MacGregor Tells the World

by Elizabeth Mckenzie

  a man with a box full of real stuffed miniature alligators; a crone selling roses from a swampy bucket. He dodged a peanut fight between two girls arguing over a hopscotch game on the sidewalk.

  Mac went into a small Mexican market and bought a pineapple drink, like piña colada without the rum. Then he buzzed the cage door barring the stairs and climbed up to Filipo’s. From the top, he could see the gray industrial underbelly of San Francisco, angular and metallic, surrounding the various arteries that fed the city through the fog. He craned his neck in the direction of Pacific Heights. Out of sight.

  Filipo’s mother, Elena Ayala, opened the door. A rush of steam beaded on his face.

  “Mr. Mac! For you!” Before he was even inside, she handed him a pink wad of dough—a sweet from a different world of taste buds. He tried to appreciate them, but more than once he had set his treat on the windowsill and later, when no one was looking, pushed it out. “Thanks, Elena,” he told her. He almost told her about meeting Carolyn, but it seemed premature, so he chomped down on the dough ball instead. “Filipo up yet?”

  “He waits for you.” She swept him through her front room, crowded with the industrious sewing and ironing crew she managed. One woman stood at an ironing board, briskly eliminating wrinkles; at her feet was a large pile of newly washed or mended garments. And there were three women sitting in a line on the floor, their backs against the wall, pulling thread through alterations and rips and hems. They worked at an amazing pace. Their hands were blue and bony, and the veins bulged all over them, and he never failed to see that one or another had to stop and rub her hands and shake the effort from her joints. Water trickled down the windows, condensed by the cold air outside. The room smelled of starch and electricity and parrot: the jungle bird paced in his cage on an old console TV.

  Mac went to the room in back. Filipo and his mother slept together in it, Filipo on a single mattress in the corner, his mother on the couch. Knees drawn up to his chin, the boy with the bowl haircut was perched by the window. Mac noticed he was starting to outgrow his baby fat.

  “Hey.”

  “That guy still keeping track of you?”

  “He was out this morning with binoculars!”

  The narrow gray courtyard was decked with rows of sagging concrete balconies; most residents were afraid to use them for anything but trash. Steel rebar jutting from the crumbling edges were brittle with gull droppings and rust.

  “Maybe he’s just watching the birds.”

  “Yeah, the bird is my mom. Last night he knocked on the door with that.”

  Sitting on the floor was what looked like the butt end of an old telephone pole, carved into the shape of a donkey head. For eyes it had two woebegone slits. A red line of paint wrapping around the rough, splintery end made a gloomy-looking muzzle.

  “He made it?” Mac said.

  “The great artist.”

  “Anyone who tries to make something is automatically cool,” Mac proclaimed, sympathetic to anyone with love in his heart. He wondered what memorable curio he could give Carolyn. “How’d your mom like it?”

  “She started laughing.”

  “Be careful, she might be falling for him.”

  “What did you have for dinner last night?” Filipo always asked this hungry question, and Mac admitted that he’d scarfed on Fran’s leftover steak.

  “Well done or rare?” Filipo pursued.

  “Kind of burnt.”

  “Potato?”

  “Yes. A baked potato, with sour cream and chives.”

  “You eat the skin?”

  “No. It was covered with foil, and it was soggy.”

  “Oh, too bad. The skin is really good. That’s where all the vitamins are.”

  This said, Filipo was ready to talk about the book.

  He lovingly picked up his copy of Great Expectations. To Mac’s surprise and satisfaction, Filipo had taken to Dickens with a vengeance and was identifying with Pip, and not simply because Pip’s real name is Philip. The first book of childhood duress they’d read together was Oliver Twist, which had been an early favorite of Mac’s, and Filipo had been captivated by the boy’s attempt to procure larger portions; now Great Expectations had his favorite food scenes: “Pip’s sister, Mrs. Joe, she makes him eat drumsticks—with the feathers on! That would be bad. Got to get the feathers off a bird before you eat it. . . . Gravy, that’s what saves him. . . . You ever eat tongue, Mac? Pip loves tongue. Tongues don’t have bones. No feathers, either. . . . Cold fowl, is that chicken or just any bird? . . . You think Miss Havisham’s cake’s full of maggots?”

