Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  A cheerful buzzing. Susan glanced at her phone and saw it was Bobby and turned it off. Part of her was glad he was calling, but not now. He was always so good at reading her moods and what she might be thinking. She drank from her cup and closed her eyes and swallowed. There was the dank taste of coffee, then the feel of a slice of pizza in her hand. It was from Tripoli’s on the Midway. The same sweet red sauce and greasy cheese and the napkins she held under it as she chewed. The memory began to turn her stomach.

  I hadn’t been to that place since I was twelve, and now I was twenty-one. It looked small and seedy and like its time had come and gone so long ago that it was as obscene as seeing an old man in a Speedo. I ate a slice of pizza and went walking.

  Most of the shops along the Midway were closed, their windows boarded up. When I was a girl, there had been a gateway to a kiddie park full of rides and the bumper cars tent, but in that space now was a dumpster under a ripped blue tarp seagulls were picking trash from.

  It was a weekday in September, so I knew there wouldn’t be a crowd there, but I didn’t expect it to be as deserted as it was, either. At the end of the Midway I walked around the guardrails onto the beach and looked out at the water awhile. In the sand were a few empty Coke and beer cans, the broken tip of a Styrofoam surfboard, a bottle rolling back and forth in the waves. Off to my left there was a building I remembered that was built on wooden piers, and at the base of one a red T-shirt was snagged on a rusted nail and I turned and walked south for the Penny Arcade and my and Noni’s old place.

  The arcade was still there. Its doors were wide open the way they used to be, but inside were only a handful of machines, no Skee-Ball or pool table or even pinball. Two or three teenage boys skipping school stood or sat at a few games with lit names like Smash TV, Area 51, and Lethal Enforcers, their faces in a trance as they jerked on controls and shot down men and blew up armored vehicles. They reminded me so much of Paul I may have felt a pang to call him later, though I don’t believe I ever did.

  My uncle-brother. I only lived with him for three years. I was three and he was fifteen, then I was six and he was eighteen and gone to the Air Force. If I had any images of Paul from that time, I held only a few: Paul sitting on the black sofa in front of the TV beside me shoveling potato chips or Cracker Jacks into his mouth; Paul’s back under the blinking lights of the arcade; Paul leaning against the hood of his first car in the lot behind our apartment. It was a four-door sedan, and it was long and blue with white-walled tires. He was in a red-and-white-striped shirt, a beer can in his hand, and he was smiling down at me like he’d just learned an important secret about life, but he wasn’t telling me.

  C’mere, Suzie. Get lost. Half of me a reminder of his big sister, the other half of the one who took her away.

  At the back wall where the door to our apartment used to be were cinder blocks mortared together. I rushed outside and around to the lot where Noni used to park our car right near our front door. It had been metal, the windows on either side covered with bars so I’d always felt locked in. But there was no apartment. In its place were thick wooden posts leading to a second story that had been built over the arcade. Where our kitchen and living room had been, there was a motorcycle and a gas grill, a hammock hanging between two posts. Where Noni’s bedroom had been, there was an empty paved parking space. Where my mother’s and Paul’s bedroom had been, there was a poured concrete patio, a round table and four chairs chained together and fastened with a padlock. In the center of the table was a plastic Wiffle ball bat and a faded tube of suntan lotion.

  That may not have been what was on that table, but it’s what I see there now. And that’s when the anger started, and I began to walk fast down the beach road, looking for the house of my birth, and things got worse.

  A whole block of cottages had been torn down. In their place was a three-story complex of condos covered with vinyl siding. Each unit had a small deck, and I knew those on the third floor probably had a view of the ocean above the roofs of the cottages on the beach side. I remembered some of these. They had the same wide clapboards and shuttered windows. Their roofs had tar patches here and there, and if they had gutters at all they were bent and rusted and led to drainpipes buried in the sand. If they had steps to their front doors, they were crumbling concrete or wood that was so warped from the sun the heads of the nails had risen up out of the planks.

