Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

by Patty Yumi Cottrell

25

  I was asleep on the couch in the study, dissolved in a dream, when my adoptive father burst into the room, terrifying me. He never knocked on doors, or if he did, he never waited for a response, it was his house, he could burst into any room he liked, all of the doors were his to open, none of them came cheaply built. Throughout his life, he burst into rooms and scared people. It was his trademark, I thought, and I’m sure people would talk about it at his funeral.

  Helen, you didn’t hear us.

  Hello, I didn’t know anyone was at home.

  We’ve been here for a while. Why didn’t you hear us? We were calling out for you and you didn’t answer. We kept calling for you, Helen, where are you, your mother called out twenty times. What are you doing in here?

  Just looking at family photos.

  So you were in here all day, sitting in the dark?

  I took a walk. A bright day to the edge of the suburb. I walked through the cemetery to get to the Moon residence, I thought no one was home, then as I turned around and walked away, I ran into the parents. Do you remember them? They were Asian and Christian, much older—

  My adoptive mother poked her head into the den.

  The food’s here, she said.

  My adoptive father wasn’t listening to anyone. I watched him select several pictures of my adoptive brother, including the birthday picture, and slide them into a manila envelope. I followed him out into the kitchen, where two brown boxes of pizza sat on the counter. Pizza again, I thought, no one had the energy to cook. My adoptive mother was seated at the table, and in front of her was a single slice of pizza on a plate along with a large wedge of iceberg lettuce and a small pool of ranch. I helped myself to three slices.

  Do you have any friends you want to invite to the funeral? asked my adoptive mother.

  You must have at least one person you could invite, added my adoptive father.

  They were always concerned about whether or not I had friends, even for a funeral.

  You should bring a friend or two, I heard my adoptive mother say.

  Bring them for what? I said.

  Then I forced myself to eat the pizza and in my mind I calculated that if I ate three hearty slices, I would be able to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

  As a support, she said, and a comfort.

  I don’t have any friends I want to call, I said, and I’m very comfortable with that.

  Did you know the police were here a couple days ago? said my adoptive mother. They rang our doorbell at three in the morning. I opened the door and they were there. At three in the morning.

  Her hands shook as she brought the pizza up to her mouth. It was kind of like watching a very old senile woman eat, and it made me feel terrible; I changed the subject.

  Did you see all the flowers and cards from the other people? I asked them. I put them into the buckets to keep them fresh.

  Goddammit, Helen, said my adoptive father. He put his pizza slice cheese side down onto his plate.

  Yes, of course you did, said my adoptive mother.

  She seemed exceptionally calm.

  I had to take them out of the buckets, she said. You see, Helen, there was almost a liter of bleach in those buckets. I’m surprised you couldn’t smell it. There was more bleach than water, so you actually killed all of the flowers in the buckets in the shortest amount of time imaginable. All of those beautiful flowers in the baskets and paper cones are dead. Luckily, we still have the wreaths, which are lovely. We can use those for the funeral.

  She always looked at the bright side of things, I thought.

  It’s really a shame, hissed my adoptive father, that we had to throw away all of those once-beautiful flowers. In fact, from now on, Helen, you shouldn’t do anything in the house without asking us first. You will ruin everything, and the worst part is, you won’t even know it. You’ve already ruined so much. We’ve been taking care of it all. We don’t want you to do anything!

  Of course, Chad Lambo has been helping, too, said my adoptive mother, give him some credit, Paul.

  I must have frowned because she looked at me and said, What are you thinking about, Helen?

  No one had asked me a question like that since I had been home; I took a deep breath, then I told her that I was concerned about the nature of the funeral. When pressed for more details, I went on to say that I didn’t think my adoptive brother would want a Catholic funeral.

  Of course he does, said my adoptive mother with emotion, I mean, he did. He went to church with us every week. He even liked the priest, Father Luke, a lot. This is what he would want. I’m sure of it.

  I wasn’t persuaded. How can you be so certain?

