Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  At Gristedes, Marge is sucked into the vacuum of cold and lights. Everything is bright, airy, in order. Colorful packages run like rainbows on the shelf. Everything is in its place. She loves grocery stores and she loves pharmacies. There is so much potential in every aisle. Everything could fill you, make you more beautiful, fix something. Every product you buy could define you, somehow. Do you buy the more expensive jar of pickled beets? You do.

  She exits, stressed with the new weight of her boon and the knowledge that it is already 6:17, and she’s supposed to be home at six thirty, and can she make it? Though why would it matter if she didn’t? James will have gotten home by now and told Delilah to go home. She realizes that this is what her rush is about. She does not trust James to be alone with the child. There will inevitably be a James-scale disaster if she lets that happen, which will require Marge-scale repairs. Rush, Marge. There’s a wind coming up the avenue, but you can push through it.

  On Bank, a man in an upstairs apartment practices for a musical performance. You make me feel so young! he sings. He is probably some Broadway understudy’s understudy, Marge thinks disparagingly. Bells will be rung! The song makes her think of James when James was James, of herself when she was herself. She thinks of the golden light of their apartment up at Columbia, of both of them at the kitchen table, working on their projects across from each other. She thinks of the way the glue she used for her collages smelled: metallic and exciting, like work and play at the same time. She misses herself.

  On Bethune, under the trees, Marge wonders why she feels a tinge of excitement, somewhere deep, somewhere unspoken for. It is not the singing, which is bad. It is not the memories, which ache more than inspire. It is the light. It is her favorite time of day, always has been. The moments leading up to dinner, when the workday is done, when you have a bottle of red wine in your heavy bag. Just like the drugstore, dinner is a promise. It is something steady and tangible, knowable and beautiful. And there is a boy waiting for you to feed him, and a man. And right now she doesn’t let the fact that the man is one who has cheated on her and the boy is one who will be taken away from her any minute get in the way of that. The feeling is low enough in her body that no logic applies to it.

  She is almost home—on Jane, just in front of the Laundromat where Mrs. Consuelo had translated and read her the letter that she found in Julian’s backpack and said, so sad, In case of death or disappearance . . . —when a woman runs directly into her. Groceries clunk and roll all over the ground, carrot tops splay like a dead woman’s hair. The woman gasps her apologies. Marge mumbles that it’s fine and bends to repack the bags. The jar of expensive beets has broken and is bleeding out onto the sidewalk. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” says the woman. “Let me. Let me. No let me.”

  They rise in tandem, find each other’s eyes. The woman is a bit older than her—is she herself old enough to call herself middle-aged, she wonders? No, not really, not yet, she is not as old as this woman, phew. The woman has a mane of red hair. She wears a flowy dress with an outrageous pattern on it: no tights. Instead she has eccentric cowboy boots and a trench coat of sorts, with many, many pockets.

  “Do I know you?” the woman asks, searching her.

  Marge looks down quickly, as if to check if any of her groceries have been stolen in the scuffle. She feels her face flush, re: this woman. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t believe you do. Excuse me.”

  But the woman’s face has given her goose bumps.

  She pushes past the woman and toward her little house, the little house where she has spent most of what she would call her adult life. The house where she had been pregnant once. The house where James had told her that he had been unfaithful to her and where she had cried and told him she would never forgive him. The house where she would forgive him. The house where she would cook these groceries into a dinner and where she would get the boy to brush his teeth with his new toothpaste and where she would put him to bed and kiss his forehead. This is what she has time for, given her extra fifteen minutes. What she doesn’t have time for is the woman who has twice now knocked her down, causing her to lose her baby and her beets. What she doesn’t have time for is her husband’s busted, swollen face, when he opens the door and makes her least favorite of his expressions, the one that looks like oops.

