Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  “You have to understand that I’ve always had trouble confronting or dealing with angry women.”

  “Yeah, well I’ve had a similar problem, so maybe that’s why we hit it off that one time in the alley. I get ignored, I just curl up in a ball and lick my wounds. But no more. No more.” She laughed bitterly. “Now that it’s too late, of course, I’m turning over a new leaf.”

  “I’m glad at least we’re talking now. I had no idea.”

  “And then worst of all is that I’ll be gone soon and I won’t have anyone to talk to ever again. I’ll just be fucking alone forever.”

  “But your brothers and sisters. I don’t get it, MariAngela. You just made a reference to your mother not speaking to ‘some’ of your brothers and ‘several’ of your sisters. Just how many siblings do you have?”

  “Twelve. I mean eleven. I’m the twelfth. Second to last in the birth order, so I guess that means I’m the eleventh and twelfth, if you know what I mean.”

  “Wow, how Catholic can you get!”

  “Yeah, we were old school that way.” She curled her right arm in front of her as if she were guarding an imaginary object. “This is how I had to eat at our family meals. All my brothers and sisters were always picking off my plate!” She laughed. “If I didn’t protect my food, I would’ve starved.”

  “So where are they all now? I don’t get it, aren’t they visiting you?”

  She uncurled her arm, stiffly, as if it cost her a great effort, and let it drop down by her side. “Not really. They have their own lives, they’re scattered all over the country, kids of their own, I don’t know. When there are so many people, I guess it’s just the odds that someone or other might slip through the cracks, and that someone was me. And maybe I said some things to some of them when I was a teenager that I regret now, rebellious stuff, you know, to try to get noticed. So the good news is, I have my food all to myself now. Can I tell you something, Charlie? Do you know I gave myself a nickname years ago? I have to warn you that it’s going to sound self-pitying, but like I said before, I really don’t care, it’s just what I feel so I’m gonna say it.”

  “So what was it?”

  “I called myself ‘the Great Exception.’ Since I was one of the last kids, I was an afterthought with them, just like I was with you. School, I wasn’t bullied, I was just a nobody—average grades, average everything. And then when I got out of the house, it was the strangest feeling, I don’t know, it was like I’d talk to someone and they wouldn’t even hear me, like I wasn’t even there. Everyone has close friends, but I was the Great Exception. I don’t know, if there was a big party or camping trip, for some reason they’d always forget to invite me until the last minute. Everyone who’s halfway decent-looking has boyfriends, but I was the Great Exception. I knew for pretty damn sure that I was pretty, but they looked right through me. Sure, some of them would fuck me, but that was pretty much the beginning and the end. So at some point, I sort of switched to girls, but they weren’t really any better. Everyone gets told by someone in their life that they love them. Everyone but me, Charlie.”

  “That’s the title of one of my songs.”

  “Oh, I’m very aware of that, Charlie. Very aware. Do you understand what it is like to have never heard, not from your father, not from your mother, not from anyone, the words, ‘I love you’? And now, this…” She indicated her own body with a laboriously slow sweep of her right arm. The Great Exception.

  I was feeling hot and uncomfortable, so I took off my sweater.

  MariAngela raised her eyebrows. “Wow, Charlie, you look skinnier than me. Are you trying to keep me company while I waste away?”

  “I am.” I had intended to say something light, but that was the way it came out, a simple and declarative “I am.”

  “I guess you’ve been really active,” she said a little bitterly. “So this Willa you mentioned from Hawaii. You had a little thing with her, too?”

  “Yeah, well she was this childhood friend, and she ended up reconnecting with me in Hawaii, but it’s complicated, because she could have told me the truth about something that’s plagued me all my life, and I only found out because I ran into her in Hawaii, and so could her mother—”

  “This is the one who yelled at you once?”

  “Yeah, and then my own mother didn’t tell me the truth either, I just found out.”

