by Peter Orner
“I like it, keep going—”
And the people without houses go to the Jewel to keep warm, and on Sundays the little Mexican girls go to church in dresses with frills sewed by the fingers of long-widowed grandmothers; sometimes the girls skip, other times they walk with their hands behind their backs, with dignity, because going to church isn’t something to take lightly, and it’s cold, always cold, and the CTA buses lump down the streets like tired Snuffleupaguses—
Kat touching her toes with one hand, holding a piece of toast with melting lumps of butter, the parka’s furry hood over her head. “Keep going, keep going. Why do you always stop?”
“That’s what I do. I start things and I stop.”
“Don’t talk, tell—”
“It doesn’t connect. Nothing ever connects.”
“Just go on.”
His day job: he checks IDs at the YMCA on Cybourne. He has to make sure people aren’t expired. He sits by the turnstile and buzzes people in. His boss, Mr. Head, told him to make periodic checks for suicides. It can happen anytime. Lots of places to be alone in this building, Mr. Head said. And so many people come here for shelter. Sometimes the threat of having to go outside again becomes too much.
“Mr. Head?”
“That’s the guy’s name. Larry Head.”
Kat chewed her toast. “I think you should change that. Otherwise, I really—”
So when it’s slow, he leaves his post by the turnstile and wanders around. Once, they found a guy dangling from a basketball hoop in the lower gym. Even though it happened before his time, there’s something about the empty gym that echoes. Yet it’s not at the Y; it’s at home, at night, when the voices truly wail, on the other side of the alley, beyond the rusted fence.
“I have to work on the transition from the Y back to the apartment. Feels weird. I’m trying to say he’s always on a kind of death patrol, but that it’s at home, in his own bed beside his completely deaf beloved—”
“Popper—”
There isn’t any mystery about the screams. All he had to do was walk around the block and read the sign. It’s an old-age home for the indigent, run by the state. It isn’t very big. He walked right up to it and looked in the first-story window. There they were, the faces silent because it was daytime. They only start screaming after midnight, sometimes a couple of hours later. Just when you think they aren’t going to scream, they scream. Not all the screams are alike. Some are sustained, operatic, almost show-offy; others are quick stabs, loud and sharp. A few are in-betweens. These are the worst. It’s as if they don’t have the strength to carry on, to finish what they’ve begun. Midscream—then a coat of blank silence.
She spins around the kitchen, half-eaten piece of toast in her hand, her body hot beneath the big coat, the butter on her toast melting. He tosses the story in the garbage along with the coffee grinds and egg shells. “They scream in the night,” Popper says. “Don’t you hear them? Ever?”
“I hear them, I hear them.”
PEROT
POPPER (in the darkness, reaching for her): ¿Quien es mas macho, myself or Ross Perot?
KAT (laughing, edging away): Maybe in the morning, okay?
July 19, 1945
I feel so rotten today—I opened a letter addressed to the ship from the wives of one of our men—His 2½ year old son was killed by a truck—and she asked the officers to talk to him to help him sort of face it out—Hell—what a life—The other day another sailor found out his wife had another kid—She put a notice in the paper that Mrs. So and So—using his name of course—just gave birth to a beautiful bouncing baby boy—Well, he’s been in the South Pacific the last twelve months! The letters keep coming in, congratulating him—
1233 NORTH DAMEN
Just after dawn, bumbling to the toilet, he finds Kat alone at the kitchen table, shards of a broken plate at her feet, the refrigerator door open.
“What is it?”
“My mother always said she felt better after she broke a few plates.”
“Better about what?”
“I don’t know.”
Kat stands and circles the little kitchen rug, careful to avoid the shards. She watches her feet in the ash light. Her toes head in the wrong direction. Dancer’s feet, she calls them, though she was never a dancer. She played soccer in high school.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald was ashamed of his feet also,” Popper says. “He wore shoes two sizes too big to make up for what he thought—”
“Where’d you get the idea I was ashamed of my feet?”
