by Ethan Joella
They hold their cigars and look out at the yard. They each have an inch of liquor at the bottom of the glass. “So who you been seeing these days, A-Team?”
“Oh man, nobody and nobody. My apartment must be like the house on The Munsters. Every chick that comes close just runs away screaming.” Ahmed sips his Scotch.
“Bullshit. You’re probably banging models. You just don’t want me to feel bad.”
“Yeah, like I wouldn’t broadcast that.” Ahmed shakes his head. “Damn, I’d let C-SPAN set up cameras if that was the case.”
They hear snow geese over their heads in the gray sky, and they both look up to watch. The birds seem to avoid the clouds, keeping the sun on their wings. “Where the hell are they going?” Damon says.
“Away from here. I’m in the first stage of frostbite. My balls are going to shatter.”
“Dramatic.”
The Scotch burns Damon’s throat in a good way. He loves the smell of the cigars, the heavy air. He loves how sturdy his feet feel against the boards of the porch. He looks out at all this land. Even though the acreage is mostly behind the house, you still can’t see the neighbors’ homes through the trees. Their neighbor Albert Fitch used to own all the land around here. He had a small airplane and a landing strip on his property. You could hear the loud engine in town and the buzzing whine of the aircraft creeping above the trees and fields. And then it would zip in for a landing. Damon wonders what happened to that plane. Did it just rust somewhere in Albert’s yard? Albert is in his seventies now. Little by little, he divided off his property and sold some acres here and there. Now he is down to about ten acres of a mostly wooded lot, his house a redwood A-frame. Someone told Damon there is a small lake on the edge of Albert’s property, and now Damon fantasizes about taking the four-wheelers out to look for it.
They are quiet for a minute, and a deer tiptoes past.
“Holy shit,” Ahmed whispers.
“It’s a buck.” Damon doesn’t sip his Scotch. He holds his cigar perfectly still. The deer has a sizable rack, and he steps over the fallen leaves in the wooded part of the yard to their right. It looks around every so often, sniffs the air, and then sees them. Damon doesn’t blink, but the deer immediately turns and bolts away, its muscles rippling as it runs, its white tail bouncing.
“That was awesome.”
“Man, every time I see one, it feels like a miracle.” Damon instantly feels stupid for saying that—men don’t say shit like that, but Ahmed never judges. He could tell him anything. Ahmed’s family moved to Connecticut from Philadelphia when Ahmed was a baby. His brother is fourteen years older, so Ahmed essentially grew up an only child. Damon likes to think they filled in as brothers for each other. He never felt as close to his twin sister as he felt to Ahmed. They always just got each other. One night years ago, Ahmed got off the phone with his dad. They had had an argument, and Ahmed’s eyes were red. “I fucking hate that guy,” Ahmed said, and he banged his fist on the wall of his apartment.
When Damon broke up with Amanda, his girlfriend for a few years after college, he downplayed it to his parents, to his twin, Lara. “Plenty of fish in the big ocean,” he said to them, but he had this lump in the back of his throat that wouldn’t go away. He would sometimes not shower for a few days because he hurt so bad. He would put off paying his bills for weeks because he didn’t have the energy to write checks. Screw it, he thought. Pay the late fee. He remembers going for a walk at four in the morning outside his apartment because he felt so awful and couldn’t sleep and didn’t know where to put himself. He’d walked the dark streets, shielding his eyes from passing cars. It started to rain, and he just wanted to lie down. What was he doing out here in the middle of the night? Why couldn’t he forget her?
Amanda. One night she was sitting up in bed. Amanda with her smooth neck, her long dark hair. He rubbed her shoulders. He shouldn’t have said it, he shouldn’t have because it seemed to pull the cork from whatever this was, and she just erupted in tears. He shouldn’t have said, “What’s wrong, Mands? What’s the matter?” Because she shook her head, and soon the sheets were wet from her crying.
“I have to leave,” she said. “I don’t want this anymore.”
