by Kate Wisel
“Technically, it’s not usable. It’s not real money,” I explained to Villy as we sat on his front steps watching the morning bus lurch by. “Because it’s a loan and because I’m going to go back.”
“Everything is real, Pilgrim,” Villy said, tapping my forehead. “Do you know what solipsism means?”
He tried to tuck my hair behind my ear, but I blew smoke in his face.
“I’m not in college, so no,” I said, “you asshole.”
“Calling me names, Ray, is just another desperate plea for rules and consequences, of which you have none.”
I obviously didn’t know what solipsism meant or why anyone would use it in an actual argument, but I knew that my loan money was untouchable. Villy could not convince me otherwise. I pictured the discolored triangles of his teeth gleaming insanely as cash blew on the wind past his head. The money I’d left for my mom in the bread box when I was fifteen so the Jeep wouldn’t get repossessed, all that money I’d saved so she could drink piss wine, and now she was truly sick and where was I? That money could be for her if I let myself think about it long enough, which I couldn’t.
“Never mind. You were right. Nothing is real,” he said. “Which is why you’re not going back to school, Ray.” He fingered my dangling handcuff earring, then flicked it.
“What are you talking about?” I said. He sighed as I palmed a tear from my cheek.
I became not allowed to answer the phone. Villy would leave and the phone would ring and I’d pick up.
“I told you not to answer the phone,” Villy would say on the other end.
“Where in the living Christ of hell are you?”
“Meet me at that bar,” he said, wildly out of breath as he promptly hung up.
Let me consult my pride, I’d think, and get back to you.
We fought about the phone and the not-real money and other things, on the cold concrete staircase as we stubbed out cigarettes like we were killing ants and his neighbors tiptoed over us, or at the late-night movie we snuck into, then got kicked out of for starting a screaming match during the previews as the mice darted through the aisles.
“Why do you swear so much, princess?” Villy whispered, the sick smell of butter on his breath.
“Because fuck you!”
One time I swore I saw him stealing shiny blocks of butter from the high-end grocery store he made us go to at least twice a week. He slipped three of them into his messenger bag, just one after the other like he was rescuing kittens. I glared at him while we stood in line, and when he peered into my basket, he raised his voice at me.
“Fuji apples?” he said. The checkout girl with the maroon vest and the name tag that read Mandy peeked up at us.
“I told you. Pink Lady.” When I wouldn’t look at him, he tapped out the syllables on my forehead. “Pink. La-dy,” he repeated. “What are you, demented?”
I waited on the bench by the Coinstar while Villy went to the bathroom, probably to steal toilet paper, when checkout Mandy walked up to me. She had bangs that looked like they’d been blow-dried sometime in the early nineties and then preserved right like that on her forehead.
“Hi,” she said, the bright zits on her jawline looking about as unsanitary as a salad bar. When I didn’t respond, she said, “If you wanna job here or something, I can ask my manager.”
She popped her gum, pink string stuck to her cheek like her tongue exploded exactly where I’d aimed.
“What are you, demented?” I said.
Her bottom lip dropped and started to twitch, which made mine twitch. I kind of wanted to hug her—I hadn’t hugged anyone in a long time. Instead, I stormed off and waited for Villy in the parking lot, even though it was drizzling and the heavy brown bags were starting to tear from the bottom. I did need a job. It wasn’t my idea to spend the last of our money on assorted cheese trays and grape-seed oil.
When we got home, I threw my headphones on and walked out of Villy’s place as he yelled “Prima!” from the window. I crossed the highway where the strip mall sat with the Staples sign half lit. I walked all the way to Southie and sat back on one of those rusted-up swing sets by the beach, kicking my feet into the air. The cold was so hostile it made the clouds look as if their punishment were to hang there and watch.
In my headphones, I had the Schindler’s List theme song blaring on repeat, the one with the trembling violin that sounds like it’s weeping. I felt the bow scrape against my rib cage. My feet pumping and the soaring through the stinging air created the false sensation that I was moving forward. The swings were the one place where time fixed itself. I didn’t want to admit that time had started to feel like a machine, a spaceship going the wrong way. Every moment I was moving back towards being entirely and completely my mother’s.
