“Just in case you have any ideas in your head,” I told him, “I’m leaving early. I’m going to go have a talk with Mr. Dickens, if you want to follow me.”
“That sounds better than watching you sleep in your car,” he said.
I had a list of ultimatums and rules for Isaac, only one of which really mattered: we had to talk to each other and not just about small, petty things but a real conversation with depth and insight. Before I rang the doorbell, I told myself I was going to leave if we didn’t say something important. I rang the bell twice. I waited for several minutes before being convinced he wasn’t home. The same was true the next day. It took me one more day to start worrying that he would never return. If that was true, as long as he wasn’t dead or seriously injured, then I also thought that maybe for once fate was doing me a favor.
I rarely called Isaac before coming over. I had my own key to the apartment in case he ever locked himself out, but I had never used it. When I arrived on Wednesday, it was a few minutes after 6 p.m. The streetlights had already come on. I didn’t expect Isaac to answer when I knocked—I knew he wasn’t home—but I did so anyway, out of a sense of decorum, because even if you had keys it was still rude just to walk into someone’s home. He didn’t answer, and I heard nothing when I pressed my ear to the door. I took the spare keys and pretended to struggle with the lock.
I followed the same routine after I entered. I couldn’t shake the idea that maybe Isaac was watching me from a corner to test my loyalty to the pattern we’d created. I poured myself a glass of water and drank it while standing in the kitchen. I moved to the bedroom, and though Isaac was gone, I still undressed, crawled into the bed, and quickly pulled the sheets over me. I had spent hours in that bed but had never slept in it. Once or twice I’d slipped into a semi–dream state, but without ever forgetting where I was or that Isaac was lying next to me. When completely exhausted, I’d fought off sleep by thinking of things to worry about. I’d imagine myself pregnant. I’d think of what would happen if someone I knew drove by and saw my car parked outside. I’d think, What if there was a fire in the building right now and I had to run out with hardly any clothes on? If anything kept me awake, it was the silly delight I took in imagining all the different ways my life, as I knew it, might crumble.
It was glorious lying in Isaac’s bed alone. The sheets smelled faintly like the baby oil he slathered on himself after each shower. I lay on my stomach, my arms outstretched, my finger caressing the carpet just a few inches beneath them. I wished it were always like this. Isaac was so much easier to be with when only the ghost of him was around, and I remember thinking that if he were dead or never came back I’d probably learn to care for him more than if he were to walk through that door right then and never leave. I was tired. For two weeks I hadn’t slept more than five hours a night. I happily closed my eyes and slept.
When I woke up, hours later, the apartment was completely dark—the shades in the bedroom were drawn, so not even the street lamps could be seen. It was after midnight, roughly the same time I always went home. I was more worried about staying too long than I was about Isaac’s absence. I knew his life was full of secrets, starting with the visa that had brought him here, and it was natural to assume that his sudden disappearance was another secret I’d probably never have access to. I didn’t have to think of anything grand to find that secrecy appealing. In a life of small-town wonders, a man with a passport that had been stamped several times was already extraordinary, and Isaac, by those measures, was remarkable. The more mystery I could attach to him, the more exceptional he became. When David later asked if I didn’t have my doubts about who Isaac claimed to be, I tried to explain to him that I’d always had my doubts, and that I tried my best to protect them. The last thing I wanted was to bring Isaac down to earth, to find out that he was just an ordinary exchange student who’d come to America. I wanted him far removed from life as I knew it, for as long and in as many ways as possible. This made it easier to tolerate, if not forgive, almost anything he did.
When I left work the following day, I drove straight to Isaac’s apartment. I didn’t expect to find him at home, but I was anxious nonetheless. I knew I could do whatever I wanted in that apartment. I could rummage through the closets and drawers, and this time, if anything made me nervous, it was that I was certain I was going to do so.
When I walked into the apartment, I had the feeling Isaac was gone for good. Though I didn’t imagine him dead, his presence was just as remote. There was no routine to follow, and a part of me wished I had brought a change of clothes to spend the night in.
I lingered around the kitchen and living room, dragging my finger along the counter and over the coffee table, searching for dust. Isaac’s apartment was always clean. Each time I came over, the place was immaculate, as if nothing had been touched since I was last there. He had the type of kitchen my mother would have been proud of: free of dust, without a hint of grease on the counters, in the sink, or on the stove. I didn’t like it. The longer I stood in the kitchen, the more uncomfortable I became. I had the sensation that, just by standing there for more than a few minutes, I was violating if not ruining it with my fingerprints and the dirt attached to my clothes and bag. Whether Isaac intended to or not, he had made it impossible to live in that apartment. We had filled it together—there was a gray couch in the living room, a small television set, plates and bowls and silverware in the kitchen, and lamps throughout—but the place felt emptier than if there had there been nothing inside it.