  I remembered that my cottage had concrete steps and that it was two or three blocks from the beach with a view of only more low-rent cottages across the street. A dog was barking. Somewhere back there an engine kept revving. A breeze blew in from the ocean and the temperature dropped and I was sorry I’d left my sweater back in my car. Or maybe the temperature didn’t drop. Maybe I’m just writing this because I’m sitting in an overly air-conditioned room in Arcadia, Florida, twenty-two years later. But I remember finding our old house, though it was like seeing an old friend who’s just had a haircut or lost a lot of weight.

  The cottage’s name was still Ocean Mist, but the sign looked new, its edge beveled and painted dark green. The siding was vinyl like the condos but so very white, and the concrete steps to the door were gone and in their place was a deck built out of fake boards, the kind that’s made to look like wood but is really some kind of poured plastic. The posts were fake, too. Strung from one to the next was real rope, and on the wall near the door was one of those orange Coast Guard life rings.

  A radio was playing. Or maybe it was a TV. But I remember voices coming in from the airwaves, and I remember the sun on me but feeling cold anyway and staring at that door that used to open right into our kitchen with the yellow linoleum. And that’s when the new owner walked out of it.

  She was probably the age I am now. She wore a sun hat and white sunblock on her nose and lips. She held a plastic tumbler of what looked like Coke or iced tea and on the small table beside her chaise lounge was an upside-down paperback. I wondered what she was reading. She stood there staring down at me.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I used to live here.”

  “Who hasn’t? It’s a rental.”

  We may not have said these things, but I remember not liking her, especially when she sat down and picked up her paperback like I was now dismissed. She was reading shit, too. One of those cheap thrillers written by a staff under one name.

  “My mother died in this house.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I was a kid. She was stabbed to death.”

  The woman seemed to go very still, though she was sitting in her chaise lounge with the book in her lap. I might not have looked so good, either.

  “I think you need to leave.”

  I know she said that because it matched the voice in my own head nearly word for word. I need to leave.

  But there was something about her I detested. It wasn’t that she’d been rude to me. It’s because of what she or the new owner had done to our cottage. They’d made it cute and benign-looking, and it was like seeing in three dimensions the lie I’d been fed since I was three, and this woman with the sun hat and sunblocked nose and lips and shitty paperback, she may as well have been a gargoyle at the gates to the black pit my mother had been thrown into and forgotten.

  “I need to see the inside.”

  I don’t recall when the yelling started. I just know I wanted to see the kitchen, but then there was how she yelled the word cops. That accent I’d heard only from Lois the last nine or ten years. Cawps.

  “I will call them right fucking’now.” She was out of her chaise by then, holding the kitchen’s screen door open with her hip, reaching her hand around the corner and pulling out the receiver of her wall phone. It was white, too, when I know our phone had been the color of mustard, my father’s hairy forearm holding it to his ear. Why go inside and see more whitewashed bullshit anyway?

  I turned and started walking straight back to the Midway and my car. My face burned and my throat ached and I may have yelled something back at
the woman, I’m not sure. Maybe something about the piece-of-shit paperback she was reading. Maybe something about lies.

  Then I was driving too fast along the highway wishing I’d walked up onto that fake deck and into that house. Wishing I’d walked from room to fucking room.

  I drove south. I passed cars from the left and from the right. The flash of a woman’s face in her driver’s window yelling at me, her eyes dark, her teeth white. I followed signs for Lawrence, and when I hit the bridge over the river I looked off to the west at long mill buildings that lined both dirty banks, at the brick smokestacks rising in the air, and there was that poem about the shirtwaist fire I’d read in school. Dozens of immigrant women having to jump to their deaths from buildings just like those, their escape doors locked.

  I took the exit ramp too fast and my left tires bumped over the curb, and I slowed down and I hated Lois then. Why tell me?

  Halfway through My Year of Two Dannys, I sent Noni a list of questions.

  Did my father’s father drink?

