Right by My Side

by David Haynes

  “Does she now?” Sam laughed. “Well, you and I ain’t quite finished our beer.” He lifted the glass to my lips and I sipped the warm liquid. It was bitter and I made a face. “That’s right,” he said. “Nasty.”

  There was a lot of talk around the bar such as “put some hair on his chest” and “chip off the old block.”

  When I was that age Sam seemed bigger and more powerful than anyone in the world. He slung me off that bar and right up to his shoulders as we took his leave. I had to duck down as we cleared the door with the gold diamond window. I bet between us we were eight feet tall.

  *

  Big Sam’s guest arrives just before supper. Sam has fixed a platter of breaded chops, made gravy of the drippings and mashed a bowl of potatoes. He’s opened a can of peas and I’ve even been asked to make a little salad. “Add a nice touch,” he says, but we almost never eat salad. Ever. Sam’s all fired-up, so I do as I’m told.

  Sam’s all dolled up, too: he’s wearing his beige dress pants with the new striped red and white shirt I got him for Christmas, (x-large, 18½, 35). When the doorbell rings Sam quick throws on his navy blazer, straightens his cuffs and opens the door.

  “Come right on in. Let me rest your coat.”

  She is wearing a waist-length blue fur which was made from something with impossibly long hair. I mean, this coat—you could braid the hair on this mother. She has a matching silk scarf tied under her chin to protect her hair. She pulls off the coat and pulls the scarf back through one of the sleeves.

  Sam hands the pile to me. It is like holding an armload of feathers. It smells like flowers.

  “Miss Annie B. Semple, this is my son, Marshall. I told you all about him.”

  “Evening, Miss Semple,” I say.

  “Please to meet you, sugar. Call me Annie B. Everybody does.” She says this in a voice that is high and sweet.

  “Take her things in the other room there,” Sam says to me, and then to her, “Make yourself to home. Have a seat.”

  While I’m hanging her coat, she accepts Sam’s offer of “a cool one.” I lean on the door jamb and give her the double O. She’s eased back on the plaid sofa real casual with her legs crossed, but the thing is—they’re only sort of crossed as if there were some sort of problem with them. As if the one leg couldn’t quite figure out how to get across the other one. She’s got on a green dress, and next to her medium brown skin it makes her look like she’s sickly. Annie B. hasn’t stopped smiling since she walked in—grinning really—raising up these big brown cheeks and forcing dimples into them.

  The whole effect—the round head circled with curls, the little green slippers the whole effect is somehow soft and jolly. She is like a clown at the circus.

  Before I can volunteer, Sam says, “Entertain our guest while I set out dinner.” Sam goes and gets his table ready. He is determined this be a one man show.

  “I hear you in’ high school.”

  “Yes, ma’am—a junior.”

  “No need to ma’am me, sugar. Come over and sit by me.” I do. She raises a fleshy arm up behind me and pulls me over. “This sure is a cute place you all have.”

  This is a crackerbox. It has a broken glass table and a large broken mirror, though the mirror, the way Sam cracked that, looks like it could have been meant to be that way. Sam has fanned out the sections of today’s Post Dispatch so as to cover the main line of the crack on the table.

  I don’t say any of this. Instead I say:

  “Thank you,” and then ask her where she lives, the polite conversational thing to do.

  “Up in Overland. You know that area?”

  I tell her I do. It’s one of those places with poor people and crackerbox houses just like here in Washington Park. Except the poor people up there think their shit don’t stink.

  A crackerbox is a crackerbox.

  We sit there in silence a long, long time—I simply cannot think of a thing to say to her. She is contentedly sucking at the beer can like a baby with a fresh nipple.

  Sam saves us at last. “Come and get it.”

  I sit down at the table and put on my best eating manners: elbows up, free hand in the lap with the napkin. One never really enjoys food with guests because of all these rules.

  Imagine my surprise: Sam and Annie B. stuff napkins in their collars and dig in—start greasing. They pick up pork chop bones to tear the meat off. They suck and slurp until the bones are bare. They shovel mounds of gravied mashed potatos into their mouths and heap up seconds and thirds while I’m still on my first pork chop.

