What was it about?
“Oh, you know. Tom Sawyer?”—this was a joke. She laughed at their jokes, which went on all year until the time came at the end of her course when they were finished with the memoirs she had Xeroxed for them to read, and sat down to write their own autobiographies.
“You can be funny,” she urged them. “I know somebody in this class has had something funny happen.” But humor had fled, when they wrote down what they considered, at that moment, to be their lives. Half of them wrote as if she had made a rule that they break her heart. And that was as good a rule as any in autobiography class, was it not? Though she had not, of course, made that rule.
If Sven was a loose cannon who considered himself above the rules, still, May thought, he had natural politeness with his elders. Though if there were parents, they were somewhere far back—Sven was skin and bones, he had no money—and if she thought about it she couldn’t really see a father at all. Sven didn’t talk sports with Shawn and Rafael, the other male aides, or take his break with them. All three satisfied themselves with “How’s it goin’?” Renee confirmed it. “No fahmily,” she told May, shaking her head as you would over something hatched out with one leg.
Renee had made the mistake of trying to give Sven presents, shirts and even shoes. The shoes did it. May heard him: “So take them back!”
“So I will take them, but why cahn you wear them this one hour?” They were going to her niece’s first communion.
“Like I give a shit?” This provoked in Renee a little startled sob. “Hey! Not about church, hey, I want to go. Look, the shoes are great. Thank you! I mean it. Just—I’ll buy shoes, all right?” But once, Renee had on earrings she told May Sven had bought her, and they were gold. They flashed aggressively at the corners of her smooth jaw, the kind of big flashy earrings a little boy might want to buy his mother.
Sven was used to being alone, May could see that in the way he watched over himself, feeling his way. Except with women: the female aides and the receptionist and the dietitian, even Charlotte. With women he had a casual boldness.
He played the bass guitar in a rock group. His mind wasn’t on his job because he was trying to make it, Charlotte said. They were lucky he didn’t come to work in the stuff he wore to perform. “How does she know?” Frieda snorted, clashing her knitting needles. Freida lived in the room next to May’s, and liked to poke a needle in Charlotte’s direction when her back was turned.
It was quite possible to imagine Charlotte buying a ticket and stationing herself—frosted hair, blazer, pleated skirt—in the crowd at the base of the stage. Snapping her fingers, wearing her expectant look, her bright, lost, cinematic smile. Before she came here, but how long ago she wasn’t sure, May had seen bodies on TV being tossed up and passed along to music, some graceful, rising and traveling like mermaids above the crowd, some all elbows and flailing legs. The mermaids rolled along on a fin of arms, the clumsy ones scrambled and thrashed and even tried to stand up, and toppled back to be sucked into the crowd upside down. Here and there the crowd-surfing might still get started, more of a joke now, at the end of a long night when people were pretty high, Sven told her. If it did, he liked to get into it. Just as in the old days, it could go on relatively peacefully for some time. Sometimes it got out of control. She could see on his arms, below the black and green of his tattoo, the big purple fingerprints.
One Monday out of three Sven might fail to show up for work, but when he supervised an outing he did the job he had been hired to do. In winter he would hand each one of them down the van’s high step—now with the new bus, there were three steps—sheltering them with an umbrella until they were all gathered under the awning, and then hold the heavy doors of the Bon Marché while they filed in. He took care of details but he was attending to his own business at the same time. He was waiting for something. Sometimes he whistled softly, and wrote something down on a scrap of paper. Sometimes if a voice surprised him, he ducked.
May could not help picturing Sven as a child, told to wait, left in charge of something, and keeping at it for hours, days, only gradually discovering himself forsaken.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you, Sven!” Charlotte would pout, a brownish rose color spreading over her small face, dug out under the eyes and soft-skinned with estrogen.
But May had caught Sven actually looking at her, and at the others in the center, with fixed, acknowledging eyes. She didn’t know whether to be gratified or ashamed.