  Did he get mean when he drank?

  Did people like my father?

  Did he have friends?

  Did his parents call him names?

  Did his father hit him?

  Did his father beat him with anything?

  Did his mother hurt him somehow?

  And there was this question the others led to like lemmings off a cliff: What did my mother do to—

  The rest of this question was an obscenity, and I knew it. But I kept the first part and crossed out the word to and mailed my list to Lois.

  Noni’s letter came back in days.

  Your father is a criminal and your mother loved you. What did she do? She was a mother to you. xsThe best.

  Please be careful up there.

  Susan stopped. She’d already written about what came next. That’s where she’d started. There was her motel room in Lawrence overlooking a park. From her second-story window she’d watched two men and a woman her age pass around a bottle in the shade of a sickly elm tree, and there was a dog chasing a tennis ball a fat man in shorts kept tossing. There were empty beer cans at the base of some kind of bronze monument to the war dead. But this wasn’t important. What was important was when she’d asked a cop where Canal Street was and finding the office of Nicholas Xenakis.

  Susan scrolled down to the end of this section. She stared at that last line. And so what was Susan Lori to him? What was she to anyone? She sipped her cold coffee and swallowed.

  It wasn’t long after this that Susan Lori drove back south, stopping in Statesboro, Georgia, where she stayed because it was a campus town with a lot of bookstores. And then she found herself living with Delaney. They worked in the same restaurant, a cool dark place that served fresh produce and organic chicken to professors and students who’d walk in from campus down the street. Susan Lori’s sports bar money got her a small studio apartment in the rear of a house owned by a gay couple, two men who drank and fought a lot. The younger of the two would smoke cigarettes under the pecan tree in the backyard, and sometimes she’d watch him from her window as he stood there, one hip cocked like a woman’s, inhaling deeply and staring at the ground like he was working up the nerve to apologize.

  Watching others was what she seemed to do now. Since her trip north, it was as if she’d stepped into the in-between of all things. She had zero interest in ever meeting her father, and she was through with school. All she was working for was earning enough money to house and feed herself, to buy used or new books at the store two blocks from the restaurant, to lie on her bed in her small room and slip inside the lives of others over and over again. It was like being fifteen, sitting on the floor of the Arcadia High School library, her face in book after book, ignoring living people for the imaginary spirits on the page.

  Except she began to ignore herself too. She was smoking too much and eating only when she felt like it, and it’d be a bowl of cereal or a limp carrot she’d dip into a jar of peanut butter, if she thought to go buy some. Her days off were the worst because even with a book in her lap, the air in her apartment seemed to buzz with invisible voices: Zit face! Spoiled little bitch! He’s no longer in our custody. He’s no longer in our custody. He’s no longer in our custody.

  And she drank too much. At first it was only wine, two or three glasses. But then she started drinking bourbon, and so many mornings she woke on her sofa or across her bed, still dressed, her face a dry riverbed, her mouth the stones, her small quiet room feeling like a tomb.

  Late in the afternoon she’d go to work hungover, and it was always a surprise that people smiled up at her from their tables as if she were normal, as if she had not begun to appear like some useless night creature who had no business serving the public.

  But she still looked the way she did. Her male customers flirted with her, and one of them told her he had never seen anyone as captivating as she was. That was his word, too. He was sitting at the corner table, and when he said it, he’d looked up at her and smiled behind thick-framed glasses, his eyes slightly magnified above a scruffy beard. He was probably a teaching assistant in graduate school, an art historian or political scientist, and standing there with her empty serving tray looking down at him, part of Susan Lori could feel herself reaching for the old pleasure of being desired, but what had it ever gotten her but the feeling she’d been lessened somehow? Not by the sex itself but by having been wanted so much. What did that have to do with what she wanted?

  “That’s nice. Go fuck yourself.”

