by Wally Lamb
“Can I tell you something? You should try sitting closer to the rest of us. You miss a lot by sitting apart like that. It sets up barriers.”
“How do you know?”
Heat rose to my face. “I don’t know. I just think it must. This is my car.”
“You’re really good at description,” he said. “When Roy read your paper, I could practically feel her foot in my own lap.”
“You could?”
“Yeah. Which was a real turn-on because I have this foot fetish.”
I unlocked the Biscayne, got in, locked it again. He was talking at me through the glass. The trouble with those little squirt cans of Mace was that you had to rummage in your purse for them while the pervert waited. I rolled the window down a millimeter or two instead. “What?”
“I said maybe you’d like to go out for a coffee sometime?”
I told him I was pretty busy.
“That was just a joke, you know. About me having a foot fetish. Actually I think feet are kind of ugly.”
“Oh.”
“I was just trying to be witty. Happens when I get nervous. Sorry.”
“How old is your kid?”
“How did you know I had a kid?”
“Your paper? You said you watch your kid sleep?”
“Oh, yeah, right. Thirteen—pain-in-the-butt age. Not that he wasn’t always one. I notice you don’t wear any wedding ring.”
I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets.
“I’m divorced,” he said. “If you’re wondering.”
I rolled my window down some more. “The reason I know you miss a lot when you sit apart in class is because I used to do that. When I was in high school. At a table . . . Because I was fat.”
His laugh was one edgy note.
“Not that you’re fat,” I said. “You’re big-boned. I was . . . well, I was obese. But anyway, I really liked your paper.”
I sat in the Biscayne with the motor racing and watched him walk away. My hands were sweaty on the steering wheel; I wasn’t sure why I sat there and stared instead of just reaching down and getting out of neutral. He unlocked a van and got in; the whole vehicle leaned toward his weight.
He waved as he drove past me. “Existential Drywall,” the van said. “Responsible Work for Authentic Individuals.”
* * *
It would surprise you—the number of people who crave Chinese food on Christmas Eve. Roberta had had dizzy spells that day, so I was running the takeout service myself. Mr. Pucci’s order was one of the last to come in—the Dinner for Four special. I was nervous driving over there.
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Pucci,” I said. My tote box was brimming with brown bags. I shifted a little and almost dropped his entire order.
“Is that Dolores?” he said. “Oh, my God, you’re the last person—do you have time to come in for a drink?”
“Oh, well, not really. I don’t want your stuff to get cold. Half a glass, maybe.”
The dining-room table was set like something in a magazine. Men were talking and laughing down in the sunken living room. I followed Mr. Pucci out to the kitchen.
For a couple of quiet seconds, we just smiled and took each other in. “How long have you been working at the restaurant?” he asked.
The cup of cider he gave me was warm and freckled with cinnamon. I told him about my divorce, night school, Roberta. “Well,” I laughed, “here’s to the man on the moon.”
His eyes teared over and he shook his head. He looked older, old. “To old friends,” he said.
One of the men called up, “The smell of that food is torturing us, Fabio. When do we eat?”
I drained my cup. “Is that Gary? I’d like to say hi to him,” I said. “Wish him happy holidays.”
“Well—he’s been sick. The flu.” I watched a nerve jump in his face. “But all right. Come on. Sure.”
I nodded and smiled as he introduced me to his company—handsome Jordan Marsh–catalog men come to life in their beautiful cable sweaters and creased pants. The room was sweet with cologne.
“And you remember Gary?” Mr. Pucci said.
I struggled to control my face, to force my muscles to act normal. There was a quilt over his legs. He had become a skeleton.
He squinted up at me. “Who is it, Fabio?”
“It’s Dolores Price, honey. She was a student of mine.”
He stared without recognition.
“I barged in on you once,” I said. “You two were going on a picnic. You gave me some cookies and played Billie Holiday on your jukebox.” I suddenly noticed the jukebox, pointed to it. “There it is,” I said.
