by Peter Orner
WATER TREATMENT PLANT
The thing itself is nothing to the lies we tell about it. By the time it happened, there was nothing left to feel. She was safely from Deerfield. Deerfield only two miles away, but across the highway, another cosmos. A nonplace—the mall was in Deerfield. So was the DMV. You drove through it to get out to O’Hare. Deerfield was west, lakeless. She was shy, not fat, not unfat. She was what Popper’s Massachusetts grandmother, Grandma Sarah (who was wonderfully spongy herself), would call healthy-proportioned, with kind eyes that didn’t look for your flaws and exploit them, as she must have been used to people doing to her. They met at Tonnio’s. Her name was Sandy. She was a cashier known for her fast fingers on the keys. She also took phone orders. She was serious about her work. She never chatted back when the takeout customers tried to talk her up. She never got change wrong. Unless you gave her your coupons before she started to ring you up, she wouldn’t honor them, I’m sorry, no exceptions, Tonnio’s policy, I don’t make the rules. Popper took her to Bennigan’s on Route 41 one night after their shifts. They ate mostly in silence, staring at each other’s hands. After so many hours in the glazed light of the pizza place, the neon-green dim of Bennigan’s was a place where they could both hide. They shared an order of onion rings. He’d heard stories about her from other delivery boys, all lies probably, but he wanted to believe what he wanted to believe. He tried to eat slow. She was eating normal. She said her cheeseburger was good, yours? Mine’s good, too, he said.
“What does your father do?” Popper asked.
“Why do you want to know?” she said.
He didn’t really know why he wanted to know. Why did he want to know?
“No reason,” he said. “Good onion rings.” She smiled. He smiled. After, they took her car to the abandoned water treatment plant off Cary Avenue Beach. Earlier, before his shift, he’d left an old comforter, a couple of pillows, condoms from Osco, a flashlight, a tape deck with Lionel Richie, three cans of beer. Is this your fort or something? she said. Sort of, Popper said. He kissed her. She didn’t kiss him back, didn’t stop him, either. She put her hands on his shoulders. He groped aimlessly, trying to avoid her eyes in the dark. Do you want to lie down? I don’t care, she said.
They lay on the cement together, beached. In their August sweat. The mosquitoes found them, and they slapped and missed.
“Sandy?”
She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t looking at him in the moonlight but up at the rafters of the water plant.
“I think I just saw a bat,” she said.
For the first time then he heard the lake, high tide slapping at the edge of the building.
“He’s a teacher.”
“What?”
“My father. He teaches fifth grade.”
“Beer?”
“Okay,” she said, and Popper reached across her for a can, opened it macho with one hand, and brought it to her mouth, poured it slow; she swallowed, some drained out the sides of her lips. He kissed it up and she laughed.
Manny?
Popper, you can’t call so early, you know my mom doesn’t get home till—
Guess what, baby—
He put the beer back down on the cement. He kissed her neck. I don’t care, she said. He kissed her chin. Do you have to flail around so much? she said. He traced his hand down the veins of her wrist. Later, when she moaned a little, he felt like a general. I don’t care, she said. I don’t. The drab light woke them up, tangled and alone, the cement floor, the lake quiet, the gulls hawking and circling.
SHOE SHINE, NORTH WABASH
Philip doesn’t—like other men—hold a newspaper spread wide, flex-armed, like a downtown Hercules studying battle plans as the man below works his shoes. No, Philip inspects. He watches, makes suggestions, criticizes—sniffs. It takes two minutes and thirteen seconds for a decent shine, but Philip Popper could sit here all day, being happy, being well pleased. There are, of course, different degrees of shine. He likes it a dull tint. Shine is the wrong word. You don’t want it noisy.
It’s late March. Morning light glints across the upper floors of the buildings. Up there, it’s spring.
