“You’re single, right?” Gloria asked, pointing first at me and then at Frank. “You two should date.”
It wasn’t so much we said yes—it was just neither one of us said no.
For our first date, Frank took me to an outdoor movie at the botanical gardens—Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle—so we could watch his ex-wife. She sat five rows in front of us with her new family, a middle-aged husband and twin teenage daughters. They weren’t so much new, really. Frank and she, Tina was her name, were married for only six months twenty years ago, but he followed her most every night.
“I just like to see her happy,” he said.
As it turned out, I liked seeing her happy, too. She was elegant and long-necked and her shoulders reminded me of a bowstring pulled taut. She had the longest fingers I had ever seen, and her life reminded me of a Crate & Barrel catalogue, filled with happy, smiling memories and sun-kissed afternoons and pumpkin spice scented kitchens. Her life was enviable in a way I didn’t know existed in real life—it was like I wanted to get close enough to smell her.
At the movies, she twined her long fingers in her two beautiful daughters’ hair. When she laughed, she laughed with her whole body. When she cried, she did so with aplomb, and without abasement. It was like she filled up all the space around her. She filled up the botanical gardens. She filled up the screen. She filled up the sky and the city and me, too. I was filled with so much joy I didn’t know what to do with myself, and so I grabbed Frank’s hand and I squeezed and he squeezed and, for a time, we were happy.
That night, we made love. He lay on top of me and he groaned and it was over quickly. Afterwards, he ate a bowl of Raisin Bran. He poured sugar over the flakes and let it soak in the milk for a good long while. He savored every bite, moaning each time he swallowed the same way he had when he’d been inside me.
OUR RELATIONSHIP PROGRESSED FROM THERE. Each night we watched his ex-wife and her family. We followed them to dance recitals and to softball games, and we’d hide near their property and watch them enjoy a nightcap next to their pool. We watched them shop for groceries or a new car or take a family trip to the zoo, jumping when the chimpanzees pounded against their glass enclosures. We watched them cook dinner and take family photographs and feed their pugs and order around the Mexicans who mowed their lawn, and all the while Frank held me close and I rubbed my face against his chin stubble.
“How long have you been watching them?” I asked.
“About ten years,” Frank said.
“When’s the last time you spoke to her?”
“When she told me she was leaving me.”
“And they don’t know you watch?”
He shook his head. “They don’t pay enough attention.”
And things were good, so good after a while we sometimes didn’t have to watch his ex-wife. We caught a movie or grabbed a bite to eat—we did normal things, went on normal dates, and had normal sex, almost to the point we convinced ourselves we were normal. Most nights passed without us saying more than three or four sentences to each other, but that was okay—preferable, in fact. He stayed over at my place and I at his. We even had emergency toothbrushes. For a time, we convinced ourselves it could last forever.
I even took him to meet my parents. We went to my childhood home for dinner, and Mom baked us a casserole and Dad served the good whiskey and we sat around the dining room table as a family for the first time in more than a decade. It had been a while since I’d been home, but the place still smelled the same, like dill pickles and coffee creamer. Mom interrogated Frank, asking about his job and how we’d met and his family, and Frank offered her short, clipped answers: taxidermist, visiting his brother, only the brother was left. Dad eyed Frank, but didn’t ask questions, judging and inventorying, casting aspersions and jumping to conclusions. After dinner, Mom and I did the dishes while Frank and my father bonded over a single malt. Interesting, is what my mother called him.
“And you’re happy with him?” she asked.
I told her I was.
“Well,” she said. “As long as you’re not hurting yourself.”
Frank and I left and didn’t return, opting instead to spend our nights watching Tina and her husband because everything was much better that way. We were happier watching Tina get her nails done or shopping for a new Christmas tree or waiting to get her oil changed. As we watched, we talked about the future. We talked about Harry and us moving in together and how we’d be happy as Tina fought with her family over the TV remote. After she kissed her daughters good night, Frank and I made love, and he lay on top so I could feel his weight bearing down upon me.
