The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  On the drive home, Gloria didn’t speak.

  “It’s just a bike on four wheels, Mom,” Corey said. “We’ll go anywhere you want.”

  19

  We’re Going to Have a Problem

  He was standing in the parking lot outside the Quincy Center T the Saturday after taking his mother to the doctor. The sky was overcast, he was wearing sweats beneath his parka, a gym towel around his neck, there was a blue knuckle mark under his eye. He was handing out flyers to a cage fight.

  Molly came off the T, carrying a shoulder bag full of textbooks. He hadn’t seen her since her graduation in the spring. She had a gray wool band around her head—like a scarf for the ears. Her coppery hair hung down her back. She wore purple tights that hugged her legs so tightly she looked like a marble statue that had been spray-painted at an auto body shop. They were infused with violet light like an airbrush sunrise. Out of modesty, she had a sweatshirt tied around her waist.

  “Is that you, Corey?”

  “Molly, hey!”

  “What’re you giving away here? Your next rap album?”

  “No, this is for an athletic competition.”

  “ ‘An athletic competition.’ Let me see. ‘The Brawl at the Palladium.’ What is this, backyard wrestling? Oh, it’s ultimate fighting. Is that why you look like a battered wife? Is this what you’re doing?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted.

  “You nut.”

  “How’s college?”

  “It’s a lot of work.” She was home for the weekend and had a paper to write and was going to the café to work on it. Corey asked to walk with her. She went to Gunther Tooties. He followed her inside. She stood in line and bought a coffee. While she was waiting, she checked her phone. He got the impression she didn’t want to talk. He said he had to hand out the rest of his flyers. “Good luck with your paper.” He left.

  An hour later, the door opened and he came in again.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  “No.”

  “Mind if I close my eyes for a minute?”

  “No. You must be tired from getting black eyes.”

  He pulled his towel over his face. With his eyes closed, he could hear her typing. He could feel her when she shifted on the couch.

  “I’m sorry about last year,” he said from beneath the towel. He took the towel away and looked at her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I was stupid, and I’m sorry.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes. Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”

  “What’s your paper about?”

  “Psychology.” It was her major. She had planned to major in small business administration. “My dad used to work for this really small company, like one guy and a van, and they laid him off when the recession hit in 2008. Now, you know my dad: He’s way too proud to go on unemployment.”

  “I never knew he got laid off.”

  “That’s because he didn’t tell anyone. So, we were like, ‘What’s going to happen?’ I thought he should go into business for himself so nobody could lay him off.”

  “Your dad’s my hero.”

  “Every guy says that. I’m like, ‘You’re not living in his shadow.’ ”

  “I’d love to live in his shadow.”

  “Well, he doesn’t talk much.”

  “No, he’s old school.”

  “He has no idea how to talk to me. I used to be mad at him, now I just feel sorry for him.”

  “Do you wish you’d had a mother?”

  “Yeah, of course,” said Molly—and that was all she said about it.

  An hour passed. He’d fallen asleep. He woke up and blinked and saw Molly checking her phone. The laptop was off. The café was about to close. The last of the shiny cards his coach had had printed up at the printer’s lay on the table. Corey asked Molly if she wanted to see a fight. To his surprise, she said yes. She closed her laptop and put her things away and stood up and shook her hair out and refitted the woolen band around her ears. “Let’s go.”

  “You really want to come with me?”

  “Yes, nerd. Get your car.”

  On the drive to Worcester, she described her college as being out in the middle of nowhere. They had genuine farm girls there whose idea of a joke was to pronounce pasteurized “past-your-eyes.” They’d take a glass of milk and swing it by your face. For the first time, Molly had heard the ad for a country dating website, FarmersOnly.com: “City folks just don’t get it.” The campus was surrounded by woods. She ran cross-country through miles of trees. At night, she saw the stars.

  But usually she was too busy to look heavenward. She had to keep her grades up, she had a scholarship, she played two sports, she worked, and UMass was party central. The drinking was on another level. She had broken up with her shot-putter from last year. As she said this, she looked out Corey’s windshield. They were tunneling down the Mass Pike in the darkness. She said she’d met some asshole guys.

  The campus was big and industrial—a concrete factory in the middle of the woods. Soviet-project-sized dorm buildings. A matrix of tiny fluorescent lights in a giant cement slab in the freezing black New England night, one of them her room—hers and the girls she roomed with and the bottle of vodka and the chocolate cake they ate for comfort. Going to the yellow gym to watch squeaky-shoes basketball. Betting online on a website hosted in Costa Rica. Thinking what would they do for spring break if they had no money. Joking about UMass’s isolation. Her best times as always came when she was running for distance and playing soccer—she was a halfback—and she got her instep on that ball.

  “I bet you’d kill someone if you took Muay Thai.”

  “Muay Thai: What’s that?”

  “A martial art.”

  She said she didn’t remotely have the time.

  They reached Worcester and parked in the square lot outside the Palladium. The building looked like an old New England textile mill, like the ones in Lowell where Tom, her father, had worked as a young man. Molly had been here before to see My Chemical Romance on their Black Parade Tour. They waited in line, got wristbands and found seats inside with a view of the as-yet-empty cage.