Life! That’s what was missing. Where were the pictures and stacks of unopened junk mail, the lone sock under the bed, the fingernail clippings on the bathroom floor, the soap stains on the sink, or the early traces of mildew on the shower curtains? I thought I was going to search for intimate details about Isaac, but instead I roamed the apartment for an hour looking for proof he existed. When I was finished, what did I come up with? A carton of eggs and a stick of butter in the refrigerator; a letter that Isaac had begun one month earlier that had only a date and the words “My dear friend,” which had fallen behind his pillow, a bottle of baby oil and two unopened rolls of toilet paper in the bathroom. I thought that perhaps Isaac was just covering his tracks, or that he knew when he left he wasn’t coming back, but this would have meant that there had been some hint of life to cover; no one who saw that apartment could have believed that a man had lived there every day for months.
That apartment was the only place Isaac and I had. Its emptiness felt personal. I could picture him scrubbing away any trace of me each time I left.
Before I understood all the reasons why I never wanted to be like my mother, I was deliberately terrible in the kitchen. I burned everything she asked me to watch and had a habit of dropping plates and glasses. I ruined the domestic chores dear to her because they were the only things in her life she could control. What had been semiconscious rebellion when I was a teenager had become second nature in my adulthood; anything I touched in the kitchen was destined to come out wrong. I had never cooked or eaten inside of Isaac’s apartment, but I was suddenly determined to do so. I thought of it not as trying to leave my mark but, rather, as trying to leave an impression on the place, a fingerprint that couldn’t be easily removed. I took the eggs out of the refrigerator, hoping not to burn them. I cracked all twelve into a bowl and then spent several more minutes fishing out the bits of shell that had fallen inside. I tried to beat them like my mother had shown me, with the bowl tilted at a slight angle, but it was too shallow, and I had gotten carried away and whisked too briskly. By the time I was finished, there was at least one egg’s worth of yolk on the floor and on my shirt. I saw the mess I had made, and felt a bit of relief. Life is messy, I told myself. There should be a bumper sticker that reads, “You can’t live without breaking some eggs,” or, “Don’t worry about the yolk on the floor.” And another one just for Isaac: “A man can’t live on eggs alone.”
Though I had begun recklessly, I was determined to m
ake something that resembled a proper meal. I scrambled the eggs in three batches, with ample amounts of butter that turned them to a pale shade of yellow, a color that would have been perfect for the kitchen walls. I put the eggs in a wooden salad bowl that I had bought for twenty-five cents. I thought the brown and yellow shades would complement one another, and I was right: they made an elegant pair. I set the bowl in the center of the dining-room table and then stepped back so I could judge its effects clearly. I had no intention of eating those eggs; I hated eggs. The only thing I was interested in was how they looked and what kind of effect they had on the room. A trail of steam rose from them. I admired that—it added a bit of domestic charm to the scene—but it wasn’t enough.
I dressed the table for two as best I could, with knives and forks on either side of the plates, and glasses on the top right-hand corner. Playing house was the last thing I would have done as a child—my mother did that for the two of us—but now that it was my turn I was surprised how much pleasure it brought me. If I had built a small wooden home in the middle of a forest, I’m sure I would have felt a similar sense of victory. However temporary it may have been, that table and those eggs brought life to the apartment. If I could do it once, I was certain that when Isaac came back, and the time was right, I’d be able to do it again.
I began to think of my work differently after that night. I was a social worker, but I hadn’t really thought of myself as one for years. If I was honest in describing what I did, I would have said I was a caretaker: I dispensed bandages to bleeding souls and broken hearts. Lives that had fallen apart or never really begun were sent to me, and I treated them as quickly as I could. I searched for the cheapest nursing homes for the elderly and requested food stamps and sometimes housing subsidies for any woman who could convince me that she and her children had no food and nowhere to go. Recently returned veterans were supposed to have been assigned to David, since he was the man in the office, but after two soldiers mocked him (for what he never said), he claimed he no longer had the time or energy for such hard cases, so I took on most of them as well, arranging trips to the hospital and sometimes to the movies for those who couldn’t walk. I knew everyone who came to me had suffered some form of ruin. Whether it was poverty, age, or war didn’t matter; they all suffered the same. My first day at the job, David gave me a passionate and I believe genuinely heartfelt speech about the shattered lives I’d be working with. “We are here to change people’s lives,” he said. “I firmly believe that, after everything we went through in the last decade, we are on the verge of making a great society.”
I remember that my eyes brimmed with tears when he said that last part.
Disappointments, I knew, were to be expected. A client cried for an hour after I told her the housing subsidy had run out, and my eyes never fluttered. Others lied to me about their poverty. My black clients accused me of being racist, and my white clients said I’d treat them better if they were niggers. I bore that easily. It weighed on me, but not in the corners that counted. It wasn’t until an entire year had passed and I was asked to make a list of all my successes that my faith began to give. I only had vague memories of the 154 people who had been assigned to me. After a year, most of the clients were wiped off our list to clear the slate for the hundreds more waiting.