After a while, though, Tina’s husband ruined everything. He left early in the morning and returned late in the evening, his absence conspicuous on the weekends, when she and her daughters hung out in the backyard. He didn’t come home some nights, not returning until the morning, zigzagging as he made his way to the front door. He missed a birthday and once even passed out in the front yard. It was something that built up over time, this tension he caused, starting out as a slight tingle, much like when I’d tie my legs until they went numb, but soon it grew in intensity until it seemed like electricity swimming through the air. I could feel it from our vantage point in the woods, hunkered down with binoculars. In Tina’s face was this sadness, and hurt, and angst, and it affected Frank and me, too. When she was sad, we no longer touched, and every time I reached for his hand or he mine, we moved our hands away.
Eventually, Tina confronted her husband. They were in the kitchen, and Frank and I were in our usual spot along the tree line, watching. The kids were in their rooms upstairs, and we could see the whole family through their windows. It was early on Sunday and the back of the house faced the east and the morning light cast the house in orange. It was like watching a play, but with the actors ignorant of their audience’s presence.
At first, we didn’t know they were fighting. They simply stood there. Through our binoculars, we could see their words were pointed and with focus, consonants snapped off the tongue, but their movements weren’t animated, their necks not strained from yelling. I suppose they were trying to keep their voices low so as not to arouse the suspicions of their daughters upstairs. And it appeared they were succeeding. The girls watched television diligently, some high school drama flashing on the screen.
Back downstairs the fight progressed. The husband ran his hands down his face, pulling at his cheeks, and he frowned and puckered his mouth like he was eating something sour. Tina, however, wouldn’t stop talking. I tried to read her lips as she spoke, but it was difficult. Her accusations were adamant, her lips forming around the words like helium trapped in a balloon. How could you? It looked like she said. How could you? How could you? How could you?
And then he slapped her. He slapped her one, and he slapped her hard. I jumped and Frank jumped, and Tina just stared at her husband in disbelief. She didn’t have to say it this time—everyone was thinking it: How could you?
FRANK AND I STOPPED SEEING each other. It wasn’t something demarcated or defined. We didn’t break up; he just stopped showing up when I got off work. He stopped taking me to watch Tina. He stopped taking me to the movies or staying at my place or eating my cereal. He even stopped visiting his brother. I wasn’t sure if Harry even noticed, however—our days still filled with the same routine. First thing in the morning, I changed his colostomy bag. I wheeled him down the hall and gave him a bath and together we picked out the clothes he’d wear. That day, we selected a Hawaiian shirt with large pink flowers on it.
We ate breakfast: yogurt and fruit puree. Harry always chewed with his mouth open and the sound it made comforted me. I then told him all I’d done the day before. I told him how I’d cut in line at the movie theater and pretended to not understand English when the patrons behind me complained. I told him how I shoplifted all the hand sanitizer from Walgreens and dumped the contents in the water fountain outside city hall. I told him how I moved
a child’s bike a street over to see how long it took the owner to locate it. I didn’t, however, tell him how I missed his brother and how I wondered why he wasn’t visiting anymore. I didn’t tell him how I now watched Tina alone and hoped Frank would return, although he never did. I didn’t tell him how I watched Tina’s husband move out while the daughters sat on the front porch crying. I didn’t tell him how unhappy Tina looked. I didn’t tell him how she often sat downstairs on the couch alone for hours. I didn’t tell him how when her daughters did talk to her, she stared past their heads with an unfocused gaze. I didn’t tell him those things because he had enough to worry about without hearing my problems, too.
That afternoon, Harry and I went for a walk. It was windy and cold, so I put Harry in a jacket and wool beanie. I showed him the 7-Eleven that had been robbed the week before and the house where there’d been reports of dogfights. I even showed him Tina and her now ex-husband’s house where she still lived with her two daughters. I showed him where they used to play horseshoes as a family and drink margaritas by their pool. I showed him where one of the pugs was buried and where the daughters hid their beer. I showed him all the secrets I knew, but Harry didn’t seem to care, sniffling from the cold.
