The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

“It’s not like, ‘Yo, my bitch be lookin’ fine, man’?”

  “Not at all. You’re way off.”

  “I guess ya can’t fool a fool. Are all your boyfriends so smart?”

  “You have other boyfriends, Gloria?”

  “See, I think women totally blow men out of the water when it comes to who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.”

  “What are you saying!” Gloria exclaimed. “You’re going to get me in trouble! Corey, she’s silly! She’s getting me in trouble!” She held the toddler by his arms. She looked up at Joan and used his hands to wave at her.

  Corey was wearing faded cotton pajamas with a rubberized image of Spider Man on the chest, which was peeling like a fresco of an early Christian saint on a temple wall in Italy—exploding out of the halo circle of his landing site in rings of red and white.

  “Blowing people out of the water at lying—that’s what I’d call a dubious distinction,” Leonard said.

  He must have wanted to be invited into Gloria’s room that night. From where he sat, he could see down the open throat of her shirt to her breasts as she played with her son, catching him, lifting him, so the boy could run in place. But Leonard was disappointed; Gloria didn’t invite him in.

  After Leonard had left and Corey had been put to bed, Joan, still in her kimono, invited Gloria into her room to listen to a rock song on her Walkman. She put the headphones on Gloria’s head and pushed Play and watched her eyes.

  Gloria soon found she had a friend in Joan, someone in whom she could confide. In the evenings, they made dinner together and learned each other’s histories, lying side by side on the carpet, flipping through Joan’s notebook of pencil drawings and song lyrics: an unabashed nude self-portrait showing Joan’s small-breasted, short-legged body—she looked Mayan; a poem or song about roses and their thorns.

  “How are you so creative?” Gloria exclaimed.

  The answer lay perhaps in Joan’s interesting life. She hailed from San Francisco. As a girl, she’d run away from home and grown up on the street, sleeping in cars, getting hassled by cops, making all the wrong friends, cutting school and surviving on her own. A girl gang at her all-black Oakland high school had forced her to shoplift. “This bunch of big loud screaming black girls comes charging in the store, getting security all freaked out, and I’m over here shoving these designer jeans inside my bag…They told me what to steal or they would beat me up.”

  She was half Japanese, half Irish-Italian, one thirty-second Portuguese, and one sixteenth Hungarian, however that worked math-wise. Of her Japanese side, she said, “We have a sense of honor.” She had a temper. “I grew up having gutter fights.” She was a tough girl and didn’t feel right unless she was practicing karate. She lived a high-risk life. “I’m a very promiscuous person.” She’d had more than one abortion. “You come in me, I’m pregnant.”

  She had strong tan legs with full calves. Those legs had powered her bicycle up the hills of San Francisco. “Flying down the other side is like a video game, weaving in and out of cars.” The momentum of that breakneck ride had carried her down east. Boston was chump change compared to Oakland—not at all as dangerous. Her first job here had been as a dishwasher in Methuen.

  After hearing Gloria’s story, Joan volunteered to screen Leonard’s calls, to meet him at the door and check with Gloria before she let him in—to be her first line of defense. The next time he stopped by, Joan changed into jeans and sneakers—fighting clothes—and challenged him to chess.

  She wasn’t afraid to open up her heart any more than she was afraid of getting hit by a car. It wasn’t long before she told Gloria, “You’re one of the best people I’ve ever met, a doll.” And she loved Corey. “If I was a boy, I’d be just like him.”

  She bought Corey a birthday present and gave it to Gloria to give to him—a book called How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World. Gloria was moved. She sat with her son, holding the book, looking at the drawings, contemplating each of the pages in turn. At each page, Gloria waited for him to study the picture. The book was about a girl who rode a hot air balloon around the world, gathering the ingredients to bake an apple pie.

  “Why is she a girl? Why isn’t she a boy?”

  “Because girls like to go on adventures too.”

  One night, Joan pulled her into her room and made love to her, and Gloria let her do it. Afterwards, sitting by her side on the velvet couch where Leonard had once sat, Joan put her head—she had coarse black bangs—on Gloria’s shoulder and said “Aww” as if this vulnerable-looking gesture wasn’t to be taken seriously. To Gloria, she said, “I hope I haven’t perverted you.”

  Their romance became the start of a war with Leonard. Joan said he was a creep and fraud and if she had to, to protect Gloria, she would bite his face off.

  For many years, Joan and Gloria had remained close, sometimes intimate, friends. But they’d fought and nearly lost their friendship over the fact that Gloria would not renounce Leonard despite everything Joan insisted he had done to her.

  * * *

  —

  Ironically, Leonard was the one relationship that survived Gloria’s move to Quincy. He still saw her sporadically. As always, there were such long gaps between his visits that Corey kept thinking he was gone for good. Boston lay between the South Shore and the North Shore, his father’s country, the land of Chelsea, East Boston, Malden, and Revere, making it almost possible to forget that Leonard walked the earth. Then, as ever, he’d drop by. His tie to Corey’s mother had stretched and attenuated over the miles and years like a strand of spiderweb, floating invisibly in the atmosphere until it touched the face.

