by Atticus Lish
He worked in his winter coat in a room lit by a halogen lamp, dust swirling in the light beam. The foreman signed his time sheet: four hours at eleven bucks an hour. He would submit his time on Friday and get paid the week that followed, which was Christmas.
The next day, he wasn’t working. He got his mother up and in the wheelchair and poured her coffee and set her up with her laptop in the sun and went out by himself on Shore Road with the cell phone in his hand and waited for a call, too stressed to see the sea, the expanse of saltwater that rolled against the beach. The pale sun was in the south. He was alone with the jetty. The frigid wind buffeted his ears.
In another month, he would have to go to court to answer Leonard’s charge.
He went home and got a call from Dawn. She went over their situation. A church, Quincy Reform, was paying a percentage of their rent. Disability paid certain medical costs but only after a complex reimbursement process. They received a check for $200 a month. Their food was partly subsidized. Corey was expected to work, but the state put a cap on how much he could make before he started losing benefits. He wasn’t anywhere near the cap. His mother had to make $700 a month.
“My mother can’t work at all.”
“The family needs to contribute seven hundred dollars a month.” If not, Gloria would go to a state-run home.
He called Labor Ready. The dispatcher said they might have night work for him; they didn’t know yet, try back later.
His mother said, “Son, I hate to bother you, but could you make me something to eat?” For that matter, Corey was hungry too. The refrigerator was empty. He was afraid to shop and afraid to drive. He dished up applesauce for them both and put the spoon in his mother’s hand while he made mac and cheese.
She needed him to take her to the bathroom. The door was too narrow for the wheelchair. She stood up and used him as a walker. Each step she took, he waited and he held her. He helped her turn for the toilet. He pulled down her sweatpants and lowered her to the seat. He waited while she went. They developed a procedure. He put toilet paper in her hand. She blotted herself. He helped push her hand between her legs while looking away. She had a distinct, non-male smell that came from her anatomy. He flushed for her, picked up her pants, and helped her walk back to her chair.
Labor Ready called back. They had the night work. He said, “Thank you, God!”
But they said, “Wait, you’re only seventeen. You can’t do it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Labor laws. You can’t work at night until you’re eighteen.”
Gloria told him to take her credit card and get them food. He drove to Star, grabbed groceries and hurried back. On the way, he stopped for gas. He swiped her card and put the nozzle in the tank and watched the numbers climbing up and up and up until the eight-gallon tank was full and the pump in his hand clunked off.
* * *
—
The undergraduates went on Christmas vacation. Leonard continued working at MIT, guarding buildings that had been left vacant by their absence. He spent several long night shifts in the marble-floored halls of the main building and several more doing rounds in a near-empty undergraduate dormitory. He sat at the desk, reading Dreams of a Final Theory by Weinberg, which talked about the origin and fate of the universe. Christmas passed like any other workday. He spoke to no one but the 7-Eleven guy from whom he bought coffee at the end of his shift, and then drove home in the early morning with the fresh light of a new day on the brick buildings of Cambridge, traces of frost on the asphalt. In Malden, he returned to the burrow of his house, slept and woke refreshed at nightfall, except for a few nightmares. Upon waking, he spent several hours reading, browsing the Internet. Then he fixed dinner: meat and sauce, a lot of onion and garlic. The loss of his best knives interfered with his cooking. He calculated the cost of what his son had taken from him. At nine thirty, he put on his uniform, packed his book in a plastic bag because his son had taken the good bag, the paramilitary bag that expressed so perfectly what he wanted to say about himself, got in the car and drove through working-class Malden towards the lights of Boston and the gleaming commercial and technological utopia of MIT. There, he ensconced himself at his post and passed another night.
Around midnight, he was in the main building and encountered Adrian coming down the Infinite Hallway. He’d come back to school early to avoid spending the vacation with his mother.
They went upstairs to a professor’s office—a windowless attic crammed with paperbound science journals on a half floor between the engineering and chemistry halls. The security guard and the student talked for several hours about families, mothers, women, the social meaning of Christmas and its hypocrisy. Adrian said that Christmas brought out the worst in people. He did most of the talking while Leonard sat with his feet on the professor’s desk and his two-way radio on the green felt blotter. Around two a.m., Leonard did reveal one thing: He said that, due to his son Corey’s violent, out-of-control nature, he, Leonard, had recently been forced to stop taking care of his mother, and that sooner or later, something would have to be done about it.
On a desolate day just after New Year’s, Corey was sitting on his bed, taking off his boots, having just returned from work. He had gotten a long-term job at a Target in a dying mall in Braintree, next to a Loews cinema with blacked-out windows and a Starship Enterprise–style roof, which cars could drive beneath. A red sun hung above the evergreens that fringed the colossal parking lot when he arrived at work in the mornings. He put up steel shelving in the northwest corner of the store with a gang of temp workers. They held the vertical rails; he worked his way up a ladder, banging the shelves in with a hammer.
