GJ put his hand up to his cheek. Already his hands were larger than Greg’s. The boy was going to be enormous, a tall, slouching creature with Greg’s face. And then GJ laughed. A quiet snuffling from his nostrils that Greg first took for crying, but no, the boy was laughing, trying to hold it in with both his hands now. Greg coasted and then parked along the road outside the condo gates. He did not know what else to do. He and Marie had made a promise never to hit their child; they’d both been whipped and hit and tossed as children. But they had both gone back on that promise with GJ.
“I don’t understand why you’re laughing,” Greg said. “Your friend could have died.”
“It’s just funny to me,” GJ said. “Not Doyle. That’s not funny. You’re funny. This is exactly how I pictured you reacting, and now we’re here.”
Doyle’s mother was right; GJ wasn’t the same. He was talking to Greg like he knew him in a different way. He had taken the money from Greg that night after what happened at Mick’s. He had taken it as easily as if it was money he was owed from a job he did.
“You could have gone to jail,” Greg said.
“Doyle’s mother said she didn’t want to press charges.”
“You could have died.” Greg realized he didn’t know enough about what had happened; he didn’t know anything, really. What time had they started drinking? What was GJ wearing? When did he know Doyle wasn’t okay? Why didn’t anyone call him—the cops, the hospital, anyone? Did Marie know?
“I didn’t drink any of it,” GJ said.
“What?”
“Yeah, I didn’t want any. Doyle wanted to try it and he drank it like it was a Pepsi or something. I just watched him.”
Greg looked at his son, who would not look at him aside from quick darting glances. The glances of someone who had something to hide. Or who had something to protect. His black hair was getting long; there were some curls in the back now, something girls probably liked. He had his backpack in his lap, crumpled in a way that made Greg realize there probably weren’t any books in there, no way for him to do his homework. His T-shirt had a hole at the shoulder revealing painfully white skin underneath, the same pale skin he had as a baby. He had Marie’s coloring but Greg’s features. It was hard to look at the boy and not see Marie, though Deb told him the boy looked more like him than her.
“Why didn’t you want any?” Greg asked.
“Oh, you know…” GJ looked out his window, plucked something off the side mirror, brought it into the car. Greg saw that it was a ladybug, a delicate red bead that GJ was letting crawl across his hand. “I just didn’t want to.” He shook his hand out the window and the ladybug flew away. He pushed open the door and got out. He leaned back in through the window.
“Next time I’ll try harder,” he said, and laughed again, that laugh his whole face tried to hide, his lips tightening and his eyes bulging and the laugh escaping only in quick bursts of air from his nostrils.
Greg watched him walk through the side gate, unlocking it with a key around his neck. He’d left a warm moisture behind him that filled Greg’s car. He had no idea who that boy was, that stranger with jeans that were too short, that young man with the rolled, defeated shoulders walking slowly away from Greg, no rush, nothing to run from or fear. That stranger who was his son.
“So why did you stop at a strip club, really?” Marie asked. She had one hand on the wheel and the other on the bulb of the gearshift, as if it were a manual transmission like she had in their early days together, that shitty, shit-brown Dodge. “I mean, in general. What’s in it for the men who go to those places?”
“It varies, I guess,” Greg said. An answer that wasn’t an answer, his specialty when they were married. He fit comfortably in the passenger seat of Marie’s Buick, a small miracle. There was enough room for his legs, enough room for his gut. He said a silent thank-you to the Buick gods, or he said it to Marie, or he said it to nobody and nothing. The sky was a purply gray now, the skin of a car-crash victim. Greg had forgotten how Marie liked to push hard on the brakes, then push hard on the gas when she wanted to get going. He’d also forgotten how hot the insides of cars were, before the AC kicked in; he’d forgotten how Marie always had a paper strawberry hanging from the rearview mirror, swinging idly, ejecting plumes of canned scent that was supposed to refresh but instead coated his tongue in what tasted like old Juicy Fruit and hairspray. His mouth watered the way it did when he needed to vomit. Marie rolled his window down using her driver-side controls; she always knew. She always knew everything, except for the stuff that mattered. Like how the tone of her voice—that … haughtiness was how Greg had come to view it—made his spine shudder inside his body. How his body physically rejected the sound. She didn’t know that. And she didn’t know how to cure GJ. And she didn’t know where to find him. But she knew when Greg was about to be sick, congratulations to her. The air coming in through the car was hot, too, but it helped, and Greg opened his mouth so it could fish out the taste of the air freshener. Marie’s car was tidy, too tidy, like those model homes they’d looked at back when they were buying a house. Everything in its place, not even a pen sticking out of the cup holder. Why did she think she needed that strawberry shit?
