by John Fulton
Jenny stepped in front of my chair and put out her hand just as Danny Olsen had been about to turn around. “I’m Steven’s sister, Jenny,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
He didn’t turn to meet her at first, and I thought about how this was her chance to speak with one of the hundreds of names she had memorized from the yearbook. I hoped that he would be kind to her. “Daniel,” his father said sternly, after which he relented and, without looking her in the eye, briefly touched my sister’s hand.
* * *
Later that night, after Mr. Olsen and his son had left and after my father had written a check to the hospital for the amount in full, a check he knew would not bounce, winning began to feel like something real and substantial, something that stayed with you and changed you and your life for good. It was past one in the morning when we finally drove away from the hospital. The snow had eased off by then, the roads had been plowed, and driving was easier. Jenny, who had always had a funny and demanding appetite, announced from the backseat that she was hungry. “I want an ice cream,” she said.
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t celebrate,” my father said. Perhaps had I not been on muscle relaxants, had it not been early in the morning, my father’s use of the word celebrate on that occasion might have seemed odd to me. But at that moment, it seemed right, and we stopped and were soon all feasting on ice-cream bars in the parking lot of a Gas-N-Go. None of us laughed at or even noticed our odd choice of frozen desserts in the middle of winter and in the aftermath of a blizzard. We simply ate as the car heater blasted warm air and the windows around us fogged up.
For the rest of the drive home, my mother leaned into my father and whispered to him. I could not hear her, but I knew by the way he kissed her on the cheek and she returned his kiss that they were both happy. I think that she must have believed in him that night. I know I did. I know also that she must have seen, as I saw, that my father, for all his rage and past failures, could be a strong man, a man who knew, one way or another, how to get what he wanted. In fact, as we all saw a week later, when new furniture arrived, when the pissy-smelling La-Z-Boy disappeared from our rented duplex, when we were able to replace my eyeglasses with a new pair—new frames and new lenses—he had gotten more than enough, and at, or so I believed that night, a pretty good price—the price of a little pain, an injury, some tears and aggravation, a quarrel among kids. And as we drove across the city and my mother fell asleep and Jenny curled up on her side of the seat and dozed, I hardly remembered the pain. It had been masked and smothered beneath the medicine and the victory. For once, I believed that the future would be better and larger than I had ever before let myself imagine it could be. I knew how it felt to win. I knew that believing—and not just pretending—that the next day would be better than the present one was the conviction of winners. It was a boom time, and soon we’d be in the middle of it. I had not felt this way much before; it was a feeling that made that night remarkable with possibility, a night on which I had begun to see a future that held the promise of something as miraculous and unbelievable as an indoor pool, a warm swim in the middle of winter, in a blizzard on a night like that night. I could see that pool then, imagine myself walking from the dry carpet of the living room into the strange, damp enclosure where aquatic shadows flitted over the walls and where I stood and heard the wet suck of filters as I looked through the glassy slab of water and made out in the deep end the little silver coin of the drain at the bottom. A real pool.
“Steven,” my father whispered. “You awake?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You did well tonight. You hung in there.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You know how to throw a left hook?” he asked. Before I could answer, he began to tell me. “Don’t telegraph it. You don’t want the other guy to know what’s coming. You want to step into it. You’ve got to be fast.” He threw a couple punches just short of the windshield, and with my good arm I threw two or three, despite the fact that it hurt a little. “Good,” he said, though he couldn’t have been watching me closely. “That’s the idea. We’re going to teach you how to fight,” he said, still boxing. “We’re going to make a fighter out of you.”
“Great,” I said, believing him, absolutely believing him, as I threw another two punches into the dark air in front of me.
Two
I HAD NEVER SEEN my family spend more money than in the month after my accident. It was February and what the Channel 2 weatherman called an inversion—a soupy, dirty smog—had settled over the Salt Lake Valley and would probably stay for weeks. The sky and the ring of white mountains around the city disappeared in the murky brown air. Mornings at the bus stop were strange and a little spooky as the headlights of invisible cars pushed through the thick air and drove past us. My arm was still in a sling, and when Jenny and I walked to the back of the bus and past the boys who’d hurt me—Danny Olsen among them—they became quiet and looked away. We had gone from being outcasts to being unseen. My arm would not heal quickly, the doctors had told me; along with the dislocation, my muscle and some ligaments had been torn and damaged. I struggled to do schoolwork with my left hand, took vitamin supplements, and went weekly to The Richmond Clinics—where I was treated now that Mr. Olsen was paying the bill—for physical therapy.