  “One thing after another, huh? I mean, I’m like totally sympathetic, ’cause I’m not speaking to my own mother, or I should say she’s not speaking to me, so I know how it can be. But…”

  “I know, I know, Willa kind of overlapped with Alisa a little, so I guess I cheated, too.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m sorry, now’s not the time to be talking about me.”

  “No, it isn’t. And I’ll tell you something else. You feel cheated? You feel betrayed? Huh? What about your betrayal of me?”

  “Oh, c’mon.”

  “What, am I harping on this? Is that it? I get to harp, Charlie. This is my last chance, so I get to say what’s on my mind finally, for the first time. And you? What did you do? Did you call this grade-school sweetheart yourself? Did you call the mother? No, you waited until this Willa tracked you down. In Hawaii! What was stopping you years before from asking her whatever it was that was troubling you? Why is your passivity my problem?”

  “Yeah, why is it your problem? I mean, it’s mine. I shouldn’t have brought any of this up.”

  “Your passivity is my problem, too, because whether you like it or not we’re connected. Look, one thing I’ve learned from all of this back and forth with you ever since that first time in Berto’s is that, for whatever reason, we’re stuck with each other. Would this have been my choice? Was this something I wanted? I don’t know, if you had asked me when we had that night behind Berto’s, I would’ve said yeah, but after that, no way. But sometimes you just can’t choose, you know? You had a fling with your childhood friend, okay, that’s fine, whatever, you do what you have to do. But here you are, aren’t you? Fight it all you want, we’re together.”

  “MariAngela, are you trying to tell me you love me?”

  She shrugged. ”I know, fucked up, isn’t it?” She closed her eyes, opened them again. “Like I said, sometimes you can’t choose.”

  At this moment, a young Filipino nurse brought in MariAngela’s lunch, and it distressed me to see that her meal consisted mostly of soup, vanilla pudding, and several glass dishes of orange and lemon Jello. It was no meal for an adult.

  She looked at the food blankly for a moment. “Hold on, Charlie, before I eat, I have something for you.”

  There was a small tower of paperback books next to her bedside table. With great difficulty, she extracted a slim paperback from near the bottom of the pile, causing, in the process, all of the other books to slide in various directions—some behind the bedside table, some in front, and some under the bed. Of course I thought of Elizabeth—Bitty—knocking down her piles of books at Willa’s facility.

  “Shit. Fuck. It’s like they all got together and said ‘next time she knocks us over, let’s all scatter in different directions to piss her off.’ Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot of this guy.” She handed me a paperback book. “Open it to where the second Post-it note is, okay? Thanks.” She took the book back from me and recited. “Now listen: ‘Take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforward regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.’ ”

  “That’s pretty nice.”

  “Yeah, ‘nice’ if you’re just reading it because you happened to pick up his book or someone like me reads it to you, right? But it means something else entirely to me, now that I understand what it means in my bones.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “A Roman general, beli
eve it or not. But that isn’t even the part I wanted to read to you. That first quote? That was for me. Turn to the other Post-it note now.” I complied.

  “Okay, this one is for you, Charlie: ‘Come back now to your sober senses; recall your true self; awake from slumber and recognize that they were only dreams that troubled you; and as you looked on them, so look now on what meets your waking eyes.’ ”

  And with that she let the slender paperback slide out of her fingers, where it joined its slippery fellows on the floor. She smiled at me. “If you want to be nice to me, Charlie, you can start by getting me a new iPad.”

  5

  When I got back to the rental house, I climbed up to the dormer and stooped down for a moment and checked out the dollhouse. The house was quieter than I’d ever heard it, and I missed, in an odd way, the family of missionaries off doing God knows what in the Philippines; I wished they were there with me, or that I was there with them, in the warmth and the sun. I looked at the yellow scribbles on the opposite wall and saw for the first time, in a child’s hand, the words “Sweet Maggie,” and I wondered if that was the name of the little girl who’d thrown the egg roll, or the name of a friend of hers, and I saw a crude green caterpillar and a few stick figures and tic-tac-toe games in yellow and orange, all of it covered in a swirl of concentric, complex yellow circles. I spent a good fifteen minutes considering this canvas as if it were a Cy Twombly or a cave painting from Lascaux.

