Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  She edged sideways through a gap someone’d hacked out of a waist-high bank of snow and followed the asphalt path to the door of Building C, limping she liked to think only slightly. Her heels snapped on the asphalt, the wind swirling fine gusts of snow across her path, like smoke. The door of the building was painted metal, the wire-reinforced glass affixed with a smattering of Protected by Armitron Security stickers and the business cards of twenty-four-hour locksmiths. On the strip of buzzers beside number 2 a jagged piece of masking tape served as the label, the word “resident” written in block letters. That would be Mona. Never write your name down anywhere you don’t have to; that was right up there with never talking to cops. Marissa’s flight instinct began howling again. But how many Thanksgivings could she run from in one day? She didn’t like to think of herself as a coward. She pushed the button.

  Inside, the buzzer trilled angrily. She waited, lifting her right foot to rearrange the tension in her back. The flight tonight would be a nightmare—but one nightmare at a time. She was thinking she ought to have called Caitlyn to make sure she’d be here when, with a metallic clack, the door swung open and a male voice was saying, “Whadja forget your key or someth—The fuck?”

  This was her question, too, seeing the man before her. Tattoos covered his wiry arms and bare chest, and he studied her through bifocals attached to a red plastic cord that dangled behind his back. His ponytail and beard were stained with gray, and creases ran every which way over the rough skin of his face, like battered boots treated against water damage. “You ring the wrong buzzer?” he asked, more curious than suspicious, scratching a triangle of white chest hair, his quizzically parted lips revealing a bottom row of teeth that all seemed to have different ideas about which way was up.

  “I’m looking for Mona Cavano,” she told him.

  He gave her a disappointed look. “You a process server? Because legally, you need to declare yourself as a process server, if asked by any, um,” he scratched his chest hair uncertainly, “resident of the county.”

  She smelled, or imagined she smelled, a powerful odor of marijuana wafting off him. “No, I’m not a process server, I’m . . .”

  “Thank Christ!” He smiled, leaning against the doorjamb. “I once got ass-nailed by a process server. I knew this guy was after me, and I didn’t go home for a week. This was in, say, ’88 or so. I see him waiting at my car, I take the bus. He shows up at my buddy’s door, I get out the fire escape. Man, we cat-and-moused it all over Minneapolis in the summer of 1988. But then one night I got coldcocked in a bar, and I opened my eyes in the hospital, and guess who I see?” He laughed, pleased, then broke down into coughing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and continued, “Gotta give the sonnafabitch credit, right? He earned his paycheck that week.” A shiver raced down his tattoo-carpeted chest. “God almighty, what are we doing out here? How can I help you, sister?”

  “I’m Marissa.” He nodded at her, unfazed. “Mona’s daughter,” she added, her voice oddly insistent. “Marissa Cavano.”

  “Caitlyn’s sister?”

  “Caitlyn’s sister,” she confirmed, inexplicably jealous that Caitlyn had been there, met whoever this guy was.

  He straightened, lifted his hands behind his head, giving her a view of crooked strings of charcoal armpit hair, and blew through pursed lips to let out an airy whistle. “Caitlyn’s sister. Mona’s oldest kid. You went to college upstate New York somewhere?” Before she could answer, he said, “Hoo boy.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Folks call me Special K ’cause I used to be a vegetarian.” He whistled again. “Well, fuck it,” he concluded, “come on in, you can’t believe half the things you hear about people, right?” He turned from the door. She tried as best she could to ignore the implications of what he’d just said, and followed him inside.

  A domed fluorescent in the entry buzzed and blinked over teal industrial carpeting, apartment doors with vertical lines of deadbolt locks stretched out to a chained fire door. The door to apartment 2 stood half-open, a busted handcart leaning beside it. It was all a little more like Marissa’s growing up than she’d anticipated. As Special K pushed the door open, she said, “Maybe I should wait outside. Could you ask my sister to come out so . . .”

  “Oh, Caitlyn isn’t here.”

  Fresh flight adrenaline burst into every limb. “She’s not?”

  “She’ll be here any minute.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, any minute.”

  “Then can you tell my mom I’m . . .”