He tossed his boot to the floor. It landed by his hammer and a cheap new leather tool belt from Home Depot. The bruises on his face were fading. He took his sweatshirt off. His stomach muscles had lost their definition. His hair had grown and there was stubble on his chin. He unfolded his time sheet and laid it on the other time sheets, which he kept pressed like flowers in the notebook he had used for martial arts.
He straightened up and listened: There was someone knocking on their door. He went out barefoot through the cold-floored living room, where his mother was sitting in her wheelchair, reading an article on the laptop in her reading glasses.
He opened the door—and found himself looking at Joan.
She had arrived at their moment of greatest jeopardy. It didn’t seem real. Corey hadn’t seen her since his elementary school days. She looked great.
“I do karate,” she said. She was wearing white jeans and a bomber jacket. They hugged. She said, “I’m afraid to come inside. I don’t know if your mom wants to see me.”
“Of course she does. Mom, look who’s here!”
Joan put her arms around Gloria, who started crying.
It was only at this point, by overhearing the two women talking, that Corey learned his mother had called Joan.
“Could I use your bathroom?”
She came back with her eyes red but dry. Corey asked if he could get her something. She looked in their freezer to see if they had any vodka. When they were in private, she hugged Corey with her whole body pressed against him, which confused him because he liked it.
Gloria didn’t want Joan to stay, but Corey said they needed help—he needed help. When he asked if Joan would stay, she said, “Sure,” just like that.
She’d just gotten kicked out of another house—and another relationship (don’t ask)—but that wasn’t why she was here. “I’ve got a lot of love in my heart for your mother. It breaks my heart to see her in there. She was always my good girl, my blondie. I would’ve thought with all the grievous things I’ve done, the risks I’ve taken, that it would be me like that, dying young.”
Corey made up the futon, but Joan spent the entire night in Gloria’s bedroom, talking. In the morning, Corey got up and made coffee
for everyone. He hung up the mandala once again where it belonged.
* * *
—
Joan’s return ushered in a period of new hope. There was love and humor, as there hadn’t been with Leonard. Joan was a joker. She brought relief. She was the ally they’d always needed—good and loyal.
She had a job with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, vacuuming out the vehicles for the next customer. She went to her job in the city and slept with them at night. Corey temped for Labor Ready. They split the groceries and set the house up so Gloria could survive alone, each day leaving her a prepared meal that she could open by herself. Corey wrapped tape around the handle of a fork like a prison shiv so she could hold it.
With two women in the house, Corey sensed vortexes of emotion he didn’t understand. Hidden turbines spin like a stack of washing machines under every wave traveling across the ocean to the shore: Thus were the currents of love between Gloria and Joan. Sometimes, Corey was sure he felt rancor in the air, only to see them talking like old friends. He was often confused.
By the same token, when Joan first arrived, Corey felt a strong attraction to her—a burst of lust, programmed into him in early childhood—and he was sure it was reciprocated; he could hardly sleep the first night she spent in the house, and he imagined a hundred times running into her coming out of the shower. But after she had lived with them a few days, he noticed a reserved and businesslike tone in her voice when she spoke to him and a brusqueness that warned him to not even fantasize about her, that to do so would be as unthinkable and perverse as it would be to proposition his own mother, and in such moments he felt appalled that he had ever lusted after her and mortally afraid of being found out.
* * *
—
One day, Joan asked him what his mother thought of acupuncture. Corey said it was a scam. “Oh yeah,” Joan said, “I get that. Send nine-ninety-five. I’d be the type to give away my life savings. But, on the other hand, what if—ya know? Isn’t that how the Egyptians healed wounds, with mold?”
Weren’t there things they only knew about in China? People scammed, but where there was smoke there was also fire, and under every little come-up was a secret that even the scammers themselves were unaware of because all they saw was twenty dollars. It took the wise bloods, the stubborn old women whose periods had stopped, to restore the wisdom. Had he ever thought of that?
Corey didn’t know.
“You’re like, ‘What’s she talking about?’ It’s ’cause you’re a guy.”
For Corey, the month passed in a state of engagement, as things do when they are new.
* * *
—
Gloria sat propped up in bed with pillows. Joan was sitting with her in the dusk. Through the window blinds, a small orange sun slipped below the rim of the world. The land was black, the sky was purple. The room was gray, as if filled with seawater. The women were alone. Both had been crying off and on. Joan was wearing jeans, which were tight on her. She sat with her knees bent, her thick brown arms on her knees, and the meaty part of her pudenda outlined in tight denim. She rubbed her wet eyes and nose and shook her coarse mop of black hair. Her breasts were still full; she needed a bra. Next to her, Gloria lay sallow and deflated, her blonde hair gone gray. Her skull was childlike and small. Her narrow, Northern European nose and sharp cheekbones and hard triangular jaw showed clearly under her vanishing flesh. Her thin hands lay on her belly like a Knight Templar in a coffin. Unconsciously gesturing, she raised them with effort, like a ninety-year-old, and let them settle again. Usually she was matter-of-fact and war-weary from her disease, but when a wave of grief hit her, her face contorted and her eyes squeezed shut as if she were about to cough up chunks of her heart. Then the wave passed. She was settling now. Her eyes were closed. She had turned, as much as her paralyzed body was able, into Joan, who gathered her in. Now Joan sat with Gloria’s head in her lap, cradling her in the position of the Pietà. Lines of tears were drying on Gloria’s yellowed cheekbones. Her eyes were closed and her face was bizarrely calm as if she had taken morphine.
