The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  She’d roll out of position in protest. She couldn’t cry, but she looked as if she were crying.

  This whole time, he’d be saying, “I’m sorry, let me try again.”

  He would try and bend her legs, but they wouldn’t stay put; they’d resist him; the spastic, perpetually rigid muscles would straighten out again. Her legs were wrong and her pillows were wrong. She’d roll away. He had to re-tuck the pillows under her head, between her knees, under her back.

  “Is that good, Mom?”

  Yes, she moaned.

  He drew a blanket over her, put on her baby monitor, turned out her light, and kissed her head and went out to the kitchen. At intervals all throughout the night, Gloria would need to be moved again. As soon as he was asleep, he’d hear her on the baby monitor, a sound from her vocal cords. He’d get up in the darkness and fumble his way to her room.

  He’d have to go through the same process all over again. He had to re-tuck the pillows under her head, between her knees, under her back. The time he spent in the bent-forward care-ministering position started to tell on him.

  In wrestling, you move the opponent by fitting your body to his while maintaining a position of mechanical advantage; you disrupt his balance while keeping your own. In moving his mother, he gave up all advantage for the sake of being gentle with her. The simplest movements became surprisingly hard, all the patient’s weight on the small of his spine.

  Sometimes he was able to make her comfortable. Sometimes not, and that was bad. “This is hard,” said Joan. “We’ll get it, Mom,” he said. They tried again. “Mom, the problem is, I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.” It was the third time they’d readjusted her that night. “Are you okay?”

  Yes, she moaned.

  And he’d take the baby monitor back to bed. He never slept fully and, in the morning, the bleary day would start all over again. This routine went on with no beginning and no end and created an endless trance state in which the sun was never fully up. He was awake so much at night during this stage that he thought of it as Night World.

  * * *

  —

  One night in the kitchenette, Joan told him that once, when she was a teenaged girl, a guy had chased her with a steel whip. Corey wanted to know why. Joan said they’d been at a rock concert and the guy had gotten mad because she’d turned him on.

  She looked at Corey with her brown eyes. He wanted to say something, but didn’t know what.

  He told her he’d had a friend who wore a cup seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. He told her about Adrian’s eccentricities, his intense determination to improve himself, his enormous physical strength and training in math and science.

  “Worried about his jewels, huh?”

  “He’s scared his mother’s going to castrate him.”

  “If I were a boy, I think I’d be afraid of that too.”

  “What’s any girl going to see in him?”

  “Besides an intact set of nuts? You never know who a woman’s going to pick.”

  “I don’t know why my mother picked my father. If I was a woman, there’d be no way.”

  “She thought your dad was interesting.”

  “I think he’s a worm.”

  “Love is blind.”

  “I guess it’s not my business, but I wish she’d stuck with you.”

  Joan made a sound between Oh and Aw.

  “Love you, Joan. Always have.”

  “I know you have.”

  Corey stood up.

  “No. Sit down.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sit down.”

  “It’s hard to sit down.”

  “I bet it is. No. Sit down.”

  “Are you sure you’re sure?”

  “Do what I tell you.”

  “All right. All right. I’m sorry.”

  “When I say something, I mean it.”

  “I apologize.”

  “I’m not going to do anything with you.”

  “I apologize, Joan. I’m sorry. Can we put things back the way they were?”

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, coming on to your mother’s girlfriend.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “You’re a perverted one. You’re sick and twisted. I should’ve known.”

  “I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

  “That’s okay, you’re going to make some girl very happy someday with your pervertedness.”

  “I’m not perverted, Joan, I swear.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in the sink.

  “Your mother’s going to bite my head off for smoking in her house.”

  He listened for any sound from the baby monitor. If the smoke had reached his mother’s nose, she would’ve moaned. The monitor was silent.

  “Can we forget this happened, Joan? Please? You know, you’re a big person to me. I’ve had dreams about you all the time. The dreams took over.”

  “It’s forgotten.”

  “I have these dreams from back in Cleveland Circle. You and me saw Billy Jack.”

  “No doubt. ‘One tin soldier rides away.’ ”

  “Was that the song?”

  “That was it.”

  “The drugstore scene when he stands up for the Indian kids: ‘I just go berserk!’ He puts that motherfucker through a window.”

  “A classic.”

  “I remember the Freedom School. The blonde woman getting raped out in the desert.”

  “You remember that? I’m surprised you knew what that was. You were really young.”

  “I still see it in my head.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  “I remember you bought me a book for my birthday.”

  “That’s right. You were this little blond kid. Your mother used to read to you. You were like, ‘Why’s this book about girls?’ I was like, ‘This kid’s gonna be a little sexist when he grows up, like his father.’ Ha-ha,” Joan laughed. “No, you were cool. But your father wasn’t. He kept coming around the house, night after night, to kick his little rap to your mother.”

  * * *

  —

  But, a thing she didn’t discuss with Corey:

  Joan recalled, at the turn of the millennium she and Gloria had been in love. Having learned of their affair, Corey’s father had begun to call on them persistently, demanding their attention at every turn, teaching Corey pig Latin and lecturing them on the game of chess. Joan had understood what he was after—Gloria. His ego had been injured. He didn’t love her, but he wouldn’t be satisfied until he got her back.