  Arlene Arlene Arlene! Pull yourself together. That woman is fine, Raul is fine, you’re fine. You didn’t do anything wrong. Not then, not now. Not that day in the studio, when you put the severed hand into that big can of turpentine. Not when you pulled the hand out again, afraid you had ruined it, wrapped it in a rag, packed it in your purse. They couldn’t have reattached it anyway, even the doctor said; all the tendons had been sliced beyond repair. Sliced! Turpentine didn’t slice. Turpentine blackened, apparently. The hand you had presented the doctor was black. Jesus Christ, Arlene. Really?

  Really. It had definitely been her, the woman from New Year’s. She had been wearing burgundy that night. You remember because you always remember burgundy; it is the only color that is exactly as ugly as it is beautiful.

  That night: You had met someone named Claude and let his Spanishnness get to you. Claude had made your shoulders go slack with his accent, which was the thing that meant, whether you liked it or not, that you would sleep with him. Whether your shoulders had gone slack on purpose, and whether Raul Engales’s official snubbing of you earlier in the evening had had anything to do with that, was debatable. Jesus Christ hell fuck bitch. Raul was a baby! Claude was a man of ripe age, like you. Where you belong! With someone old and foreign like Claude. Claude had given you some sort of rolled cigarette, surely laced with something; who cared, what the hell? You had gotten dizzy and you had become a fucking ignoramus. You had shouted 1980, assholes! And you had, for reasons you cannot remember, eaten grapes.

  And then you had seen Raul Engales through the glass of the glass door, finding his way into a room with Winona George. That bitch! She was as old as you! What was Raul doing in a room, alone, with Winona fucking George?! You had tilted a bit, trying to get a better look: Would they kiss? Would he press her against one of the blue walls? You had tilted and then you had tilted too far and you had fallen. Your fall had been cushioned by a welcome ball of flesh. That woman you just saw on the street. It had been her, her flesh. Her soft stomach that you had landed into with your full weight. Her burgundy dress you had spilled champagne onto, creating continents of wet on the world of her belly. Her less-attractive-than-her husband who had said, to your terror, It’s just that she’s . . . pregnant.

  The next morning, in bed with Claude, whom you suddenly hated, you had remembered the whole scene in abstract but visceral detail. The give of her stomach. Her little scream. You had thought you might have hurt the baby. You had worried about it for months. You lost sleep. You went to therapy for this woman. And you had just seen her on the fucking street and what had you done? Murder her beets. Kill her carrots. Knock her down and take yourself with her: the two of you clumsily grabbing for cans and cereal boxes and tampons. You still didn’t know. How could you know? If you had hurt that woman’s baby like you had so feared? Blackened her life like you had blackened Engales’s hand? Oh, fuck, Arlene, you’ve fucked so many things up in your life it’s scary.

  Your therapist would say, definitively: no. But your therapist is an asshole with a goatee, and now is your only chance. To stop wondering forever. To turn. To turn and follow the New Year’s Eve lady, see which stoop she ascends. To knock on the door, act calm, cool, collected, just a regular lady in a regular cargo coat and regular cowboy boots. To let yourself feel the deep, poignant relief when you see that little boy. They already had a kid; so no matter what, you hadn’t ruined their only chance. They have a little healthy kid with nice hair and cute shoes, whose eyes—holy shit—look exactly like Raul’s.

  Engales has been moved to a floor whose walls are not pink but a sad, clinical blue. There are no orange cups and there is no Darcy and there is no Lupa. Engale
s hated Lupa, she was a good old-fashioned bitch, as Darcy had so eloquently put it, but now, without her, Engales finds himself wanting her. He had heard Spinoza blowing up at her. He had heard the Spanish word for fired. He knows it was his fault. But there are so many regrets, and Lupa is just one of them.