I got dizzy and kicked to a stop. Also, a kid with a puffy jacket and snot running down his gleaming upper lip had been standing there pouting at me for more than fifteen minutes. Swing sets need more swings. I walked dumbly home to Villy’s, amazed and numb by my own capacity for so much sadness. Behind the bars, by the dumpsters, I mistook a rat for a squirrel and didn’t flinch. I was floating, trying not to think more about how the heart’s a muscle like any other, one that memorizes its contractions.
Towards the very end, I started to see how strangers saw Villy—and this made me want to die in place of someone else. Instead, I hid myself in his coat just to leap out and startle them. Like the captain of the duck tour when Villy strode down the aisle and said, “Excuse me! Captain!” like we’d ordered a car service. “Captain, care to deliver us to Copley Center?”
“Read the map, chief.”
Villy whipped the hair from his eyes as we tipped back, the driver making a wide, purposeful turn through the dark water. A lady looked up at me from her pamphlet, her lips pursed into the unmistakable shape of an asshole. Instead of asking what she was looking at, I waved my arm at the driver, then pointed at Villy and said, “Is your presupposition, chief, that this man is literate?”
I saw it, and I didn’t. Villy made me tea and swirled it with a stick of honey. He came to where I faced the wall, curled up in his bed. The ceiling fan whirred as I pictured myself hanging from it. Villy and I were strangers who had collided with each other on the sidewalk, hard, and I was too tired to get up and walk away.
He slid me to him. He whispered, “Never, never, never leave me, Booger,” turning my chin like a photographer angling my cheek to the correct light. I half smiled, the hook. He asked me to go get the mail downstairs, but not if it was bills. I did it, and I noticed the paper slips piling up outside his front door like pizza coupons. I knew he hadn’t been paying rent. There were shades of stupidity that could be attractive to a girl like me. This wasn’t one of them. That same day my mom called as I sat on the edge of the tub fully clothed with the door locked.
“Frankie,” my mom said. I could barely hear her. Her voice was different for being exactly the same. “I need you to do something for me.”
I reached back to turn up the water so I couldn’t hear her, but she wouldn’t shut up. I blamed the Dilaudid for slurring her speech, but I was sick of her calling me during blackouts. Demanding I fix things in a voice that was as empty as the tire on the Jeep when she crashed into the fence of a golf course.
What my mother said drunk, on a loop that hurt every time, were clear answers to questions I preferred to keep foggy.
“I hate my life!” she had cried as I pictured the Jeep steaming beside her. “My life is garbage.”
Or when I came home late and she propped herself up to say, her pants wet with piss, “You are the last person I want to see.”
“You are an embarrassment,” I said. I hung up, a habit I can barely talk about.
I kept seeing Villy long after I left his apartment on a Tuesday, my toothbrush, bra, and deodorant tied in a plastic CVS bag. I waited stone-faced by the bus stop while Villy hung his head out the third-floor window and sang “Helpless” as he flicked a cigarette from a pack
of American Spirits I’d left on the counter.
I slightly broke my composure and screamed, “Shut the hell up, you mother-fucking fuck!”
“And in my mind, I still need a place to go, all my changes were there,” he crooned. I hurled my plastic bag up to the window, but it made a low arc, then dropped at my feet.
“Where are my oysters?” I screamed.
My cheeks were burnt with tears, but the one I was screaming at was myself. I’d caved. I’d taken out the rest of my school savings, the not-real money now really real, and paid two months’ worth of Villy’s rent. I felt like a kid who was being kept inside during summer vacation, which in a way I was. It was June and unusually hot, and everyone had their windows thrown open, which made Villy’s strangely on-key serenade all the more humiliating.
In July, the week my mom died, I stayed with Villy for the actual last time. This I can tell you because it’s all I remember: he took me to the Mobil station across the street, the farthest I could walk. I asked him to hide me in the long coat he wore despite the heat, and he did. We walked the aisles in stumbling stride, me shoeless in Villy’s coat with my tiptoes on his dress shoes. He kept me wrapped up as he picked out Hostess cupcakes and ghost-shaped mac and cheese, along with twenty dollars’ worth of Tylenol PM. We ate the cupcakes on the curb and I cried.
