Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  I prop the leg on the chair between us. It sits there, looking very conspicuous, lording over the salsa.

  The waiters say nothing. I come to Bandito’s a lot. They parade past us, wearing black sombreros and elaborate, frilly tuxes. A man comes over, tips his hat, and recites the seviche and molé specials. We order and then sit without speaking. Around us, couples chat, raise glasses. Mariachi music plays and Jimmy sips his drink. So, he asks, finally, Are you going to tell me what’s up with your father, and that leg?

  I’d rather ask you a few preliminary questions first. So listen up, Jimmy. I tap my fingers against the tablecloth, smooth the wrinkled fabric. I want to know a few things before we go any further, I say. I want to know, what kind of man are you? Do you run at the slightest provocation? Are you still, after years of living, afraid of the dark? Are you waiting for your life to open? Do you feel you’ve failed others? Are you brave with your love? I want to know, do you believe that one event can change a lifetime? Do you hold on to the slenderest bit of hope?

  Jimmy’s eyes widen. He says, Whoa, horsey. That’s a lot of questions. I really just wanted to take you out for tacos and get to know you better. I don’t even know your favorite color, he adds. He surveys the chips and salsa and the margaritas adorned with umbrellas. He says, Anna, it’s not as though you’ve been super easy. You’re not the most open woman I’ve ever known. Frankly, you can be a little scary, with all your interest in sex.

  Look, I say. Sometimes I really wonder if there’s any person in the world who is really worth the risk. Love, I say, is a complicated thing, so maybe I should just leave right now.

  He says, I’d hate to think you’re leaving me for a leg, Anna.

  Perhaps, I say. In a manner of speaking. I don’t wait for dinner, and I don’t finish my margarita. I get up from the table and leave.

  BACK AT HOME that night I lie in bed with the leg, and peer into its hole. I search not for a canary but for my mother’s engagement ring. I shake the leg until I hear it move then fall down into the hollow toe. It should be substantial, it should hold weight and meaning, but finally it is just what it is—something carried and discarded or put away.

  I make a decision then. I ransack the apartment and return with buttons, cuff links and lighters, dental floss, photographs, CDs, and that red thong. I take everything I have pilfered and stuff each item into the leg. The cuff links skip down to the toe. The buttons tap lightly against the wood. The Chapstick follows. I rip pages and pages from Strunk and White, stuffing each page into the leg. I fill the leg. I open the window and set the leg on the sill. It is a warm summer evening that promises, across this city, a new beginning and start.

  That night, I dream of my father for the first time in years. We meet on the street, and he seems happy to see me, which is surprising. I’ve been trying to find you, I tell him. He says, Me, too; imagine. It’s a real jungle, isn’t it? Together, we walk around the city. In my dream, we talk easily. I ask him about the years I’ve missed, and he speaks of distant countries, my mother, the war, and all his love.

  When I wake, I check on the leg. I breathe in the warm air, expecting to find that the leg has been lifted by the waiting birds that are always so hungry. But the leg is still there and there is no miracle. I bring the leg inside again and pack it away for good. When I finish, I call Jimmy at the pharmacy and tell him that I’m sorry.

  Hey, he says, genuinely surprised. Why are you crying?

  Please, I tell him. I want to see you now. I’ll run over there to get you, Jimmy. I’ll run over there just as fast as I can.

  MEMPHIS

  My brother Georgie has taken off again, this time armed with a leaf blower and a kidnapped dog. From my bedroom window I watch as he sneaks across the grass, his body pushing against the breezy autumn air. The purloined leaf blower is strapped to his back. The always-unsuspecting Winston trots at his heels, nosing at the pepperoni stick sticking out of Georgie’s fist. It is bribery, I know, the pepperoni stick, a treat brought to coax Winston into Georgie’s Jetta. The dog yaps happily, with an easy willingness that makes me curse. I decide I have the most perfidious dog in the world, the craziest brother, and a perfectly good leaf blower, which is just about the only thing that has not annoyed me tonight.

  “Call Elvis,” I tell my wife, Elle. “Georgie’s gone off to Memphis again, and this time he has a hostage.”