  That wisp of a thought I’d had the previous night was starting to form into something, but I still couldn’t say what it was.

  When I woke up the next morning, I ducked briefly into the dormer room and saw that the shutters, oddly enough, were now open, and there was a splash of orangey light on the opposite wall. It looked like the sun as seen through a slice of tangerine. It hadn’t been an especially windy night, but it seemed possible that a gust of wind had popped the shutters open. It was also the case that the intricate hinging mechanism was affixed to a drywall anchor that was beginning to crumble, and perhaps the tiny doors were loosening, or on the verge of becoming detached. But I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about this. I got into the Lexus and ran some errands and picked up my unemployment check, because it was a Friday and I didn’t want to be without my check over the weekend. And then late in the afternoon, I drove back to the South Side of Chicago, although this time not for the purpose of consulting with Dr. Nemerov.

  Armed with Google Maps, and the knowledge that her last name was Halloran, I headed to a neighborhood called Beverly and, after a bit of trouble finding the place, I drove up to the house where MariAngela had spent her childhood.

  It was a little cottagey place on a very typical South Side Irish street—neat, trim homes with neat, trim lawns. No butterflies, no sidewalk cracks, no chalk marks on the sidewalk, and no children to be seen. I noticed a sodden, rolled-up newspaper on the roof, lying diagonally half in and half out of the rain gutter, full of news that no one would ever read.

  The trees in front of MariAngela’s house looked nothing like the trees Willa and I had played under, nor the trees in front of my rental house that the missionaries’ children must have played under, but as the sun began to set and all the colors started to run together, the trees, and the sidewalk, became indistinguishable from all of the ones I’d known in my life up until that point.

  The windows in her house were dark, but I closed my eyes and tried to imagine MariAngela, in the half-awake, half-asleep stumbling state that is childhood, where we accept everything and understand nothing, playing with the multitude of brothers and sisters that would one day see her as less than even a stranger. I could almost see her, in there in the darkness, playing with a plastic train set that snapped together neatly, and I suppose that if she could have known what awaited her as an adult, she would have screamed out in horror. Thank God that she did not, and instead innocently played and unknowingly drifted to her fate.

  I woke up very late the next morning, a Saturday, feeling more exhausted than if I had never slept at all. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, feeling like a failure, until I had to urinate so urgently that I knew I had to get up and turn on the overhead light. But still I lay there and stared at the big, bare, old-fashioned light bulb and pretended that I really did have the power to turn light switches on and off. But then, as I imagined doing so, I started thinking that if I flipped the switch, the bulb would fill up with mud instead of light, and that even if I flipped the switch off again, the mud would keep on flowing, and then I suddenly realized that it wasn’t mud at all but liquid shit, and I was terrified that the bulb was about to explode.

  After I finally urinated and took a long shower, I felt a bit braced. I had a bit to eat and then I texted Willa. “U wanna talk? How’s Bitty? She like the candy?? :)”

  I stared at my phone, expecting an instantaneous response, but there was none.

  I walked down the street to buy some orange juice for Sunday’s breakfast and deliberately left my phone on the kitchen counter. When I came back, I ran to the phone to check for Willa’s response, but there was still nothing.

  That evening, I got on Facebook and sent Willa a message. “Hi Willa, I hope you’re well. How’s Elizabeth? How’s everything with you? I’ve been thinking about you, and us, and everything that happened, and I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe you could have handled things a little bit better. I’m sure I could have, too. But I mean specifically about letting me know about your sister and what happened to Elizabeth. Hope you don’t see this as unreasonable. Send me a message when you get a chance and tell me what you think about all this.”