  The thing is, I’m mesmerized. By the sound, even. The grunting, moaning and general “mmm, mmm, mmm-ing.”

  “Something wrong with your food?” Sam wants to know of me.

  “It’s just great,” I say, though it’s really only just fair. A lot of salt, a lot of flour, a lot of grease. I quick eat what’s on my plate. It’s the last of the meat. I eat it before one of them asks me for it.

  For twenty minutes that’s all the talk there is except for an occasional “pass me the peas” or “sure is good.” And in just that much time they are done, leaned over to the side in their chairs, puffing and panting. Eventually they are able to haul themselves out and sit in front of the TV.

  The tabletop looks like dogs have eaten here. Little chunks of potato, explosions of gravy, trails of green peas. I am stunned. I clean it away before anyone can see.

  “Sure is nice of him to clean that kitchen,” Annie B. shouts, intending that I hear.

  “He’s a good boy,” Sam shouts in response.

  They watch Cosby and whisper and giggle the evening away.

  *

  I wake up shocked in the middle of the night. What could there be left to eat? How could they be at it again?

  Opening the door to my room I discover the house dark and realize I am wrong. What sounds like eating is another matter entirely.

  Can you imagine? That’s what it sounds like here. Sloppy and gross. When you go to the movies and the good part comes on, there is all this music playing. Who’s ever listening to it, anyway. But who could imagine this? It could be a zoo in there, or people unloading crates at the warehouse. The squeak of the bedsprings. The giggles.

  I heard Rose giggle once.

  Oh, my God.

  I lay back down, close my eyes and try to sleep. It’s hot in the room so I open a window, and then it’s cold and I shiver. I’m sick to my stomach but I really haven’t eaten anything. I pray for relief of any kind. Nothing happens, and years later morning brightens my room.

  *

  After the first visit Sam stops me in the kitchen.

  “What do you think of my lady?”

  Before I can answer he nudges me in a disgusting way saying, “Ain’t she something else?” He laughs heartily.

  “She sure is something,” I say flatly.

  Sam goes on to tell me how Annie B. is the sort of person who just makes you feel good, a person who is always happy, a person you don’t have to say nothing entertaining to or nothing.

  I nod.

  Sam says he’s lucky—damn lucky—to find one of the good ones.

  “Lotsa dogs out there,” he says. “Man can’t be too careful nowadays.”

  I nod some more.

  “You don’t mind my lady spending the night,” Sam asks me. Straight out he asks me.

  “No, sir,” I say. He pats me on the back and says “Good man,” or some such thing. As if I were, in some way, more a part of this little deal than an innocent bystander. And what if I’d said “yes,” anyway.

  And slowly Annie B. Semple works her way under my skin. The voice becomes syrupier and grating. Her brown skin shines, seems to soak up all the light in the room. And she sits there with that stupid smile, waiting for me to serve her “a cold one” or some Doritos. One night she watches me boil a can of soup for my dinner. She and Sam are headed off to some fancy place for steak and shrimp. Sam says she likes romantic joints. Annie B. sticks a finger in my
soup.

  “Needs salt, sugar,” she says.

  *

  About this time I get another letter from Rose. She encloses it in a Christmas card. The Santa on the card wears shorts and sunglasses.

  Dear Marshall:

  Things go like they go. I get by. Which I guess is what this is all about.

  Everything’s upside down. It’s freaky. Eggs … make eggs for just yourself for the first time and it’s like you’ve never eaten eggs before. You go to the store and get whatever you want. Whatever you got the money for. Don’t worry about what Sam has a taste for. Or what Marshall won’t eat. I get sad about that, too.

  I got me a job. A little old piece a one, Sam’d call it. Waitressing in a coffee shop at the Sahara Hotel. Believe that. I got me a silly little uniform. A short little skirt and a little cap says “Debbie” on it. Debbie musta had the job before me. A lot of those dudes you don’t want to know your real name no how.