Why did he ask? How devastating that a single question could pull everything apart. In minutes, she was climbing from bed, dressed in her polka-dot sleep shirt he’d gotten her a year before for Valentine’s Day, and it was almost as if she was relieved he’d asked. Like if he hadn’t, she would have just gone back to sleep and stayed forever in that apartment with him, sitting on his parents’ brown couch they used to keep down in the finished basement, eating at the dinette set his aunt Rosie let him have, stocking the old green refrigerator. And he was half asleep, so foolish in his Star Wars pajama pants, watching her stuff bras and blouses and her makeup into a garbage bag.
“We’re breaking up?” he asked, and she glared at him. The same girl who once made him steak, who poured champagne for the two of them into glasses from the dollar store. He used to kiss her freckles. She used to cut his hair sometimes, and he loved it, even if she missed a spot at the top, even if his sister said his neckline was crooked. Are we programmed this way? he wondered. Can we not know we’re unhappy sometimes until someone asks the right question?
Those months that followed after Amanda left turned him into a pile of nothing. He hated everything on TV. His heart jumped every time his cell phone rang. Is this the price of love? he thought one day when he started to dial her number, then hung up because he knew he’d seem pathetic. He tried to remember what his father said about if the train doesn’t stop at the station, then it’s not your train.
But over and over, he hated himself for asking her. Why did he invite that pain into his life? Ahmed was the only person he talked to about Amanda, the only one who seemed to understand. And after that time in his life passed, Ahmed was kind enough to never remind him of it.
Damon finishes his Scotch and looks over at his friend, who is also deep in thought, a trail of smoke coming from his cigar. What question could Suzette ask, or Ahmed ask that would unknot him? Does he have one? Is it strange he never told Suzette about the breakup with Amanda? Is it strange that he’s kept that inside him, that he still doesn’t know how he got over that sadness? Once in a while he catches himself thinking about her leaving that night, dragging her garbage bag behind her, and he still feels wronged, still feels like if he were back in that apartment those years ago and she knocked, he would open the door for her. He would shake his head and pull her into his arms.
What is he doing in this nice house, in his mid-thirties, thinking about Amanda, who was nothing in the long run? He will have kids with Suzette, most likely, and she will be the one he sees every night. They will grow old together, and that’s all that matters. Thank God you left me. He should call Amanda and tell her that. Thank God you did me that favor. Look what I have because of that. Look.
Why did he never tell Suzette though? Why hasn’t he told her about what a failure he felt like that year? His other secrets are smaller. He cheated on a Latin test once in ninth grade because his friend found the same test in an old folder of his brother’s and they memorized every question. When he was fifteen he was picked up at the mall for stealing a CD at the record store because Jason, the quarterback in school, told him he didn’t have the balls to do it. He almost threw up when he sat in the mall security office. They didn’t call his parents, only the cops, and the cop who came took him in her car to the station. He imagined his parents coming to get him there. He could feel the color leave him. As he sat answering a few questions, his hands shook, and the officer must have felt bad for him, because she got him a Dr Pepper from the vending machine, cold and syrupy as he drank it, and she sighed and touched his shoulder. She said, “Don’t be stupid anymore,” and told him the store wouldn’t press charges. She didn’t call his parents. She just drove him back to the mall and waved to him from the brown cop car as he walked away.
Why h
asn’t he said anything about any of this? Why hasn’t anyone asked?
Ahmed finishes his Scotch and holds his cigar in his mouth. He zips up his coat. “Well, Romes, ready to hit the open farm?”
“Yeah.” He looks down at the drink in his lap. He tastes the cigar, the liquor. He wants a mint.
“What’s got you?”
Damon looks up. “Nothing.”
Ahmed lifts his eyebrows. “Don’t play.”
“I’m not.”
“Shit, I can feel it. What’s eating you?”
He drops the cigar. He stomps the tip of it with his boot. He doesn’t care if it leaves a mark. “I’m lonely, man.” He clears his throat. “Nah, not lonely. That’s the wrong word. I just feel fucking out of it.”
He expects Ahmed to laugh. To punch him in the arm. He expects him to say something like Time to change your tampon, but Ahmed nods. “I feel you,” he says. “I was putting myself in your shoes this whole time and thinking this must be awesome but weird, too.”