  2

  Entry into the Realm of Reality

  It started in the fall of 2010, a month after Corey’s birthday—his fifteenth birthday, his sophomore year at Quincy High. The sensation was somewhere in Gloria’s body, she couldn’t tell where exactly, somewhere in the flesh between the body and the mind. It felt like an animal coming alive inside her, a spring awakening, but it was out of season.

  Her son was growing. She found a sex site on the laptop’s history that he’d forgotten to delete. She was aware of him masturbating. In his flushing face, she read the waves of embarrassment and anger that she thought belonged to menstruating women alone. His skin was breaking out and he was growing sharp gold whiskers on his upper lip.

  She didn’t know how to describe what she was feeling, it was making such a subtle entrance. She wondered if it was her youth returning. Could this be what she had been waiting for, for this strange power to come to her?

  She took it as a sign to write again. She took out her books and turned on the laptop and started making notes. “There is so much information out there!” she said, wearing her robe and reading glasses. The sun was coming in her windows, a cup of coffee cooling on the table. She was almost forty. She opened a new file and tried to put something on that blank white page.

  Sometime later, she reopened the essay and reread what she had written. It was actually promising! Wow! she thought. Not bad for once! I mean, this was big.

  As always, her subject was everything—all of life. Her beginning ran three pages without a break. As she reread it, she felt it touching one idea and veering off to another, as if she was running through the world naming all the things she wanted to take with her wherever she was going. But go with it! she thought. It had been years since she’d felt this inspired. When she hit her writer’s block, she would write about that too. It was all part of what she was exploring, her fear itself, going down to the root, to the fact that men can impregnate women, fill them full of shame, make them mutilate themselves, make them lie against themselves.

  All of a sudden, all she wanted to do was write. That was when she noticed that the thumb on her left hand had stopped obeying her. There was no pain, just a loss of motor function.

  * * *

 
—

  The winter landed on the Northeast. At Christmas, over wine, she thought sentimentally of calling Joan.

  On New Year’s Day, she woke up to snow covering everything except the ocean, a frightening foam-skinned body with a gray marble interior. Ropes of foam netted over the heaving body, stretching and tightening.

  At her annual checkup, Gloria laughed with her doctor. She’d had trouble opening a jar of peanut butter to make lunch for Corey on New Year’s Day. “My son probably wishes I would cook.”

  She drove through the snow-drifted streets to work, past a tool and die factory, an AutoZone, a Planet Fitness, a moving company. She worked at a private company that had a social service function, helping people who had been in drug programs find work. It was a strange company; for profit. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have a college degree; she could still be what they called a counselor. She didn’t know how the company made money. Probably by applying to the government. The goal seemed to be to sign people up. That was the model, almost like sales. It was one of those things where you didn’t know what you were selling, and the customer didn’t know what they were buying. The pace of work was slow. When she entered a new name in the online system, no one rushed her if she typed slowly due to the mysterious weakness in her fingers. It didn’t seem to matter. But she received a paycheck and insurance.

  Her manager didn’t object when Gloria had to take time off to see a specialist in Brookline. Having noted atrophy in her left hand, the specialist gave her physical therapy to do.

  “Carpal tunnel?” her manager asked, seeing Gloria squeezing a rubber ball.

  “A pinched nerve, supposedly.”

  She took a sabbatical from her essay to read a terrific book by a woman who had started a career as an oceanographer late in life, after a bad first marriage, and who believed that the earth could still be saved.

  In April, the snow melted away but it stayed raw and cold. A bill came in the mail from Aeron Medical Partners, and she was dumbstruck to see she owed $1,200. She called her insurance and complained. She was sure that the Brookline doctor was trying to pull some kind of medical billing scam.

  “It sounds like a made-up name: nerve conductivity test.”

  “It’s not made-up.”

  “Why would they give me that?”

  The customer service rep said she couldn’t speak to the doctor’s medical decisions.

  “Unbelievable,” Gloria said. “You don’t get a break.”

  The spring came and the weather became beautiful.

  * * *

  —

  Midnight on a spring night. Out of the darkness came the rumble of skateboards. A series of long sweeping kicks. Now the wheels were speeding this way, faster and faster, louder and louder, racing downhill. It was Corey coming, steering with his balance, arcing right up to the house, which abutted the seawall. He jumped off, running with the board, kicked it up and caught it, and ran up the steps of his house all in one motion.

  He had another skater with him, a friend from school. They had gone to hear a thrash band—kids their own age—a drummer, a guitarist, a singer with acne. The audience crowded around the band, face-to-face, no stage, no barrier. Everyone was screaming at everyone else and everyone was dressed the same, in black ski hats and white high-tops. Corey had insisted on leaving early. He had a problem with conformity. He called it “the single biggest problem that human beings face.”

  Corey led his friend through his house, past the open door of Gloria’s bedroom, making no effort to be silent despite the hour. He flipped the light on in his room, and it fell on the scarred wood floor outside his door, suggesting the apartment’s empty lack of furniture. His friend sat on the bed holding his skateboard between his knees.