“It’s too hot out,” I said, my nose running.
The electricity had been shut off at Villy’s. He said I was starting to depress him, so we both took three PMs as we walked the dark, lonely streets, as many stars in the sky as we had cigarettes left. Villy didn’t care where we went, but I did. I led the sleepiest way as if we were crossing a time zone. Some movie where the plane flies over the ocean. The cabin is dark. Passengers’ heads are slumped on strangers’ shoulders, and it’s impossible to tell if that is peace or the moment before the crash. At the swing set, the Atlantic rumbled a meshy white. Villy stood behind me with his fingers over mine on the chains. A plastic bag was caught in a tree branch, rippling and translucent. I kicked like I wanted to leave the world, because at the time I thought I could.
The other day I got a call from a telemarketer while I was unscrewing a lightbulb. I stayed on the line for forty-five minutes.
“As you may or may not know, Walker Oil is one of the best-known oil companies in Massachusetts, with a reputation for high-quality oil, excellent maintenance service, and timely delivery. Mrs. Adams, could you tell me if you use oil, gas, or electric heat at your home?”
I stepped down from the ladder. “We use oil,” I said.
Outside the kitchen window, fresh snow, the swing set’s slide a white tongue.
“Fantastic! While oil burners are fuel-efficient workhorses, they do need regular maintenance. Tell me, Ray, have you had your burner inspected in the past six months?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”
My daughter was watching something she shouldn’t have been and laughed sadistically in the other room. I swung open the fridge to sober myself. Inside, a half-eaten PB&J sandwich.
“I would like one of our service people to stop by so that you can take advantage of our free inspection.”
“To take advantage?” I said, my mind as white as the snow on the slide.
“Precisely,” he said.
Earlier, chewing on that crust, my daughter had answered, “Good, not great,” when I asked her how it tasted. It could not have occurred to her that an answer like that would hurt me.
“You could’ve just lied,” I said, kneeling to look into her eyes, my grip making an impression around her wrists. “Say it was great.”
RAFFA
BENNY’S BED
THE BUS DROPS ME on the sidewalk, which is full of veined leaves and crumpled receipts and soy sauce wrappers that scatter as if hurt when I kick them. It’s the last day of school and I’m on my way home to lie to Rima’s face for the five hundredth time. She is curled into the couch, Caramel flickering a lover’s spat on mute. I tear off paper for a list, break the sharp tip of the pencil’s lead, then look up to see Rima asleep. Her shallow breath is one with the fan. I put the list on her cheek, sweat blotting into pinpricks, but the wind takes it when the fan turns its head.
I click off the TV and pull the shades so it’s dim. I wonder if everything was quiet when Benny was found slumped against the wall in a Laundromat bathroom. If I had been there, would I have run out the glass door into traffic, or would I have held Benny, wrapped my whole self around him in the bathroom, while the pink soap drizzled on the rim of the sink? Benny nodding out against the tile, his eyes rimmed old-wallpaper yellow. I think the laundry was spinning and chugging in each unbreakable machine when they found him, swishing wet colors that hurled against the glass when he died.
I wake up, sweat-soaked and stinking. We live in a one-bedroom, and Rima and I sleep butt-to-butt on a queen-sized mattress, our arms hanging off the edge. When I was little, she held me. I had nightmares that her arm was the arm of another. The arm of another coming to take me. I’d wake up gasping. I don’t know when Rima stopped holding me at night.
I sit on the toilet seat with my hair clipped, cool water dripping behind my ears. I find Rima’s cigarettes on top of the mirror, heavy with the lighter in the pack, then pull up the window to lean my elbows against the insect-littered sill. After I flush the butt, I hear Rima downstairs, plunking dishes into the sink. I pull on a tank top, the elastic frayed at the armpit.