  “Take no prisoners,” she says in a pillow-muffled voice. She raises her arm in mock triumph. A mass of dark-blond hair furls the pillow’s edge. It’s late, too late for any of this, and I am already tired. I’d like to lie down again and drift off to sleep, undo the burden that is my brother. This is my first year married to Elle, but the honeymoon period has been anything but blissful, not with Georgie and these late-night trips, not with all of Georgie’s antics. Georgie is my younger brother; he will be thirty this December. He is also schizophrenic—an ill man, a crazy man, a man who has a penchant for driving me crazy too.

  Outside, Winston barks. Elle moans and says, “You’d think at least the dog would know better.”

  I remind her that Winston was never what you would call a savvy mutt, particularly in matters of food or trust. About a year ago—right before my mother died and we inherited Georgie, along with the doilies and the grandfather clock—we marveled at how Winston scarfed down his food at the pound, ran in indeterminate circles when we tried to make contact, and then promptly threw up. “Nervous stomach,” the pound worker said, shaking her head in an apologetic way. “You’ll take him?”

  Elle and I looked at each other, and hesitated. “Yes,” Elle told the woman finally. “We’ll take him.”

  It will be a miracle, frankly, if Georgie or the dog even makes it to the Blue Route. We live outside Philadelphia; Tennessee is more than a thousand miles away, and all the roads to Memphis are ridden with rocks—bits of broken asphalt laid there, according to my brother, by the government, in an effort to impede his progress. This paranoia is only one manifestation of his illness, and though I often tell him that his beliefs are untrue, that all of Pennsylvania’s roads are simply broken, my disagreeing with Georgie does nothing to brighten my brother’s outlook or mood.

  The Jetta’s engine guns in a furious way, and I worry once again about noise ordinances in the neighborhood, the quiet night suddenly ruined. Georgie speeds up the road that leads away from our house and drives up past the neighboring houses with their neatly trimmed lawns and hedges. He screeches the car to a halt. After a few moments of silence, the engine guns again.

  Did I mention I am tired? It does not help to worry. It does not help at all.

  “Good riddance,” I say.

  Elle sighs and slips her head out from under the pillow. She turns on the light and squints at the alarm clock. She moans again. It is after midnight. Still, she sloughs off her covers, gets up, and pulls her long tangle of hair back into a twist. She collects our clothes from the floor and says, “You don’t really feel that way, Bud. I might feel that way sometimes, but you don’t.”

  I do feel that way, and it is the wrong way to feel, but Elle, who is generally soft-hearted, is still too nice to believe that I am mean, too nice to let me mean any of this. Instead of arguing the point, I dress. I dress even though it is sheer futility, it is absurd to keep bumbling around in search of my brother. Tomorrow if I am late for school again on account of Georgie and his antics, the principal will be angry, possibly he will take disciplinary action against me, as he has threatened to do in the past. I work at a prep school, teaching American history and English to gifted students who go on to prestigious colleges, enjoy successful careers, marry, and have expensive children and houses. The principal, a self-indulgent prig of a man who is hardly a pal, expects those students’ needs to be met daily, without flimflam and excuses. Unlike Georgie, I do not have the luxury of work or no work.

  Elle is already dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. She throws a shirt at me. She says, “You get slower each time.”


  “Of course I get slower each time,” I say. Does it really matter if I am slow? Does it matter if, perhaps, I grab a cup of coffee before I go out in the rain and retrieve my crazy brother? I tell Elle both coffee and slowness are options, that there are, indeed, a great many options in life.

  Elle huffs at this. I ignore her and consult the calendar I keep bedside, a calendar I keep for Dr. Mulvaney to chart Georgie’s “progress.” To date, this is the twenty-fifth time Georgie has tried a road trip to Memphis. Each time he heads south, puts no more than thirty miles on the odometer, and, confused, agitated, he stops every time his car hits a stone on the road, one maybe the size of a pea, one just large enough to be felt under a tire. “Progress,” I tell Elle. “It’s all in the name of progress.”

  Elle stands with her hands on her hips. “It would most assuredly be progress if you finished dressing,” she says. “I’ll put on some coffee, but Christ, Bud, make it quick. I don’t have all night, either.”