I gradually gave up trying to change anyone’s life. I was twenty-six at the end of my first year, but felt much older. When fall came, I suddenly found myself crippled with nostalgia. I wanted to be a child again, or, at the very least, crawl my way back in time a few years. I canceled my plans to move out of my mother’s house. When I told her I wasn’t ready to leave home yet, she made an awkward gesture toward me with me her hands. They fluttered, or flapped; I don’t think either description alone is accurate. Whether her hands were fishes or birds, they were trying to speak for her. When they were close enough, they latched on to my elbows, and squeezed hard, as if trying to break through the flesh.
I began to spend more time with her in the kitchen and in the living room. She had an empty home that she tried her best to care for, and I had the lives of strangers that I was hopelessly trying to clean up after. I thought I would be fine as long as that was all we had in common.
The only thing that had changed between that time and Isaac’s arrival four years later was that I no longer missed the restless anticipation I’d experienced during my childhood and the surges of joy and sadness that came with it. I didn’t feel troubled when the seasons changed. My heart beat the same in winter as it did in spring, because I knew what was around the corner. If I saw a group of students from my old high school walking home at the end of the day, I felt something close to pity for them: no one had told them yet how ordinary and predictable their lives were going to be. I had, in other words, accepted the measured composure of adulthood. I saved money. I bought a used car from a friend of my father’s. I slept with several men, just to see if I could. Isaac was the first break I’d had from that routine. Our relationship had upended my private life while leaving the bulk of my days relatively the same. It wasn’t until I left his apartment with the table set and the eggs tossed into the trash that the rest began to change.
As I drove back home, I had the idea that when I went to work the next day I was going to do everything differently. I’m going to start making homes, is what I told myself in the car, though I wasn’t sure what I meant.
The morning after leaving Isaac’s apartment, I planned to stop by the homes of four of my clients. The only one I visited was Rose. Her real name was Agnes, but after her husband died five years before, she decided she wanted to be called Rose. She was eighty-one. She lived on far too little and made up the difference with jars of spare change, a table overflowing with coupons, and church-donated canned food. She lived in a one-bedroom home I helped her find after she could no longer afford the property tax on the house she and her husband had owned. She had been on my list for eight months, and this was only the third time I came to see her. I showed up with a dozen plastic yellow and red roses tied together with a bit of rope. The loneliness of old age had taught her to be excessively grateful for any human presence, however fleeting.
“Flowers,” she said. “How lovely.”
She didn’t take the bouquet from me. She had me place it in her hands, as if the flowers were real and fragile, and then she embraced them against her chest as if they had come to her seeking comfort and she was the only person in the world who could provide it. I helped Rose arrange the flowers on her coffee table. She didn’t have any vases, so I used the tallest glass I could find and filled the bottom third with water. I looked around the house for signs of emptiness.
“Would you like to have some pictures on your wall?” I asked her.
“I used to have so many pictures in my house,” she said. “There were pictures of every place my husband and I had been to: New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit.”
For the next three hours, I sat with her as she told me about staying at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Chicago at the same time as Al Capone, and then the Warwick in New York, which was a disappointment after all the glamorous stories she had heard. I only half listened. As she spoke, I was also trying to see if her stories filled that apartment in any meaningful way, if they could take up space, like a trinket picked up in an airport that sat on a mantelpiece, yet somehow more substantial than that. If listening to her talk for ten more hours would have answered this question, I would have stayed; there was so much emptiness in life that had to be filled, and I was just seeing it. Rose, however, was getting tired. She was starting to fall asleep as she talked, which was fine. She was happy and maybe at peace, and I felt certain that, even if I didn’t understand how to fill all those holes, I was finally on to something.
ISAAC
Despite the crowd and smoke, I noticed immediately how well Isaac had healed. He had one scar above his right eye, but even if his face had been covered in bruises, he would have looked better than ever. His clothes were ne
w, his hair had been recently cut, and he had the vague glow of someone who had easy access to running water.
As soon as he saw me he gestured for me to join him, as if inviting me into a circle of friends at a party where I was the stranger. That simple wave of the hand was all it took. I began walking to him before he had time to put his arm down. I walked past the soldiers, who formed a loose perimeter around the students, and never once did I feel afraid. Even at that early stage, the power in numbers was staggering. The crowd parted to let me through; I turned back once so I could see it close ranks behind me. It wasn’t how I had imagined it, but once Isaac put his arm around me, and boys I had never met slapped me on the back, I became a student at the university.
During the thirty-six hours the grounds were occupied, not one sign went up. We had no chants, and the few songs we sang were those that had been popular in the years just before independence. The revolutionary songs from the late 1950s and 1960s were everyone’s favorites, the songs of our parents and of our childhood, which we might have scorned at one time, but which we sang throughout the night to keep from falling asleep. The generation before us had had their revolution, and look what they had done with it. Over the course of the evening, I heard more than one student say that we were going to finish what our parents had started. There was the standard talk of a new African utopia, of a borderless and free continent. The students from the two opposing communist camps had their arms draped around one another, and at various times draped around Isaac and me as well.
“Look how happy they are,” Isaac whispered to me. I zoomed in on the boys at the end of the chain. They had the clothes and hair that came with privilege, but what I noticed most was the sheer, unrestrained joy that was on all their faces. They seemed incapable of closing their mouths.
All Our Names Page 7