  “Mona just went out, don’t worry, she’ll be back any—”

  “Are you my mom’s boyfriend?” She sounded like she was twelve now. But the familiarity of the scene—the mildew smell, the hints of seediness, her mother’s unexplained absence, the unaccountable stranger, the fuzziness as to who or where anybody was—it had all become so potent it was like she’d forgotten she’d grown up.

  “Your mom and I are . . .” Special K smoothed his ponytail as he searched for the word. “Compadres,” he finally said. “Fellow travelers. We’ve still got some time on the road yet, so why not spend it together? Ya dig?”

  She felt like the passengers you sometimes got, who after the plane pulled away from the gate demanded to be let off: only when it was too late did they realize that something horrible was going to happen. “You can tell her I stopped by.”

  But Special K shook his head—friendly, conspiratorial. “Your mom’ll cut my balls off for letting you in, but she’ll pickle them and throw them out in the snow if I let you leave. You know how mothers get. Mona’ll be back any minute now.” He waved her toward the apartment door with a lopsided, consoling grin. “Come on in, little sister. You’ll make it out in one piece. Most everybody does.” Those passengers were always wrong, she reminded herself. The planes never crashed—not yet, anyway, in her experience. She went after him into the apartment.

  The smell of cat piss tempered slightly by lavender kitty litter struck her first. But her mother was allergic to cats, she thought. The apartment had thin, gray carpeting, walls painted a dull yellow shade, with some faded brown water stains near the ceiling opposite the door. The furniture triggered another pang of déjà vu, not that she recognized any of it, but it had that worn-out and jumbled quality of having been acquired from anywhere it could be found on the cheap: a dented metal card table on a frayed area rug; a pocked, upholstered couch, sun-bleached to colorlessness; a taupe recliner with a mismatched green seat cushion; a boxy little television, flashing muted scenes of a car chase.

  Special K picked up from the carpet an ashtray in which a joint was burning and offered it to her. When she shook her head, he took a long hit himself. From where she stood, she could see through an open door into the bedroom: a mattress on the floor, piled with clothing, a cross hammered to the wall above. Her mother was close to sixty, and she still didn’t own a bed. This thought was painful enough that Marissa turned her head the other way and surveyed the narrow kitchen. Beside an overflowing plastic trash can was a great black garbage bag, bulging with curves; she could as much as hear the clunk of empty plastic liquor bottles that would follow if she touched the bag with her foot. She turned her back on the kitchen.

  Special K had seated himself on the couch, had the joint between his lips, a blue-painted guitar in his lap. He blew some smoke through his nostrils, offered the joint to her again.

  “They drug test at my job.” Marissa knew it was the only kind of excuse guys like this took seriously.

  “Bummer,” he said. “You need any ice for that?”

  “Ice?” she asked, puzzled, then remembered the cut. “No, I’m fine.”

  “I should see the other guy, right?” he chuckled. “None of my business, of course.” He bent forward to replace the joint in the ashtray, and began strumming, singing. “From the—” A coughing fit interrupted the verse as it got started. The coughs were hoarse, throaty, the kind she associated with mouthfuls of blood. But he
smiled good-humoredly when the fit was done, and took another long hit. “Take your coat off and stay a while,” he said as he exhaled billows of smoke. Marissa kept her coat on, but sat down next to him, angling her back to the kitchen and bedroom. A window, half-covered with a slat curtain, opened on a snowy patch between the apartment and a rear wall of another building in the complex. “You know ‘This Land Is Your Land?’”

  “No.”

  “How about ‘The Weight’ by the Band?”

  “Sorry.”

  He strummed for a while, then slapped the strings with his palm. “Shit, sister, what do you know?”

  This might go on for hours, Marissa realized: her sitting around waiting for her mother to appear, Special K smoking weed and playing guitar. She should have called Caitlyn; more, she should have anticipated her mother’s seemingly supernatural ability to transform any situation, divert any intention, however serious, into absurdity, into farce.

  “Look,” she said to Special K.

  “How come you don’t look a thing like Caitlyn?” he asked.

  She lowered her eyelids, rolling her eyes behind them. “Take a wild guess.”

  “Oh, gotcha,” he said. “Different dads.”