  Today something else was eating at him. “What makes Pip like Estella?” he asked, clutching his book. “She’s a creep, man. I hate her guts! I wouldn’t put up with that. So what if she’s pretty!”

  “Filipo, know any pretty girls?”

  “One, but she growls at me.”

  “That’s actually a good sign.”

  A clatter and a groan in the courtyard caused them to turn their attention outside. A man appeared in the glass doorway across the way. He was built like a porpoise, head disappearing into his body, buttons pulling apart, his teeth scattered loosely in his mouth like pegs. “There he is,” Filipo whispered. “El Monstruo!”

  “Jesus!” Mac said. “That’s the guy?”

  “He’s gonna step out there someday and the whole thing’s gonna fall and I’ll laugh.”

  “Just because he’s lonely, malformed, needs dental work, and is a Peeping Tom doesn’t mean he’s evil,” Mac said.

  “How’d you like it if he wanted to be friends with your mother?”

  A fair number of rejects had orbited the woman known as Mac’s mother; once, when they ran out of toilet paper, one such man used a T-shirt of Mac’s from the hamper. A day that would live in infamy! Mac was proud to remember that his mother told the man to get lost because of it.

  Elena brought them mugs of cinnamon cocoa, and Filipo slurped it hot. He called after her in a whiny, exaggerated fashion, “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

  “He always wants more!” cried Elena.

  “Ah, the fruit of our labors,” Mac said. And Filipo picked up his notebook and wrote: FRUIT OF OUR LABORS.

  The boy read aloud the chapter in which Pip first meets Miss Havisham and Estella, but Mac was unusually distracted. He was remembering Carolyn’s shoulders, and the smell of her hair, and the way she’d looked at him when they kissed.

  “Are you listening?” Filipo said.

  “Of course,” Mac said. “Let me see that.” He took the book and examined it a moment. Filipo had circled words he didn’t know, such as farinaceous, penitential, and hunch. And he would look them up, and write each one ten times in his notebook. Mac appreciated such diligence. Collect words, he advised willing youths who’d pay heed—they’re everywhere and they’re free.

  “So here was Charles Dickens, possibly the most productive human being ever to live on this planet. By the time he wrote this novel, he and his wife had ten grown kids. And he’d written fifteen other novels already, and a lot of them were over nine hundred pages! He was also putting out his own magazines and acting in plays. You’d think with a father like that the children would have a great role model, right? But no. They went into debt and floundered around. Total losers.”

  “So we’re lucky we don’t have dads?” Filipo said.

  “Could be. Anyway, ready for your assignment? Here—between chapters eight and nine. After Pip leaves Miss Havisham’s, after Estella treats him like a dog. Before he goes home to Joe and Mrs. Joe. Imagine that Dickens wrote another chapter but that there was a fire at the printer’s and the only copy was lost.”

  Filipo said, “What’s missing?”

  “Imagine something happening with Pip before he went home. That’s your assignment. To write up the missing section.”

  Filipo said, “Me?”

  “Sure. Why not you?”

  “Before he went home.”

  “Imagine what
happened, and let it unfold, simple as a movie.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good,” Mac said. “Go for it.” He looked at his watch while the boy took up his pen and began.

  Maybe Mac was about to write the missing chapter of his own life. For until yesterday, seeing Filipo once a week was one of the best things Mac had had going—besides eating tacos, drinking bourbon until he passed out, and turning the pages of a book his cousin’s husband, Tim, had in the bathroom called Women of the Sud-Tyrol. His mind was always elsewhere, looking for a nice, warm place to curl up. And here was where his thoughts went just then, so fast he couldn’t stop them—simple as a movie. To Tres Osos, California, where he’d gone to live with his aunt and uncle and cousin after his mother abandoned him. This guy named Cesar had shown up in ninth grade in a jacket with patches of Chairman Mao and Karl Marx sewn on the sleeves, with his long black hair and pocked skin. And when Mac introduced himself, behind the trees on the Tres Osos Junior High athletic field, where Cesar was sitting on a rock, smoking, Cesar had said, “You know why I’m so ugly? Very bad karma. Karma’s contagious, a creeping disease. We start talking, we get to know each other, your karma turn black, and all you hear is the weeping of the world.”

