It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  “I’m going to Vassar,” she said to him the spring of their senior year, and he didn’t know what she meant. After a moment she added, “It’s a college in upstate New York.”

  “That’s great,” he said. “I hope it’s a really good college, you’re awfully smart, Dorie.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Yeah, it’s a good college.”

  He could never remember the last time they spoke. He did remember that during the graduation ceremony, when her name was called, there had been some catcalls, whistles, things of that sort. He was married within a year, and he never saw Dorie again. But he remembered where he was—right outside the main grocery store here in town—when he found out that she had finished Vassar and then killed herself. It was Trish Tucker who told him, a girl they had been in school with, and when Denny said, “Why?” Trish had looked at the ground and then she said, “Denny, you guys were friendly, so I don’t know if you knew. But there was sexual abuse in her house.”

  “What do you mean?” Denny asked, and he asked because his mind was having trouble understanding this.

  “Her father,” said Trish. And she stood with him for a few moments while he took this in. She looked at him kindly, and said, “I’m sorry, Denny.” He always remembered that too, Trish’s look of kindness as she told him this.

  So that was the story of Dorie Prescott.

  • • •

  Denny headed back to his house; he went up Main Street. Over him came a sudden sense of uneasiness, as though he was not safe; and in fact the town had changed so much over these last years that people no longer strolled around at night as he was doing. But he had not thought of Dorie for quite a while; he used to think of her a great deal. Above him the moon shone down; its brightness continued, as though the memory of Dorie—or Dorie herself—had made it so. “I bet your house isn’t quiet,” she had said.

  And suddenly it came to Denny: his house was quiet now. It had been getting quieter for years. After the kids got married, moved away, then gradually his house became quiet. Marie, who had worked as an Ed Tech at the local school, had retired a few years ago, and she no longer had as much to say about her days. And then he had retired from the store, and he didn’t have that much to say either.

  Denny walked along, passing the benches that were near the bandstand. A few leaves scuttled in front of him in the harsh breeze. Where his mind went he could not have said, nor how long he had walked. But he suddenly saw ahead of him a heavy man bent over the back of a bench. Almost, Denny turned around. But the large body was just draped over the back of the bench—such an unusual thing—and appeared not to be moving. Slowly Denny approached. He cleared his throat loudly. The fellow did not move. “Hello?” Denny said. The man’s jeans were slightly tugged down by the way he was hanging over the bench, and in the moonlight Denny could see just the beginning of the crack of his ass. The fellow’s hands were in front, as though pressed down on the seat of the bench. “Hello?” Denny said this much more loudly, and still there was no response. He could see the fellow’s hair, longish, pale brown, draped across his cheek. Denny reached and touched the man’s arm, and the man moaned.

  Stepping back, Denny brought out his phone and called 911. He told the woman who answered where he was and what he was looking at, and the dispatcher said, “We’ll have someone right there, sir. Stay on the line with me.” He could hear her speaking—into another phone?—and he could hear static and clicks and he waited. “Okay, sir. Do you know if the man is alive?”

  “He moaned,” Denny said.

  “Okay, sir.”

  And then very shortly—it seemed to Denny—a police car with its blue lights flashing drove right up, and two cops got out of the car. They were calm, Denny noticed, and they spoke to him briefly, and then went to the man who was draped across the back of the bench. “Drugs,” said one of the policemen, and the other said, “Oh yeah.”

  One of the policemen reached into his pocket and brought out a syringe, and in a flash—it seemed to Denny—the policeman injected the man, in his arm, in the crook of his elbow, and very soon the man stood up. He looked around. It was the Woodcock boy.