“Yallah,” she says, setting a glistening pan of baklava down to cool on the counter. I bite my nail, craving another cigarette. “Raffa!” she says, wiping the same spot on the counter in circles as if she’ll get a wish.
“What?” I say, leaning against the doorway. She throws up her arms.
“What’s this what?” she says. The corner of her lip twists where the mole beneath her nostril gives her dark eyes a crazed sparkle. She turns back and laughs into the counter, shaking her head. The sunlight from the window hits a strand of copper that sweeps through her still-healthy hair but she keeps it tied back in a scrunchie.
“So stupid,” she says to herself.
“What’s stupid?” I say.
She wrings a rag over the sink, quick and hard, the way she used to swipe brushes through the spirals of my hair. She squeezes till it’s limp in her grip.
“You,” she says. “You’re what’s stupid. Come help me.”
“I’m going,” I mumble. She turns back with a tiny smile as I hook my thumbs onto the straps of my backpack. She lifts herself on tiptoes to level with my eyes. The bright scars of her pupils readjust like cameras snapping for evidence. I think of her sitting puzzled at the dining room table, the way she used to stare at the Arabic-to-English dictionary, breaking pencils.
“Where you going? Huh?” she says, stepping back down. What could she know—nothing or everything? I blink. “Huh?” Rima says.
“I told you! Serena’s.” And like that, I’m out the door.
This is what freedom is. Each crumbling block between my apartment and Benny’s house. The blue dumpsters behind our old elementary school. The woods in the arboretum, light spotting the ground, dazzling my arm. And up the giant rock, the size of a mansion, you can climb into the light where broken glass glitters off the top like a beach.
Benny hung out between the trees, down by the rock in eighth grade, the year we became friends. I used to hike up the rock and trample down to get home, where I knew Rima would be waiting for me with her head out the bathroom window, batting smoke from the air. Down through the branches, I’d seen Benny with his hood up over his eyes. Mickey had his back turned, spray-painting an outline of Marilyn Monroe midwink, flattened on the side of the rock. Benny tilted his chin up towards me.
“Hey!” he shouted, his hands punched into his pockets. Twigs broke under his stride. “Hey, you,” he yelled, his face flickering under leaves.
Now the woods are empty as I duck through the twisted opening of the chain-link fence I leave rattling.
Benny’s house is tall and brick. From the thick window of a car, it looks traditional, but if you’re standing outside like me, you can see the front door is boarded up with plywood. Flowers with bent necks, thirsty in the boxes. Benny used to walk me through the side door after we’d been passing a bottle of Svedka back and forth on the swing set in his backyard. He would hold his palms over my shoulders from behind, and I knew he was pushing me to his bedroom, but it felt gentle, like we were floating.
Now I’m walking alone through the overgrown path towards Benny’s backyard, past the rotting fence and the aluminum swing set and the piled-up bricks. I keep my hand on the knob while a full minute passes. It’s unlocked. The kitchen is covered in blue carpeting and outdated appliances with knobs like old airplanes. Through the hall, like a portrait, Benny’s mom is sitting in the living room on the recliner. Her hair is black and matted against the shades. She’s watching an old episode of Friends. Relief passes through me like a slow sip of beer.
The first time I came over, it was my fourteenth birthday and Benny led me by the wrist past his mother passed out on the recliner and up the stairs to the attic. He never said anything about her. One day we were naked under his sheets except for the pair of orange polka-dot underwear I kept on, feeling like a Creamsicle, half to stay cool and half to tease Benny, who once said girls were sexier with their underwear on. We were having a staring contest. I was watching the yellow in Benny’s iris blur to green as a tear slipped down my cheek.
I blinked twice and blurted, “Is there something wrong with your mom? I mean, why doesn’t she say hello?”
“Who, Woman?” he said with a grin. “She’s on lots of meds ’cause she’s a fuckin’ nutcase. Don’t worry about her, though. Or me.”
Benny pinched my chin as I pulled apart a split end. He didn’t squirm. He was the only guy I knew with a beard, but the gap between his teeth turned him back into a kid. He floated his palm on the small of my back. A line, straight as the pills he snorted, charged up my belly button.