  From his new room, he can see directly into the abandoned squat, into the dark corridor that led to the room where he first fooled around with Lucy; the room next to it, where he had helped Selma mix her plaster; the makeshift shower made of a spigot and hose, where Mans and Hans worked out their pyrotechnics, with easy access to the only water source. He remembers one of the first nights he was at the squat with Arlene, when a brunette woman had showed up in a black leotard and begun to dance among the crowd. Eventually people made space for her, watching her graceful body scrunch and wave and bend. She had a piece of charcoal in each of her hands, and she began to mark surfaces with her gestures: huge sweeps of the arms, broad, reaching strokes. “That’s Trisha,” Arlene had said, but Engales hadn’t much cared what the woman’s name was. What he was interested in was the way she filled and used the space, like it was all hers for the taking. What he was interested in were the lines she was making: arcs like almost-full moons, hatches like ladder rungs. At the end of her performance, Trisha climbed out one of the windows and onto the street, disappearing as quickly as she had arrived. Behind her the charcoal stripes rang with her movements. She was gone, but she was also still there.

  Now the blue tarps and plexiglass windows that Tehching had rigged are gone, and the wounds of the windows are black pits of nothingness, where the guts and the soul and the art of the place have been extracted by people who don’t know what guts and soul and art are. Engales wonders if Trisha’s marks are still on the walls and floors, though he doubts it. He imagines the sad smudging of charcoal, the way it fades if you don’t lock it in with that toxic spray. In front of the building, across the street, a drunk man performs vulgar mock intercourse with a fire hydrant. Engales’s left fist pulses like a blinking light with terrific, understandable pain.

  The rest of the pain he feels is not understandable. The empty squat. What Lucy had done. Those things James Bennett had said. What he had done to James Bennett’s face.

  He had not believed James at first, when he came in last week, stuttering through a spiel about “some things Engales needed to know.” He had let the facts James presented hit him like little pellets of an impossible reality, being tossed right at his head. Your sister. Son. Safe. Sofie. Impossible, he had thought. Franca didn’t have a son. He had shaken his head. But deep inside he knew. He knew that it was Franca’s big news, big news that was being delivered by James Bennett because he had been too proud to find it out for himself. But how? He remembered thinking in the little span of time before he punched James Bennett’s lights out. How had James Bennett gotten Franca’s big news?

  That was when he saw, draped on the shoulders of the plastic chair where James Bennett sat, the white suit jacket.

  The image that had been burned into his mind that night resurfaced: the white rectangle of that suit with the black stain on the back of the jacket, like a little hole, as it accompanied Lucy down the darkened avenue. He could see Lucy’s flirtatious head tilt, feel the shadows he had lurked in and the press of the cold concrete. He could feel the hot rage he had felt that night, the rage that suit had conjured, seeping into him now.

  It couldn’t be.

  It couldn’t have been that James, the only person he had allowed himself to talk to or trust since the accident, had been the one who took Lucy home that night, who he had watched disappear into his own apartment building. It couldn’t have been James—balding, ugly, annoying James—who had been having an affair with Lucy. And whom Lucy had gone to when Franca’s big news—a son; Franca had a son—had showed up at the apartment, the apartment whose address Franca would have kept and saved in her little black book from that lone postcard he’d sent so long ago. No. It was too far-fetched. But Engales’s eyes were fixed on the jacket.

  “Hand that to me,” Engales had said suddenly.

  “Hand what to you?” James said.

  “That jacket.”

  “What do you want with my jacket?”

  “Hand me the fucking jacket.”

  Just as Engales was finding the black stain on the back of the jacket, the black stain that would out James Bennett as an unfaithful, heartless bastard, something fell out of the jacket’s pocket that would beat the stain to it. It was a matchbook: small, white, with its little red stripe of strike here. Engales looked up at James, whose face was suddenly as white and stretched as a canvas. Engales had picked the matchbook up from the floor, undone its fold with the thumb of his left hand. The inside of the matchbook read: THIS IS UNHOLY.

  Oh, yes, James. Yes it is.

  Engales was on top of James faster than a single heartbeat. His good hand drilled into James Bennett’s lying face. Again: James Bennett’s face as Pascal Morales’s face. Again: James Bennett’s face as his irresponsible dead father’s face, dead on impact against a highway tree. Again: James Bennett’s face as the fuck who did whatever had been done to Franca. When Lupa finally intervened, Engales shoved her aside. Again. James Bennett slumped in a bloody wreck, pleading I’m sorry. Again. Again again again.