  Denny would not have recognized him, except that his eyes, deep-set on a handsome face, looked at Denny and said, “Hey, hi.” Then his eyes rolled up for a moment, and the policemen had the fellow sit down on the bench. He was not a boy any longer—he was a middle-aged man, and yet Denny could think of him only as a kid in his daughter’s class years ago. How had he turned into this person? Large—fat—with his longish hair and all doped up? Denny stayed where he was, looking at the back of the fellow’s head, and then an ambulance drove up, siren screaming and lights flashing, and within moments, two EMT men jumped out, and spoke to the policemen, one of the policemen saying, Yes, he had injected him with naloxone right away. The two EMT men took the Woodcock boy’s arms and walked him into the ambulance; the door shut.

  As the ambulance drove away, one of the policemen said to Denny, “Well, you saved a life tonight,” and the other policeman said, getting into the car, “For now.”

  Denny walked home quickly, and he thought: it was not his children at all. This seemed to come to him clearly. His children had been safe in their childhood home, not like poor Dorie. His children were not on drugs. It was himself about which something was wrong. He had been saddened by the waning of his life, and yet it was not over.

  Hurriedly he went up the steps to his house, tossing his coat off, and in the bedroom Marie was awake, reading. Her face brightened when she saw him. She put her book down on the bed, and waved her hand at him. “Hi there,” she said.

  ELIZABETH STROUT is the author of six books of fiction, most recently Anything Is Possible and My Name Is Lucy Barton, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Her other books include The Burgess Boys, Abide With Me, and Amy and Isabelle, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and also won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2009 her book Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between New York City and Maine.

  PAUL THEROUX

  * * *

  Stop & Shop

  “Follow me, kid,” Ray Mammola said, pushing through the basement door, untying his long white apron with one hand and using the broken nail of his dirty thumb to slide an inch of blade out of his box cutter. “You tell anyone where I am and I’ll use this on you.” His low, snarly voice was worse than a shout. “Think I don’t know how? Ask anyone. I was in Korea. I seen action.”

  He slipped his apron over his head and heaved a wide carton labeled BATHROOM TISSUE from a stack, placing it end to end with another carton the same size, all the while swinging the box cutter and talking, his voice seeming to come out of his big broken nose.

  “Them crates behind me—it’s all jerkins in jars, so heads up when you stack them on the deck.”

  His back was turned to me, and now with wicked swipes of his knife he began slicing off the top of one of the wide cartons, in a sequence of thrusts, each like a beheading, zipping off, first the long side, then the ends, leaning and slashing the cardboard until he’d freed it, lifting it open like a lid. His recklessness excited me, but I was thinking, Jerkins?

  “You were supposed to do this yesterday.”

  “I had soccer practice.”

  For the first time he turned around to face me, still holding his box cutter.

  “You any good?”

  “No.”

  He laughed, not in a mocking way, but a surprised appreciative laugh. My answer surprised me, too.

  “All this stuff needs to be priced. You got your stamp?”

  “Right here.” I tugged open the roomy front pocket of my apron and showed him the upright chrome contraption, with numbers on adjustable wheels that printed the price on the jar cap or box top in purple ink.

  “Twenty-nine cents each,” he said, turning away and starting on the second carton, knifing the top open with what seemed savagery calculated to intimidate me. But his efficiency with th
e box cutter thrilled me. “After that, there’s more cases for the pickle aisle, them quart jars of kosher dills and the sweet ones, them bread and butters. Start loading the dolly.” Still running the blade through the top edge of the cardboard carton he said, “By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Andy Parent.”

  “You a Canuck?”

  “I’m an American.”

  “Okay.” He leaned over the open carton and began to claw out rolls of toilet paper, creating a long trough through the middle in each carton and then cutting a section of cardboard where the boxes met. Concentrating on this he didn’t say anything more, and now he was digging out loose toilet rolls, putting some on the basement floor and rearranging others in the end-to-end cartons.

  “And the jars of mustard,” he said. “Same aisle. Price them, stack them on the dolly. Stock all them shelves, and look alive.”

  I tried not to look shocked as he climbed into the bed-like trough he’d made in the two cartons of toilet paper. He knelt and then lay down and sank into the softness, yawning, extending his legs, folding his arms across his chest like a corpse in a coffin, still holding his box cutter in his fist.