Always the same chair, outside his parking garage on North Wabash. He has watched this same dark head age from black to snow. He knows the head’s name. Howzit, Jackie? Oh, can’t complain, no sir, Mr. Popper, can’t complain—and he always tips well, even better around Christmas, when Chicago is rivered with slush and your shine is lost to history after a block and a half of dirty rock salt, but this has never mattered. What matters is the shine’s existence. And what is the difference between five years of having your shoes shined and twenty?
In 1983, Chicago elected an actual reform mayor, a black reform mayor, and Philip lost his city contracts. Under Daley, Bilandic, and Byrne he thrived. Now times are tougher. He thought, Harold Washington, he too shall pass. He hasn’t. Not yet, anyway. Soon. But for the moment, even with Council Wars, Harold Washington’s still up in the polls and might even win again.
On his throne above the sidewalk, Philip tries to empty his mind of all he will remember again as he walks to his office—court in the morning, a deposition in the afternoon. Now he does mostly personal injury. There’s no sadness in this face unprotected by a newspaper—only the inevitability of another day of sitting up here in this red vinyl chair with tape stretched across the holes. When you sit down, it always lets out a chute of dead air, like a squeezed bloated stomach.
If it isn’t sadness, what is it?
Philip isn’t a tall man. Once, early in his career, during an argument in front of City Hall, an opposing counsel tapped his cigarette ash in the brim of Philip’s hat. Philip went low, and like a LaSalle Street Napoleon stomped so hard on opposing counsel’s foot he broke the man’s toes.
His old lions, Daley and Arvey, are long gone. Only Abe Lincoln Marovitz is still kicking around. Philip thinks of the last pages of The Radetzky March, Commissioner Trotta at his table, ringing his little bell, the death tinkle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He watches the hands that grip both ends of the rag—that exquisite movement—how could he describe it to anyone? Who would listen? A shoe coddled in the side-to-side of a chamois. He watches, inspects. Today he doesn’t offer advice. See that smudge, Jackie? Slight left of the laces. He doesn’t know why. He leaves the smudge be.
Funny, he and Miriam had always talked about going somewhere else. When they lived at 1444 North State, they used to take out an atlas and open it wide on the kitchen table. Not forever, just for a little while, a year or two, while Leo was still young. Edinburgh? Aix-en-Provence? The Pyrenees, where they say the snow never melts. The Bosphorus? Where’s the Bosphorus again?
PART
TWO
11
1233 NORTH DAMEN
THE MASSACHUSETTS MIRACLE
Ann Arbor, 1988
In literary parlance, it is referred to as a Madeleine Moment, meaning the secretions released by a certain cake-like cookie bring back haunted images of a time when you were exquisitely happy. Not that Popper ever read the book. (In college, it was beautiful, creative writing majors hardly had to read any books at all.) But the word Dukakis has this selfsame impact. All he has to do is hear it and Popper becomes fuzzy, emotionally overcome. Say it slow, stretch it out, prolong the pleasure. Give me a Du, give me a ka, give me an akis…
Dooooooooooookaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaakiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis.
And so Alexander Popper would like to take this opportunity to thank Michael Dukakis, not only for his contributions to the Democratic Party,* but also for presiding over a brief, happy period known only to himself as Popper in Love. Long live the Massachusetts Miracle. You, Governor, will always be my Commander in Chief. Kitty is one lucky lady.
DEATH OF COMMUNISM
On the little TV at Steve’s Lunch, best Korean food in the Midwest, the Berlin Wall falls and all Popper can think about is Nadia Comăneci in her tight little leotard. Which Olympics was
that? He was how old, and still, he’s a nasty little letch, drooling over a prepubescent who must have toiled away in some Commie gymnast boot camp, training thirteen, fourteen hours a day in order to give pride not to herself or even to her country but to an idea—an idea that even then everybody knew was a murderous lie, and yet little Nadia had to get out there and propagandize. He should have felt sorry for the burdens placed on those small shoulders, the weight of tens of millions of people who didn’t want to live and die in vain. Amazing how a few gold medals can raise a people’s self-esteem, and yet even then he took no interest in the larger implications, he just couldn’t take his eyes off her squat body stuffed into that leotard—not to mention those things she did on the balance beam.
