What Is All This?

by Stephen Dixon

  That afternoon, his mother braved a look into his room. Seeing him sleeping soundly, she pushed his door till it banged against the wall. Max rustled around, opened one eye and peered at his mother, who was mumbling to herself and fidgeting with a dish towel.

  “Max?” she said, bending over him.

  “What?” he said drowsily.

  “Max!”

  “What, for Christ’s sake?”

  “You sick or something, lying there? Before, you said you wasn’t, but your cheeks have lost all their rosiness.”

  “I’m fine, Ma, thanks.”

  “If you’re fine, why you lying in bed like you’re sick?”

  “I don’t know. I’m tired. And frustration, not finding work. I thought maybe my luck will change with a good night’s sleep.”

  “Night? Three in the afternoon is night?”

  “What’s it, three?” he said, shutting his eyes and trying to doze off.

  “What then, midnight?” She pulled a wristwatch out of her housecoat pocket and dandled it above his eyes. “You see what time it is?” nudging him till he opened his eyes and looked at the watch.

  “Yeah, three.”

  “Three it is. That’s my point. So what are you doing still lying in bed?”

  “Don’t worry about it, please,” he said, getting up. “It’s just a day’s rest. Now if you don’t mind?” He grabbed her elbow and escorted her out of the room.

  “You’ll end up a no-good loafer if you make sleeping in the day a habit,” she said from behind the door. “Get a job, why don’t you. Only then can you sleep; then you’ll have the right to. Max? You taking in what I’m saying?”

  That evening Mr. Silverman was unmoved by his wife’s story of their son’s behavior. Things are tough all over,” he said, opening a beer. “A lot of good intelligent workers are unemployed now—good young butchers in the market, even—so don’t be concerned if he’s discouraged for a day or so. It’s only natural.”

  “But why should he get discouraged? I mean, five or six jobs he could’ve got today if he looked hard enough. But no, he’s in his room all day doing what? Sleeping off all his chances, that’s what.”

  He lifted his shoulders and murmured that he supposed she was right. “Your worrying, though’s, not going to hold up dinner, I hope. At the table we’ll have a little talk with him.”

  She summoned Max to dinner a half hour later, but he said through the door he was too tired. She immediately got worried, because for Max to miss or pass up one of her Thursday meatloaf dinners meant he was either working late or drastically ill. She went into his room, turned on the ceiling light, and felt his head.

  “Ma, I told you already, I’m just sleepy.”

  “Sleepy? You got how many hours sleep today and you’re still sleepy? No, something’s wrong with you; I know.”

  He moved his head away from her hand and shut his eyes.

  “Please, Max, I got meatloaf on the table, so come eat it while it’s hot.”

  “I’ll eat it cold tomorrow. I always liked it better in a sandwich with ketchup on it.”

  “You’ll eat nothing cold tomorrow. I’ll throw it out the window before I give it to you that way. Now I’m not kidding, Max. Supper’s ready and you’re holding up your father.”

  He propped himself up on his elbows and stared at her. She’d seen this pose of his before and nervously grabbed his flannel pants off the chair and tried ironing the cuffs between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Here,” she said, holding out his pants.

  “Here, nothing,” and he slapped at the swaying pants in front of him. “I’m warning you, Ma. If you don’t leave the room I’m going to a hotel for the night and tomorrow find my own apartment.”

  She left the room, saying, as she closed the door, that she’d make two meatloaf sandwiches for him tomorrow when he looked for a job—“just as you like then, with lettuce and ketchup and a little sprinkle of salt.”

  Next morning Mr. Silverman tiptoed into Max’s room, his old underpants hanging loosely at the crotch. He carried the first section of the Times, which he’d just finished reading during his usual half-hour stint on the john. He said “Jesus, how do you stand it; it’s so cold in here,” and shut the window. He shook Max’s shoulder, and when he heard his awakening grunts, asked if he wanted to ride downtown in the subway with him.