His shaking was wilder than Roberta’s. “Now I remember,” he said. “The big fat girl.”
Mr. Pucci laughed and blushed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “He’s not himself.”
Roberta was up when I got home. I flopped down on the water bed next to her and stared up at that collapsed ceiling. “Now I wish we’d gotten a tree after all,” I said. “No matter what it looks like in here.”
“I know what you need,” she said. “You need your Christmas present.”
She opened hers from me first: a Chippendales calendar we’d sold down at Buchbinder’s. We thumbed through the months, choosing our favorites, giggling together at the sexy men.
My present from her was wrapped in red foil and had cascades of curled white ribbon. “It’s so beautiful, I hate to open it,” I said.
“Red and white,” she said. “Polack colors.”
Inside the box was a satin Chinese robe—orange blossoms falling on peacock blue.
“What the hell you crying for?” she said. “Come on, now.”
I took it out of the box and it fell to its full length. “It’s just so beautiful. You rat! We agreed not to spend more than ten dollars apiece. Now I feel even cruddier.”
“Oh, go on,” she said. “Johnny down at the restaurant got it for me from New York. Half-price.”
The robe slid coolly against my skin; we both stroked it.
I told her about Mr. Pucci’s lover.
“If it’s that stuff, it’s catching, ain’t it? The teacher must have it, too.”
“I feel scared,” I said.
“I’m sure you can’t pick it up just by walking into their house.”
“Not scared of that. I’m just scared it’s there—that it exists. I can’t stop seeing him. He looked like a concentration-camp man.”
We held hands, tight.
“Roberta?” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Nothing. I’m just . . . I’m just glad you’re here.”
* * *
Thayer Kitchen did the ceiling job for three and a quarter during our January semester break, moonlighting for a week’s worth of evenings. Sometimes I’d watch from the doorway as he hammered and hefted Sheetrock or clunked around on his steel-spring stilts, whistling along with his Bob Seger and Springsteen tapes. During his break, he set the stove timer for fifteen minutes and flopped back on a kitchen chair. I sat with him, but he did most of the talking.
“You see, it’s tricky enough now that he’s gettin’ hair under his arms and I’m noticing crusty underwear when I do the laundry. But him being half black on top of it makes it a little tougher. Hard on the kid, you know? Lately he’s gone heavy-duty into his ethnic thing. Hangs out at the Y with the bros. Gets pissed off if I forget and call him Arthur instead of Jemal. Or Chilly J, I should say. That’s his rapping name.”
“What about his mother? Isn’t she around here?”
“Claudia? Lives down in D.C. He stays there for part of the summer—August, usually—but he hates it. Claims all the McDonald’s in Washington water down their milkshakes, but I think he gets lonesome. Claudia’s got a killer work schedule, so it’s pretty much him and the VCR . . . I mean, we drive each other nuts, him and me, but we’re tight. Chilly J. My man.”
“I’m divorced, too,” I said.
“Kids?”
I shook my head.
&
nbsp; “Yeah, well, he must have been a big doofus.”
“Who?”
“The guy who let you get away.”
The comment took me off guard. It was several seconds before I heard the droning of the stove timer.
“You got a crush on that big drink of water who’s fixing the ceiling, don’t you?” Roberta said that night. She’d caught me humming “Against the Wind” while I helped her into her pj’s.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “What makes you think that?”
“Because all week you’ve been walking around here in a daze.”
“Paint fumes,” I said.
* * *
At the start of spring semester, I reduced my hours down at the store and signed up for two courses, Psychology 112 and Herstory: A Feminist Look at the Past. “I don’t really want to major in business, Mr. Buchbinder, so it’s not fair to keep letting you pay for my courses,” I said, pushing back his second envelope of money.
“Don’t force her if she doesn’t want it,” Mrs. Buchbinder said.
“You keep out of this, Ida,” he scolded. “This is business between the girl and me.”