  I searched their faces, which were pale underneath the light suspended above the table. No one responded. It was silent except for the sounds of their chewing. Sometimes silence can be implemented as a rhetorical strategy. I decided to start asking the difficult questions.

  How can you know what a dead person wants or needs? I said. Did he tell you? Did he leave instructions behind? How can you be so certain? Did he leave a suicide letter?

  What do you mean by all of that, Helen? said my adoptive father. We knew him very well.

  That’s not what I meant, I said. I didn’t mean you didn’t know him really well.

  He spent more time with us than anyone else on the planet, said my adoptive father. He spent more time with us than you and now you’re suggesting that we didn’t know him at all.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the European man helping himself to a slice of pizza at the counter. He made eye contact with me and shook his head.

  I’m sorry, I said, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? Don’t you understand?

  In between asking them if they understood what I was saying, I took bites of my pizza. The tomato sauce and cheese scalded my tongue and ripped off pieces of skin from the roof of my mouth.

  It’s okay, said my adoptive mother, it’s okay, Helen.

  It’s just us, she said. It’s just us.

  It looked like she was about to start weeping, so I excused myself and went up to my childhood bedroom where I shut all the windows I had thrown open earlier but not before I looked out at the grim trees. To calm myself, I went into the closet and brought out The Odyssey. I read the story of the Cyclops ten times before I closed my eyes in peace. Suddenly the Cyclops occupied part of my brain, and I felt a deep kinship with him. He was misunderstood as a villain, I thought, when in reality, Odysseus and his crew should be positioned as the evil colonizers, and the Cyclops as the dehumanized victim of their atrocious conquest. I’ve always identified with the victims, I identified with the underdogs, the colonized, the beggars and peasants, the bacteria in the sponge, the mosquitoes and the ants. I would get my revenge one day. Revenge on whom? someone might ask.

  I’ll show you, I said to no one.

  The ones who overlooked me my entire life, all the people who underestimated the power of my will, my life-force.

  26

  I lingered at the bottom of the stairs, then shook myself out of a morning paralysis and entered the kitchen. My adoptive mother was at the kitchen table, as if she had never left. She had a pencil behind her ear, and her head was bent down as if she was concentrating deeply on something.

  Helen, what’s a four-letter word for butter?

  There are two sides to everything, I said.

  His death on one side, I thought, the morning ritual of the crossword puzzle on the other. When I asked her what she wanted to do that day, she said pray, she wanted to be left alone to pray.

  All day? I said.

  Before she answered, I went into the empty study. I considered taking a nap in the chair. Everything had been organized; the surface of the desk was clean and smooth. My roommate Julie texted me to remind me that I needed to mail her a rent check. I got up and returned to the kitchen where I heated up a potpie in the microwave for myself, a disgusting, glue-like potpie, which ap
pealed to me in the moment, but I knew I would regret it later. I passed my adoptive mother in one of the living rooms. She sat in a wicker-basket chair with her eyes closed and her palms on her knees as if she were meditating. I brought the potpie with me into the study and sat at the desk. I leafed through a few drawers until I found a box of checks. It’s all the same money, I thought, isn’t it? I wrote a check to the landlord and slipped it into an envelope, which I addressed with a careless scrawl. It didn’t seem like my adoptive father kept very good track of his finances anymore, which was strange because saving money had once been so important to him. I only knew he didn’t keep good track because when I asked my adoptive brother how he could afford to fly to New York City since he didn’t have a job, he told me he had cashed a couple of my adoptive father’s checks that he had written out to himself. He told me he had an entire box of our adoptive father’s blank checks in his possession. If my adoptive father knew about it, he never said anything.