  “Smart guess.” She cringed—she’d said “smaht,” her childhood reaching up into her mouth and crushing her vowels.

  “I can’t say I’m surprised,” Special K answered. “Your mother is a real sexy woman. She’s got the kind of sexiness—okay, okay, turn off the death rays.”

  Marissa dug in, trying to make something of the visit. “Look, how—how is my mom doing?”

  Special K considered, still strumming as he blew smoke toward the muted television. “Sister,” he began. “I know what you’re asking.” He took another hit, letting the smoke curl slowly from his nostrils before he went on. “Sister,” he repeated, “she’s not walking any better than you are. Something’s wrong in her knee. And I’m guessing you’re familiar with her opinion of doctors. I’ll tell you though, Mary.”

  “Marissa.”

  “The fact of the matter is, she’s been going on like this for twenty years, and she could go on for another twenty. It’s a demon, there’s no getting around that. But she and that demon settled on terms a long time ago, and so far, nobody’s killed the other. I make sure she sleeps on her side and without any cigarettes going.”

  Marissa used to do that: She used to take the burning cigarette from between her mother’s fingers when Mona passed out in bed. “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “I can’t say I envy you girls. Alky Mom ain’t exactly starting life with a pair of aces. But you both grew up tough, and that’s not nothing. And I know Mona took you both to church every Sunday. That’s not nothing, either.”

  “No, actually, that would be a lie,” she corrected him.

  Special K shrugged. “Well, a Sunday or two, at least. You get on in years, you learn not to get so hung up on the details.”

  “As a matter of fact, most Sundays my mom left us to—”

  Special K lifted a hand from the guitar to stop her. “That ain’t my cross to bear.” He watched her face, already contorted with the old, ever bright anger. “Can I tell ya a little story?” She guessed there was little point saying no. “This was back in the late sixties, say, ’72, ’73. People think the sixties ended in the sixties, but the truth is they rolled right on for a while. For Special K, at least. I was shacked up with the most beautiful little surfer chick God ever made. Strawberry hair with all the little freckles over her cheeks and nose. We used to run sheets of acid from Vancouver down into Northern California four times a year. There wasn’t a border agent she couldn’t charm. Other than that, we were surfing, sleeping on the beach, going where the wind took us. It was the Garden of Eden on the Pacific Coast Highway, take it from me. Well, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. I got jammed up on some possession charges on account of a broken taillight outside Sacramento, and while Esther was coming up to post my bond, bus driver fell asleep and bang!” he shouted, loud enough that she jumped. “Drove into the wrong lane. Head-on collision, you believe that shit? Nineteen years old,” he said, mournful, confused, like it still confounded him, like it’d happened the day before. “Well,” he went on, “paradise gets lost one way or another, don’t it? We’re all naked before the winds of time and change, and all we can do is find someone to love and hold on to each other tight, ain’t that right? So take it from Special K, life’s too short to worry about how often your mom took you to church.”

  “I’m not worried about it,” Marissa said matter-of-factly.

  But Special K was singing again. “On a hill, far—” And then he was choking with coughs again.

  She looked down at her purse at her feet, sitting in a field of Dorito shards and ash. She wasn’t getting used to the cat piss odor, either. She stood up. “Is there a vacuum cleaner?” Special K stared up at her. “Fine. Where’s the kitty litter?”

  He pointed toward the bedroom door, and started strumming what she was pretty sure was a Beatles song. She saw the blue plastic tray in a corner, pebbles dark with urine and dotted with rounds of black shit. She picked the tray up without looking at anything else, went into the kitchen, dumped the contents into the black bag, and hefted it to the door. “Is there any more?” she asked Special K.

  “More?”

  “Kitty litter.”

  “Nope. But we ain’t seen Screamin’ Jay in a week, so it might not make a difference one way or the other.”

  She returned the empty tray to the bedroom. “Is there a gas station around here?” She doubted there’d be a grocery store nearby, and if there was a CVS, it wouldn’t be open today. But she could picture the gas station’s row of cleaning products: the spray bottles, sponges, brushes, bleach-coated wipes. She’d put it all on her credit card and spend however many hours it took scrubbing this place until it fucking glistened.

