by Peter Orner
Slam.
Knock again.
All information is strictly confidential. It is against federal law to share information collected by the census. The government merely wants to—
Slam.
Knock, knock again.
The census is a constitutional mandate. The Founding Fathers believed that the lifeblood of democracy itself was dependent on an accurate—
Slam.
On the first day of the second month, the Lord said to Moses, take a census of the whole—
Slam.
Banging on the door, Look, do me a favor and just throw out a number, any number—
Miriam in a trench coat, sunglasses on her head, carrying a bundle of questionnaires and booklets. Anything to get out of the suburbs. On the Kennedy Expressway—the city rising—she would say, Look around, observe! And Popper would call out the sights: Morton Salt, Aabbitt Adhesives, the Polish Catholic Union, Ukrainian National Bank, Magikist lips…
She loved construction, she loved muggings. She loved traffic. She loved traffic reports: 14 minutes to the Circle Exchange. Kennedy, 19 minutes to Montrose, the Ryan outbound 28 minutes to 95th, Lake Shore Drive free and clear from Monroe to Hollywood, fender bender on the inbound Ike, gapers’ block from Manheim to the post office—Traffic sponsored by Ray Hara’s King Datsun, home of king-sized discounts.
“That’s us. Nineteen minutes to Montrose. We’re flying in today. Careful, Honey—”
That move she used to make, that all mothers used to make, gone now in this dull age of seatbelts. Miriam slashing her arm across Popper’s chest at the hint of any danger.
A Fall River girl in Chicago and she couldn’t get enough. New England was stale, complacent. Chicago was about the new. Knock it down, big boy, and build me something bigger. The City That Works won’t be slowed by sentimental nostalgia. And Miriam, census taker, counter of souls, was now a cog in this unstoppable wheel of action. This remarkable place where a woman—a woman!—was elected Himself.
But census taking, the act itself, is its own special hell. Popper began, even then, to understand how hard it can be to confront even the most basic questions about your life. Who do you live with? Who don’t you live with?
In his census memories it is always raining and they are always drenched. And Miriam would say, “Enough of this already, let’s have a drink.” And so together they’d flee to the nearest bar, never more than a block or two away, and she’d plunk down her papers and say to the bartender, usually a sloe-eyed man emerging out of a corner of darkness, “Give me a martini. Very very dry.”
To Popper: “Cola or Uncola?”
“Uncola. No, wait. A Coke. No, Uncola. No, wait, a Coke.”
Always that unlit red-tipped cigarette between her fingers. She’d practice on him.
“Who do you live with?”
“You, Leo, and Dad.”
“Immediate family?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are all the persons you named members of your immediate family?”
“I’m confused.”
“Occupation?”
“Archaeologist.”
“Highest degree attained?”
“Huh?”
“What grade are you in?”
“Fifth.”
“Years in the state of Illinois, not excluding terms of military service?”
“Whole life.”
“Religion?”
“I know, Mom, I know. We’re Jewish, but I don’t have to be. I can be anything—”
He remembers. They were on the 1800 block of South Pulaski and the door of a basement apartment was immediately opened by an alarmingly tall woman with a wild mass of orange hair. She swatted away the speech. “Come on in, Commerce Department.”
The woman lived in a single room, a kitchen and a living room. Rain was banging on the little rectangular windows. She lived eye-level with the wet feet going by on the sidewalk. One lamp hung from a chain, a single bulb behind a tattered red shade. The light in the room was the color of washed-out blood. You could tell where the border between the kitchen and the living room was supposed to be by where the linoleum ended and the worn, gnarled carpet began, but her stuff didn’t seem to care what was the kitchen and what wasn’t. In the red shadows, he could see scattered piles of newspapers, old mail, coupon books, clothes, and unwashed dishes. Spent Kleenex were strewn across the apartment like little crumplets of flowers. On the single chair in the room was a plant the size of a man. Shoved into one corner was an upright piano that doubled as a bookshelf and a place for shoes. On the sofa, memory swears, a small load of lumber.
