Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

by Maile Meloy

  IN 1975, Steven Kelly was twenty-three and newly orphaned. His father had died of pancreatic cancer two years earlier, and Steven had quit a construction job to move home and take care of his mother. She had relied on her husband so absolutely, all her adult life, that she had never filled a gas tank on her own, or looked at a tax form. In her grief, after his death, she shifted her dependence to Steven. She told him it was lucky she’d had a son, as if no daughter of hers would be able to master a gas pump, either. When she died of the same cancer as his father—one of the doctors described it as mercifully quick, but there was nothing merciful about it—Steven felt like a boxer losing a fight, not knocked out but dizzy from the blows.

  His mother showed him pictures when she was sure she was dying, of herself as a grave little girl in a white First Communion dress, with hollow-eyed Italian relatives in suits. She told him stories: her father had tried to start an ice cream business as a young man, but the unsold, unrefrigerated ice cream would melt by the end of the day, and he would end up eating it himself, dejected. Her mother had once won a beauty contest, scandalizing the family, in a bathing costume that came down to her knees. It was as if his mother was trying to make a safe place for her family in his brain. She died as she was becoming a real person to Steven, not just the more helpless of his ever-present parents, and so she was frozen in mid-transformation, neither one thing nor the other.

  They left him the house he’d grown up in, but no money, once the taxes were paid. Their small Connecticut town, where he had spent a happy, bike-riding, bait-fishing childhood, was being transformed by the building of a nuclear power plant. When finished, the plant would pull in water to cool the reactors, which would raise the temperature of the river and kill all the fish he had grown up fishing. There were angry, impotent protests, and there were jobs for anyone who could wield a hammer. Steven hated the plant—-everyone did—but he couldn’t sell his childhood house, so he took one of the jobs.

  The plant was two miles long and a mile wide, and still being laid with pipes. Steven was hired to build scaffolding for the pipefitters, then take it down and build it somewhere else. It was a union job, and they’d been told to make it last, so they worked in threes: while one worked below, the other two would climb to the top of the scaffolding and sleep. Someone usually duct-taped a transistor radio to the mouthpiece of one of the paging telephones, so music blasted through the plant. When the security guards got close to finding the radio, it would be rescued, and the music would stop, until the guards went back to their usual stations. Then the radio would move to another phone and the music would start again:  “Born to Run” blaring over the clanging and drilling and sawing and hammering.

  Steven’s best friend from high school, Acey Rawlings, also worked at the plant. Acey had joined the Coast Guard for a while, but lost interest, and was home living with his mother. Any social status Steven had in school came from Acey’s reflected cool, and now Acey had mythologized their teenage years, believing them to be as perfect as high school years could be. They had missed the Vietnam draft by the skin of their teeth, and Acey considered luck to be something they had rights to, and could count on.

  Most nights after work, they went to the bar, to drink beer until the hammering in their heads subsided enough for sleep. So in some ways nothing had changed since Steven was sixteen: he was still drinking beer with Acey, except now it was legal, and less exciting. It was on one of those nights that a girl showed up, hanging around. She was too skinny, with small tits and narrow hips, and she leaned on the bar next to Steven in jeans and a tank top and ordered a gin and tonic. He reflected that it was difficult not to talk to a girl standing next to you in a tank top, no matter how tired you were.

  “Are you old enough to drink that?” he asked her.

  She showed him her license. It said she was twenty-three, five-foot-six, 110 pounds. He could have lifted her right into his lap. Eyes: green; hair: brown. Her eyes were oversized, and ringed with green eyeliner and black mascara. He showed the license to Acey at the next barstool, because he could already feel that Acey’s interest in the girl trumped his. He was going to have to get out of the way.  Then he noticed the name on the card: Rita Hillier.

  “I know you,” Steven said.

  “You do?”

  “We went to grade school together.  You moved away.”

  She narrowed her made-up eyes at him. “Did you have a lot of cavities?” she asked.