How odd that Ahmed sees all sides—the good, the troubling. No, not troubling. That is not the right word. He assumed Ahmed envied his life, but he saw through the facade. “You could feel that?”
“Of course.” He knows things are serious when Ahmed doesn’t joke, but this is when Damon feels the best about their friendship, that they have this authentic thing, too.
Damon thinks of Suzette then. How on one of their first dates five years ago, she looked at him over her glass of beer and told him about moving to Finland. How she couldn’t stay. How she wept for her sister who died, and left some of her stuff there and got back on the plane after a few days. How she never taught at the school where she had been hired. “It could have been such a blessing, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and there I was, chain smoking and dragging my suitcase through that quiet airport.” He remembers how he reached over and touched her hand, how she felt so warm, so full of life, and he thought God, please don’t let this go wrong. Please let this all be real, because that’s how it felt with her. Real and wonderful. Her vulnerability in confessing this touched him. She was such a full person, made up of perfections and flaws and kindness and sadness.
And after all that time of being sick over Amanda, he didn’t care about her anymore. He didn’t even think about her because there was this lovely blonde who laughed as she dipped her nacho into the sour cream. She was so open to tell him this. Maybe he thought then that she would make him more open, too.
He thinks now he fell in love with her the second he met her. But why has he been so guarded? Why couldn’t he confess his stuff to her that night, or even months later? He trusts her. He does. If he doesn’t tell her everything he is, isn’t he no better than Amanda, who kept all that inside, who stayed when she didn’t want to, until he asked her that question? He needs to tell Suzette: he has his own Finland. She will listen. She will touch his face. He doesn’t want her to feel sorry for him though. He has been afraid of that part of himself, the part that couldn’t get over what Amanda did. That part that walked and walked. He wants Suzette to know this was worth it. She was worth the difficult wait. “I’m just whiny, right?” he says as they slip on their hats and gloves and clomp over the frozen grass to Red and Blue.
“Nah,” Ahmed says. “I’m lonely, too.” He hands Damon a beat-up helmet.
“Yeah?”
Ahmed nods. “But I’ll find my queen. I’m not even playing around with princesses anymore. Going right for a queen.”
“She’s out there, man.”
“We’ll see.” Ahmed looks over at him. “Did that bridesmaid, the vet, did she, uh, ever visit or anything?”
“Ginger?” Damon remembers seeing them take a walk together at the wedding. Then she got word her ex-boyfriend died and had to leave. Leave it to Ahmed to fall for her: the best of the best. Smart, sensitive, beautiful. “Good pick, buddy… but I think she’s, um, otherwise engaged.”
“Yeah, she seemed it.” Ahmed looks straight ahead and starts up Red. The engine is loud and confident. “Let’s do this!” he shouts over the noise.
“Right behind you.” Damon turns the key. The green light appears. He puts it in neutral and hits the start button. The engine growls. Ahmed gives him the thumbs-up and rumbles ahead of him, past the house, past the barn.
They zigzag through the grass, crouching over their seats. He feels the energy of the quad, the good wind, the tires as they bounce over the uneven land, and his friend is there, like a fellow soldier on a horse, like they’re in the Crusades or something, riding toward destiny.
“Hell yeah,” Ahmed shouts at the same time Damon hollers, “Yes! Yes!” and they drive and yell like this, their lungs burning, the engines roaring. Small flurries of wet snow start to fall. They stick to Damon’s boots. They glisten on the sides of the vehicle, and he and Ahmed drive and drive, over all this land that is somehow his. Damon wonders how he found himself here, how his train stopped at this good station.
13. The Winter Puzzle
Greg Tyler doesn’t look at himself anymore when he brushes his teeth.
He notices this. He notices a lot of things. That a man’s face needs eyebrows and even eyelashes to look right. That he probably can’t do a pull-up these days (he hasn’t tried). That the day drags by so slowly when you don’t have budget meetings to attend, or board reports to write. That the taste of metal from chemo, even chemo that’s been finished for weeks, ruins everything.