“You’re real Florida, now,” he said.
Marie switched on her blinker; they were about to get back onto the highway he’d gotten off an hour before. “Am I, now?”
Greg pointed at the strawberry. “Only Floridians use these dumb things.”
“That’s not true,” Marie said. She seemed like she was about to say something else, her mouth open and inhaling, but she decided against it. She eased the Buick onto the highway, the blinker still tock-tock-tocking, all the way until she had merged. She reached over and pulled the air freshener off the mirror, tossed it in Greg’s lap. “Put it in the glove compartment.”
There was nothing in there, either, aside from a small packet of tissues. Greg tossed the strawberry in. Now that his stomach had calmed he felt better, able, unafraid, despite knowing that they were pointing the Buick directly toward squalor, toward trash and fire, toward sex and crime and death. The Buick felt solid as a tank; maybe that was it.
“I mean it, though,” Marie said. “You went to those kinds of places when we were married, and you go to them now. So you weren’t going because of me. You were going for some other reason, right? What draws you to a strip club? What calls to you?” Calls to you. Marie believed in callings.
“Why are you so interested?” It was hard not to feel interrogated; she asked and asked until there was an answer that made sense to her, even if it didn’t make sense to Greg.
“You know how it is these days,” she said. She was going exactly the speed limit, strolling along in the right lane, and cars were passing her in angry blurs. “You think a lot about the past. You wonder about stuff. You have questions.”
“These days?”
She laughed, that same husk of a laugh she always used when she felt like doing the opposite of laughing. “We’re old, G.” She hadn’t called him that in years. “I’ll be fifty-nine this year. In my head I’ve been forty-two all this time. Sometimes twelve. What age do you think you are?”
Forty-one. That was the age he always thought he was. The year he met Deb, when the world felt split open and the light was oozing in. Like he had been a cantaloupe seed all that time and the divorce was that blessed heavy mallet that smithereened it all, that freed him. “I’ll be fifty-nine, too,” he said.
“I look at myself in the mirror, like I’m doing right now.” She adjusted the rearview so she could see her own face. “Who is that old lady? When GJ was born I was young. He had a young mother, and now his mother is old. I could be the grandmother to his children, if he had any.”
She had slowed down, totally focused on her own face now. A car behind them swerved around the Buick. Greg reached over and readjusted the rearview, positioning it away from her face. “GJ is older than we were when we had him,” he said. He didn’t know what
he meant, saying that to her. He’d been thinking about it on the drive; he hadn’t stopped thinking about it.
“I know what you’re saying,” Marie said. She had both hands on the wheel now. Greg knew she was gathering herself back up, all the shards she’d just spilled. “We were adults when we were his age, but he’s still a child.”
“Yes, exactly,” Greg said. He’s still a child. Why did that feel like such a relief?
“I don’t think I ever truly let him be a kid. Do you?” She faced him, the car drifting to the right.
“Eyes on the road,” he said gently, grateful he didn’t have to answer. She was right, though. He could think of a hundred times, five hundred times maybe, when GJ bore witness to something he shouldn’t have had to. “Cocktail hour,” for one, something he and Marie devised in GJ’s toddlerhood, something to make the evenings still feel special, festive, doable. Both of them got more and more sloppy as the evening wore on, sometimes with neighbors or friends or coworkers, but mostly just the three of them. GJ’s little face, watching them, that questioning smile, Are we happy? Is this funny? Am I in on the joke? He wanted so badly to be a part of it. Marie wasn’t a drinker until they both were. She could take it or leave it. How lucky for her. Maybe it was her way of fighting for the marriage by plunging into whatever hole Greg was in. But they took GJ with them. Crying, yelling, laughing, snoring, staring, GJ saw it all. Why didn’t they just get on the floor and play trucks with him? Tickle him, draw with him, anything. Would it have been so hard, so impossible?