  Molly took out her phone and looked at Facebook. “How long will this be?” Her girlfriend wanted to meet her back in Quincy later. “No offense,” she said, but to her, the ultimate smackdown stuff was just brutality. If you wanted to give blood, play hockey.

  “Hockey’s a combat sport,” Corey agreed.

  The rock ’n’ roll came on, the stadium filled up with athletes and their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, coaches, friends and training partners wearing fight academy T-shirts. The round card girls came in and sat on folding chairs. One was a blonde, one was a brunette, they were wearing matching strawberry spandex jog bras and shorty shorts and sneakers without socks, and when they sat down, they crossed their legs the same way. Molly rolled her eyes. “Who’re they? The Doublemint Twins? I get why you like this.”

  “I never noticed them before.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’d destroy that little outfit if I tried to wear it.”

  “Me personally, I think everyone should be big—males and females—with tons of muscle.”

  He excused himself to say hi to a few fellows from Bestway he’d seen across the stands. “Back in a minute.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” A crew of big good-looking men in cammie hats, drinking beer and dipping chew, had just taken seats next to Molly.

  When Corey was gone, the brunette round card girl turned around and waved. One of the good-looking guys climbed over the seats to her and gave her a respectful half hug. He was neatly dressed, manly and self-possessed. His black hair was combed on top and trimmed short on the sides, revealing his big clean ears and handsome neck. The girl talked in his ear.
Her round breast was an inch from his chest. One could feel their bodies straining together. Under the cover of drawing him close to speak to him better, she placed her hand on his ribs.

  They hugged again, and he climbed back to his friends, other wide-shouldered guys in hunter’s hats drinking beer and spitting chewing tobacco in plastic cups.

  “Oh, of course,” Molly said, watching this spectacle.

  By now, Corey had returned. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  The lights went down, the rock went off, and a man in a sharkskin suit and a black-on-black dress shirt entered the cage and grabbed a microphone and said, “Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “No problem.”

  “We welcome our first fighter to the cage.”

  The music kicked on and a girl walked out to the cage under a spotlight.

  “Is that a girl?” Molly asked.

  She was white and had her hair done in cornrows. Behind her came her coaches, men with full-sleeve tattoos. They took her black silk robe when she removed it. She was scrawny and flat-chested with a short torso and long arms, wearing a sports bra and big shorts emblazoned with Thai script, which looked like a chain of m’s or elephants. Underneath, she wore knee-length silky spandex bike shorts in pearl gray. Her legs were a contrast to the rest of her. They were glamorously long and strong with long-bellied calves like a dancer. Ankle wraps covered her insteps and exposed her white heels.

  Next, her opponent marched out of the wings to the sound of military drumbeats: a glossy brown-skinned Dominican woman from Lawrence, with a fierce young face. Confident, good-looking and bursting with aggression, she had biceps, her shoulders were capped with epaulettes of muscle, and she had heavy legs and hips. She was wearing royal blue bike shorts. Her African hair was twisted into a pair of short pigtails and bobby-pinned to the back of her head like two sausages. She ran up into the cage clapping her hands and gave her opponent a smile in which one could feel the bad intentions.

  The guys near Molly said, “This is going to be nasty.”

  As soon as the ref said, “Fight!,” the women started throwing full-force punches at each other’s faces. The entire room reacted. Everyone could feel the fighters getting brain-damaged, the egg yolk commonly cited by scientists sloshing in the skull, rupturing and leaking into the white. “Sweetness!” somebody yelled. “All night long!” Blood was running out the white girl’s nose. She had a bloody mouthpiece. She kicked the Dominicana in the lower belly as if she wanted to destroy her reproductive organs. She pulled her head down and threw a knee at her beautiful face.

  Corey twitched as if he were in the cage with them. “Gotta have more head movement!” He ducked punches in his seat.

  They learned the fighters’ names, when, at the start of the second round, the fighters sallied forth with their fists up to meet again in the center of the canvas and half the crowd began chanting, “Let’s go, Rachel! Let’s go!”; and the other half of the crowd began cheering for Alayah, the Dominican. Her supporters shouted, “Mama says knock you out!”

  “Come on!” screamed Molly. “Both of you! I’m rooting for you both.”

  The women fought through a second round and then a third. Rachel was repeatedly staggered by her opponent, but eventually the more muscular Alayah began struggling against fatigue. They fought until the final bell. No one gave in. The ref had to separate them when the clock ran out. The audience was applauding and cheering. The guys in camouflage hats put down their beer cups and clapped and whistled.

  “That’ll be fight of the night! Hands down!”

  The announcer declared the winner by decision, and the ref raised Alayah’s hand. She crossed herself and pointed up at God and said, “Thank you.” Her corner went wild, pounding the apron of the cage. The two women hugged each other tightly. A wag in the audience whooped, “Oh yeah!,” precipitating a bit of laughter.