  “No. I mean, not more than normal,” he said.

  “Did I ever kiss you?”

  “No.”

  She shook her head. “Then I don’t remember.”

  He could have told her that her father was the first person he had ever seen falling down drunk, but that seemed unfriendly. “You sat in front of me in Mrs. Wilson’s class,” he said. “You showed me how to cheat on spelling tests by keeping the practice list inside your desk, and pretending to look for an eraser.”

  “I did not.”

  “You think I don’t know who corrupted me?”

  “I remember cheating on math, later,” she said. “Not spelling.”

  “Your dad used to walk you home from school.”

  Her eyes lost their gleam, and she looked at her drink. “That was me,” she said. “They took his driver’s license away.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you see him much?”

  She frowned sideways at him. “You ask a lot of questions.”

  Acey kicked him under the bar.

  “This is my friend Acey,” Steven said. “We went to high school together, but not grade school. He doesn’t ask so many questions.”

  Acey smiled his handsome smile at her, leaning forward over his beer.

  Steven withdrew to the men’s room to let Acey move in. Behind the closed door, he stood looking at the filthy urinal, feeling disoriented by his brief return to third grade. Mrs. Wilson had caught him cheating on the spelling test, but he hadn’t turned Rita in. It was his first and maybe only major act of chivalry. He got a zero on the test, and a C in spelling, but his parents had never asked about the sudden drop in his grade. He guessed that Mrs. Wilson had told them about the cheating and they were too embarrassed to mention it. Rita’s dad wouldn’t have cared if she cheated—the old drunk might even have applauded it, as wily—but it had seemed important to protect her from the disgrace.

  When he went back out to the bar, Rita had her head bent close to Acey’s, the deal sealed, and Steven put his arms around their shoulders.

  “Let’s go out for a midnight nuclear protest,” Steven said, and Acey whooped with eagerness.

  They drove down to the marina, stole a Sunfish from a slip, and sailed it across the river. Acey manned the tiller and Rita stood precariously in the bow and danced in the wind. When they got to the new plant, they yelled until the lights came on and the security guards came running down to the water to see what was going on. It was a pointless thing, hassling the security guards who were just local guys like them, getting a paycheck. But it felt good to yell on a warm night. Rita was surprisingly loud. When the guards threatened them, fat and breathless in their tight uniforms, there wasn’t any wind left to sail the Sunfish, so they laughed and paddled back for the marina with their hands. They could see a few stars through the haze. When they got back to the slip, Steven was starting to sober up. Acey left them to go pee off the end of the dock, and Rita said, “I’m sorry I got mad when you asked if I see my dad.”

  “That’s okay,” Steven said.

  “I don’t see him at all,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “A little.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Not that much, really,” he said. “I just remember him picking you up at school. He seemed like a nice man.”

  She looked at him skeptically, and he pretended he was telling the truth. Then Acey
came back, buttoning his jeans. He bear-hugged Rita, kissed her hair, and took her home.

  AFTER THAT, Acey was in love, and he couldn’t shut up about it. He talked about Rita all the time, how amazing she was, how unlike other girls. He did it at the plant, where people weren’t used to such happiness, and he made himself unwelcome. The married men only smiled and made jaded little jokes—Wait until the blowjobs run out—but the lonely ones found it intolerable. A raffle was held for a car someone needed to unload, with two packs of playing cards cut in half on the bandsaw, and Acey made a big show of buying a lot of tickets, and asking specifically for the heart face cards, so he could give the car and the winning card to Rita. There was open glee in the plant when he didn’t win.

  Even though Steven knew Acey was driving everyone nuts, and guessed there would be some attempt to take the Romeo down a notch, it still took him a minute to realize what was happening when a high, spooky voice came over the PA system one afternoon, filling the whole plant, calling, “Riii-ta, lovely Riii-ta!” Then it made a kissing noise and hung up.