Sven would go back cheerfully for handbags and pills, and get out the paper cups he kept in the glove compartment so they could have a drink of water. Mr. Dempsey would show he wanted his forelock combed back out of his eyes or he would jiggle his shoe to get Sven to close the Velcro tabs. When Sven came back from parking the van, most of them would go some way into the mall and settle on the benches.
Sometimes he would bring them coffee and then disappear into the CD store. The twins, Nita and Nalda, in their schoolgirl mood of perpetual recess, would press May to say what she was thinking. The knowledge that she had taught school led to the idea that she was always thinking. And that had to do with Sven, didn’t it? Didn’t it?
The twins had picked up, by some means other than their rote questions, a signal of the liking that had sprung up between Sven and May. They were not jealous; they enlarged their infatuation to include her. She could not pass their door without the blessing of their causeless, eager laughter. They slipped notes under her door, and dashed half-dressed out of their room across the hall to tiptoe after her in their knee-highs, slip straps down their puckered arms, teasing for her notice.
In the mall, they spied on Sven as he talked on the phone, each with a crooked finger in the air for silence. Sometimes Sven would be making calls the whole time he was keeping watch over them, holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder.
May could close her eyes and bring on a dreamy, river-floating sensation: footsteps, creaking strollers, brightness on all sides, espresso vapor in the air, throbs from the CD store coming through the soles of her Nikes, though the numb foot could only believe what the other one reported—all of it muffled as if the two strokes had encased her in fur, and all having to be sorted and identified.
Unless she had a mirror it was not a sure thing her hand would find her hair, or her scalp know her hand had found it. She could not be sure the hair was in the comb. Everything took sorting.
One of the twins would say, “Sven called up Renee, I know he did!” In the cafeteria, or beached in the lounge while grade-schoolers sang to them, or on the new grass where a few would sit in deck chairs now, the twins never tired of the subject of Sven and Renee. All day, when they weren’t napping in their seats, they would gossip and invent. But phone calls between Sven and Renee, or kisses sneaked in Clean Utility, took the twins just as far, May decided, as they liked to go; beyond that lay a world barely remembered, and unregretted.
May herself did not add to the gossip, though she had witnessed more than kisses, but she couldn’t help listening to it, or studying the chemical blue of Sven’s eyes under the ledge of forehead, his thin-edged nostrils, his flat fingers silvery with calluses from pulling the fat bass strings. May was curious about his music and she knew that was one reason he liked her.
She liked him a great deal now, since she had seen him naked. On Mr. Dempsey’s stripped bed, with Renee. May had not said good-bye to Mr. Dempsey that morning, the first time they took him back to the hospital. He had passed out in the lounge. She hadn’t shaken his paper-skinned hand or wished him luck before they rolled him out, or indeed heard about it at all until hours later, and she was worrying about him, talking to herself.
Mr. Dempsey, I hope you will not give up just yet.
She meant to let herself into Dempsey’s room to hide his magazine collection from Charlotte. She heard a sound before she saw the two on the bed. As she backed out, stabbing her bad toenail with the cane, she was sure she had seen in Sven’s unhumiliated look at her
, with his long hands protectively around Renee’s face, the steady man he was going to be.
“Don’t worry, it was just May.” She heard that.
Sven never mentioned it, of course. That week he played her a tape of one of his songs, though. He came in with a cassette player. “It’s a ballad, more or less,” he said, actually reddening as he pushed the button. The vocalist, who was not Sven, sang in a high, agonized register, and on one hearing May could make out only a few of the words. She heard “suck,” though the song seemed less about sex than some hateful, unshakable obligation. Played differently the tune would have been pretty and sad. She could hear the steady pulse of the bass, and runs that lifted off with a casual trickiness from the rhythmic, laboring grunt. She said, “Good, good.” It was good, she suspected.
She knew that in addition to the bass guitar, Sven played the upright bass, keyboard, harmonica, and sometimes, though he could not read music, the cello. The one he borrowed to play, he told her, was a cello neck without a body, plugged into an amp. Still, you played with a bow, you were playing the cello. Sometimes he bowed the upright bass. That was his favorite instrument, he said, and he had worked it into core songs for the CD. On the bulletin board in the reception area there was a picture of him cradling it. It had taken him years to pay for this bass, which was old and scratched.