I smiled at the word “girl.” I was thirty-three.
* * *
Allyson was in my Herstory class, too. By then she had broken up with her boyfriend, thrown her Boy George screenplay into the wood stove, and given birth to Shiva, a ten-pound baby boy. I visited them one afternoon with a present, one of those snuggle sacks that lets the baby sleep against your chest while you carry on with your life. It cost $39.99, a splurge, but it was the only thing I felt like giving her. Allyson and I read the instructions and she tried it just before I left. “Whoa, it feels primal,” she said. “Third World or something.”
The only man in the Herstory class dropped out after the second week. Some nights, class turned into a kind of group-therapy seminar, though, personally, I kept my mouth shut. The more my classmates shared their stories and raised each other’s consciousness, the more horrified I became with the marriage Dante and I had put together. I looked up “existentialism” in the library. If I had the theory right, I was just as much to blame for my bad marriage as Dante had been. Roberta’s your family, I told myself. She’s all you need. Yours is an authentic life.
Thayer was taking word processing on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Sometimes we sat together in one of the student-lounge booths, but whenever he started talking about new movies or restaurants he’d heard about, I broke in with complaints about my busy schedule.
One evening I spoke out in class. I hadn’t meant to; those women just drew me in. “I think . . .” I said, “I think . . . the secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes.” My voice hesitated a little but I kept talking; everyone seemed interested. “Instead of, you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.”
“What might make you happy?” my professor asked.
The rest of the class took over. “Prince Charming,” someone sighed.
“Small thighs.”
“My boyfriend finding my G spot.”
Allyson hooked her bare feet around the chair in front of her. “Prince Charming locating my G spot between my thin thighs.”
All around me, women laughed and nodded.
* * *
“No thanks, Thayer, really,” I said.
“Any reason in particular?”
“I’m just not seeing anyone.” If he expected something in return because of the ceiling job, that was his problem, not mine. He should be existential about it.
All of which would have been fine if Allyson hadn’t brought Shiva to class one Tuesday night. She’d decorated the snuggle sack with studs and punk-rock buttons. I couldn’t tell if the safety pins were decorative or practical. “Psst,” she said. “I’ve got cramps. Can you take him?”
The baby warmed the front of me. Watching that little vulnerable gap in his skull collapse and expand with each breath was a kind of hypnosis. The professor’s voice blurred away.
“Why don’t I just hold him for you until after the break,” I whispered to Allyson when she got back.
Thayer was in the lounge, eating a bowl of chili. “Well,” he said, smiling at the snuggle sack, “I see you’ve become a marsupial.” He got me a soda and, when he returned, bent down and brushed his lips against the baby’s head in the exact spot I couldn’t stop watching. Allyson was at the jukebox, dancing wildly by herself.
The following week, my Herstory professor assigned me a research paper called “The Biological Clocks of Baby Boomers: A Dilemma for the Eighties Feminist.” Well, “assign” was the wrong word; I chose the topic from her list of possibilities.
In the library, I read article after article, stared at one downward-sloping graph after another once you hit age thirty-five. Down at the store, Mr. Buchbinder started featuring two new lines of clocks, cuckoo and digital. Allyson began wearing a series of see-through watches strapped to her arms, their inner workings exposed like X rays. The whole world seemed to be counting down my remaining childbearing time. Or at least I was. In the student lounge, I’d sometimes catch myself staring over at Thayer, sitting in the same booth where he always sat, directly beneath the big wall clock. But I told him no thanks to whatever he suggested: bowling, the stock-car races, a home-cooked meal.
“It’s my size, isn’t it?” he said.
“Of course it isn’t. I just . . . I just don’t have the time.”
* * *
Gary, Mr. Pucci’s lover, died in March. I hadn’t known his last name and I’d forgotten that he was a travel agent. Since the holidays I’d been watching the obituaries for their address.