  I ate my potpie with thoughtful bites. My adoptive brother and I had this in common: we were both prone to being careless with money as a concept and as a vital material. I could never afford my rent with my part-time job helping troubled young people; I relied partially on a small monthly amount from my adoptive father’s parents, both dead, the Bach-abusing schizophrenics, which my adoptive father sent to me reluctantly, and I refused to feel badly about it, because there were times when those Bach-abusing schizophrenics were also emotionally and verbally abusive toward my adoptive brother and me, sometimes they had said very inappropriate things to us, especially my adoptive grandfather, especially around the holidays, he would really get into it, first he would hand us each a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill, fresh from the mint, and before we could thank him, he called into question why the two of us had been adopted when there were millions of starving orphans roaming the streets of Korea and eating out of garbage cans.

  Why you and you, he would say, pointing at each of us, why the two of you in particular, what’s so special about you?

  And he seemed to especially enjoy verbally abusing my adoptive brother.

  Little man, he called him, and not in an affectionate way.

  Small hands, he said shaking his head. You know what they say about boys with small hands.

  For some reason, I escaped most of his wrath, although when I graduated college, he told me if I didn’t start to have babies I would get uterine cancer.

  I didn’t feel any qualms about cashing his small monthly checks because all I did was keep myself alive with the bare necessities, the staples, the basics. My ultimate purpose was always to simplify my life, to keep it as small as possible. The first thing you can do to contain your life is to just stop buying things. I almost never purchased anything, not even health insurance. The black turtleneck was a $20 extravagance. While living in New York City, I learned to wear clothes left on the sidewalks of all the richest neighborhoods like SoHo and the West Village. I learned how to alter pants and shirts with a sewing needle and thread. The last time I bought brand-new shoes that fit, I turned twenty-five. I wore shoe sizes from 7 ½ to 11, men’s and women’s. I liked to stuff socks into the toe to make them fit and I always had blisters, but I was never uncomfortable.

  Walking has always been a huge part of my mental process, I thought as I sat in the chair.

  If I can walk, I can think, I thought.

  I always had enough money to live on and I never had enough time to live, whereas time was never of any concern to my roommate Julie and her lifestyle. It was strange to live with someone who had so much time for every whim, every impulse, even artistic ones. I, too, once had artistic impulses, I thought, but then they died away. A few weeks ago, she told me she was leaving for a week to take cooking classes in Mexico. She wanted to rediscover her love for cooking. I enjoyed when she left on these little excursions, because it was almost as if I had a normal-sized apartment to myself, even though there was no time to enjoy that space and freedom, I had almost no time for anything when I wasn’t at work, I never had time for anything but answering phone calls from my troubled young people. I talked to them all the time; when I was supervising them on the clock, I talked to them about their troubles at home, and when they went home, I had to talk to them on the phone about the troubles they had with other supervisors, my coworkers. They swallowed up countless hours, my hungry troubled young people. Even though it was a part-time job, it took up almost sixty hours a week. That’s why they call me Sister Reliability, I thought, I’m always there.

  Ever since the suicide, I had set up an auto-reply for my email. To put it plainly, I copied and pasted the content of the email to my supervisor. Of course it’s not necessary to subject yourself to such exhaustive work practices, because I believed it was possible to live on nothing in the city and still survive like the cockroaches and rats. It’s about knowing the right people, the rich ones, or the friendly ones, and listening to their problems. In fact, I once wrote and designed a FREE PAMPHLET out of my own goodwill, specifically for my troubled young people, titled How to Survive in New York City on Little to Nothing.

  27

  HOW TO SURVIVE

  IN NEW YORK CITY ON

  LITTLE TO NOTHING

  —

  BY HELEN MORAN, 2013

  There is a man who worked all his life to be a success, but everything he touched turned to ashes, and he ended up in the soiled crevices of a corner of the subway, with nothing but a cardboard box and a shopping cart. He didn’t even own a good broom. There is a woman who has in her possession a bedsheet, some wooden clothespins, a bath mat, and a radio; late in the evening, she walks to a café in the West Village. Outside the café is an empty rectangular cement patio. Eventually, tables and chairs and umbrellas will overtake the patio, but they are locked up inside the café. For the time being, the patio is empty. The woman sets out her bath mat and radio. She makes a tent with her sheet. She uses her imagination to see it as her temporary home, a very beautiful place, filled with promise, until the café manager arrives at six in the morning to discover the woman and her belongings, set up like a refugee camp. The manager tells the woman to find a different place to set up, but not before complimenting the woman on the bath mat.