“I feel like this is all a great comeuppance.”
“Sshh. Hey.”
“Thank you for holding me, Joan.”
“He’s worse than a bum. He’s a creep. You’re better off without him.”
“I know that’s how Corey feels as well.”
“There’s no excuse. I’ve seen a lot of men who’ve had harder lives who haven’t turned out like that. I know this one kid from the projects. He has no teeth, because they don’t get good medical care. But he’s the nicest kid. And to top it off, he’s got MS. He never had any breaks. He’s from Southie. So you’re gonna tell me people from East Boston have such a harder life?”
“He hasn’t done anything with himself, and neither have I.”
“Yeah, you have.”
“He could have done more.”
“Poor him.”
“Don’t worry, I’m done worrying about his tragedy. I’ve got my own grief.”
“You know, I never thought he was such a genius. I just think he has an ego.”
“The ego is the great enemy. I wish I could let go of my fear.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You’re an angel for being here.”
“No, I’m not. More like a devil.”
“I’m sorry for hurting you.”
“No, Gloria, don’t. Hey, blondie. Hey. I’d been dumped before.”
“Joan, I’m such a fool.”
“Your son’s probably worried I’m gonna dyke out with you.”
The two of them laughed and blew their noses.
“I’m not gonna say it didn’t hurt. For years, I looked for somebody to replace you, Gloria my darling.”
“Oh, Joan.”
“One time, I was dating this dude, and the whole time I was scheming on his ex-girlfriend.”
“Sounds like trouble.”
“It was. He got jealous and threatened her with a gun. So I said, ‘If you’re gonna be a fuckin’ animal, I’m gonna go.’ So I said sayonara and got the fuck out of there. And I was imagining if I was like a super-cool dude in the movies, I’d be like, ‘Hey, there’s room in my car,’ and she’d jump in with me. But my car had all my shit in it and there wasn’t room for anyone else, so I never got to say that. So I left, and I drove away crying, because I was imagining them having super-hot sex when I was gone. I’m crying and turned on and jealous. And I got so mad I thought about driving back there.”
“Only you, Joanie.”
“I know, right?”
Two days before his court date, when he got home from Target, Corey found out his father had come to the house while he was at work. Gloria had told Leonard to stay out, he had tried to come in anyway, and Joan had blocked him at the door.
“He was surprised as hell to see me,” Joan said. “He was all like, ‘I should have known.’ I’m like, ‘Known what? That Gloria’s got friends besides a creep like you?’ Then he gets all crafty: ‘Joan, you know me from the old days. Let’s handle this like two adults’—blazzy, blazzy, blah. I’m like, ‘If you know me, then you know I’ll never let you in.’ When I wouldn’t let him in, he was fuckin’ ripshit. What’d you take from him anyway?”
“His pots and pans and knives. I threw them in the marsh.”
“Whatever it was, he wants it back pretty bad. You sure it wasn’t a diamond?”
“No! I wouldn’t steal from him.”
“I wouldn’t care if you pawned it down the block.”
“I don’t want anything of his. If he had a diamond, I wouldn’t take it. All I wanted was a little justice for him throwing my mother on the floor. I tore up his uniforms. His handcuffs, his cop-stick-thing, his little cop bag—I threw all that shit out, plus his skillet, his fancy cooking knives. And I busted his car window a
nd his glasses.”
Joan remarked that this sounded like quite a lot of property.
There were different penalties under the law for property crimes, based on the value of the things involved.
“I won’t be facing a felony, will I?”
“Probably not. I’m sure they’d let you plead it down.”
* * *
—
On the morning of January 27, Corey reported to the Francis X. Bellotti courthouse. A handful of people were milling around the front steps. They were about the same people who hung around the T. An armed officer opened the door and told them to form a line. The line moved inside slowly, through a metal detector. They all went into the same courtroom.
The judge arrived, a rigidly decent woman in her fifties with glasses and a Boston accent, and the court began its day’s work. Corey showed his desk appearance ticket to a clerk, who told him to wait for his attorney.
Almost that same second, a man in a tan suit came in, looked around and asked, “Are you Corey Goltz? I’m Shay. I’m your defender.” He wore a red tie, his top button was undone, he had a sharp Adam’s apple, and he was carrying a briefcase. All of his curly sandy hair grew on the top of his head, as if his head were a flowerpot and his hair was the plant life coming out the top.
As Corey would discover, Shay was a hardworking, cocky but nice young jock who, over the course of his association with him, would mention going to the gym in every conversation they had; he was either going to or coming from—or regretting having missed—the gym that day. His sports had been basketball, baseball and hockey. For Corey, he would attain the same status as an Eddie. He was extremely diligent. Eventually, he would visit Corey’s home and become a true ally after meeting Gloria and seeing her condition. He would try to file a counterclaim against Leonard for domestic abuse.