“You’re not?”
“Ashamed of my feet?”
“Ashamed of something. What aren’t I ashamed of?”
“Don’t confuse us with each other.”
THE BLUFF
Down the road from his father’s house, the house he grew up in, his bluff, his brother’s bluff. The guy who bought the Krawchecks’ house after Mr. Krawcheck died put up a fence across the bluff and a no-trespassing sign. Assholes, you think you can own a view of Lake Michigan? Yes, I’m talking to you, 47 Riparian.
He took Kat there. They climbed the fence. He wanted to show her where he was from, this little spittle of land above the lake, as much home as anywhere. It was a night in April, the fog thick as cotton.
From up on the bluff, the lake in the dark. That shoving noise, that pulling away. Kat took off her shoes and tossed them over the edge of the bluff. Then she lifted her white socked feet and raised them above her head and laughed.
They listened to the lake. Off the bluff there was a wreck, or so Seymour always used to say. A mile off Highland Park, a steamship bound for Milwaukee hit a boat carrying lumber. The passengers had been attending a rally for Stephen Douglas in Chicago. Three hundred drowned, what they got for supporting the Little Giant. The debris washed up for weeks. Suitcases, a head of cabbage, innumerable unmatched shoes. Popper thought of old bones in cold water.
“There’s a city of dead Milwaukeeans out there in the water.”
“No doubt,” Kat said.
“No really, the boat was called The Lady Elgin. It’s still down there. Only a few people got rescued. Seymour himself swam out from the beach and saved three babies.”
“There’s rain in this fog,” Kat said.
The fog. The fog pressing them farther into the wet. Her socks floating up there, small ghosts of her feet—
July 20, 1945
And soon this whole business will be over and we’ll be back together again, hand in hand, going forward to make a beautiful life for ourselves—and maybe another couple of children, what do you say? Are you feeling prolific? I’m like a caged animal—Just waiting to get my hands on your letters and devour them—But they still don’t satisfy me—I want more and more—What about a new linoleum and rug deal for the dining room?
THE END OF COMMUNISM II
Nadia Comăneci got a boob job.”
“Say it ain’t so.”
“It’s in People. Look.”
“Something to be said for our system of government, I got to say.”
“Yo, Popper, you got a problem with these?”
“Lemme see those.”
ZIGGY MARLEY AT THE ARAGON BALLROOM
She had a way of being alone in a crowd of dancing people, of mining out her own space in any sweaty bungle. Popper, trying to keep pace with her, only jostled people and had to keep apologizing.
“Maybe try not moving so much. Try and meet the tempo—slower, slow—it’s not aerobics. Don’t try and control it.”
Kat in Levi’s and a white T-shirt, dancing in her beat-up leather hiking boots. He’ll never not think of her in Levi’s, a white T-shirt, and hiking boots.
More than a basic lack of rhythm, it was a patent lack of ability to translate what he heard into any sort of actual motion. Listening and moving, and somehow the two never meeting.
“Stop thinking about it, Popper. Just move.”
“Ziggy’s not like his father. There’s not enough political subtext.”
“If it was his father maybe I could get into it, because there’s more political subtext.”
“What?”
Them closing in on each other, shouting into each other’s ears now. Where Popper likes it, where the uncertainty of music cedes to his turf: conversation, talk.
“But I guess it can’t be that easy being the son of a legend. Imagine being Lisa Marie. Think about it, one day you wake up to the realization of who you happen to be. You’re five or six years old and it turns out your overfat dad is—”
“Dance, Popper—try to channel your grandmother.”
“It’s probably different in Jamaica.”
“What?”
“I said maybe fathers and sons in Jamaica—What, what am I trying to say?”
The darkness, the music heard, untranslatable. Kat, her face hot and wet, the way she gently slinked her shoulders, hardly moving but moving—to the beat, the easy vibe, the casual syncopation.