  After it was over, Mary Spinoza herself had led Engales to a room where he could do no harm to others, where visitors weren’t welcome and the walls were blue. His rights were read to him—not that they felt like rights—and his sentence delivered. For this incident: another month at the Rising Sun.

  He is in that room now, a full week later and still burning with anger, and the sun is fading, turning the blue walls brown. He slouches in a hard chair, watching a woman in a third-story window across the street walk casually around her apartment, naked. Her feet flop flatly in front of her. Her body is lean and unremarkable. Her triangle of pubic hair marks her like a target. She glances out the window, as if to check who is looking in on her. She does not see Engales, who is cloaked in shadow. She sees no one, and her little show has gone unwitnessed. She pouts out into the night, pulls a shade down, disappears. Engales forgets her immediately. His mind is across town, with a boy he’s never met. His hand is on the letter from his sister, that James Bennett had limply pressed against Engales’s chest before he was dragged off, covered in his own nose bleed.

  Raul,

  Did you know that in the long time that you and I have been brother and sister, I’ve never asked you for anything? I know what you’re thinking: my sister is full of shit. But it’s true. I’ve made a point of it. I’ve never once asked you to do anything for me. Instead, I wanted to do everything for you.

  It backfired, I see that now. I should have asked you for something. I should have asked you to stay. Really asked you, not just cried like a baby on the stoop. When you left, everything went badly. Pascal could not save me—you were right about that. I acted like a child—you know how I can get when I’m sad, it’s like I’m six again—and eventually he left. People think it was a kidnapping—that’s what’s happening here now, all over. I think he’s at his mother’s.

  If you get this, it means something’s gone wrong. I don’t know what’s in the news up there, but things are bad here. The kidnappings are happening to everyone, even people who aren’t involved. People are going missing, disappearing right off the streets. I’m scared, Raul. I can’t not be involved. But I need to know that Julian will be safe.

  Yes, I know. I wanted to tell you about him, I swear. But I couldn’t send a letter; they’re opening all the mail now. And I didn’t know what number to call. He’s the one thing I’ve done right in my life, and it is only because I owe him my entire sanity and my entire happiness that I will now ask you for something.

  Raul, please take care of my son.

  He’s five years old—probably almost six by now—born on February 16, the year after you left. He’s smart—probably too smart—I think he takes after Br
aulio. He likes his steak almost black, like Pascal. He likes sweets, like me. He likes to draw, like you. Please love him for both of us.

  Yours. Always yours.

  F

  Julian Morales is sure of two things in this life: that nighttime is just daytime with an eyelid over it, and that his mother, if he does everything right, is coming to get him tonight, when the clock makes a backwards L. The first thing he knows because his mother told him so. The second thing he also knows because his mother told him so.

  His mother knows everything. She knows how many cups of flour to put in and how air pushes on birds’ wings to make them fly. She knows multiplication and voodoo. She knows the right stories for every situation and she knows that Tuesdays are Julian’s least favorite day, since he has to go to Lars’s house. She knows everything he thinks because she’s telepathic, which means she can see what’s happening in other people’s heads. It only works with people she loves a lot, though, like Julian, and like the Brother. One time, the time she likes to talk about the most, she told the Brother (in her mind) that he needed a haircut. The Brother had gone into the bathroom right then, chopped off his thick hair himself so that it became a spiky plant. His mother had to fix it. His mother fixes everything.

  Julian watches the clock, poised above Marge and James’s refrigerator like an eye, like he used to watch his fish, Delmar, in its bowl. The clock chugs and bubbles and looks at him. It’s too slow, just like Delmar was. Where is she? Swim faster. She is late, late, late. But wait, also, where is Delmar?

  He prays: Dear God, send Mom a telepathic message. Tell her I drew all the pictures in my head and baked all the cakes in my head. Tell her I would do it in real life if I could, but I’m in a house with people who talk funny. Their ovens are funny, too, and I can’t find any paper. Tell her to get here fast, please. And Delmar. Remind her to feed Delmar because sometimes she forgets. Amen.