Despite my arm and the bleak season, those few weeks of sudden riches were reminiscent of better times for our family. Our best time was the first year in Boise when my father had been the manager of a windshield replacement business, had liked his job and the people he worked with. My mother had found a nice house for us to rent. It was small, but it had new wood floors and the fuses wouldn’t short when you toasted bread and brewed coffee at the same time. The owners, an old couple called the Brownings—related, my father claimed, to the family who sold the guns of that name—even talked about selling that house to us. My father and mother made friends, Mr. and Mrs. Kirkeby from across the street and Joel and his live-in girlfriend, Christina, who lived a couple streets down from us. My mother thought of returning to nursing school and taking a part-time job until she finished her degree. Both Jenny and I liked our school and had the sense that for once we would stay in a place for more than two years, maybe stay there for good. It was a nice thing to believe after having changed schools several times, moving from California to Arizona, then back to California, from where we moved once more to Washington State, and finally to Boise. We’d had good times in those places, too, though they hadn’t lasted long. My father had had repeated bad luck and always knew an old friend in another state who had a job for him. When that golden year in Boise came to an end, we stayed another year before we moved on to Salt Lake, where, even if we didn’t have friends, we could start again. I think we all hoped our unusual beginning in Salt Lake would put us on that same good track and keep us there. We had money, at least, and wouldn’t have to worry for a change about how to pay the bills that winter and, I hoped, for many winters to come.
The things our new money bought made my family giddy for a while—the matching couch and La-Z-Boy, the new TV with stereo sound, black and sleek, so shiny it glinted with the flash of your reflection whenever you walked by, the new Danish blue dishes for my mother, some pots and pans, a set of kitchen knives in a knife block, a new pair of eyeglasses with silver frames for me. The chair and couch were red and had been carried in by two men from a place called Instant Furniture, which was printed on their white monkey suits and in giant letters on the side of their truck. It was instant, too, miraculously there, in the middle of our small home, packed in thick plastic that Jenny and I tore off until we got to the fabric that smelled new—of detergent and untouched cloth and of fresh-cut wood beneath the thick stuffing. We subscribed to more than sixty cable channels, including the ones you paid extra for—MTV, HBO, The Romance Station, and even a channel called Play It Again that featured reruns of Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, and I Dream of Jeannie. Jenny and I lay on the couch and surfed the channel
s for hours, fighting over the remote control, over which program to watch, until our eyes felt sore and our mother said no more TV and sent us to our rooms, exhausted and lethargic from doing what she called too much of nothing.
After a while, my father began to bring home stuff nobody wanted or needed. He bought a new basketball for me, even though I had an old one that I never used. “Smell that leather,” he said. I did smell it, though I couldn’t hide my lack of excitement. (I had never been particularly good at hiding anything.) “You don’t like it,” he said.
“Sure I do.”
“I’d appreciate some gratitude. A thank-you, at least.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said in a tone that let me know I had disappointed him.
My sister and mother were even less receptive to his misfired attempts to please. When he gave Jenny a stack of CDs by Billy Joel, she said, “That’s what I liked last year. I don’t listen to him anymore. Why don’t you ask me what I want?”
“You’re very welcome,” he said.
To the candles and perfumes, soaps and cosmetics he gave my mother, she smiled. “Thank you, Billy,” she said. “But we don’t need these things.” More than once, my mother and Jenny and I drove from store to store—sometimes as many as six—returning expensive bubble baths, incense sticks, a lava lamp, sea sponges, costume jewelry, chocolates, and sweets. When the sales people sometimes refused to accept the returns, my mother argued vehemently until they relented. “My husband bought these things,” she’d say, becoming fiercely honest. “But we can’t pay for them. We are not the kind of family who can afford fifteen-dollar bubble bath.”
The salesperson would then eye Jenny and me, seeming to confirm what kind of family we were, before finally saying, “All right, then. Just this once.”
My father had never cared for shopping, especially grocery shopping. But for the four short weeks of that February during which the Salt Lake Valley was covered in the dirty muck of inversion and the nights were black and starless and the lights of the city, even when you looked from the top of the Downs, became distant, blurry, and disconnected dots lost in the swampy air, my father was determined to make a sort of party out of our weekly trips to the Albertson’s Super Store. “I’m going to let the kids loose on the cookie aisle. You’ve got ten seconds to grab whatever you want.” It was for events like these that he had persuaded Jenny and me, who’d rarely accompanied my mother on shopping trips before, to climb into the Buick and drive through the black smog—the air made two smoky cones in our headlights—for an evening of family food shopping. My father didn’t seem to understand that I was too old to freak out with happiness—which he wanted to see us do—over a timed rush at the cookie, cold cereal, or candy aisle. But Jenny was still willing to act the part of a kid and go spastic, become giggly and greedy, as she filled her arms full of Keebler Fudge Shoppe Fudge Sticks, Chips Ahoy!, and Chips Deluxe, Fudge Shoppe Deluxe Grahams, and Pecan shortbread Sandies, and whatever else she could grab and haul to our shopping cart before my father—attracting the attention of other shoppers and store employees—eyed his wristwatch and shouted, “Time!” When my mother complained, when she called it wasteful, accused him of spoiling his daughter, when she said we couldn’t afford to play with food, my father claimed it was just this once, though he’d do it again the following week.