  Christmas was a bitch. I worked. These places never close. Pouring out coffee to folks that looked as lost as I felt.

  Me and some of the other girls got together and grilled steaks and exchanged gifts.

  Barbecue on Christmas!

  Terri, who wants to be a dancer, got drunk and cried. I cried, too.

  Everybody here wants to be something else. Unless they’re already Wayne Newton or Cher. Everybody wants to meet a rich man, sing, get famous. We wished each other all our dreams to come true.

  I cried cause I didn’t even know what my dreams were yet.

  At least I’m some place warm. And I got a nice silk scarf and a bottle of Shalimar.

  Nevada is not like Missouri at all. It is hot, dry, flat, sandy. Out in the distance there are mountains, yet try driving out to them and they seem to move away. It’s almost like they aren’t there at all. Christmas in the desert does not seem like Christmas at all. I pretend by watching the holiday specials. I recreate the Christmases of my memory.

  When you were just a little thing Sam and me would hide your gifts and then sneak them out late at night. We thought you’d believe in Santa forever. Such a cute thing, opening up gifts in your pajamas. One year Sam didn’t get paid till Christmas Eve. We drove all over the county looking for an open store. We got you a fiat wooden train and you loved it.

  Remember?

  Check this out: I was in the hotel lobby and across the way I saw a boy from the back. This boy has the same hair as you and even a sweatshirt like the kind you like to wear. I ran and hid behind a giant plastic palm plant. Then he was gone.

  I know it wasn’t you but for a minute I thought you’d come for me.

  Would you do that?

  And don’t ask me what I was hiding from. Hiding maybe cause this is my thing out here. I don’t know how you fit into it yet.

  I’ll let you know when I got it down.

  Later,

  Mother.

  Annie B. spies me rereading my letter. “What’s that?”

  “A letter,” I say. “From my mother.” I try to say it nice. Whatever way I say it, for once her big smile almost completely disappears. What was left was as false as a warm winter day.

  *

  One night the Finney bladder fills on schedule, so I go to deal with it and am waylaid by a light from the kitchen.

  “Hee hee,” giggles Annie B. “You caught me.” She has spread before her a regular smorgasbord of delights: paper-thin slices of ham, hunks of Velveeta, a salami, sweet pickles.

  “Just making myself a little bedtime treat.”

  For the Chicago Bears. Of course I don’t say that. She’s sitting there, her hair all rolled up and pinned into little knots. She’s thrown on a nightgown that is pink and covered with little hearts.

  “Join me?”

  I shake my head, which she thinks means “no,” but really means “give me a break.” I swear: between her and Sam they’ve put on 55 pounds. You’d think all they did was eat.

  Unfortunately I know that’s not true.

  I don’t see any other choice but to discuss this matter with my boys.

  “What I know of your dad,” Todd offers, “he wouldn’t be really thrilled about you dipping into his business.”

  “She’s eating us out of house and home.”

  “Bullshit,” Todd says.

  “All I know is a man has certain needs,” Artie begins, but since fists are against the newly established rules, Todd and I ignore him.

  As if someone like him knew what a man needed.

  I go on as if he hadn’t spoken, “It’s all true. All of it.”

  I tell them about the last straw. That was when I found Annie B. in the kitchen at 3:45 in the morning in some sort of hypnotic trance. She’d forgotten her robe. She was wearing only a green silky see-through thing. I mean, I could see everything. There were layers and layers of it. Somehow it never looks the way you remember it. The way it looks in those magazines. It is always a shock, isn’t it? Artie and Todd and I found one of them magazines once. Up by the depot. This didn’t look like that at all. There was a lot more of this, and this was a lot more … loose.

  So there all of Annie B. was, stirring rhythmically a bowl of fudge cake mix. The box was torn open and the floor was covered with egg shells. The water splashed in the sink for background noise. It was like the Night of the Living Dead. I went in there and shook her. “Miss Annie, Miss Annie,” I said. She came to with a start and then was all embarassed.

  I asked her what she was doing, but she ran back to the bathroom, trying to cover herself, using these chocolate stained hands.