  The man looked as if he’d been slapped with rotting fruit, and when he began to fumble for new words she turned and hurried back into the kitchen. There was the feeling she might be driving too fast in the dark with no headlights, but Susan Lori was also beginning to believe that she could live happily without a man for the rest of her time. She had always relied on that invisible account of hers that always seemed to be full, though something new was happening; it had never occurred to her before that she did not have to spend any of it.

  At the end of her shift, she’d sit at the bar and order a bourbon from Delaney. She was a cliché of feminist beauty with large breasts and boxy hips, and she kept her hair cut short and dyed black, the roots rust-colored. She had high cheekbones and thin lips, six piercings in one ear all the way up the lobe, and each one was a tiny silver animal of some kind—a fox, a turtle, a leopard, a snake, an eagle, a porcupine, though Susan Lori would not see these clearly just yet. What she saw was that Delaney seemed to see her.

  Not whatever men did that got them to say words like captivating, but something other than that, deeper maybe.

  “You look stranded. Anyone ever tell you that?” Delaney was leaning close, washing dishes in the bar sink.

  “No.”

  “Well, you do.” Delaney smiled. Her work was nearly done, and she poured herself a soda water on ice.

  Susan Lori nodded at Delaney’s glass. “No bourbon?”

  “Bourbon doesn’t like me.”

  “Wine?”

  “Hates me.”

  “Beer?”

  “Can’t fucking stand me. I don’t drink.”

  “Then why’re you a bartender?”

  Delaney stuck a straw into her soda and sucked on it, her eyes on Susan Lori like she was weighing something important. She swallowed and said, “It’s good hours for a poet.”

  “Yeah? I write.”

  “Poems?”

  “I lied. I don’t write. I start things, but—all I do is read.”

  “‘A writer is a reader moved to emulation.’”

  “’Scuse me?”

  “Saul Bellow.”

  “I haven’t read him.”

  “I don’t read men, period. Not anymore, anyway.”

  It seemed a stupid thing to say, though Susan Lori, at least that fall, was drawn to it. “Why not?”

  Delaney stared at her. “Because there are other voices out there, that’s why.”

  “Like yours?”

&n
bsp; “Yes, like mine.”

  Things got hazy here. Susan knew she liked the first poem of Delaney’s she’d read, and she knew she was sitting on the porch of Delaney’s rented clapboard when she’d read it. She remembered that Delaney wore shorts and was barefoot, her toenails unpainted and clipped, her knees drawn up to her chest as Susan finished reading a poem about an old woman’s love of motorcycles, though the old lady had never been on one and probably never would. The last line of the poem had the rattling idle of an engine in it, then the quiet of a graveyard, and to Susan’s ear Delaney was hitting a sentimental gong a little too hard, but it was affecting, and knowing that this woman she knew and worked with had written it made Susan want to write something as well.

  They started meeting a few mornings a week in a coffee shop three blocks from campus. They would share a small table against a wall covered with old posters of rock bands going back to the seventies—Golden Earring, Grand Funk Railroad, Black Oak Arkansas—and they’d write. Then they’d share with each other what they wrote.

  Susan Lori wrote her first story then. No, it was really just a few scenes, and it was told from the point of view of a young woman who comes back to her apartment from class to find her dead roommate’s naked torso, her head sitting on their turntable with its mouth half open like she wanted to finish saying something, though Susan’s protagonist somehow missed this.

  Delaney didn’t believe it.

  “C’mon, she’d see the head right off. You’re just writing in slow-motion here. It’s like blood-porn for you.”

  Blood-porn. That stayed with Susan Lori awhile. The truth was, Delaney did not like her writing. No, she admired some of Susan Lori’s sentences but not what she was writing about.

  “I mean, I know you were there then and all, sweetie, but don’t you want to write about something less sensational?”

  Like what? Susan Lori wanted to say. Your polemical pussy poetry? Every single poem celebrating the feminine over the masculine? As if one could exist without the other? Susan Lori meant this literally, as in sperm and egg, but she heard it in that other way, and she was beginning to feel that she could, in fact, live without any boy or man ever again.