I wasn’t prepared to have it strike me with the force it did. The article mentioned his relatives, an award from the Chamber of Commerce, a “lengthy illness.” Nothing about Mr. Pucci.
I told myself I was too busy to visit Mr. Pucci: two jobs, a research paper, midterms on their way. That “pal” stuff he’d said at Grandma’s wake—about us being connected by the moon walk—it was just his way of being nice. Comforting me.
But that was it: he’d comforted me.
I couldn’t sleep. I tiptoed downstairs, hoping to regulate my breathing to Roberta’s. But her snoring sounded like a chain saw. Back in bed, I told myself how rewarding it was to finally have a neat, predictable life, give or take a ceiling cave-in. Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep.
For the next three nights, I drove through Easterly’s sleeping neighborhoods, burning up gas and listening to my humpback tapes. Each night, Mr. Pucci’s upstairs light was on: a single rectangle of pain.
* * *
The weekend before my research paper was due, I sat at the kitchen table, index cards fanned out in front of me. Outside, the snow was coming down in fat chunky flakes. The doorbell rang. Roberta was off at jai alai.
“You Dolores?” the boy said. He was lanky and handsome, with smooth coffee skin. He had a sweatshirt hood pulled over his head and something menacing in the bag under his arm.
“My husband always shovels our walk for us,” I said. “As a matter of fact, he’s putting on his boots right now.” I pointed back inside the empty house.
From behind the bushes, a voice said, “She’s bluffing. Get going.”
It wasn’t a weapon in the bag—or a snow shovel either; it was a boom box. Suddenly, Aretha Franklin was singing “Freeway of Love” and Thayer was up on the porch. They began a father-and-son break dance.
The boy—I couldn’t remember his name—whirled and spun and managed gymnastic flips all over the snowy porch without slipping once. Thayer was a disaster, grunting and repeating—over and over—a single graceless maneuver. A miscalculation with one of his clompy work boots sent three of the railing spindles flying off the porch and into the snow.
“Hey!” I protested.
&
nbsp; At the end of the song, the boy clicked off the tape and began snapping his fingers.
The name’s Jemal
And I’m the best
I got fine ladies
Hangin’ off my chest
“How old are you—twelve?” I said. “Give me a break.”
Thayer had been staring at his son’s hand, trying to get his own finger-snapping to catch up. “Yeah, get to the point, doofus,” he said. He was still panting hard.
This here’s Thayer
He’s sayin’ a prayer
You’ll be his lady
The deal ain’t shady . . .
“My term paper is due on Tuesday and . . .”
My man here’s cool
He ain’t no fool
Think about you all day
Make him drool
“All right,” I said. “Once. I’ll come for dinner once. After I get this paper written. And don’t forget I’m a vegetarian.”
Thayer smiled goofily and snapped his fingers at me. “Ain’t she sweet? She don’t eat meat.”
Jemal shook his head. “He got it bad for you, mama. He a mess.”
I started closing the door. “I’m not your mother,” I said, attempting a scowl. “Fix the porch before you go.”
Back at the table, I couldn’t stop smiling at my index cards.
* * *
I scared Mr. Pucci when I rang his doorbell in the middle of the night. I could read fear in his face—then recognition, curiosity.
“Dolores?” he said.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” I said. “I brought you this.”
He reached out and took the African violet, staring and staring at it, turning it in his hands. Then the leaves and blossoms trembled. When he cried, I folded him up in my arms.
During the first of our night rides together, Mr. Pucci and I were mostly quiet. I turned the steering wheel with my left hand and held his hand with my right. We played the whale tapes, over and over. They soothed him, he said.
By the end of the second week, we had established a routine that either of us could trigger with a single telephone ring. He waited for me out on his front porch in a lawn chair, bundled up against the cold in his trench coat and tweed cap. The red dot of his burning cigarette was the first thing I’d see. “Hi, pal,” he’d say. Then he’d close the door as quietly as he could and we’d be off.