  I tell them I’d made up my mind then and there that sleep-eating was not to be tolerated in Washington Park.

  The boys agree that this is completely unacceptable and surely dangerous; that any night Sam and I might be flambed in our sleep. But what to do.

  I’m telling you,” says Todd, “your old man probably couldn’t care if she stood on her head naked as a jaybird on the front lawn and whistled Dixie.” His country-boy way of saying: this must be love.

  And I pray right then and there it is something else, something, whatever other choices there are.

  We decide that I have to set her up; that the best idea is to let old Sam see her for what she really is. All Sam needs is to see the cow standing in his kitchen, half-asleep, making Malt-O-Meal pancakes. That’ll fix her.

  But Annie B. does not show up for a few days. And the next couple of times she does, she sleeps through the night. Or I do.

  One afternoon Sam comes in and finds me cooking my dinner. He seems tense. “Annie ain’t been here, has she?”

  He seems relieved when I say “no.”

  “Do me a favor,” he says. “She calls, say I’m out.”

  “There a problem?” I ask him.

  “You know how these things go.”

  I don’t, but I play along.

  Annie B. is around a few more times before it runs its course; I didn’t have to do a thing. That last night Sam sat there on the couch and said nothing to her. Nothing.

  Maybe he got tired of feeding her or maybe she got tired of his silence. Whatever—she just disappeared. Sam never said a word about her again.

  *

  The advantage of the front of the parade is you are in a better position to be remembered.

  After Annie B. there is Judy, the nurse from Barnes Hospital. And a truck driver for U.P.S. whose name I can’t remember, just as I can’t remember the name of the woman with the twin girls. The little girls’ names are Deidre and Desiree, and the U.P.S. woman, due to her uniform, was all the same color—dark brown.

  There is a taxi dispatcher. She shows me a gun she keeps tucked in her purse.

  Tall and wide women. Skinny and yet still wide women. Thin hair, stringy hair, and every color black comes in women: café au lait, ebony, light brownskin, dark brownskin, all the yellows, pinks and beiges, too. Sam keeps em three hours, three days, three weeks: what was Sam looking for, anyway?

  At the kitchen tabl
e late one night, Sam in the door, me in a trigonometry book:

  “Marshall, do you ever get lonely?”

  I don’t look at him. I don’t answer him. I don’t say a word.

  There’s this thing about Sam’s eyes: they look one way for people he goes for, and a different way when he don’t give a damn. Those eyes practically change colors, to tell you the truth—wax museum glass eyes changed to real ones and back again. Hot eyes and cold eyes.

  Only a few times did Sam’s eyes cool. Really, I think almost all of them could have stayed forever. A whole house full of mothers.

  As if he loved each and every one.

  11

  “I’D LIKE THIS class to do something special for parents’ night.” Miss O’Hare says. “I want us to do a reading and a panel discussion of our essays.”

  Doesn’t that sound like fun.

  For spring semester Todd and I have signed up for a class that Miss O’hare is offering only for juniors: Telling Your Heart’s Truth. Ohairy says the purpose of this class is for us to explore our values and ideas, and to learn how to express them with enthusiasm and clarity.

  It’s a composition class.

  “Your assignment is to pick one of our ‘burning issues’(a list of gripes, disasters, tragedies, and complaints posted in front of the room) and fully explore it in a three to five page paper.”

  Acid rain. World hunger. Deforestation. There isn’t too much up on that list I get excited about. Where are all the good topics? Such as: Why is my teacher getting on my nerves? and, What is it that makes parents so obnoxious?

  “I want your parents to hear what’s on your minds.”

  There are usually about twelve of us here for this class. I don’t know most of them, but Todd does. These are the new Kathleen O’Hare groupies. All the smart and quiet kids. The popular crowd—Connie Jo, Buzz, and all them—took Mr. McLaughlin’s class. You can get an A in there if you spell your name right on your paper. They spend their time hanging out in the library, planning the school dances, going about their business like usual. Here I sit with a bunch of funeral directors. These people are so serious. There’s hardly any laughter.