That night, I turned the heater up in his room and slowly took off his clothes. His body was rigid and pale and mostly just skin and bones, his legs and arms having atrophied over the years. I laid him down on his bed and warmed my hands over the heater, and then rubbed them up and down his body. I held him to let him know I was there, to let him know someone cared about him, that when he woke up and when he was scared and when he felt alone, he really wasn’t. I made sure he felt safe and he felt loved, because he was, and everyone should feel that way every so often.
After a couple of minutes, the door unexpectedly opened. I was lying next to Harry in bed, and I didn’t have time to move or to cover Harry up, and so Frank walked in and found me in bed with his brother’s penis in my hand. I expected Frank to have some sort of reaction—to be angry, to be jealous, to turn and run away. But he didn’t do anything like that. Instead, he just stood there. He just stood there and didn’t have any sort of reaction at all.
HARRY MOVED OUT OF THE Rosewood Medical Center two days later. I wasn’t told about the move, and I hadn’t been there when it happened. I didn’t actually find out about it until the following Monday when I returned to work. I put my lunch in the break room, poured myself a cup of coffee, enjoyed two or three sips, washed my hands, and then started my rounds. I always saved Harry for last so that he could sleep a little later, so I could spend a little more time with him, but when I opened his door, another man lay in Harry’s bed. Another man’s belongings decorated the walls. Another man’s waste waited for me to clean. The realization that Harry was gone was a deflating one, a punctured tire losing air pressure.
The new man, a quadriplegic named Walter from Wisconsin, had been injured in a car accident. He and his wife had driven their Chevy to town to celebrate his seventy-eighth birthday, but Walter suffered a stroke on Second Street. Their sedan careened across the intersection and collided with the First State Bank at more than sixty miles per hour. Three died in the accident, two bank customers and Walter’s wife, Shirley. His son placed Walter in here because he didn’t know what else to do with him. The whole thing was tragic and senseless and over in just a few seconds.
I ended up leaving Rosewood myself, finding a new job working for an amusement park called Frontier City. I figured I needed a new scene, someplace not so lonely or sad, a place instead full of people, laughter, and the high-pitched shrill of a teenager’s joy as she rode the loopty-loop. My job was to clean the grounds, continually crossing the park to pick up cigarette butts and sucker sticks and Gatorade bottles. Occasionally, I hosed down vomit from a ride or disinfected a bathroom stall after a guest with irritable bowels had tried one of the park’s deep-fried offerings. Such things would bother most, but I grew accustomed to them.
It wasn’t a bad job, though. I enjoyed it even. I enjoyed the feeling of being alone amid a legion of strangers. I enjoyed walking against the grain of an oncoming crowd. I enjoyed being able to feel it all around me, the people and the rides and the concrete under my feet. I enjoyed how the hose felt in my hand and the friction from my broom sweeping the pavement. I enjoyed the mist coming off the log ride and the late-evening sun warming my legs. Sometimes, I felt so much at once it was overwhelming, as if I was filling up to the point of bursting. Most of all, though, I enjoyed thinking Frank might be out in the crowd somewhere, and I couldn’t find him because I wasn’t paying enough attention.
Brought To You By Anonymous
JUST AFTER DAWN, RUSTY AWOKE TO THE BUZZ OF A CHAINSAW. OUTSIDE, HE FOUND HIS NEXT-DOOR neighbor, Gil, hacking at the overgrown Pastuchov’s ivy he’d planted a few years back. Gil waved the chainsaw about, sweeping it back and forth like a dizzy child trying to demolish a piñata. Soon, all of their neighbors had awoken. They came out in their robes, sipping coffee, wading through waist-high grass to see Gil going crazy. No one attempted to stop him, and with good cause—he looked deranged, like if you tried to reason with him, he’d slice you down as well.
Not that Rusty blamed him. The neighborhood looked wild. The entire city did. Left to its own devices, nature will overtake manmade structures. It will crumble concrete. It will shatter glass and warp shingles and weaken steel. It will rot wood and crumble asphalt. It will oxidize copper and turn iron into rust. It doesn’t even take that long. Without regular maintenance, it’s only a matter of weeks. Take grass for example; during a Midwestern spring, grass will grow approximately two feet each month.