1233 NORTH DAMEN
It was in the morning’s Sun-Times. Page 3 of the metro section, the story of a sixteen-year-old girl. One guy held the gun, the other guy raped her. When the guy was done raping her, the one with the gun shot her. Later, the rapist ratted on the shooter, which is how the cops got their version of the story.
Kat said, “Shouldn’t we at least—”
“What?”
“I don’t know. If we aren’t going to do something, shouldn’t we at least say something?”
“To who? Call Richie Daley and say we’re upset by the violence in this city, that he really should ask the citizens to cut it out, that Chicagoans really ought not rape and kill each other.”
“Fuck Richie Daley. To at least acknowledge that it happened. Repeat it. Shouldn’t we be out on the streets shouting—”
“Nobody really does that anymore.”
“Or at least call up the family and say, Hey, we’re—”
“Like send a card or something, or flowers?”
“If it was me, wouldn’t you want somebody to at least notice. Nobody even notices.”
“If it was you, people would notice.”
“Doesn’t that make us complicit? Doesn’t that make us accomplices?”
“I don’t disagree.”
“Tomorrow I’ll forget.”
“I’ll remind you.”
“It’s like that girl never existed. If she existed, we’d have to imagine her. And since we won’t, since we refuse to even try, it’s just a story, right? A horror story.”
She left the paper on the ironing board and went out to the stoop to watch the traffic.
AT SEA
Highland Park, 1978
Seymour never stopped lamenting the fact that he’d gone all the way to the South Pacific and the only true combat he saw up close was the age-old battle between the big fishes and the little fishes. Occasionally, he said, seabirds got in on the act. He did, though, lose a man. A young sailor felled not by enemy fire but by some kind of tropical fever.
We buried the boy, he would say, at sea. All hands bury the dead.
That was the grand talk. The not-so-grand talk was how they zipped the boy up in a canvas bag and put him on a board. A few respectful words. The slow bugle and a prayer. They slid him off the board into the ocean, and the last thing that sailor did on earth was make a splash nobody heard over the roar of the engines and the wind. Seymour still remembered that sailor’s coordinates: Latitude 12 29.26 south. Longitude 130 49.10 east. I wrote them in a letter to the mother.
Seymour was a hard man to love, and most days he understood this and accepted it. Other times, he demanded that somebody look at him and see his sorrow. All hands bury the dead. Latitude 12 29.26 south, Longitude 130 49.10 east.
“Why are we spared when others, so many others, aren’t?” Seymour at his station behind his desk. Leo drawing a sketch of Seymour’s head. Popper only half-listening, on the carpet turning on and off Seymour’s weather radio. (The barometric pressure is 18.45, winds out of the southeast at 32 miles per hour, small craft advisory from Calumet to Belmont…)
“I’m asking you, boys. I’m really asking you. Why do some guys get it in the neck while others go on living? You call that God?”
“We don’t know,” Leo said. “How could we possibly know?”
And Seymour, his voice reaching across decades, Hold it right there, ensign, you call this being spared?
IN SKOKIE
The turnout would have disappointed him. There were more empty white folding chairs than mourners. He was suspended over an open pit—a neatly cut rectangular wound—by a complicated rigging of rope and steel pulleys. This was in the big cemetery out by Old Orchard Mall. A manicured, highly regulated place. No flowers or any other adornment permitted, as per Jewish law. Thou shalt not sugarcoat the end of things. It means you spend the rest of the world in a hole in Skokie.
It was early June. They tried to stay focused and not enjoy the sun on their faces. There was a naval honor guard, and the sailors also wore their best solemn looks. Popper had never seen Kat so snazzed up.
“Liking the tights,” he said.
“Shhhhh.”
A woman nobody recognized, wearing an enormous yellow hat, began to moan, a low moan from the bottom of her throat, like a dying dog.
“What’s with the sombrero?” Leo whispered.
Kat tried not to laugh.
“You can laugh,” Popper said. “We’re a modern ironical family.”