“Make yourselves at home!”
“Oh no, I wouldn’t want to trouble you. I only have a few very brief—”
“Sit.”
For a few moments they stood there confused. Sit where? The woman motioned toward the chairless kitchen table. As they got closer, they saw that on the other side of the table, wedged against the wall, was another, lower, couch. On it were crumpled sheets and a pillow. They sat. The orange-haired woman might have been tall enough for the couch to double as a bed and a kitchen chair, but Miriam and her kid were smallish people. Miriam scooted forward, so that at least her head and arm were above the table. Popper did his best to do the same, shoving his chin just over the edge.
“No! Sit back! Make yourselves comfortable!”
Miriam propped her papers up on her knees and poised her pencil. The woman joined them on the couch bed.
“Move over a bit, honey,” Miriam said.
“So, what was it you wanted to ask me, Commerce Department?”
“How many people in your household?”
The orange-haired woman swayed backward and laughed. She stopped and abruptly stood up. The effect was like a trampoline, the two of them flung upward.
The woman looked around the apartment as if she were looking for somebody who’d been hiding.
“You know, I used to have a lot of men,” she said, and reached down and set her large hand on the top of Popper’s head. “Cute when they’re little. They ought to snip it off early.”
“Age,” Miriam said. “You can be approximate.”
“Are you married? You must be married. Petite, pretty. Although, I notice, no ring. It’s in your pocket? Men talk easier that way. Answer your questions?”
“Source of monthly income?”
“Happy in that matrimony?”
Miriam changed her grip on her pencil and sank deeper into the half couch.
“Disability,” the orange-haired woman said to buoy her a little. “I’m on disability, $160 a week. Monthly, that’s—You’re not from here.”
“Massachusetts,” Miriam said. “I’m from Massachusetts. Alternate source of income? Stock dividends, bond yields, interest on long-term savings accounts—”
“Would you two like some pretzels? I’m sure the little monkey eats pretzels.” From the front pocket of her blue jeans she yanked out a crumpled bag of pretzels and handed it to Popper. He took one pretzel and listened to himself chomp in his own ears.
“Doesn’t talk much, does he, Commerce Department?”
“I’ve only got a few more—”
“Oh, don’t be shy. Ask away.”
“Would you consider yourself white, black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, or Aleutian Islander and/or Eskimo?”
The rain went on banging on the windows. Miriam was diligent. She soldiered on. The training manual had said expect certain countees to be resistant. Remember the three Ps: Patience, Persistence, Politeness.
“And my hair’s not really red.”
“It’s not?”
“I dye it. Out of vanity. I’m not saying I was ever beautiful. Not like you. I was never as beautiful as someone like you. I can only imagine what you must have looked like as a child.”
“Highest degree attained?” Miriam whispered.
“I’m not lonely. You can think what you want.”
He watched his mother
write this down. She’d begun to write it all down, everything. But he remembers thinking this was true. The orange-haired woman wasn’t lonely. It was the two of them who had come to her out of the rain.
“Occupation?”
“Insomniac.”
“Is this your primary residence?”
“What’s he do?”
“Who?”
“Your other monkey. The bigger monkey.”
“He’s an attorney.”
Miriam wrote this down also. Popper read it. My other monkey is an attorney.
“Religious affiliation?”
The orange-haired woman watched his mother so intently and for so long that the afternoon collapsed. The patterns of wrinkles radiating from her eyes were like fresh cobwebs. She reached for Miriam’s throat with her big fingers and held them there, as if she were taking her pulse.
Popper spoke then for the first time all afternoon, nearly shrieking, “It’s not required!”
The last shred of outside light now gone, only that blood light, but the rain still banging on the little windows. He doesn’t remember leaving. He doesn’t remember the walk back to the car, South Pulaski reaching flat for uncountable miles, or even the rain, the rain beading on his mother’s coat, the rain in his shoes, the rain in his eyes, the silence between the two of them on the drive home, none of it, he remembers none of it.