It sounded impossible, but that was what had happened. Potholes on I-40 and the Broadway Extension formed quickly, filled in with weeds that punctured through the asphalt. Children’s playgrounds around Hefner Lake turned unusable, pockmarked by moss and dandelions and hornets’ nests. That was the worst—the insects. They swarmed everywhere: locusts and cicadas and beetles and cockroaches and spiders and flies and moths and mosquitoes.
The quickness of the city’s transformation, however, was misleading. Rusty couldn’t see the grass growing. He couldn’t see rust spreading. That happened a little at a time, so that if you continuously peered at it, you’d swear there weren’t any changes at all.
Not long after Gil took the chainsaw to his Post Oak, sirens sounded in the distance. Three police cruisers soon arrived, and out popped six cops, guns drawn, their badges gleaming. Gil didn’t put up any fight, though. As soon as he noticed them, he killed the engine to the chainsaw and dropped it to the ground. The police drew carefully towards him, handcuffed him, and then holstered their weapons.
When Gil was placed in the back of the police cruiser, the onlookers retreated back into their houses to start their day.
DEBORAH AND RUSTY WERE AT the mall shopping for Riley’s birthday. It was packed for a Thursday evening; teenagers milled around the food court, young parents pushed strollers filled with wild-eyed babies, middle-aged men tried on fleece vests, their wives puckering their lips in disapproval, and then there was them, completely lost as to what an eleven-year-old girl would want.
WHEN THEY’D ASKED HER IN previous weeks, she said, “I don’t know. I have everything I need.”
No use to a clueless parent.
They checked out new video games. Most of them seemed too violent for her age, shooting dinosaur-like aliens or beheading bloodthirsty zombies. She was too old for Build-A-Bear and Legos, not yet ready for jewelry or makeup. A clerk at a bookstore recommended the latest YA fiction, stories about teenage wizards and dystopian futures where children fought to the death, but Riley was already bookish and withdrawn—they didn’t feel the need to exacerbate that part of her personality.
As they shopped, Rusty slurped on a fruit smoothie, and Deborah appeared to touch every item they passed. She groped jeans and skirts and watches and hats. Some pigeons had flown in through a broken skylight, and they circled
overhead. Every few feet or so, some bird poop would be glued to a handrail, and Deborah would have to raise her hand for a few moments so as to avoid it.
“I just don’t know what to make of it,” Deborah said. “What kind of kid doesn’t want anything for her birthday?”
“I know,” Rusty said. “It’s just so weird. When I was a kid, I had a list of things I wanted. New basketball shoes and a Ken Griffey, Jr. jersey or the new Mario Kart game or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures.”
“I collected fossils. Shark teeth and iguana bones. Anything creepy and crawly.”
“You were a weird kid.”
“Do you think something might be wrong with her? Some sort of anti-social behavior?”
“No,” Rusty said. “No way. She’s just shy.”
“I don’t know. She rarely goes over to friends’ houses. That Rachel girl invites her over, and Cheryl. I’ve talked to their parents over the phone, but she has never invited anyone over to the house. Have you ever met any of her friends?”
He admitted that he had not.
“That’s strange, isn’t it? It has to be.”
Rusty had noticed, and it did seem odd, though, he figured, it was way too premature to diagnose Riley as having some emotional problem. She could be going through puberty, her hormones creating irrational insecurities that would eventually ebb away. Perhaps she considered herself too mature for her peers at school. A little presumptuous, but nothing a little humility couldn’t restrain. She just needed something, a spark, to ignite her interest in becoming sociable.
The tech store seemed promising. It bustled with kids, kids Riley’s age. They surfed social networking sites and played Bejewelled and Fruit Ninja. There they found a helpful salesman, Tim. A young guy himself, he wore thick plastic glasses and tight jeans and the store’s signature T-shirt that simply said “Genius” on the front.
“Can’t miss,” he said. He held up an iPad.
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