Popper spears his fried egg and fishes for thin little pieces of steak in his bibimbop. November 19, 1989. On the little TV behind the counter things go on being momentous. Tom Brokaw’s outthrust chin and crisp articulation = momentous. He’s leaning over the wall and talking to an East German border guard.
“And how do you feel about these great changes?”
The guard shrugs. What’s it all to me? I still got a day job, bud.
“I’m not sure about Brokaw’s coat,” Kat said.
“It’s a loden coat. My father has one. Maybe Brokaw’s trying to pay homage to German culture.”
At the commercial break (Buick, Mountain Dew), Kat said, “It’s not like the Communists didn’t have the right idea in a lot of respects. The complete lack of consumer culture allowed them to spend more of their time worrying about more important things like sex. I mean, if you read Kundera, who is as much a philosopher as he is a novelist, he makes it seem like all they did was have sex, that the command economy screwed up everybody’s lives but at the same time allowed the intellectuals the freedom to actually have some fun once in a while and so—”
“So I was right all along.”
“ ’Bout what, Popperino?”
“For years, I fantasized about jumping on Nadia Comăneci. I had a poster in my closet—”
“Nadia Comăneci is like twelve. Do you have to tell me everything that pops into your head?”
“She was twelve in the seventies. So was I.”
“Did your whole life happen in the seventies?”
“Didn’t everybody’s?”
THE FOURTH OF JULY
Best album—of all time.
This is a total no-brainer. Petty. Hard Promises.
I mean, I like Tom Petty also. Who doesn’t like Tom Petty? But even he’d be embarrassed by your weird obsession—he’d be, like, who is this freaky Jewish redneck—
The Pogues. Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. And/or If I Should Fall from Grace with God.
Solid choices.
Billy Bragg’s Workers Playtime. The difficult third album.
There’s hope! You’re actually evolving. Right before my eyes, you’re evolving. It’s like you just stood up after crawling around on your hands and knees for decades.
Purple Rain.
Baby—
Anything by Johnny Cash, not excluding gospel.
Most excellent. Best song?
X, The Fourth of July… Mexican kids are shootin’ fireworks below… Hey baby, it’s the Fourth of…
Fuck me, Popper. Now, fuck me now.
1233 NORTH DAMEN
They were awarded bachelors of arts degrees of dubious worth in a packed basketball stadium with twelve thousand others. Stand up, graduates! Sit down, graduates!
Congratulations!
The guy who made The Big Chill gave a speech. You just experienced the very best years of your entire lives. After Michigan, the real world will pretty much suck. Life’s nothing but drudgery, people. Unless, unless you keep the friends you’ve made here in Ann Arbor! And if ever one of your friends is getting married across the country, and you find yourself not being able to afford the flight—because, remember, you’re basically unemployable—I want you to pledge right now that you will take the Greyhound to that wedding! Yay!
Popper announced it utterly insipid. Nineteen thousand and something other people wept and hugged.
They moved to their own place in Chicago, to an apartment in Wicker Park, just about the time it was beginning to be ruined by people like them. Nelson Algren is dead and lives on Long Island; long live Nelson Algren. There goes the neighborhood. Their first apartment. God, did they hate themselves. Down the street, the O’Hare/Congress/Douglass trains clacked and chuttered.
Kat would put on Curtis Mayfield and waggle around the apartment singing, Educated fools from uneducated schools… And she’d say, If people only listened to Curtis Mayfield—if Curtis Mayfield was President, or King, or Secretary General of the UN—then even yuppie wannabe scum like us could be forgiven for triggering higher rents.
All their kitchen chairs were unmated. They were proud of this. This is the kind of people we are. One chair Popper found in the Jewel parking lot, the red one with the shimmied seat. Another, an old iron patio loveseat, he stole from the basement of the house on Riparian. Another, the desk chair with the broken spring, Kat pulled out of a dumpster in front of a building they were tearing down on Cortez. She also liked to collect shadeless lamps. They crowded the apartment like the skeletons of thin dead men, their little bulb heads. She called them free Giacomettis.