  “Nah, stick around!” Special K told her. “You know ‘Freebird’?”

  “No,” she said sharply. “No, don’t play that.”

  He scratched his beard quizzically. “What’d, somebody in Lynyrd Skynyrd stiff you on a bar tab?”

  “I just . . .” She felt strange and sickened and guilty to think about Adam, as she’d last seen him: in the rearview mirror, standing by himself on the sidewalk outside the bus station. “I just don’t want to hear ‘Freebird.’” It seemed the least loyalty she owed him.

  “Suit yourself. How about some CSN? I held David Crosby’s coke for half their tour in ’77. Or ’79. He was all right.”

  The door swung open and slammed with a clatter into the trash bag. “You left this goddamn trash in the—” Mona caught sight of Marissa and stopped abruptly. She wore a gray-purple coat, knee length with faux fur around the collar, and a pair of ridiculous red rubber boots. She’d gained another fifty pounds, at least; the mounds of flesh of her face were struck with fine red veins, her skin otherwise an almost shocking white. The last of her thinning hair had been dyed jet black, and two thick black arcs were tattooed above her eyes in the place of vanished eyebrows. She sneered, her lips bright with cherry red lipstick. “Well, well,” she began.

  Marissa stood unmoving by the bedroom door; she felt so tiny standing there across from Mona. “Hi, Ma.”

  The sneer subsided and Mona bounded to her. “Don’t move until I got my arms around you.” She wrapped Marissa in a fierce hug, her cheek still cold from outside. She smelled like booze and cigarette smoke and Head and Shoulders shampoo, the same as ever. “My oldest,” Mona said in Marissa’s ear. “My first.” She dropped her arms and took a step back, giving Marissa a full examination. “That’s no paper cut,” she said, eyes on the Band-Aid. “We’ll get to that.” She reached out and started to unbutton Marissa’s coat.

  “Jesus, Ma, hold on,” Marissa said, unbuttoned the coat for herself.

  “Huh,” Mona said. The longer Mona stared the smaller Marissa felt, like a shrinking Alice. “Are you getting a litt
le fat?”

  “You’re one to talk,” Marissa said.

  Mona smirked. “She always had a lip on her, Ken, you watch out,” she said to Special K.

  A plastic bag dangled from her hand, the neck of a capped bottle wrapped in brown paper peeking out. Only her mother could have found an open liquor store on Thanksgiving Day—or maybe it was easier than Marissa imagined. Mona clopped with a noticeable limp into the kitchen, set the bag down, and pulled out the bottle: Smirnoff, the same as ever.

  “Could you not, Ma—”

  Before Marissa could even finish the question, Mona had spun around, eyebrows jagged between her eyes. “I had twenty years of you telling me what to do, and that was plenty. If you try to give me orders in my house, that little scratch above your eye will be the least of your troubles.” Her accent was so thick it filled the Athol apartment with seagull cries, T train whines, the occasional hollers from porches that would follow them down the streets in neighborhoods where they’d outstayed their welcome: “Those kids should be in school, Cavano!”

  “Now, hey, play nice, Big Mama. It’s Thanksgiving!” Special K was calling from the couch.

  Mona looked at Special K, then looked at Marissa. Surprisingly, she grinned, showing her tobacco-stained teeth. “Did you hear I was living with Bruce Springsteen?”

  She returned to the bottle. Marissa sat back on the couch, hearing the snap of the plastic cap twisted from its ring, the glugs of the vodka into the Solo cup, the Sprite liter pulled from the refrigerator, the token splash, the refrigerator door closing, and the first, long slurp. And then Mona stood in the kitchen doorway, cup in her hand. To Marissa she said, “How long’d you stay away from me, five years?” Then, to Special K, “And then she comes waltzing back. Looks like she caught a bump or two climbing that ladder of hers up to Beacon Hill. Well, we’ll get to the bottom of her.” Mona took a long drink, wiped her lips on her coat sleeve, then took her coat off to reveal a sort of frock dress underneath, white blazed with blue and orange flowers. She tossed the coat in the direction of the bedroom, limped in her boots over to the recliner, sat down heavily. “The cat come back?” she asked Special K.