  “This is what I wanted to show you.” Corey handed him The Norfolk Bible of Seafaring. “It’s all here: maps, charts, rigging.”

  Pete looked at the black-and-white pictures of yachtsmen who had soloed around the world.

  “Won’t a boat like this cost a bunch of money?”

  “Not if I build it myself.”

  “Are you going to build a motor?”

  “I’m going to have oars.”

  “What about food?”

  “I’m going to catch fish.”

  “Won’t you get sick of that?”

  “I’ll go hunting when I get to land. I’m going to pick oranges when I get to the equator so I don’t get scurvy. I’ll get my water from the rain.”

  Corey took a rigger’s block and tackle out of his closet. There was some thirty feet of seaweed-y rope running through the pulleys—he had found them on the beach. He hooked one to an eyebolt in his ceiling and the other to his bed frame. Heaving on the rope, he lifted the bed off the floor while Pete was sitting on it. The roof beam creaked, the eyebolt started out of the joist. Pete held on. Together they looked at the flying angle of his bed. Corey let go the rope and the bed dropped like a lowrider at a car show.

  A voice spoke from somewhere outside the room.

  “I think that’s your mom.”

  “Hey, Mom.” Corey said to the dark doorway.

  Across the wall, someone could be heard getting out of bed and shuffling towards them. Corey’s mother came into view. She wore an oriental shirt that came down to her knees and a pair of belly dancer’s pants, and she looked tousled.

  “Hey, kid. Who’s this? Are you Josh?”

  “This is Pete from my grade.”

  “I hope we didn’t wake you.”

  “Oh no. There’re no bedtimes here. I smoked a jay and couldn’t sleep.” She rubbed her face and yawned. “Are you looking at the ship book?”

  “Yeah. Corey was showing me some stuff.”

  “But it’s great, isn’t it? Corey likes to discover things. It’s all about the magic of what’s out there.”

  Pete had to get home. He shook hands with Corey and left. They heard him skate away.

  Gloria asked, “Was it raining?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I must have dreamed it was. I had the most lifelike dream. Can we go see what’s in the fridge? I’ve got the munchies.”

  He followed her to the kitchenette, smelling the pot on her, clinging to her cotton clothes.

  She opened the refrigerator and they stared into it together.

  “I didn’t get groceries. What’s my problem? I’m so stupid.”

  “It’s fine. Look.” They had half a jar of peanut butter and three slices of bread. He took a knife and made a sandwich and gave it to her on a paper towel.

  “For my mom.”

  “Share with me. You’re growing.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m going open-face.”

  “Look at you with the last slice of bread. Jeez, Gloria, time to shop. There was no milk in there, was there?”

  “No. We’ve got water, though.”

  He filled a plastic cup with tap water and sat with her while she chewed.

  She swallowed. “I can get with water.” He watched her.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I didn’t go to work today,” she said. “I spent my day getting stoned. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t write.”

  “You did something: You dreamed.”

  She shook her head.

  “No, really, Mom. You did.”

  “I did manage to read,” she said at length.

  “What did you read?”

  “Germaine. Her masterwork. It’s such an achievement. I think she was thirty when she wrote it.”

  “You’re barely forty, Mom.”

  “I gotta stay positive, right?”

  “Of course you do! Forty’s young! Siddhartha didn’t even begin his quest until he was your age!”

  He walked her back to her bedroom and said goodnight. Tomo
rrow was a new day, they agreed.

  “Come on, Gloria! Get it together!” she told herself as she crawled into her bed and got beneath the covers. He heard her setting her alarm.

  * * *

  —

  A week went by and she stayed positive more or less. On Friday, she was going to see a neurologist who had examined her test results and had the expertise to make a ruling. The morning of her appointment, Corey gave her a Mother’s Day card before he left for school. She put it in her woven purse and took it with her.

  Beth Israel Deaconess was a modern tower built like a space station. She went to the eighth floor. The sun was shining in the waiting room, it was a cloudless blue-skied day, and all around she could see monuments to learning outside the window. Harvard University owned the buildings in the Longwood Medical Area. The very architecture told you what the mind could accomplish with enough discipline.

  Two months had passed since the vernal equinox, the pagan day in March when spring begins and the two halves of the universe, dark and light, are in perfect balance. She contemplated the blue sky and thought about what she’d like to read. She wanted to open her son’s card, but would save it. Her heart was calm and she knew she would feel like writing when she got home.

  The nurse called her, and Gloria followed her to a private room. There was a woman in a red turtleneck waiting in the room, who introduced herself as a social worker. Gloria didn’t understand why she was there, but she said hi and shook her hand. A few minutes later, the doctor hurried in and took a seat and crossed his legs. He opened her file and said, “Okay, we’ve got some things to talk about.” He looked at her intensely and gave his diagnosis.

  It took a while to explain, and she had to ask some questions.

  “Well, that’s a hell of a note,” she said when she had heard his answers.

  The social worker would take over from here. She had a number of resources for her. She wouldn’t let Gloria go. She marched her from floor to floor making appointments.