  “No thanks, Pop,” Max said, his voice muffled in the pillow.

  “You still feeling sick?”

  “I was never sick.”

  Then maybe you should get up. It’s quarter of eight.”

  “Quarter to eight?”

  “Sure, quarter of eight. Be smart and get to the agencies first. That’s what I used to do when I looked for work.”

  “Friday’s the worst day for looking…you know that. Besides, it’d be silly going downtown now when I got an interview in Brooklyn at noon.”

  “In Brooklyn?” his father said, chattering from the cold. “You’d travel all the way out there for a job?”

  “At this stage of the game I’d take one in Newark. You should get dressed. You’re freezing your ears off.”

  “But in Brooklyn it’ll mean a good hour and a half ride from here. That’s before seven you’ll be getting up if the job starts at nine.”

  “So I’ll get my own apartment there—I don’t know. I’ll tell you about it later tonight.”

  “But why should you pay rent when you got your own room and plenty of food here? Look, don’t get desperate, all right? A good job you’ll get Monday, so just sleep your worries away today.”

  When he returned to his room, his wife asked if Max was getting up.

  “He still looks a little sick,” he said. “Why don’t we let him sleep?”

  She jumped out of bed and went to Max’s room.

  “Max!” she said, throwing open the door.

  “Yeah, Ma?” he said, his head under the covers.

  “I’m not fooling around now. Max. Get up this instant. You got to get a job.”

  “Like I told Dad, Ma, I’ll go later—in an hour or so.”

  “You’ll go now!”

  “I said later. Now, please?”

  She threw the covers off him. He was curled up on the far side of the bed, one hand under his head.

  “Max, you was never a loafer. I’m surprised, really surprised,” and stormed out of the room, leaving the door wide open. He got up, shut the door, opened the window a few inches, picked the covers off the floor and went back to bed.

  The only movement he made from his room that day, besides going to the john a few times, was a quick trip to the kitchen for a few slices of seeded rye and a knife and an unopened Velveeta cheese, and another trip into the living room two hours later for a book of Reader’s Digest novel condensations, which he’d purchased for ten cents and a coupon through the mail. His mother, who always cleaned the apartment thoroughly on Mondays and gave it a good going-over on Wednesdays and Saturdays, twice opened his door by bumping it with her vacuum cleaner as she turned the doorknob. Both times, after saying “Excuse me, that was an accident,” and peeping into his dark cigarette-smelling room, she slammed the door shut and continued vacuuming the hall outside his room another ten minutes.

  Max admitted to himself he was never that reflective a person, but began thinking a lot as to why he refused to leave his room other than for the toilet and snacks. First, thinking about the psych course he took in his second and last year at college, he blamed it on his mother’s strong pushy nature and his father being kind of meek and browbeaten and such. But that was a lot of nonsense, he thought, No matter what he felt about them, he still couldn’t tie staying in bed to all that Freudian crap he’d read in his textbook and heard long discussions of in the City College cafeteria. So next was that he did it because he did it and that was that. He liked this one better because it fitted his concept or image or something about himself in the way he made decisions; quickly and forcefully, without time-wasting thought or goi
ng back on it. Anyway, that was good enough for now, and he opened the Readers Digest book, lit a cigarette, and knocked off a condensation of Uris’s Exodus.

  That evening his Uncle Barney, the sage and Ann Landers of the family, knocked on Max’s door. He walked in when he didn’t get a response, and sat on the bed.

  “Is it all right if we talk nicely—with the light, too?” Barney said, turning on the night table light and squeezing Max’s foot through the covers.

  The folks call you in?”

  “Stopped by on my own. Just wanted to see how my favorite nephew’s doing.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Time for supper, kid, so what do you say? Though we were only dropping by, your Aunt Dee and me are thinking of gracing this happy household by eating over tonight.”

  Max turned to the wall-side of the bed. “See you at the table then, okay?”