THE BLUFF
He follows Leo out to the bluff. The lake down below rasping in the dark. They never even need to listen to it, because it is always there. The bluff is a scoop of land above the lake, as if God’s mouth took a bite out of the middle of an apple and left the top part, and they sit up there and pluck weeds and kick the scrawny trees that barely hang on to the ground. Erosion will send these trees off the cliff sooner or later. Over the edge are carcasses of newly fallen trees, uptorn roots like festoons of pubic hair. Every year the bluff shrinks more. Two brothers on their backs looking up through the trees at the scrumble of clouds in the purple dark, not listening to the lake.
Leo?
Yeah?
What’s taking her so long?
He wants the house. Think about it, Alex. Mom doesn’t have a dime.
Leo?
Yeah?
It’s late
So?
BACK PORCH
You aren’t going to be a kid without a father. My own father, by the way, who you only knew in the very last years of his life, was a wonderful father, ineffective in many ways, he spent most of his life dreaming, but he couldn’t have been more loving. That’s neither here nor there. The point is, you can’t choose your father any more than you can choose the weather or how tall you are or how straight your teeth are—and your father loves you, never think for a minute that—
“But you chose him.”
They were on the back porch. Leo, being older and more independent, and pretty much mayor of his own life, was exempt from this speech. On the patio the fountain gurgled, the little naked boy with the leaf over his dick was still holding his turtle, and out of the turtle’s mouth water was still drooling and collecting in the pool at his feet.
Miriam shrugged. “Oh, honey, you know your father can, on occasion, be extraordinarily charming. I used to think of him as a short Warren Beatty. I admit there are times when I forget this myself and want nothing at all to do—Also, he’s quite a good dancer. Beanie taught him. And he says she never paid attention to him. Well, at some point she must have—Not that he and I have danced in—”
VANISHED SCENE
It’s stopped, but still the trees keep on raining. The loud plops amid the leaves. Philip and Leo took turns digging a shallow ditch. Popper held Sir Edmund to his chest. The grass wet, the new dirt blue and wormy. The dog fit snug in the hole. Philip held Lord Byron under his arm. He had planned to read: Oh could I feel as I have I felt, or be what I have been,/Or weep as I could once have wept, o’er many a vanished scene… But he didn’t. Instead, he paraphrased: “It never started. It ends.” Miriam watched from the rain-fogged kitchen window—her breath and the steam of the rain.
9
SO LONG, WALTER MONDALE
WHITE CEDAR APARTMENTS
You want the house, Phil, take it. I’ll take the kids, some furniture, a few wedding dishes, and the cat nobody ever mentions. And they did, they took Louise with them, a cat that spent her life avoiding the Poppers as if she knew too much about them. Louise emerged from the shadows only in the deadest part of the night for her chicken-flavored kiblets.
They left on a weekday afternoon while Philip was downtown. The three of them in the gravel driveway packing up his mother’s convertible VW Bug with the last of their clothes and junk and pillows that would fit. Leo put the top down, so there’d be more room, and the two of them sprawled on top of their stuff, trying to keep socks from blowing away in the wind. It was November. Miriam drove, cigarette between her lips and the cat in her lap. Mom as Steve McQueen. They vagabonded seven blocks to an unfurnished apartment in a small complex called White Cedar Apartments. There weren’t any white cedar trees anywhere. They must have chopped them down to build the place.
December 1980. The new place smelled of plastic. It came with a built-in bar. The day after they moved in, Miriam picked up some stools at a restaurant supply place in the city. It was mercifully quiet. His father’s raging hurts a few miles away; they heard only an echo. Miriam had left him the phone number. He called and he called and he called. Nothing’s been finalized. My lawyer says you have zero right. You can’t just pack up; you think this is some hotel you can just check out of?