  “Remember what I said, Andy.” He wagged the box cutter at me, then closed his eyes and seemed to gargle luxuriously and go to sleep.

  Upstairs, I was stocking the shelves in the pickle aisle, when Mr. Crotty the store manager approached me, looking fussed, pinch-faced, his thin cheeks glowing with exertion. His blue smock was a sign of his seniority, his name KEVIN CROTTY embroidered on the pocket.

  “There’s a black kid up front by the registers looking for you, Andrew. Keep it short.” Saying shawt in the blunt Boston way was his being fierce. “This is a supermarket, not a social club.”

  I slipped the crate of gherkins that I’d held jammed between my chest and the shelf, and eased it to the floor.

  “And where’s Ray Mammola?”

  “I haven’t seen him.”

  “You sure?” He peered at me, the eyes and teeth of a small nibbling animal. His confident authority made me evasive and I found it easy to lie.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He glared at me and in my lie I felt older, like a conspirator, an outlaw, doing whatever I wanted.

  Roy Junkins was waiting behind one of the registers. He looked uncomfortable among the shoppers, dancing from one foot to the other as though controlling a soccer ball. He widened his eyes and said, “Coach Umlah sent me. I’m supposed to tell you we got an extra practice tomorrow for the Governor Dummer game.”

  “That’s not for two weeks. Anyway, I’ll be on the bench.”

  “Everyone plays. He’ll put you in.”

  “For five seconds. Third string. First string wins the game. Roy, come on.”

  “We’re unbeaten!”

  “No thanks to me. Anyway I might have to work. I got promoted.”

  With a note of sorrow in his pleading voice, he said, “It’s a team, Andre.”

  A blue figure twitched at the far end of the aisle, Mr. Crotty glaring at me. “Cheezit, Roy, I can’t talk. Okay, I’ll see you at practice on Monday.”

  That I got promoted was not an exaggeration. I had started in the summer rounding up shopping carts in the parking lot and hating it, especially on rainy days. I still attended soccer practice regularly and was on the verge of quitting the Stop & Shop when a new boy, Felix Perez, was hired and I was moved inside, bagging groceries, while Felix did the shopping carts. A month of that—and soccer games at Newton High and Phillips Academy—and the grouchiness of customers saying “Careful with my eggs” and “Don’t put the Ajax in with my chicken.” I was a servant, at a buck an hour, and ready to quit when I was moved again to help Ray Mammola, stocking shelves, and Felix was promoted to bagging.

  Lying about Ray should have made me feel bad—Umlah the soccer coach had an honesty policy (“Hands up if you fouled someone”); but lying to Crotty had the opposite effect. It made me smile inside; it suggested that Ray trusted me. Roy Junkins was my friend, and he believed in the team, but he was a starter, and starters were gung ho. I was not gung ho about anything, not even the Stop & Shop.

  I had just raised the crate of gherkins to my chest again—the technique was to use both hands—when Mr. Crotty approached me again.

  “I don’t want Your friends coming around. Understood?”

  I wondered if he was saying that because Roy was black, but I said, “Yes, sir.”

  “And what about Ray?”

  “I still haven’t seen him.” It now gave me pleasure to defy him.

  “He was supposed to tell you to take a break. You can go at four.” It was another fierce Boston pronunciation, foh-wah. “I want you back here in twenty minutes.” He hesitated, then said, “Another thing, Andrew. Mr. Hackler the area supervisor is making a surprise inspection.”

  “When would that be, sir?”

  “Did you hear me? A surprise inspection. We don’t know. That’s why it’s called a surprise.”

  “Right. I see what you mean.”

  “Everyone on their toes, like a fire drill.” And he walked away, narrow shoulders, narrow head, blue floppy smock. Fy-ah drill.