  It was without a doubt the best deal Mac had been offered in a long time. Otherwise, there was a group of guys who hung out in their cars after school, driving backward as fast as they could around the parking lot. Or the other group, which chewed tobacco and shot birds with pellet guns. When he was younger, Mac had thought he knew who he was; until he found Cesar it seemed as if that self had evaporated into the hot, dry air.

  Cesar’s family moved in over the hardware store in Tres Osos. Mac spent all his time there, though Cesar claimed his parents were typical frumpy immigrants aspiring to the bourgeoisie. To train them from their impulses, he forced them to listen to Buddhist chants on a pint-size record player. He and Mac listened, too, stoned out of their minds on pot they bought in bags as big as the grass catchers on lawn mowers. Usually they were busy discussing, and writing what they hoped was “literature.” Cesar said they needed pen names, and while he picked The Scorpion, Mac chose Soldat duBois. In one fast burst, Mac and Cesar read Apollinaire and Éluard and Baudelaire and Desnos and Rimbaud, as well as all the Beat poets who had benefited from the French guys.

  They read Tangier together, too. Carolyn was right—he barely wanted to admit how right—that her father and the people in his world had been of interest to Mac. He could still remember ridiculing passages, for the book was known to be based on Charles Ware’s friendship with the publisher William Galeotto, and was on the reading list for young men questioning their identities, and for young men questioning their affection for other young men. (Mac and Cesar were reasonably certain they weren’t questioning anything of the sort.)

  How different things could be now! The summer before their senior year, riding the motorcycle he went everywhere on, Mac’s best friend found himself unable to avoid the temptation of speed on a country road after midnight with the smell of cattle floating over the warm hills. He went airborne for half a second here or there as the uneven ground gave way, as crickets chirped along the road in chorus, as he tested his reflexes when ground squirrels scurried before him, as an old pickup coming home over the next rise, a local, mindless shit-for-brains, loaded with his father’s masonry equipment, tore too fast around a negligible curve and, fearing for the integrity of the masonry equipment, which included an old, battered hand mixer and some crusty trowels, straightened out the truck in the wrong lane and veered into the path of a cycloptic beam of light, thus sending Cesar into an airborne spin, landing him upside down on a rock, which snapped his neck and killed him on the spot.

  Despite the differences, Filipo reminded Mac of his lost friend, and Mac had told him so from the get-go. Searching for substitutes was the one true way of the world.

  “Okay, I did it,” the boy said. He looked up from his work sheet, ready to hold the floor.

  “Let me hear it.”

  Filipo cleared his throat. “ ‘A cold, howling blast of wind stung my face under the penitential clouds. I trembled at the sight, for fear of what being caught in such a storm would mean to me and all others who had no coats or umbrellas. I pushed onward, my face cold, my lips in a rigid line like a Popsicle stick. I tried to halt my shaking appendages and force the tears from my sockets. Then the storm began.

  “ ‘I bravely knocked on the nearest door. The door slowly swung open on its rusty hinges. Facing me was an old man in his late forties. His gray eyes showed relief in seeing me, but also there was a great sadness that showed he had a hunch.

  “ ‘A woman’s body, grossly misshapen, lay dead on the earthen floor. Her face was contorted, and a soiled knife was buried deep within her chest. I stifled a bellow and withdrew. Upon returning to the door, I found the man struggling to speak to me.

  “ ‘I saw the farinaceous loaf and the meat on his table. In a rage unknown to me, I grabbed them and thrust myself out the door. Into the light of the street I ran, home to my punishment. I chewed the bread and meat. I laughed, I realized, I cried.’ ”

  He finished and looked up at Mac.

  “My God,” Mac said. “You’re a good writer. Who is this person?”

  “He lives across the road from Miss Havisham.”

  “Why is there a grossly misshapen woman on the floor?”

  “Because,” said Filipo, “things like that happen.”

  “Yes, they do. But—” Mac stopped himself. “Interesting. Imaginative!”

  “Now what?”