  “Sure,” I say with a flutter of fingers. “I am on the case.” But of course I am thinking what neither of us will say, what neither of us will talk about: This is just the start of things. When we bring Georgie home, we will inevitably spend the rest of the night listening to one of my brother’s tirades about how Elle and I are co-conspirators against him. Georgie will storm through the house. And when I argue with him, when I attempt to inject any sort of reasoning into the discussion—Georgie will appear confused. He will shake violently. He will punch holes through the daisy-printed wallpaper that Elle loves, just as he has done before. He will kick furniture. Turn over the TV. He will break things. Small things. Things like Elle’s Hummels, those perfect-looking children, so idiotically pastoral I can’t say I blame him. And Elle, who only agreed to this arrangement because Georgie is my brother, will probably smile thinly and remind Georgie that the Hummels were a gift from her mother who lives in Florida. Elle will probably tell him that she always did think the statues looked too happy for their own good, and anything that happy deserves a good downing. She will say all this, and a hint of sarcasm will creep into her voice again. Can I blame her for this tone? They are her things, after all. She cares about them in a way she does not care for Georgie when he glowers and tells her simply, as if it explains everything, “Fuck you.”

  Somewhere in the distance, the Jetta’s engine guns again. Georgie is there, still up the road, and I am here, at home, still trying to figure out our progress. I think, progressive backpedaling, maybe, and write this term down so that I remember to run it by Dr. Mulvaney at Tuesday’s session, after Georgie huffs out in his usual way, and she and I debrief. I am very into those debriefings. I take meticulous notes, as meticulous as my brother’s plans for Memphis. In his room, Georgie has a large map of the United States hanging on the wall, with red lines plotted over all the major highway markers that lead him to Memphis. He has calculated distances and miles, has marked each failed attempt with a push pin until there are a cluster of push pins surrounding the road on which we live.

  Why Memphis? The truth is, I have no answer. Perhaps some queer love of Elvis blooms in Georgie’s heart. Perhaps the muddy waters of the Mississippi beckon him. Perhaps he wants to learn the blues. He has never been to Memphis. He has never once expressed an interest in Elvis. I’ve asked, of course, and he tells me to mind my own business, so there is that. My mind unravels possibilities, none of which Georgie will confirm or deny.

  I write down, co-conspirator? I write down, for Dr. Mulvaney, glommed leaf blower and kidnapped dog. These things I can explain, more or less. Someday I fear I will be forced to explain Georgie, which I cannot do. I cannot explain him at all. I cannot explain him because the truth is—the truth of it all is—I no longer know my brother. I think with mild irritation that passersby will probably see my brother out tonight on some desolate ribbon of road and wonder—Who is this man? What is he doing? And how could I explain? Possibly the passersby might wonder if the dog isn’t in a spot of trouble, some kind of trouble that maybe a leaf blower could put an end to.

  How was Winston killed, Officer? My brother blew my dog to death.

  AFTER A CUP of coffee, we head outside. Elle is a good wife with a good heart and insists on coming. She pulls her jean jacket tighter when the wind blows, and she tries to make light of our nightly excursions. She tells me, “It’s like having a baby, Bud, only without all the fun and sex.” Then she shimmies her thin hips and sings an Elvis song. She curls her lip and bellows in a deep, exaggerated tenor: I know my baby loves me …

  In the middle of singing, her foot twists and she flails her arms forward. Elle is a woman with a generally boisterous, robust nature, but she can be a real klutz, too.

  “Careful,” I say, catching her.

  She shakes her head. “I’m losing it, Bud.” Then she gives me her frequent and now tiring refrain, which is that she thought the first year of marriage was supposed to be the happy honeymoon. “The whole year,” she says wistfully, her voice too loud. “Imagine.”

  I say nothing. It is a too-cold night, too cold, I think, for saying anything that might hurt. Rain hits the trees. The air smells sweet from dying leaves. It is dark and damp, the grass brown and soggy. We walk past the Halloween display in our yard: three drenched ghosts hang from a cedar tree, their painted mouths contorted to scare neighborhood children. Under the tree are mounds of dirt and Styrofoam gravestones that say “I.B. Dying” and “U.B. Watching.” The gravestones were Georgie’s idea. When we put them up, Elle said they were ridiculously morbid.