  • • •

  The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, of which I was a fifteen-year-old card-carrying member, specified that we workers were to be given a twenty-minute break for every three hours on the job. The break room was in the back, next to the employee toilets. On my way through the stockroom I stole a jelly donut out of a box, and a carton of chocolate milk out of the dairy case. The break room was clouded with cigarette smoke and chatter, three men at the card table, Omar from produce, Vinny the head of the deli section, and Sal the butcher talking together. Sal’s bloodstained apron over his knees gave him a kind of brutal majesty. Felix sat eating something from a paper plate he held close to his face.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” Sal asked Felix.

  Still eating, Felix said, “My mother tamale.”

  “I want a taste of your mother’s tamale,” Sal said, and the others laughed, though Felix went on eating.

  “Where’s Ray?” Vinny said. When I stammered he said, “You can tell us! Never mind—we know he’s sleeping.”

  “Right,” I said, and saying that made me feel conspiratorial again.

  “We need a fourth here—you’ll do,” Vinny said to me, and began to deal cards for whist, the usual break-time game. As he snapped the cards down he pointed to my jelly donut and said, “If you’d eat that you’d eat anything.”

  We played whist quickly, gathering and piling tricks. We were in the middle of one hand, when Ray flung the door open, yawning. He took the cards from me, tapped my shoulder. I got up and gave him my chair.

  “Did he ask?”

  “Two times.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What you told me,” I said. “And there’s going to be a surprise inspection from Mr. Hackler.”

  “Hitler,” Ray said. “The mystery man.”

  “I’ll give him a hit on the head,” Vinny said.

  Sal said, “Ray was in the service. He never leaves his buddies behind.” He nudged Felix, “Get it?” Then he said to Ray, “That’s his mother’s tamale he’s eating.”

  Staring at his cards, Ray said, “Who dealt this mess?”

  • • •

  Soccer practice the following Monday started with a prayer, and then Mr. Umlah, the coach, read from his clipboard the order we’d be playing. I was third string, so I sat on the bench, between Fesjian and Brodie, waiting for my turn. Coach Umlah came over and sat heavily next to me, bumping my shoulder as a rough companionable greeting.

  “Missed you on Saturday, Andrew.”

  “I had to work.”

  “Work is a good character builder, but so is teamwork. The Governor Dummer game is coming up. We have a good chance to stay unbeaten.”

  Roy Junkins had drifted over and heard what the coach had said. “We’ll win, no sweat.”

/>   “We’ll win if we work together as a team,” the coach said in a reprimanding voice.

  “Bunch of percies,” Roy said.

  “I don’t want to hear that word,” Coach Umlah said.

  The belief at our public high school was that only wealthy, overdressed, fairly stupid boys went to private school, their parents buying them an education; and poorer, tougher, more athletic, highly motivated boys attended public schools. I was a junior, a wing on the soccer team, skinny and not particularly strong, but fast enough and accurate when I had an opening in the box, which was seldom. Because so few high schools had soccer teams, we played the Tufts freshmen and the Harvard freshmen and the prep schools, and we had not lost a game.

  “This is a team,” the coach said at the end of the Monday practice. “Everyone plays. No heroes, no glory boys.”

  But I knew that when the game was on the line only the first string mattered, and the scorer would be a hero, and it wouldn’t be me. Still, I ran, I kicked, I headed the ball, Coach Umlah praised me, and afterward we went to Brigham’s for ice cream.

  We crowded into a booth and talked, the usual hot whispers about the names for different parts of girls’ bodies. I glanced at the soda jerk, Joe Slubsky, digging his scoop into the tubs of ice cream; his apron, his high-crowned paper hat, saying nothing. His English was poor, his face was averted, but he was listening and I knew what he was thinking. We were sweaty, and dirty from practice, and monkey-like, talking about what girls looked like naked, and he half envied us and half hated us.

  • • •

  School, and more soccer practice the rest of the week, Friday evening at the Stop & Shop; Friday night at my grandmother’s house because her home was walking distance from the store—I got out of work too late to take the bus home. Sunday church, Monday school and more soccer, then the weekend, Stop & Shop.