It would have been impossible. Even now Greg felt antsy, the pull of the liquor cabinet, the beers under the dinette in the RV, the Arby’s and the Popeye’s and the Pizza Huts whizzing by, so many missed chances.
He remembered one night when GJ was older, in second or third grade, and Marie had reached over and cheersed his new gut. Here’s to you, Santy Claus! she said, and they both laughed at him. Ha ha, Dad is as fat as Santa! It was something his mother would have said, elbowing one of her girlfriends and telling him to twirl. He knocked the drink out of Marie’s hand before he could stop himself, the vodka and lemon splashing into GJ’s hair. He was too angry to be thankful for it at the time, but GJ just kept laughing. He was delighted, in fact. Thought they were all just being silly. The mercy in that child’s heart, Greg knew he’d never deserved it. Would never deserve it. But if GJ was still a child, there might be mercy still.
Marie pulled the car over, jerking it to a stop on the shoulder. Mists of dust plumed up around the Buick, like it was part of a disappearing magic trick. “It makes me angry,” she said. “It makes me really fucking angry.” Greg always hated when Marie said the f-word. Every letter pronounced, drenched in hatred, like a wet dress she’d pulled from a stranger’s suitcase and forced herself to try on. The Buick had felt as spacious as a loft, room for their bodies and small talk, but there was not enough room for this.
“Do you want me to drive?” he asked. Then he remembered that Marie said no to all questions when she was upset, like a toddler. “I’ll drive.” He reached around his gut to unbuckle his seat belt, but she put her hand over his to stop him, her fake nails grazing his skin, dulled and harmless and sad as a clipped beak.
“Why aren’t you angry?” She looked at him, that studious look on her face; it truly was bizarre, how little people changed. He had shut a door when they’d divorced; he’d shut another door when he and Deb settled in West Virginia. A whole hallway of doors, shut tight. And yet here he was, all of them flung wide open, spilling light or dark and noise or silence, all leading right back to Marie, this woman he’d tried to escape for years. Family is family (shut up, Mother!). He was angry, only not the way Marie demanded. He was angry at time, how it bent and careened and led you right back to the beginning, how it made strangers of loved ones, how it made family of strangers. He was angry at his big body. If he was felled at the waist there’d be rings of fat showing that he was a million years old, not forty-one, not fifty-nine. He had to carry the years of blubber around; Marie had her fake nails and lonely condo; GJ had oblivion.
“We don’t know where he is, Marie.”
“I know that,” she said. She took her hand back. “Why doesn’t that make you angry? Half of our lives, we’ve been worried about him. Half of our lives! I want it all back.” She was miming pulling a rope in, hand over hand, like the rope was unspooling from where Greg sat. “Give it all back to me.”
“You’ll never get it back,” Greg said. He shocked himself with the kind tone in his voice. This was at least something he knew, something he’d known for years, at least all those years in West Virginia staring out the plate-glass window at the treetops and wheeling birds and colorless sky and his own widening reflection. The grandfather clock whispering the passing seconds, growing desperate and shouting out the hour. Hour after hour, day after day. Twenty-four hours in a day. Sixty minutes in an hour. Sixty seconds in a minute. All divisible by three, which is one and one and one. This was it; the only turning back was in his head now. Remembering. Examining. And then discarding. Today is Tuesday, that much I know. “It’s gone.”
A police car pulled up next to the Buick, and the cop in the passenger seat gestured for Marie to roll the window down. “We’re fine, Officer,” Marie called. “Just needed a breather. But thank you.” The officer, a woman with hair the color and texture of those curly noodles in soup cups, leaned over so she could see past Marie to get a look at Greg. He held his hand up in a wave, then a salute. Nothing to see here, just a pair of old goofs.