He looks at his wife as she steps into the shower, her blondish hair touching her shoulders, and he envies her healthy skin, the way she can stand so straight, the way the water doesn’t wilt her at all. He squirts out a blob of Colgate original and closes his eyes while he tastes more metal and runs the toothbrush over his molars.
He wonders if he can survive this.
Of course he would have raised his hand and volunteered to take cancer so no one else would have to, and he’s glad Freddie and Addie are spared. That means something somehow, that because he has this, they are spared. Aren’t they? Yes, he thinks so. He always felt the world doled things out this way, like a game of duck, duck, goose. He is glad they won’t feel sick, lose their hair, see the shock on people’s faces. But even still he wishes someone could feel the way he feels for a second, to slip it on like a smock in art class in elementary school, so they’d know what he knows: that there is no God at a time like this, that there is nothing really. That you can’t come this close to seeing darkness without it altering you. He realizes how ineffective it is when someone says, “You’re in my prayers,” or, “Let me know if I can do anything.” You should regard someone who has cancer with silence because it is so heavy, so burdensome, that even when the patient is tough like Greg is, silence is the only thing you should offer. He wishes someone could feel how heavy and cruel this is. Then they could slip it off and shake their heads and say, Oh, Greg. I had no idea.
He blows Freddie a kiss and says goodbye. She must make it a point not to stare at him. She must work on it, because she waves and winks at him, her body glistening with shower water, her hair slicked back, and he slips on his track pants, his Columbia fleece pullover, and heads out the door. The one good thing about all this: it is so easy to get ready. No hair to pat down. No need to shave that often, although sometimes a faint crop of five o’clock shadow creeps across his face like hope.
He wears a ski hat and gloves. It is only one mile to the treatment center, and he uses what strength is left in him—somewhere in some compartment of his body—to walk. Freddie has stopped offering to drive him, knowing he needs to do this. And he can. Damn if he’ll be driven like a junior high kid to band practice. Damn if he’ll not make these legs continue to work for him. He is holding on to his independence because he needs to. Because almost everything else—his work, his ability to be the leader in the house, his energy—has been taken from him. He will walk. He will whip his feet like unruly horses.
He likes his sneakers bouncing on the sidewalk, the hills and slopes of t
he neighborhood, and then the way he weaves through parking lots like Hamilton’s (where he used to take clients for cocktails) until he gets to the treatment center. Some of the houses have paper hearts in the window and red sparkling lights. There are small mounds of snow every so often from the storm a week ago, but mostly the yards and sidewalks are clear. He notices so much more now that he goes slower, now that he’s not always rushing from the gym to work to a dinner with Alex or clients. On foot he notices everything, and he likes taking it all in. One of the houses has a snow shovel on the front porch propped by the door with a big shaker of ice melt beside it. Seeing this makes him feel weak. He misses shoveling snow. He hopes he can mow the lawn this summer. He is not meant to be a patient.
His mother was from a German family, and they prized cold air and honest work and not feeling sorry for yourself. He remembers how after his great-grandmother had a stroke she insisted they keep the lights off in her hospital room. “No television, no noise,” she said. “I am willing myself to get better.” Now, thirty years later he is doing the same. He feels there must be a benefit to the February air passing through his lungs, that the sun on his face must help in some way. He imagines his body is a factory, and good practices will make it produce what it needs—strong antibodies spilling out on a conveyor belt—to keep fighting this.
Even if he has to stop every so often. Even if his legs ache, and the site on his hip itches from the radiation, and he feels queasy sometimes. Through his pants, he thinks he can feel the tattoo where they marked him for the beams of radiation. He feels so sensitive lately—as though his brain notices everything wrong in his uncooperative body. He hears his own breathing, his blood coursing under his skin, his heart beating.
How many years did he just ignore his whole body as though it was machinery with a lifetime guarantee? He took it all for granted and assumed it could keep going and going. He wishes he had lain in a hammock more, resting his hand on his heart. He wishes he had enjoyed the freedom he had when he was well. He could have called in sick whenever he wanted and just sat in a café with Freddie and Addie, eating ice cream or french fries. Now everything is hard. Now the only thing he can do is walk to a doctor’s office. That is his outing. What was he thinking before?