May always took credit privately for predicting the romance between Sven and Renee. She had watched it begin, the looks, the loud jokes between them getting softer and less frequent, like birdsong thinning out in the morning as the birds get down to business. Sven was a secretive boy but he let her see it, she realized, long before the bedroom incident. Regardless of her loose arm and wet lip, he had taken the word of her daughter about her. “She understands everything. Don’t forget, she knows.” Her sensible Laura, turning in circles and repeating herself to Sven all afternoon, the day May moved in, because he was the one bringing in suitcases and plants and books, getting May settled. The day before, Laura and Will had come with a U-Haul, and put down the old Persian rug from the front hall and arranged May’s dresser and whatever else would fit in the room. There was space for her own double bed but for a time she would have to sleep in a hospital bed with sides.
Later May was proud of herself for noticing, in her confusion on that occasion, some deftness or economy in what Sven was doing. It was in his hands as he set things on her shelves and her dresser. “I know you’ll want to rearrange this,” he said apologetically, while she sat by in the new armchair Laura had bought. Was it comfortable? She did not know. She did not know. It was January. She knew that.
“Your daughters?” On the dresser he had placed her studio portrait of the two girls, and the yearbook picture of Nick. She nodded. “Your son?” He didn’t hold it up for her to look at, as he had the other one. She nodded again. She knew the nod was different and so, it seemed, did he. It seemed he knew, as he looked at the picture and back at her, that Nick was dead.
Laura was gone. The lamp was off—May had done that herself, practicing with the ingenious string arrangement swiftly demonstrated by Sven. She was waiting for dinner, which would be eaten at five. Laura had said as she kissed her that Sven would be there to take her to the dining room. Already she could smell the food, a gravy smell. Her first dinner. Laura had wanted to stay, but someone—had this been Charlotte?—had said no, not the first meal. “She’ll be meeting her table. Come back tomorrow and you’ll see it went just fine.” So Laura was coming back in the morning.
When May turned her head she saw a tall thin boy with sunken eyes, and behind him someone else. She jumped. “Oh, dear, on the first day I see a ghost,” she said to Sven—to herself, of course, because at that point she never could have produced that many words, and was she now a woman who would begin every sentence “Oh, dear,” if she could talk? And it was only the young man’s thin back, and his white-blond ponytail in the dimness of the dresser mirror, in this room where she would be living. I thought I saw my son.
A few days later Sven gave her a pad of paper. “You write for me. Then you fold the paper. Then you stick it in my shirt pocket, see, like this. Here, I’ll button it and you unbutton it. Use that hand.”
“Franklin H. S.” She printed it laboriously.
He wanted her to use the right hand that wouldn’t obey, but he praised her for the left-handed printing. He studied the scratches on the paper and said, “You were a teacher, I know that.” She grasped the pencil and drew a question mark. “You mean me? No, I didn’t go to Franklin. I look familiar? Nope, no brothers, no sisters.” Nobody, she thought. “I look familiar to everybody,” he added pleasantly. Right away she noticed the pleasantness.
If she could have said, “I don’t know why that would be,” she would have, because he did not look familiar to her at all, really, with that thin wolfish face, only partly softened by the fair hair. Something had told him to give her the pad and she wanted to write on it to establish herself.
He went to work on her speech, making her talk. When his shift didn’t match Renee’s, he gave May messages for Renee. “Tell her, ‘Anytime.’” This was said in a tone that surprised May, both harsh and intimate, with the blue eyes narrow. But then sweetly to May, “Lemme hear you say it. Come on.” And later, “Tell her yeah, no problem, bring the kid. I mean ‘yes.’ Say the s.” He told her, “This place used to have a speech therapist. Real good guy. Over in rehab.”
“Wha—”
“Whatt—form your lips—whatt—happened.”
“Wha—happuh?”