Popper thought of him in there, in that steel casket, in his peaked American Legion hat, in his suit and well-knotted tie, ready to deny a loan.
The woman in the yellow hat moaned louder. And yet he was theirs. Ours is ours. Who are you to come here with fresh tears, lady?
Later, back at the house, Bernice said it must have been Irma Bluestein, an old friend of theirs from Lunt Avenue. “We haven’t spoken to her in years. She must scour the obituaries. Or perhaps that’s not who it was. It doesn’t matter. Why would it matter?”
The service didn’t last long. The rabbi was concise and proper and celebrated Seymour Popper for the things he had been, husband, father, grandfather, Navy captain, insurance company executive, suburban banker. As he went down the list, Popper thought about how much work all our failure takes, and he gripped his knees in terror as they started to lower the pulleys. Therefore, by the All-Merciful One, offer shelter to Seymour beneath this humble earth. And the rifles saluted him. God, would he have loved the guns, every jolt of every report, the way the reverberations of the shots hung in the air after. He would have chatted up the men: Hey, sailors, what ship? I myself started in the Coast Guard, but as you all know, the Coast Guard’s for puffs. I went to war in autumn of ’44, better appear in the last act of the show than never. The men cleared away the ropes and pulleys. One by one, they took their turns with the spade and rained dirt and gravel down upon the casket. That outrageous final thumping. Everybody took turns holding Bernice, who then walked slowly away from the grave. As Philip was helping her back in the limousine, she stooped, plucked a handful of grass, and stuffed it in her purse.
HOLLIS
The funeral over, everyone began heading back to Bernice’s for cold cuts, Kat and Popper were still searching the unmowed grass on the other side of the little road.
“He’s got to be around here somewhere,” Popper said.
“Who was he? A black-sheep uncle or something? Why’s he over here?”
“He worked for us. Our houseman. He had a heart attack in the basement. My mom always said he died of loneliness.”
“Your houseman?”
“He put up the storm windows, cooked, baby-sat, drank whiskey with my mom. That sort of thing. We loved him. Or we said we loved him. His name was Hollis Osgood. When he died, his family didn’t want to take him home to Alabama. So we buried him with us.”
“Why’s he over here?”
“Because he’s not Jewish. If you’re not
Jewish, they put you on the other side of the road. In cemeteries that aren’t Jewish, they put the Jews on the other side of the road or outside the fence or wherever. Or they don’t let them in there at all. It all evens out.”
“There’s nobody else buried over here.”
“Not that many housemen. Hollis was unique.”
“But now you lost him,” Kat said.
“We didn’t lose him.”
“Then where is he?”
Popper didn’t answer, on his hands and knees now, pulling the grass by the roots, searching the moist dirt with his fingers.
Our hold on people, even our own people—
HEAT WAVE
July 1995. On the news, the old people were dying like flies in sweltering apartments. No, not like flies—flies died with more dignity. The old people slumped over in the thick, fetid air and nobody collected their bodies for days.
Popper sat on the stoop in front of 1233 North Damen trying to breathe, a wad of twisted Kleenex up his nose. It had been too hot for sexual congress for weeks, or for that matter, even sexual dictatorship, if you know what I mean. Popper further philosophizes: If sneezing is a form of orgasm, then you could say that all total celibacy really amounts to is not sneezing. I mean, I love sneezing. Who doesn’t love sneezing?
Kat just back from a run. All through those panting days—the heat index up to 120 degrees—Kat ran the melting streets.
Her face red, her neck, her hair sweat-stuck to her ears. Ten days ago, at three in the morning, they went to the Golden Nugget for the air conditioning. Out of mercy, Kat gave him a hand job using the oil from the salad-dressing rack on the table. Since then, nada.
“What happened to your nose?”
“I’m trying to not sneeze.”
“I’ll make salad,” Kat said, and went inside. The door whacked. She’d recently been accepted into the graduate program in philosophy at the University of Chicago. Now everything she did was terrible and purposeful. Now she ran, now she made graduate school salad.