  One horrible day, Gloria had finally agreed to go camping with him. Joan had fought with her, crying and wretched. But Gloria had resolved to go with Leonard. She was going to make up with him because he was Corey’s father.

  Joan had stormed out. Then she’d turned around on her heel and stormed back in and snatched Gloria’s birth control. During their argument, Gloria had claimed that she didn’t want to sleep with Leonard. Joan yelled, “If you’re not going to sleep with him, then you won’t be needing this!” And then she’d stormed out again and slammed her door—a bang to wake the entire building. Smoke had seemed to curl in the air as after a gunshot. Choking back her tears, she’d run down to her car—a Saturn twin cam in those days—and driven through Boston recklessly to relieve her broken heart.

  Seventeen hours later, the next afternoon, she’d called up Gloria and told her, “I’m sorry. I guess, I’ve got a temper. I guess I should move out. Can I at least take you out for a sandwich? Can you see me?”

  The day soon came when Leonard arrived for Gloria, driving not his usual car but a dirty old van, which none of them had seen before. He didn’t want to take Corey on their weekend, but Gloria insisted—he had the room—and then Leonard sai
d, “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Both of you get in.”

  Joan helped Gloria pack a picnic and carry the cooler downstairs. She felt as if she were giving her away. But she hid her sorrow and her hatred and pretended to be perfectly happy, so as not to allow Leonard any reason to gloat.

  He sat behind the wheel, rushing Gloria and her son to get inside the unfamiliar vehicle. Joan approached and chatted him up. “You picked a nice weekend for it. The weather’s supposed to be great.” She said she’d been out to Provincetown a while back. And then there was Maine. She was trying to feel him out about where he was taking Gloria. He wouldn’t say. Joan made an issue of it. She stuck her head in the window of the van and said to Gloria, “So, do you know where he’s taking you? Because he won’t tell me.”

  “Where are we going?” Gloria asked.

  Leonard didn’t want to be forced to say.

  But Joan made Leonard tell them what he had planned. He was taking Gloria to Harvard, Mass.—a small town west of the city past 495. A friend was lending him a cabin.

  And the van departed, leaving Joan in Cleveland Circle.

  Halfway through the weekend, Gloria called Joan. She said the weekend wasn’t going well, this had been a mistake. They weren’t in Harvard, but in Ayer—in a trailer in the woods. She had gotten disoriented on the trip and wasn’t certain where they were. It would be hard to find. She’d seen a lake where they had turned. She described the trailer.

  She gave Joan enough to go on, and after driving around for six hours, Joan had found her, had seen the van through the trees. Joan drove up and honked the horn. Leonard opened the door.

  Joan wouldn’t leave until Gloria came out with Corey. She kept her distance from Leonard, yelled to him, “Mikey DePaolo and Justin and Terry all know I’m here.”

  Gloria and Corey got in her car, and she drove them back to Boston. As she backed away from the trailer, Leonard had looked at her, his eyes reflecting her headlights, no expression on his face.

  26

  Gelato

  In his second year at university, Adrian had undergone a transformation. In September, he had arrived at school with a mountain bike, a Habit with out-front steering geometry, full suspension, and eighteen inches of travel, which he rode across campus to his independent project, an internship at a research lab in the Polaroid building, on the geometric image of a photon. The mountain bike, which retailed for two thousand dollars at REI, sliced along the winding paths trod by quiet academics. It was powered by Adrian’s bulging legs, fitted into clean tight-fitting denim.

  He had gotten rid of the motorcycle jacket, the sweatpants, kneepads, the tattered wrestling shoes. Outside a steel and glass, corporately donated research facility, beneath a twisting modern sculpture, he secured his bike with a Kryptonite bike lock and went into the lecture hall, carrying on his shoulder a new backpack from Eastern Mountain Sports, dressed in clothing so unremarkable and inoffensive that one couldn’t say what he was wearing. Quietly, he took his seat and seemed to vanish among the other young people facing the front of the auditorium.

  In stark contrast to his freshman year, he gave a general impression of a mature young man leading a highly scheduled life, moving in duty-bound fashion from one commitment to the next, turning in assignments when they were due, meeting with his study group to work on problem sets, communicating a machinelike responsibility and task orientation. He had taken to wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

  He had grown a partial beard and bought a pair of leather dress boots from the New York Lug Company for the weekend nights when he went out. He’d gotten a fake ID. On a typical Saturday night, he went to a bar in the Fenway, wearing his high school letter jacket for wrestling, which had white leather sleeves, and when asked “What’ll it be?” pressed two fingers to his lips and said, “Hm…I think I’ll have an IPA.”

  Those who knew him included Ajay Singh, his freshman roommate. Ajay would report that Adrian had a new interest in evolutionary biology, which he was using to try to understand women.

  “He was getting better about his mother,” Ajay would say. “He had a plan to go to grad school at Caltech. All he had to do was finish MIT in excellent fashion in the next three years, and he’d be free.”