  “Come on, kid, what’s happened to you? You used to be such a go-getter—a real driver for the almighty buck. Believe me, I know what I mean when I say if you don’t get up now you’ll be chained to this bed like an addict.”

  “I can’t right now, Uncle Barney—just try and understand.”

  “What do you mean ‘can’t’?”

  “Just that something around me—a voice, even—is telling me to stay here another night. Then when I leave, the whole world will open up for me. Not exactly that, but something like it.”

  “Huh? What’s with this voice stuff? Listen, the only things you’ll get staying here so long are bed sores and a free ticket to the loonybin. I’ve always done right by you in the past, haven’t I? So I’m telling you now, kid: get up.”

  Max rolled over to face him and said “Will you just get out of here already and let me sleep? And shut the light before you go, because you turned it on when I didn’t ask you to.”

  “Okay, okay, you’re going off your rocker and I won’t waste my breath on you anymore; okay,” and he shut off the light, left the room and shut the door. Max then heard from the hallway his mother carrying on the way she did over the newly dead: “Oh my God; what am I going to do? Oh my God.”

  He wasn’t bothered much after that. Twice his father tried to make contact through the door, with a couple of taps and then some mumbling about Max’s health and appetite and did he need anything? Max answered the first time with a grunt that he was doing fine, don’t worry. But the second time, feeling sorry for his father, he said that he’d see him the next morning when they’d go to the Bronx Botanical Gardens, something Max had been promising to do with him the past ten years. The Gardens were only a twenty-minute ride across the Bronx, but neither of them had ever been there.

  Saturday morning his parents closed their eyes or turned away each time Max went to the bathroom or sneaked into the kitchen for a snack or cup of coffee. On Sunday Max dry-shaved himself in bed, leaving the start of his first mustache. Later that day, while lying in bed, cigarette smoke rising from the ashtray balanced on his chest, he concluded that he was no longer staying in bed for any just-plain-old-Max reasons, as he’d believed, but as a one-man protest against the lousy economic conditions in this country. He saw himself staying here for weeks—a sort of fast-unto-death that Gandhi threatened the British with in India—the word getting out to neighbors and friends and through them to the newspapers, who’d write him up as someone protesting against heavy unemployment and the so-called reputable captains of industry who caused it. In time, others would join his protest—thousand upon thousands of blue-and white-collar workers staying in bed, eventually causing many big businesses and corporations and factories to close down. Supermarkets, department stores, movie theaters would suffer. Time and Newsweek would devote cover stories to the news, TV would run half-hour documentaries on it. It would an end up with a meeting of the frightened big guns of the financial and industrial world, who’d end the recession and after that work together with the federal and state governments to building a new and sounder economy. Sometime after, before the eyes and ears of the nation, they’d credit him with having alerted them to how serious the situation was and for having driven some sense into their heads. Because of the notoriety he’d get, he’d soon have a top executive job, with a huge private office and plenty of pretty secretaries within reach, and become a known force in the business world. All these things were up for grabs for guys like himself: The Takeover Generation” that Look devoted an entire issue to; the young entrepreneurs who were on the way up by the use of their wits and initiative and because of their courageous, dynamic actions.

  He awoke an hour later. At his feet were the Times and Tribune with the Help-Wanted sections on top, which his mother must have put there during his last nap. He kicked them to the floor. “Who needs you?” he said, and shut his eyes and tried to get back to sleep.

  Monday, Mr. Silverman left for work, calling Max, through his bedroom door, a hopeless mental case and wishing on him a multitude of the worst Yiddish curses. Mrs. Silverman, too distraught to say anything, went about her morning household chores. But around noon, with all the rooms dusted, carpets swept, scrubbed and mopped with pine disinfectant, she could no longer restrain herself. She barged into his room with a shriek, waking him.

  “Get up, you bum, before I call the police.”

  He pulled the covers over his head. His mouth felt parched and sour. He’d brush his teeth soon as she gave up and left the room.