“Well, I’ll tell ya. In these outfits, they get rid of the ones who know what they’re doing. I know. I’m what you might call a veteran of rehab. Anybody tell you that? No? Old Charlotte didn’t? Well, you can handle it, right? You tell Renee, ‘He told me all about rehab.’” Sven’s snicker jolted May back to the classroom. He had that high-pitched, two-second laugh of boys made to shut up at home.
Renee’s voice was deeper than Sven’s and she was his height, six feet. But she was stronger than he was. He had cords of muscle in the forearm from dragging on the strings of the upright bass, but he couldn’t pick Mr. Dempsey up out of the chair the way Renee did. Smiling, she told May of her brother with AIDS in Port-au-Prince, and her sister Annette here, mother of the niece who was having her first communion when Renee bought Sven the shoes. Annette was unemployed and took care of Renee’s son. She had to be called several times a day, from the phone in May’s room—checked on and reminded and sometimes threatened. In addition, Renee had an ex-husband who siphoned off some of the paycheck with which she supported her son, her sister, her niece, and her mother. Renee had paid her mother’s way from Haiti. Like May, her mother had had a stroke, and she lived sitting in a chair in Annette’s apartment waiting for Renee. But unlike May she was young; Renee was thirty-one, her mother forty-six. “Very bad, now.” Renee showed May a picture of her mother as she had been, a laughing woman with shiny black skin and tied-up hair, throwing out grain to chickens.
“Home . . . home . . .” May began.
“Hohm-sick.” Renee nodded, closing her eyes and deeply wrinkling her brow at the same time her cheeks curved high with her broad, all-meaning smile. Her face had a contained light like that in aluminum, but the smoothness of her skin was not absolute; there were scuffed patches May noticed with some relief, at the elbows and knees, and behind the knee, soft bluish knots Renee had shown her in the bathroom when she first bared her own legs with the spider veins.
In the early morning May listened for Renee’s “Bonjour!” as she passed from room to room, still in her guard’s uniform, dropping the aluminum sidebars some of them had on their beds.
Renee had a night job as a security guard and she carried her weapon with her into the center rather than leave it in the car. She unloaded it and when Charlotte was not around she gave one or two of the men a chance to look at it and weigh it in their hands. Three mornings a week she hung up the khaki uniform and stowed the holster in the staff
lounge closet.
She guarded a music store not far from the mall. Bundling sheets into damp drifts in the hallway, she told May about shoplifters, the boy chased out of the stockroom at midnight, the junkie couple who pitched a tent behind the store, rolling it up in the early morning and hiding it behind the Dumpster. On one side of the store there was a unit for rent and on the other a building for sale, that was how they could get away with it. The man played the guitar, and once despite his filthiness he asked Renee to let him come into the store to try out an instrument. Did she do it? “Wohn hurt, if he wash his hands.” So Renee let them both wash in the bathroom. Eyes downcast she smiled, slowly closing her lips over her big even teeth. Renee was part of the music world, in a way. When he stripped the cellophane off his new CDs, Sven wanted her opinion. “Hey. Check out the drummer.”
Sven had dropped out of high school to write songs and play with his band, but he had his GED and he was smart, he could sit in for the receptionist at the computer. He had shown May the lyrics to a number of his songs now; they were simple and harsh but there were no misspellings. Despite all the sex it seemed to May they had to do with something adverse, treacherous, and yet longed for, which might be drugs but might just as easily be the families they had all once had, or not had, or fame, or even God.
On paper the lines seemed vaguer and less anguished than she remembered hearing on the tape, but she decided to ask him nevertheless. One of these days she would print on her pad, What’s wrong? Sometimes, with a student, that had been enough. If not, she knew to back off. On the other hand, how much had they ever said—the ones like Sven? They had sometimes seemed to her in her own classroom, sprawled at their desks asleep, to be like the boys in one of the memoirs she Xeroxed and handed out year after year: little boys in their country’s army, being sent down the gauntlet. Her students might have rap sheets, but in the classroom they would be likely to identify with authority. If she gave them a story to read about a sentry who left his post to pull a drowning man out of a river, they would say he should have stayed in the booth.
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