  In October, just after midterms, Adrian was at a dorm-wide meeting when a chemistry major from another wing of the building made a pass at him and invited him to her room. She was a loner herself—a short-haired woman with a cold, strong-jawed face, who led an adult social life without sentimentality. In her room, Adrian removed his cup. She reportedly said, as she took hold of him, that he had a beautiful cock.

  They were seen together around campus after that—not holding hands, but trading looks with one another while they locked up their respective bikes—she had one too.

  Adrian was very pleased about the affair, according to those who knew him. Athena—the chemistry major’s name—was very interesting intellectually: “She thinks just like a man. She’s even turned on by other women. She’s perfect for me.”

  One night at the peak of the affair, Adrian went out to Red Lobster with his mother. His mother bought them daiquiris and asked about his girlfriend. He told her he didn’t want to tell her—but he’d tell her a little. His mother picked up a spoon, rubbed it and hung it on her nose.

  “No fair!” he said. “You’re cheating!”

  “You try!”

  He took her spoon and set it on his nose. His mother smiled.

  When he got back to the dorm that night, he was seen walking up and down an imaginary line on the floor like a tightrope walker, arms out, the spoon, which he had kept, balanced on his nose.

  Ajay asked what he was doing. Adrian said he’d been to dinner with his mother, he’d had a couple daiquiris, he felt as gentle as a bear.

  They started Gloria’s dinner around five and it took until eight o’clock to get it all done. The day got harder as it went along because everyone, Gloria especially, was getting tired. A great deal of the time, she seemed to be displeased with everyone around her. The house swam in unhappiness and dissatisfaction, the same emotions that an overworked person brings home every day from a hated job. The job was her life, the job of existing in this wheelchair. She wanted to be left alone with a glass of wine in her hand, perhaps. But she could never do that again. And she was always closed in with people, locked in endlessly prolonged interactions over putting a spoon in her mouth. She had to absorb their energy too, just as they had to absorb hers. It had to push her beyond patience. She couldn’t talk about it. She couldn’t go for a walk by herself. She couldn’t pick up a book and forget it. No, the only thing she could look forward to was being put down on her bed and having the lights turned out on her.

  As the evening turned sour, Joan, who had a temper and who wasn’t immune to having moods, went out to the kitchen to wash the sippy cup and the Tupperware, smeared with pureed squash, and put the wet dish towels in the laundry basket by the dry gray mop in the spiderwebby alcove that housed the boiler. She went outside, squatted compactly on the steps and smoked a menthol, shook her head and said, tearfully, “I’m not a fuckin’ doormat.”

  She wiped her eyes on her brown hand and said to no one, “I know it’s hard for her, but my heart’s not made of gold but it’s not made of leather either.”

  * * *

  —

  One night not long thereafter, Corey was sitting in the kitchenette listening to the baby monitor. He could hear his mother’s breathing the same way he could hear the night sky when the window was open.

  “I wish she’d never had anything to do with him.”

  “You mean you don’t want to be alive?” Joan asked.

  “I don’t know why she ever liked him. I wish you were my dad.”

  Joan knocked the ash off her cigarette. “I’m not perfect either, you know, my dear.”

  “What’s wrong
with you?”

  She shook her head.

  * * *

  —

  November. The North End was strung with thousands of red, white and green lights and banners for a saint’s day, Saint Therese of Lisieux, patron of the little flower. Local tourists—Mass. residents who had driven in from Peabody with their families—crowded the narrow sidewalk, big people, their small sons carrying a football. They walked in front of Corey. The dad said, “Why don’t we go in here?” and pointed to a pastry shop. Mom, strong and fat in tight-fitting jeans, her hair in a sexy ponytail, pivoted on the ball of her Under Armour sneaker and went in, her purse over her shoulder like a rifle sling, calling back to her girlfriend, passing the word back. The girlfriend was the wife of another guy and they had kids and friends too. The families were chained together in a great united clan.

  They all entered the shop, enveloping Corey like an amoeba, carrying him along. The women wore baseball hats and their ponytails fed out the hole above the adjustable plastic hatband like a horse’s tail coming out the back of a ceremonial saddle in a parade. The boys played together; the men stood with their hands in their pockets and their sunglasses over the brims of their ball caps, looking over everyone’s heads at the loaves of bread. An aging yellowed hue to the shop’s interior. Glaring fluorescent lights like a public school built in the 1950s. Industrial gratings. Statuettes of the Madonna. A photograph of “Our Nonna” signed “with love from all of us.” The antique kitchen in the back. Corey waited in the crowd. It was like waiting for tickets at Fenway Park, the customers forming into several lines to get to the women behind the counter who were like moving ticket windows—pale Old World women with brown and blonde hair and oval faces—Italian, Slavic, Albanian.

  The mothers and dads ahead of him were joking. “Mike’s getting her a cannoli.” “I’m putting out an Amber alert.” “Why does he take her out on a Friday night? He’s setting her up for Saturday.” “He should pay for her hair. He works at the beauty parlor. Let her get a cut and color.” One of the boys tossed the football to his brother. It missed and Corey picked it up and gave it back. The father: “Thanks. He drops things.”