  The guys around them were already laughing, and Steven saw knowledge dawning on Acey’s face. He thought he should have taken Acey aside long before and told him to keep his mouth shut.

  The high voice came again, asking, “Rita, where are you?” Then the kissing noise.

  Acey stalked to the closest paging phone, holding a wrench like a weapon, the guys still laughing behind him. No one was at the phone, of course. When Acey turned back with the wrench, he nearly bumped into a white hat, a liaison for the client. Normally someone saw the white hats coming soon enough for all the sleepers to get down off the scaffolding, but this one had appeared out of nowhere.

  “Who’s doing that voice?” the inspector asked Acey.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Who’s Rita?” the white hat asked.

  Acey didn’t say anything. The guys didn’t, either.

  “Tell me,” the white hat said.

  “It’ll stop,” Acey said.

  “It better,” the man said.

  It did stop, until the next inspection. As soon as the white hat got there, the voice came over the loudspeaker again. “Riii-ta, darling Riii-ta!” And then the kissing noise. But by then it wasn’t really about Acey or Rita. It had turned into a way of baiting the inspector, who went to their foreman, Frank Mantini, to complain. Someone who was standing outside the office heard Mantini tell the inspector it was a harmless prank, the guys letting off steam.

  The white hat put a hundred-dollar bill on the foreman’s desk, according to the eavesdropper, and said, “It’s yours if you find out who’s doing this.”

  “I don’t want the money,” Frank said.

  “Find out anyway,” the white hat said.

  Frank Mantini had a family at home, three daughters, and must have felt his job was at stake. But he couldn’t stop the prank. If he caught one guy—which he couldn’t—there would always be another to carry on. They switched tactics and started to torment him specifically. The high, spooky voice would say, “Frank-ie, you can’t catch me!” and then make the kissing noise and hang up.

  It went on for days, third-grade stuff: the occasional “Lovely Rita,” sometimes a line of the Beatles song, badly sung, but mostly taunts for Frank. The white hat came in every day. Frank Mantini started to look ill, and people were saying that whoever was doing the phone stuff should lay off.

  At the end of the week, Frank took Acey to the bar for lunch, to pump him for information. Some of the guys at the plant went to the bar at noon every day, and the bartender had their drinks lined up. They were career drinkers, old hands, and they drove back to the plant unimpaired. Frank Mantini and Acey weren’t those guys. Acey came back drunk and decided to take a nap, not up on the scaffolding, but in a quiet corner on the floor. Frank had already gone into his office and shut the door.

  Acey’s quiet corner, where he had put his jacket under his head, was behind a parked front-loader, and someone went to use it. The poor guy climbed in, started the engine, and backed up, feeling a bump. He stopped and climbed down again to check what it was, and saw that he’d backed over Acey with one of the front-loader’s heavy back tires, crushing his skull.

  Someone tripped the alarm, and the ambulance came, pointlessly, and the white hat showed up. Frank Mantini got dragged out of his office, smelling of whiskey, and fell to his knees at the sight of Acey dead on the floor.

  THE DEATH—the real weight of it—didn’t hit Steven for a long time. He felt as if he was watching everything from behind glass. He got his old rod out and went fishing, and wondered why he and Acey had stopped going, why they stole boats to protest the plant but didn’t take advantage of the last years of cold water and healthy fish. He didn’t catch anything, and thought maybe the fish knew what was coming and had already cleared out.

  The funeral was at St. Mary’s, where his parents’ funerals had been, and Steven sat in a pew like someone’s accountant, thinking about what the flowers cost, and the casket. Frank Mantini, who had lost his job, was there without his family. Acey’s little brother, the snotty kid they used to put in a headlock, now a stocky nineteen-year-old with a crewcut, read from notes, his voice shaking, about how he would never have a big brother again. Acey’s mother, who used to cook Steven eggs and muss his hair, tried to speak but couldn’t. Then a big motherly girl with caramel-colored skin, Acey’s first cousin, got up and helped everyone out by saying nice things without breaking down. Rita sat next to Steven, not crying. She had sobbed and screamed when he first told her.