  “Poor Georgie,” she says, surveying them now. “All conspiracy and disaster.”

  “It was funny,” I say. Anyway, I tell her she won’t be saying poor Georgie tomorrow when she is falling asleep over toast and coffee, nursing puffy eyes. Elle—her real name is Ellen, but she’s preferred Elle since being promoted to manager—starts her shift at 8 a.m., stacking thin, expensive lipsticks and hypoallergenic powder puffs at Macy’s. If she’s groggy in the morning and doesn’t look good, it’s bad for sales.

  I know my baby loves me …

  She mutilates the rest of the words. She’s too young for Elvis, really, too young to know the song by heart. We take Elle’s Bronco and head out the driveway, up past the neatly clipped hedges, the houses with the lights now on. Turning, I peer both ways down the road. Next to me, Elle hums Elvis tunes and draws fat men on the fogged-up window with her pinkie. “Right or left?” I ask.

  “He mostly goes left here,” she says.

  “Left, then, it is.”

  Some case history: Since the onset of Georgie’s illness, six years ago, he has gotten, each year, progressively worse. He has not held a job since he was fired from the car wash for threatening the manager with a good hose throttling. He has not had a girlfriend since he was twenty-four and dated a creamy-skinned girl named Rose, who dumped him when Georgie started becoming agitated and accusing her of stealing his money, and of buying too many dishes. Last I heard she’d met another man, married, and had a baby. If Georgie misses her, he seldom says.

  In general—and as Dr. Mulvaney knows—my brother believes everyone lies to cover up “the truth.” He thinks that his medicine is laced with mind-altering substances. He is certain our mother pricked him with a pin when he was two. He believes our father abandoned us, when in fact our father died of a complication after surgery. Georgie thinks the mafia is working with the government, and that I, in turn, am working for the government and the mafia, that prep school is an elaborate cover-up for racketeering. He has called me, several times, a flat-out traitor to a cause I had no idea I belonged to, a cause which I cannot even name.

  Well, that is that.

  Dr. Mulvaney likes to explain all of this to me in clearly delineated terms. She uses terms such as cycling, word salad, onset years, paranoia. I am so full of her lingo. We talk about neurotransmitters and serotonin, the success of new medications, the alternatives of mental institutions, the progress of shock therapy. “Shock therapy prog
ress,” I say, nodding. “Imagine that!” I chart Georgie’s behavior and tell her about his appetite, his moods, how many of his pills I found stashed under his mattress this week, or how many managed to find their way into the toilet—all that scientific progress down the drain. Listening, Dr. Mulvaney sits behind a large oak desk, and she sometimes taps her pen, because she is a woman with very little patience. And behind her there’s a photograph of her family—a photo of her husband and two sons, all in identical red sweaters too thick around the neck; and her sons’ eyes are dark like hers, and their foreheads are round and shiny—and she leans back and says, somewhat exhaustedly, “Your brother’s life is not your life.” She says, “There are always other options.”

  I stare at those boys, those boys in their ghastly red sweaters and their pudgy arms looped around each other and their broad, smiling faces, and I think, Fuck you, Dr. Mulvaney.

  Elle, bored with her Elvis drawings, turns from the fat men on the window. She is usually quiet on these trips. I can barely stand to think of all those things she might be thinking, how her thoughts and worries and dread might compound my own.

  “You need new windshield wipers,” I say. “I’ll replace them this weekend.”

  “Is that it?” she asks. “Is that what you were thinking about just now?” She pulls her jean jacket tighter and rips a loose thread from her sleeve. She stares straight ahead, in an absent way.

  “Safety first,” I tell her. “That’s what I was thinking exactly. You know me. I’m an open book.”

  She tsks this, rolls her eyes. “That’ll be the day.” It would be nice, she tells me, if anyone were as open as a book. She hums again, more to herself, and the entire space in the truck seems to shrink down to the size of a pebble. Finally, she says, “You know, though, we should talk more about Georgie’s future, because lots of people are sick, Bud. There’s help for sick people. I mean, it’s just like Dr. Mulvaney says … there’s help for Georgie.”