Thanksgiving of that year. Popper went down the street to the park and played football with some neighborhood kids. It was tackle, and those local boys merrily whomped his ass. The ground was as hard as a parking lot. He came home wearing crumbly November dirt, his face bleeding. Kat had bought an enormous turkey at the Jewel. It was still lying uncooked on the table. She was lying on the floor beside the table, staring at the ceiling.
“What is basting, anyway?”
“My head’s bleeding.”
“Something tells me you have to cook it first, baste it second. But I really have no idea. It could just as well be the other way around.”
Kat reached and opened the cabinet door beneath the sink. She pulled out a can of Ajax and held it to the ceiling like an offering.
“Who the hell was Ajax, anyway?”
“A warrior god.”
“Now he’s a scouring powder. Is that success?”
“Why don’t you call your mother and ask her how to make the turkey?”
Kat talked to the can of Ajax. “You call your mother.”
“She’s in Tibet—or somewhere. I think she and Ralph went to Tibet. Don’t you care about what happened to my head?”
“They really whoop it up, those two.”
“After my dad, wouldn’t you?”
“What was so bad about him?”
“Nothing so bad, really. But it was like he never saw us. Or he saw us too much. No, we never saw him, but that’s because he made himself so hard to see, so we looked through him. Does that make any sense?”
“Not at all.”
“He hit my mom once, or tried to. I can’t even remember anymore. There should be more than one word for remember—”
“He hit your mom?”
“We’re quiet people, middle-class people, slightly upperish-middle-class people. My father ran for office. He’s a well-regarded attorney. My mother, for years, was the most popular substitute teacher on the North Shore.”
“So he hit her.”
“I won’t be taking further questions from the press at this time.”
“Well, he’s alone now,” Kat said.
“Mostly.”
The turkey reposed on the kitchen table, pink and dead and huge. Popper silent, his face bleeding. He looked out the window at the leafless trees, stark and empty. November always his favorite, an orphan sort of month, cold, often snowless.
“Whoop,” Popper said.
“Whoop,” Kat said.
“Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful.”
“Who said that?”
“Forgotten poet.”
Kat in shorts in November lying on her back,
her strong freckle-pale legs. Kat? You remember? How that fat thing sat on the kitchen table through the night, through the weekend into Monday, before it turned greenish?
ACROSS THE ALLEY
Screams from across the alley, people, people screaming, human beings. And her saying she didn’t hear a thing and his trying to tell her that it isn’t right, isn’t natural, that sound. January of a snowless year and they were cold, always cold, and they huddled in the back room with the gurgling radiator, under the blankets and unzipped sleeping bags. Nights those voices screamed, nights she slept so hard she heard nothing. In sleep she went so far away and he was so alone, and nothing helped; it didn’t matter if he read or didn’t read. As soon as he turned out the light, he couldn’t stop hearing them.
In the morning, Kat made coffee in a parka and shorts, an old pair of his high school gym shorts. The shorts are slowly unraveling and the tatters hang down her legs like streamers. No, not his. The faded name in the white box: Laveneaux.
There wasn’t any point in asking if she’d been kept up, if she’d heard what he heard. The windows were crusted with snow, and the light against the panes came through as if through crystals. The kitchen had an ironing board that came out of the wall. They used it as extra counter space.
Popper said, “I’m trying to write a sad story, a good, sad story,” and she said, spinning at the bop of the toast, “You know what you love most? Melancholy. Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I think you love the gloom more than you love the people.”
“Don’t take it the wrong way?”
“You want me to be the cheering section all the time?”
There is frost in the January trees and the sidewalks are the buckled ruins of ancient ant civilizations and the new cars at Bert Weinman Ford are lonely too and even the weeds are dying—