“Move along,” the officer said, her voice as hard and dense as a stone.
“Sure thing,” Marie said. When the cop car pulled away she turned to Greg and said, “Well, then, don’t you want the rest of your life?” As if the conversation had never been interrupted. “If we can’t get those years back, then I want the remaining years I have to be mine. Finally mine.”
Marie had lived alone for at least a decade, GJ coming and going, but mostly going, living with girlfriends or drug friends or, in the brief pockets of sobriety, living in his own room in a halfway house downtown. In Greg’s mind those years had been hers and hers alone. But maybe he wasn’t the only one in a holding pattern. Maybe Marie had stared the paint off her walls, too, waiting for release.
Marie put on the blinker, craned her neck over her left shoulder to watch for an opportunity. “When my mother was sixty,” she said, pulling the car onto the highway, “she had white hair and wore her glasses on a chain and embroidered pillows and drank prune juice out of a Dixie cup every morning. She was a granny.”
“You’re not a granny,” Greg said.
“She wouldn’t be caught dead going where we’re going, anyway,” she said. It was clear this was the story Marie told herself. If she had not yet turned into her mother, if she had not yet given in to age, then there was still time. If GJ was still a child, then there was still time; that was Greg’s story. Time for what, though? All Greg had was time and it didn’t make a difference.
“This is it,” Marie said. A bright green sign said ORANGE BLOSSOM TRAIL, NEXT RIGHT. The sun had made a flamingo-pink line of the horizon, its final gaudy act before disappearing for the night. Now he felt a bit afraid, a black seed sprouting in his stomach. He found himself wondering if Marie actually did have a flashlight, though there wasn’t one to be seen in the neat confines of the Buick. Not even a crowbar or an ice scraper, since it was Florida, after all; neither of them had a weapon. He truly was old. The few times he’d driven down OBT he hadn’t been bothered. The few people he did see walked along the sidewalks like they were sleepwalking, hiding from the sun beating down, or the drugs flooding their veins, or simply trying to pass for normal so they wouldn’t be stopped or ogled at. Who did he think he would be swinging a crowbar at? West Virginia had its OBT, he knew, probably in the mountains if TV was to be believed, but he’d never had to visit.
There were palm trees here, too, waving their fronds over broken sidewalks and in the pa
rking lots of strip clubs and boarded-up motels and bars. Chain link stretched everywhere, like OBT was an abandoned prison. People collected on corners and outside gas-station shops, talking and gesturing, like flies in glue traps. Black, white, Hispanic, a true melting pot of misery. In the final moments of daylight Greg could see a woman in a short dress walking along the sidewalk, slowly, like she was tiptoeing, and when they passed her Greg saw that she’d broken a heel and was in fact up on her toes. Marie turned on her brights; most of the streetlamps were out and the dark was coming fast.
“It’s just up here,” she said. The primary colors of the Liquor Garage sign loomed ahead, the green G burned out. As they got closer they could see another clump of people outside the door, waiting or watching or doing nothing, it was hard to tell. “I have some mace in my purse,” she said. If he’d been at home watching this on the television, he’d have hoped these two old fools wouldn’t be so clichéd, would have some compassion, see these clumps as human beings, each with his or her own story, each with a mother and father or children of their own. But as Marie’s headlights washed over the gathering, as they shifted and cringed in the brightness, Greg felt afraid, terrified even, of what might happen. This was where GJ spent time; these were his people. Greg loved a good bar. Wood tables, sticky floors, the smell of grease and beer, waitresses looking just past his face as they waited on his order. The warm coziness, a place to let the sounds of televisions and small talk and the thick silence between songs cradle him like a hammock. He had taken it too far once or twice. But the Garage was something different. It was the end stop. It was where people came when there was nowhere else to go. And so Greg didn’t want to see any of them as anything. He just wanted to crane his neck and spot his son among them, pull him into the Buick and drive on. But GJ was not in this clump, Greg could see. They’d have to get out of the car and go inside. Marie parked the car as close to the door as the crowd would allow.
Eat Only When You're Hungry Page 8