  After I sent this message, I went on Amazon and purchased an iPad for MariAngela that I had shipped straight to the Rehab Institute. Then I went back on Facebook and fooled around for a while longer, and a red “1” popped up in the “Messages” column, so I clicked through excitedly, but it was only a message from Bowen checking in on me. I reread my Facebook message to Willa, and my text message, and as I looked at the little smiley face I’d appended to my text, it suddenly occurred to me that the reason I’d intuited that Bitty was still alive was that, when I was in Beatrice’s house in St. Louis, I’d seen in her hallway several photographs of a young woman with an odd, scrunched-up face, and I had known instinctively that her face was scrunched-up because she was brain-damaged, and that she was brain-damaged because she had fallen between a bed and a wall when she was an infant.

  On Sunday evening, I blocked out some time to call my mother so that I could report to Dr. Nemerov the successful completion of at least one of my two tasks, but I kept on putting it off, and by 9:00, I found myself getting into my Lexus to take a little ride to the sports club where MariAngela had once been rumored to work.

  This time, I didn’t turn around in the parking lot of a Burger King, though I didn’t have much more of an idea than I did in the last go-round why exactly I was there.

  The club, which was called the ManCave, was rather handsome, I thought, dominated by blond wood walls; darker rosewood-looking, round, high-top tables; and, like every other sports bar I’d ever been to, twenty or so gargantuan flat-screen TVs, all of them tuned to either basketball, football, or mixed martial arts. I sat at one of the rosewood tables for about twenty minutes sipping a ginger ale and watching two MMA fighters involved in a complex entanglement on the mat that I had trouble following; I couldn’t, at times, determine whose arms and legs were whose.

  My waitress, who like all of the other waitresses was wearing a lavender polka-dotted halter top tied tightly under her breasts and a pair of white short-shorts, seemed faintly distant to me, no doubt annoyed that I hadn’t ordered any wings or drinks. She was a leonine redhead with fine features but slightly flattened cheekbones that gave her a faintly bruised or offended look. There also were two other young women with trays of brightly colored tubes of liquor shots around their necks, wandering arou
nd the tables looking for takers. Though rather noisy, the place was mostly empty, possibly because there were no major games that evening and the MMA fight was a rerun, and most likely neither the shot girls nor the waitresses were making very much money at all. So after the match was over—I thought the guy on top was the winner, but it turned out that it was his hand, and not his opponent’s on the bottom, which had frantically slapped the mat to indicate that his other arm was caught in an inextricable trap and about to be hyperextended or broken—I called the waitress over and ordered a Heineken draft. I drank it very slowly, and then more slowly still, as if it were a glass of pitch or darkest tar, and at one point, I saw the waitress eyeing me curiously, and then at some later juncture I thought I saw MariAngela at the back of the bar, so I got up to go to the washroom, but when I got back there, the young woman I’d seen looked nothing at all like her.

  I went back to my table and resumed drinking my warm beer, and after finishing it, I merely sat. I reflected on the fact that I had never self-medicated; I drank rarely, never used illegal drugs, didn’t gamble or indulge in pornography. Instead, I did nothing, and for some reason consciously imagined that my irritated waitress had just come up to me and said, with some considerable tartness, “You’re a good little boy, aren’t you, Charlie?” The remark stung, even though I had merely imagined it. I had never quite felt the way I felt at that moment, as if I were alive and of this Earth merely by dint of my breathing. It was a form of meditation, I think, though who meditates in a clamorous sports bar besides me, I don’t know. I envied those two exhausted and flattened-out fighters I’d just seen, though I couldn’t figure out why until I had driven halfway home. It was because they were engaged in something difficult and demanding that carried with it a definitive result; they were striving after something they and those who watched them deemed worthwhile and exciting; they were contending, battling, hammering, grappling, jabbing, and breathing very hard; they were doing something bloody and visceral, as MariAngela would say, and all too real; and they were fully and painfully alive.