  Rachel’s coach embraced her. The top of her head came up under his chin. “Sorry,” she said. “I tried.” She seemed not to take the loss too hard. She left the arena, high-fiving members of the audience who reached out to congratulate her. The sound system played “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar.

  Molly kept saying, “God. Oh my God.” She turned to the guys next to her. “That was balls-out!”

  “Totally,” they said. They recognized Corey. “Didn’t we see you fight in New Hampshire?”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “You getting in there tonight?”

  “Not tonight. And, hey, this is Molly, by the way.”

  “Hey, Molly-by-the-Way.”

  She curtsied—“Charmed, I’m sure.” And the men said, “So are we!”

  After the card was over, Molly and Corey sat in the hatchback, talking, while everyone else drove away from the Palladium. He was explaining martial arts to her. He’d been explaining it all night long and if she gave him another few hours, he’d explain the rest. There was a lot to cover—boxing, kickboxing, the clinch, trips, throws, takedowns, the ground game—Muay Thai, which he’d mentioned earlier—he was getting there—but she had not been bored, had she? It was a real sport, as real as hockey, wasn’t it? Wasn’t she glad that she had come?

  “Yes—oh my God, those girls were tough.”

  “I’d be a girl if it’d make me tough as them.”

  Molly gave him the old sneer. “You’re still weird.”

  “Come on, I’ve gotten better.”

  “You have. I’ll give you that.”

  “I owe you for everything.”

  “For what?”

  “Last year when I was fucking up, your father talked to me.”

  “That’s not me, that’s him.”

  “No, it was you too. He told me about you playing basketball, dealing with your coach, the one who said you were slow…”

  “Oh, that.”

  “That. Yeah. That made me change my life.”

  The car fell silent.

  She said it was about that time. He drove her back to Quincy. When he let her off, he asked if they could hang out the next time she came back from school, now that she didn’t consider him too weird.

  She said, “Yes, you geek, we can.”

  On Saturday nights, when the rest of the student body was at a cappella or watching Monty Python, Adrian was making his way across the long dark athletic field to the edge of campus, through a dead zone of industrial labs and into an enclave of private homes, public art and quiet parks near a Trader Joe’s that faced the river. Among the private homes of Cambridgeport, there was a redbrick house, a dorm, that belonged to the university, which Adrian had begun to visit.

  It was a house of many rooms, an old colonial structure, shabby and cavernous inside, with steep staircases, flaking plastic walls, and a multitude of corridors and closets. Upstairs, there was a common room, which was hung with tapestries. It had French doors and curtains and a TV set that no one watched. Adrian would take a seat on one of the soft, well-used couches or easy chairs and turn it on. If anyone else was there, he would encourage them to leave by talking to the TV, farting loudly, whooping with laughter. After they were gone, he’d shut the doors and draw the curtains, turn off the lights.

  Tonight, as soon as Adrian arrived, the students in the common room, a pair of girls, got up and left. He sat in an easy chair in his wrestling cup and kneepads, and watched Saturday Night Live alone.

  After midnight, footsteps came up the stairs and Leonard came in in uniform. He closed the French doors and adjusted the curtains. He sat on the couch, turned down the squelch on his radio and set it by his side. Adrian rose, inserted a thumb drive in the TV. A movie began to play.

  “Oh, nice.” Leonard glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was coming.

  “You won’t get in any trouble for this, wil
l you?”

  “Nah. You will,” Leonard said.

  “If anyone complains, we’ll tell them it’s educational.”

  They fell silent watching the movie. Adrian had the volume turned up high. The characteristic porn movie soundtrack was audible through the doors and curtains in the outer hall.

  Adrian pointed out what one of the actresses was doing onscreen. “See how she’s trying to destroy his cock? That makes me so mad.”

  A female student passed on the other side of the French doors. The lights were out in the dormitory and she went by like a shadow in the blue darkness of an aquarium. Leonard, silhouetted by the movie screen, his glasses picking up the images of flesh, looked at her and she swam away.

  * * *

  —

  They had been meeting like this for weeks. They didn’t always watch pornography. Sometimes they simply watched TV and analyzed the ads. They discussed physics, society as Adrian saw it, and human nature. Adrian would begin by talking about the advances he had made in his studies and would end by talking about his mother. Sometimes Leonard’s radio squelched and he got up and disappeared and returned much later, having tended to his rounds. Adrian would stay to talk until two or three o’clock before leaving. He would descend past the unmanned guard post with its still-burning desk lamp and head back to campus through the blacked-out streets, the klieg-lit research labs, strangely buzzing or crackling in the silence, and cut across the playing fields, the frozen cold coming from the river, having left Leonard upstairs in the cavernous house full of sleeping students.

  Tonight, after the movie, they discussed what they had seen.

  “I have this nightmare,” Adrian said. “I’m lying in my bed and I see this thing looking at me in the doorway. There’s nothing I can do. It starts coming closer and closer and I can’t stop it. And I get so mad and scared, I can feel my muscles jumping like I’m hooked up to a car battery.”

  The thing had been a rubber monster mask with eyeholes, the kind you pull over your entire head, for Halloween.

  “Was someone wearing it?”