I think she, as I did, half liked to see him make Jenny run wild, arms full of needless things my sister and I and maybe even my mother and father had never tasted. For my mother, shopping had always been a tedious process of price comparisons and coupon clippings, which she kept in an envelope taped to the refrigerator door. My father was quick and careless. He tossed cans and boxes, fresh pastas and sauces, cheeses, patés, and spreads we’d never tried—and later found stinky, uneatable, and threw away—into the cart without looking at prices. She’d never shopped that way. None of us had. As soon as my father convinced her that it was just this once—“Let’s treat ourselves, for God’s sake!”—or that this, he promised, was the last time, no more after this, she calmed down, relaxed, even began to eye the shelves and claim a few items—a bottle of red wine vinegar, flavored olive oil, fresh strawberries—for herself.
The store was different for shoppers who could buy what they wanted. My father hummed to the old music—“Respect,” “Your Kiss Is on My List,” “Blue Skies”—that played in the store, kicking a foot, moving his hips a little, performing a small dance move. In the produce section, hidden sprinklers sprayed silver mists of water over the vegetables while a voice over the intercom—happy and confirming—announced special sale items, which we no longer had to consider buying. My sister tackled my father, hanging off him and begging for something she’d just seen. “Can I? Can I? Please … please.”
“Why not?” he’d say.
I remember something odd about that particular supermarket. A family of birds lived in there that winter, quick little field sparrows. You’d see one shoot across the fluorescent sky inside that store, and all you could do was laugh. Another perched for an instant on the exit sign above the sliding doors before bolting off again. Jenny called them the Bird family, even though I told her birds didn’t have families, at least in the sense that she was thinking when she called them Mr. and Mrs. Bird. They lived well in that universe of shelved food. Once we saw one flit over the cold cereal aisle, land where a box of Cocoa Puffs had burst open over the floor, and rapidly feed on the chocolate debris before an Albertson’s employee rushed it with a net. It easily escaped, flew off, landed again, pecked at the chocolate cereal, and then again shot off before the empty net landed. We championed the birds. “You’ve got to survive somehow,” my father said.
Once they did catch one. We didn’t see it happen. We just saw a short man walking quickly through the produce section holding up a meshed canvas cage in which a sparrow fluttered. The man was bald and pale and wore a latex glove on the hand he held the cage with. Jenny and I followed him and tried to look in at the bird, which the man didn’t particularly like. “Excuse me,” he said. He was a small man, with a mustache the same shade of gray as the bird he had trapped. His eyes were pink and darted quickly at and then away from us, after which he seemed to look at us from the side of his face.
“How’d you catch it?” I asked.
“A trap,” he said.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” Jenny asked.
“Neither,” he said. “It’s a female. A hen.”
“It’s Mrs. Bird,” Jenny said.
We followed him out to the parking lot where a light crystalline snow fell. It was freezing, and the cold seemed to drive the bird into a frenzied twirping. “What’s wrong with him?” Jenny asked.
“Not he,” he said. “She.” The man actually glanced at us then. “I’d guess she wants to go back inside,” he said. “There’s more food in there, isn’t there?”
Jenny actually answered him. “Yes.”
“Why are you wearing that glove?” I asked him.
“Birds are extremely dirty.” He opened the flap in the canvas and the sparrow shot out into the dark and was gone. “I’ve got to go back in there now and handle food, after all, don’t I?”
Ten minutes later, Jenny and I saw him in the produce section arranging oranges in a pyramid, examining the bagged lettuce, eyeing the zucchinis, and Jenny said in her little girl’s voice, “Poor Mrs. Bird.” I also tried to feel bad for it, Mrs. Bird out in the cold dark winter with nowhere to go. But it was really just a hen, as the produce man had said, a dirty animal, and you couldn’t think too much about a dirty bird when what you really wanted to do was reach into the large, round bins of candy advertising three items for $.89—three Twix bars, three Snickers, three 3 Musketeers, three Chunky bars, three Kit Kats, three Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, three bags of Peanut M&M’s—three of anything you wanted for less than a dollar. We’d never bought candy before that February, before what my family had come to call my accident. Candy, swe
et cereals, Pop-Tarts, cookies, ice cream, and frozen desserts were new to Jenny and me. During those few weeks, these sweet, useless foods meant we had become rich. We could have as much as we wanted when we wanted it, though buying it was always better than eating it. At home, only minutes after unbagging the groceries, we broke open the Chips Deluxe, the Kit Kat bars, the Pecan shortbread Sandies, the chocolate-covered graham crackers, and ate until exhausted, until the chocolate tasted waxy and our mouths, full of shortbread, lined with flour and sugar, dried out, until we felt stuffed, if not quite sick, until the bored, draining sensation of satisfaction left us calm, let down, and looking for something else to think about and desire.
Those shopping trips stopped all at once at the end of February, not because my mother put a stop to them or even because we ran out of money, but simply because they were no longer enough, no longer interesting, no longer worth the trip to the store. They stopped because food was just food, and you could eat only so much of it before it got stale in your mouth, before you got sick of the taste of it and threw it away. They stopped in the middle of winter when it was cold and the nights were short and the gray inversion still clung to the valley and we wondered what could be next for us and hoped that it would be more than excessive food shopping, that it would be something that would change us, something that we not only wanted before we got it, but that we would keep on wanting afterwards, too, something that would make all the wanting and dreaming that had come before seem worth it, more than worth it, even.