  After the funeral, Steven drove her home and they sat in his truck, talking about nothing, until finally she got out and went inside. He went back to his parents’ house feeling like death was on him, a film on his face and grit in his teeth. He took a shower in his old bathroom, wishing he had a warm-hearted girl like Acey’s cousin to hold on to, and cried under the stream of water. In the morning, he got up to go back to the clanging plant.

  RITA CALLED HIM three days later and said, “I want you to help me hold a raffle.”

  “A raffle for what?”

  “For me,” she said. “I want to charge five dollars a ticket.”

  “What’s the prize?” he asked.

  “Me,” she said. “I said that. For a night.”

  He thought about it: her skinny body, the odd waifishness. “No one’s ever charged five bucks a ticket,” he said.

  “No one’s ever got a five-dollar hooker, either,” she said.

  “Some of them might have,” he said. “Some of them get it for free.”

  “I’ve seen the way they look at me,” she said. “I think I can get five a ticket. That’s five hundred and forty bucks, with two decks. If I could get ten, it would be over a thousand, and I could get out of here. But I don’t know if I could get ten.”

  “It’s illegal.”

  “So is every fucking thing that goes on at that plant,” she said. “Jesus. Will you help me or not?”

  He imagined himself pushing raffle tickets for Acey’s girlfriend’s pussy, for the girl who’d shown him how to cheat at spelling in third grade. “No.”

  “You have to.”

  “I don’t have to do anything. No one’s going to buy a ticket.”

  “They will, too. Just get me the cards, and I’ll sell them myself.”

  “Get your own damn cards. You can cut them with scissors.”

  “It’s not the same,” she said. “It has to look like what they’re used to. I need you to help me.”

  Steven hung up the phone and sat looking around his mother’s living room, at the curtains she had sewn, now long faded, and the flowered couch where she had sat, missing his father and dying. It seemed strange now, their long marriage, their total dependence on each other. His father couldn’t cook a meal or shop for groceries any more than his mother could gas up a car.

  In the morning, on his way to work, Steven bought two decks of cards, one blue and one red. All
he was going to do was give Rita the cut cards and let her do what she wanted, but Kyle Jaker, a kid on Steven’s crew, saw him at the bandsaw and asked what the raffle was for.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on,” Jaker said.

  “Acey’s girlfriend wants them.”

  “For what?”

  Steven paused too long before saying, “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, man, is it for her?”

  Steven wondered how Jaker had guessed that, and moved away. “I said I’d get her the cards, that’s all.”

  Jaker was scrappy and vain and pale-skinned, with a wild cowlick in the back of his carefully combed hair. It gave him a roosterish look. He skipped along beside. “How much?” he asked.

  “She wants ten.” Steven thought Jaker would balk at the price, and they’d be done.

  Jaker pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet. “I’ll take two,” he said.

  Steven had never seen a twenty come out so easily at the plant, or in the bar. Maybe not in his life, ever. “I’m not selling them.”

  “You just sold two. Come on.”

  He held the bill out and Steven finally took it, and dealt him two halves from the blue deck.

  “The jokers!” Jaker said, grinning. “Jaker’s jokers. That’s good luck.”

  Word couldn’t have spread faster if Steven had announced the raffle on the paging phones—which had gone eerily silent since Acey’s death—and by lunchtime he had sold all of the blue deck and started on the red. He had agreed to meet Rita at the bar, and she climbed into his truck. He put the wad of bills and the blue stubs on the seat between them, and she grabbed the cash.

  “I knew it!” she said.

  “I hate this.”

  “I knew they’d buy them.”

  “You could get hurt.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she said. She lifted her hips to tuck the cash away in her tight jeans, where it bulged. Then she put the blue stubs in her jacket and zipped up the pocket, like a kid putting away her milk ticket.