  “I’m not all here,” Mac admitted. “I met a woman.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Don’t be alarmed. I’m just explaining why—”

  “Are you going to stop coming?”

  “No! I’m feeling happy, that’s all.”

  “Could you read the next chapter to me? I like hearing it, because then I can listen to every word and see them like you told me, hanging in a tree like fruit, ready to pick.”

  How could Mac refuse?

  “All right, sure. Sit back and listen. And when you learn to drive, don’t go too fast, okay, and look out all around you?”

  “I want to have a good life,” said Filipo.

  Later Mac was on Union Street, with its leather shops, down shops, Scandinavian toy shops, and antiques, and all the elegantly bundled perusers of those dolled-up boutiques. June, and everyone was wearing woolens. Mac found himself caught in a crowd of Siamese twins—that was how couples looked to him sometimes, absurdly attached. But what a cure for loneliness! He had seen interviews with Siamese twins, and they couldn’t get enough of each other. Think of it! Had his mother and aunt been Siamese, they could have had a fine old time all together.

  He wanted to find flowers for Carolyn Ware. Finally he found some pale rosebuds in a pot, a doll’s bouquet, and retraced his steps into her neighborhood. It was about ten after three, and soon Mac was approaching the heavy façade of her residence.

  No one answered. But sticking out from under the doormat was a scrap of paper with his name on it. He scooped it up. BE RIGHT

  BACK. HAD TO TAKE MOLLY TO A FRIENDS.

  “Are you leaving something for my husband?”

  Mac turned and beheld a woman coming up the steps; a well-dressed, attractive woman with short, silvery hair, pearls on her ear-lobes, and a nice color to her skin. Her throat was tight and lean. “Are you a friend of Charles’s?” she asked. Her voice moved like cold pitch.

  “Mrs. Ware? I’m a friend of your daughter’s,” he said. “Mac West.”

  “Some people call me Adela, Mac.”

  Mac looked at Carolyn’s mother—her eyes were oddly watery. The irises were swimming. “She left me a note,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Carolyn.”

  She studied him curiously. “I didn’t know Carolyn had any friends,” she replied. She opened her bag and pulled out a monogrammed handkerc
hief, then dabbed her eyes. “I am very proud of my daughters.” She smiled. She might have had a beautiful smile, but her mouth looked distorted to him, like that of a horse with a painful bit.

  A car door closed on the street, and a wiry older woman moved up the walkway, swinging what looked like a small sack of take-out cartons.

  “I can come back a little later,” Mac said.

  Adela Ware’s swimming eyes watched him. “Will you stay with us for dinner? Isabel’s staying—” She fumbled with her keys in the lock.

  “Dinner?” said Mac. “Thank you, let’s see what Carolyn says.”

  “No one will have dinner when Charles is away,” Adela Ware said flatly. “There was a time when people came to see me as well.”

  “He’s here to see Carolyn,” the older woman said, climbing the steps. She squeezed Adela’s arm and rubbed it gently. “I’m Dr. Porter,” she said to Mac.

  Adela said, “My father loaded railcars near the slaughterhouses, you see. I was five when he went into an alcoholic coma and died. Mother raised us girls alone.”

  “That’s pretty harsh,” Mac said uncomfortably.

  Adela pushed open the door, and he followed them in. He spotted remnants from the party the night before. Shreds of a popped balloon on the floor. Chocolate cake crumbs. Balls of wrapping paper and ribbon. The fold-up bed rested there still.

  “We lived in a messy neighborhood close enough to the slaughterhouses to hear, on still nights, the groaning of the cattle starving before the kill,” she said.

  “Then you’ve come a long way,” said Mac.

  “Mother supported us making pickles, if you can imagine. Thirteen grocers she supplied with their pickles and relishes. She’d met my father at a party; he was a handsome Irishman who told wonderful stories, and she’d been a fool. Now that he was unable to decimate her life with his drinking, she was doing better. Pickling cucumbers, peppers, corn, watermelon, onions, beets, and peaches, with fifty-pound bags of salt stacked in our basement, and a hundred clay pots filled with fruits, vegetables, and vinegar. I always imagined I was leaving the house smelling of brine.”