Finally, Leo took the phone off the hook and put it in a drawer. They weren’t poor, but the illusion that they might become so was thrilling.
Strange, they celebrated Hanukah in that empty apartment. Some years Miriam remembered this holiday, other years she forgot all about it. They’d always been proud Christmas-tree Jews. Take away America’s greatest celebration of unfettered consumerism from us? Not a chance. But that year she put her father’s, Grandpa Walt’s, menorah on a folding chair and lit the candles and sang the prayer. Miriam sang. She so rarely ever sang. Her prayer was like a low hum, and very beautiful, and they listened and watched her face in the light of the candles. She was still so young then. She was their mother. How could they have known? A time of happy exile. They’d moved down in the world. Miriam’s voice. An empty apartment that smells of plastic. Her voice like a hum, rising, rising.
CHARLIE BEINLICH’S
Popper picks up a single fry and tries to eat exactly half of it, gnawing off the ridges but leaving the essence of the fry itself.
“Stop that, will you.”
The remains of the fry cling like a worm to his finger.
“What?”
He eats the fry.
“Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“About yourself, something.”
Charlie Beinlich’s is supposed to look like a Lake of the Woods fishing cabin with the pine paneling, except that it’s on Skokie Highway across from the movie theaters, Eden I and Eden II. Popper looks at the mounted sturgeon above Philip’s head. Its bulgy glass eyes, fat scaly body. The monster of Lake Michigan stuffed and nailed to the wall.
He starts working on another half fry. The ridges are where the best grease gets trapped. This is distinct from the actual potato part of the fry, so you want to try to separate it out. It isn’t easy. It’s a surgical operation.
Just Popper and Philip. Leo is exempt from the divorce decree’s stipulations. He sees his father when he feels like seeing his father, which is hardly ever.
Philip watches him, chewing his fish slowly, searching for the bones with his tongue. Wednesday night. Dad’s night. Charlie B’s. Best damn burger on the whole North Shore!
“There’s nothing you can tell me?”
“What?”
“Oh, I get it. Already you’ve seen all there is to see. You’ve seen peace, you’ve seen war. You’ve been on the goddamn mo
on with Buzz Aldrin.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You think this is all some joke?”
“What?”
“Being someone’s son. Being someone’s father. I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
“Can’t we just eat?”
“So they’ve poisoned the well for good?”
“Who?”
“Who. Ha. Your mother and brother indoctrinated you against me when you were six months old.”
Time for more ketchup. He whacks the bottom of the bottle and gets lucky on the first try. The ketchup throbs, spurts, pooling thickly onto his plate, and the fries poke out like the heads of drowning people. Like when the Eastland tipped over in the sewage of the Chicago River. Seymour told him all about it. Hundreds flailing in the city’s shit. And he was there. Seymour is always on the scene. He said he missed half a day’s work pulling women and children out of the smelly muck. The only day in my entire life—but for the war—I ever missed a half-minute of work.
He rescues a drowning Chicagoan, eats the fry whole.
“Look at me once in a while, will you.”
“I’ve seen you.”
Philip laughs. He pulls a bone out of his mouth. “All right. You win.” His head turns just slightly to watch the skirt of a waitress fling by. Popper watches the side of his father’s scrubbed, ruddy face. His father is the cleanest, most scrubbed man on the face of the earth. Dogs would be in heaven shitting on the snow-white carpet of his bedroom. In fact, Sir Edmund, just before he died, once took that gorgeous liberty.
The wreckage on his plate, the half-eaten burger, flooded fries, avoided garnishes.
Popper thinks of Sir Edmund. One day he was lying on the kitchen floor breathing, but he couldn’t stand up anymore. For a week he was like that. Breathing heavy on the kitchen floor and not standing up. Here was a dog that loved Milk Bones, but that last week he wouldn’t have eaten a Milk Bone if you shoved it down his throat. Popper knew. He’d tried to jam one into his panting mouth.