  “I said to get up, you dirty loafer, or I swear I’ll throw you out of the house myself. Don’t think I can’t, because I can. Max, do you hear me? Get up this instant.”

  He turned over on his back, sneezed, said “Excuse me,” and reached to the night table for a cigarette and matchbook. He lit up, shut his eyes, and exhaled.

  “All right,” she said, dusting the top of his dresser with her hand, “you’re not going to listen to ne, so I’ll try this. How long you going to make us suffer this way?”

  “Until the recession ends.”

  “What do you mean ‘the recession ends’? Talk sense.”

  “Okay; I just don’t know.”

  “You just don’t know what? I’m listening. I’m your mother and it’s natural I’m interested in what you have to say.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know. But something wonderful will come from all this, something that’ll benefit all of us. You might not realize it yet, but you’ve got a great social reformer on your hands.”

  “Does that mean you’re not leaving today?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Like I say: I’m not quite sure.”

  “You mean never, then, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know; it’s difficult to judge.”

  “Well, just tell me so I’ll know better than to have my friends and family come over and see our disgrace. Next week? A month? A year? Just so I know, Max.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe what? Listen, you’re thirty, so act like thirty. For fifteen years you felt like working. I did too before I had you, and your father for his whole life. So why all of a sudden you feel you can’t get up and get work? Believe me, if that’s what you really think, then all I can say is you’re a freeloader and a bum.”

  “I’m sorry, honestly I am.” He took another drag and stared at the ceiling fixture.

  That smoke,” she said, waving her hands in front of her. “You’re blowing it in my face, you know?

  “I wasn’t trying to. I was blowing it towards the door, but maybe a breeze caught it.”

  “Breeze, nothing. Stop smoking so early and get up. Enough’s enough.”

  He watched her stack his coins into neat columns on the dresser, then pick up the newspapers off the floor and fold them.

  “Your father wanted to know where the papers were this morning. He hadn’t finished them. He paid for them, you know.”

  “You probably put them there yourself when I was asleep.”

  There?” she said, pointing down. “On the floo
r like a slob?”

  “Anyway, tell him there’s nothing in them, so he didn’t miss anything.”

  That’s for him to decide. For you, sure you say there’s nothing, but there’s plenty in them, plenty of good jobs.”

  She put the newspapers on a chair and began carpet-sweeping the small round rug in the middle of the floor.

  He felt hungry, but couldn’t leave his bed while his mother was still in the room. She’d yell that if he could get up for his stomach then he could just as easily get up to make money for his food. He decided to light another cigarette. There was almost no pleasure in the world like smoking, he thought. It always took his mind off anything unpleasant. He might even be able to drive her out of the room if he blew more smoke in her direction. He reached over to the night table and fingered blindly through the cigarette pack. It was empty. He propped himself up and opened the night table drawers, but there were no cigarettes there, either.

  “You take my butts, Ma?”

  “Why, did you ever see me smoke?” she said, continuing to sweep the rug. “You do, like there’s no tomorrow.”

  “But I’m sure I had them there; a couple of packs.”

  “News to me.”

  It was useless trying to talk to her. Always the same line; never a decent, understanding word. He got out of bed and rummaged through the top dresser drawer, but all he found there were three mangled packs, an empty carton, and some matchbooks. Next he searched all the kitchen shelves, where his mother usually hid the cigarettes she’d stolen from him when she thought he was smoking too much. She never dumped them, though, since she hated throwing out anything that at one time cost money and could still be used.

  He sat down at the kitchen table with a coffee and prune Danish in front of him. He figured he’d looked at every possible hiding place, even picking through the garbage can under the sink on the theory that she’d really lost control of herself today and thrown away the cigarettes she’d taken from him. But wasn’t he acting like a perfect idiot? Because how long had it been since his last smoke? Twenty minutes? So what the hell was he getting so worked up about? All he had to do was think the situation out, just as he had when something unusual came up at the store that Mr. Winston wasn’t around to handle, and the crisis would be over.