows blocking the sun. Aldo said, “It’s sad that Leila is losing her home. You all have homes; you know the value of a home. And in those homes, come to think of it, ladies and gentlemen, you probably have one room you never go into, just an empty space. Maybe it was a child’s bedroom who moved out; maybe it’s a den or study you don’t really need anymore.”
Oh no, I thought. He isn’t.
“That space is worthless to you, but did you know that it may have value to others?”
Was Aldo going to pitch?
“There are people, obsessive-compulsive hoarders, who cannot help but accumulate possessions to the detriment of their very health and safety and who need, desperately need space, your valuable space. And all I ask of you, to help our lovely Leila in her hour of need, is the use of your spare rooms at absolutely no inconvenience to you, and with a small investment of a thousand dollars apiece, I can guarantee—”
“Get out of here,” Leila said loudly. She stood hands on hips with an erect bearing that looked to be taking a physical toll.
Sad amazement grew on Aldo’s face as he gauged the sincerity of her demand. He stepped down from the chair and bowed theatrically, slung his jacket over his shoulder, and went to the door. As he pushed passed the irritated sheriff, he glanced back around. I expected to see a sneaky smile but he looked so incredibly forlorn and serious, I wanted to press him like a dried flower between the pages of a book.
• • •
Two hours after Aldo had moved a terrified Leila into a neat brick retirement home nestled in bushland—he waved a teary good-bye to her at “medication cocktail hour”—he found himself at Paddington Markets contemplating a drifty-eyed clairvoyant at a tiny table, tarot cards fanned out in front of her. Aldo thought: Why not? Doctors tell us about our bodies, art about our souls, religion about our fears, but it’s masseuses, prostitutes, psychologists, and fortune-tellers who join us at the extreme limits of our narcissism, and while we are desperate to be diagnosed yet don’t want to be classified, and we don’t want to feel bullied by hope, and while, sure, it makes no real sense to invest my mental well-being in a woman I recognize as having once worked for a short time making keys in the hardware store, I do need to know certain things: such as will I turn out to be like my neighbor, a ninety-eight-year-old misery of a human being still waiting for his formative years? I’m relatively young, and society admires that in a person, but how the hell am I going to break my mother out of that dreadful home and pay for a wife and child when I’m so irredeemably in debt? Aldo blurted out his fears and watched the clairvoyant stretch her plump fingers over the cards. “Your child will live to be a hundred,” she said. Aldo found himself overwhelmed by an eagerness to change the subject. “Only a hundred? In this day and age?” he said, and then heard himself make a strange and totally random proposition, offering to pay the fortune-teller double to read her own palms while he watched.
She accepted, as if it were a classic, time-honored request.
A rosy future taken care of by her son. That was it. That was all she predicted for herself. “A good boy, always does right by his old mother,” she said. It was physically irritating. Her whole future was predicated on the whim of her stupid son, who, it seemed to Aldo, was capriciously tormenting her. She said, “He’s in there,” gesturing to the inside of the shop. “You’re the same age, you should meet him.”
“Because we’re the same age?”
“Jeremy!”
“Please don’t call your son.”
“Jeremy!”
That’s when Aldo heard a voice shout, “Is that a fat version of Aldo Benjamin?” and a balding man who was indeed his own age strode over, adjusting his pants. Her son, it turned out, was an old sort-of enemy from high school. “Jeremy, there’s only so much that deodorant can do for you on its own, you have to bathe eventually,” Aldo said as they shook hands. They quickly began the old game of staring at each other’s foreheads. Jeremy asked, “Are you going to the reunion?” Aldo said, “What reunion?” Jeremy said, “The twenty-year high school reunion.” Aldo said, “That’s in eleven years.” Jeremy said, “Yeah, I’m not sure either, I’ll see how I go.” And Aldo said, “Isn’t the ten-year one first?” And Jeremy smiled acidly and asked if Aldo had heard that Stan Maxwell had thrown his two-year-old daughter off a bridge in a murder-suicide that went wrong. “No way,” Aldo said, horrified. He tried to square the villainous atrocity with the Stan he remembered, but he could only think of the poor little girl, and the abject terror she must have felt on the way down to her death. Oh, how awful! “But you said it went wrong. How? How did it go wrong?” Aldo asked in a panic. Jeremy was bright with the bad news. “Stan d
idn’t kill himself,” he announced. “Well, that’s no surprise,” Aldo said, “attempted suicides outnumber attempted murders a thousand to one.” Jeremy said, “It’s always the quiet ones, eh?” “Actually,” Aldo recalled, “he was quite chatty.” That was one up for him. Then Jeremy grasped his shoulder and said, “Some of us are getting together to help him out. What about you? Would you be a character witness?”
“I’ll pass.”
“Stan would do it for you.”
“Like fuck he would.”
At that moment, a bus pulled up and a cluster of sixteen-year-old schoolgirls poured out and headed into the chocolate shop next door. Jeremy fell into a charged silence, and then in a quieter voice admitted that he had begun to find the sight of young girls’ arms unbearable. “Unbearable!” he repeated. “Their thin, slender arms!” He sounded genuinely upset and Aldo was so terrified that he might say something further about their arms, he asked, “So what are you doing these days?” Jeremy said, “I organize Wave Rock, a music festival in the desert.”
• • •
What happened next comes to Aldo as in an unpleasant dream—it comes with medical smells and desert winds and hairy faces floating out of darkness, and I will try to tell it like he lives it now, as a memory that waits in the street, engine idling, for whenever Aldo hates himself enough to take it for a spin.
It is two weeks later. Aldo and Stella are on a plane to Perth and then on a bus that barrels down a highway through bright-yellow canola fields and rolling hills of green wheat and salt plains and hours of straight road that stretches out like a long dirt tongue to nothing but nothingness and open sky and gas-station coffee and a flatness of land that is almost comic. Aldo, his head resting on Stella’s shoulder, is thinking about his bargain, in which he agreed to be a character witness for the child-murderer Stan Maxwell if, in exchange, Jeremy would put Stella on the lineup for Wave Rock. He is thinking of the strange unruly silence of the courtroom and the character-witness testimonies amounting to nothing more than silly anecdotes about meaningless acts of banal friendship that seemed grotesque against the backdrop of a murdered daughter; there were genuine recollections of how the accused would grow introspective at story time, often lend lunch money, and—in Aldo’s own contribution—later in high school, would go very far out of his way in the opposite direction to give you a ride home, though, Aldo added, we all did in those days. During his testimony, Stan Maxwell was looking at him stonily, which was equally as unsettling as Stan’s former wife’s hollow-cheeked glare. Stan’s own defense, that he was showing the little girl the water when she wriggled out of his grip and fell, chilled Aldo—he thought of himself as a self-injuring clown with the potential to harm anyone unlucky enough to be left in his care, including his own child. Footage in the state’s arsenal was presented with prosecutorial relish, yet Aldo himself found the evidence inconclusive. A pixieish girl falling off the bridge, but whether Stan threw, shoved, or dropped her accidentally was not clear. Aldo felt frozen in a ghastly fear that he was watching a preview of his own trial.