  I have the same one in my apartment bathroom, says the manager.

  The most basic thing it behooves you to understand is that, as a poor troubled brown person, rich white people’s problems are much larger and more important than yours. If you understand this when you interact with them, and listen to rich people patiently, sometimes they will buy things for you. Or if you happen to not be good with people, but are on friendly terms with a more outgoing and charming person who is poor, you can connect to the rich people through the charming and poor person, because rich people love nothing more than to befriend a group of friendly and poor people, it gives them credibility. It makes them feel noble.

  Remember to be interesting. Don’t be nice. Nice is not interesting. Nice is the how are you of greetings. Nice is the declawed cat, the beige house with the gazebo, and what’s the point of a gazebo? An investigative and probing spirit will give you a tour of the boarded-up and condemned house that every rich white person keeps inside herself.

  * * *

  Once you befriend them, as you get to know them, you can begin to ask for things. First, establish your friendly relationship with the rich person and then after it has been established, say over the span of a couple weeks to a month, you can ask them to buy things for you. This is called ASKING. Create a story designed to pull on their heartstrings. Tell them your feet hurt from your worn-out shoes, which your mother never replaced because she was busy turning tricks, and last night you had a dream in which you miraculously discovered a pair of brand-new shoes underneath your bed. Tell them you have never seen the ocean, and you would like to go swimming in the ocean before you die, but you own no swimsuit or goggles, not even a beach towel in your possession. Ask and receive! Ask and receive! Ask and receive!
r />   A young woman moved from borough to borough. Every time she moved, she kept nothing and slept on the floor of every apartment she ever inhabited in New York City, except her most recent studio apartment, which she shared with a roommate, because the previous roommate left behind a twin bed with a floral bedspread. The mattress was infested with bedbugs, she discovered quickly, the box spring, too. The first month of living in the studio apartment, each morning she woke up with dark red welts up and down her arms and legs and around her torso. Some of them she scratched and infected. Her roommate’s body was unscathed, whereas her own body became nothing but a canvas for these welts. She woke up in the middle of the night with a flashlight spotlighting the bed, searching for the blood-sucking parasites, but they were too small, at times nearly invisible. She only saw tiny black specks, their shit according to the internet. During the day, if she slid a credit card into one of the ripped seams of the mattress, the bedbugs would flow out in great numbers as if the mattress were stuffed with nothing but the brown-and-red leaf-shaped bugs. For a day, she prayed they would leave. After almost thirty years of not praying, she asked God to take the bedbugs away. When that didn’t work, she tried to see things from the bedbugs’ point of view. Wouldn’t the bugs say to one another, She’s great, but we’ve had enough, it’s time to eat the blood of a new person?

  One bright and sunny day, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She researched how to exterminate them, she bought a toxic powder, and a mask, and sifted the toxic powder over her mattress and into the cracks in the molding, and the electrical sockets. While the toxic poison covered her twin bed with a fine powder, she went on the train to get out of her apartment. A young man sat across from her on the C train, and he kept making eye contact with her, as if he wanted to ask her something. They started talking. It turned out he was a single parent, he did shifts at the co-op, he took the train five stops and a transfer and a ride on the bus to buy his groceries, and he lived in a Crown Heights brownstone. He told her his favorite thing to do was to go to music festivals and casinos, but now that he had a daughter, casinos and festivals were off limits. After they got off the train together, she offered him a bag of harmless drugs she discovered in a locked storage closet at her place of work, in exchange for a place to stay. She explained her situation, she showed him the welts all over her body. She lifted up her shirt and showed him the belt of bites around her waist, then she gave the man a bag of light beige powder the size of a pillow for a tiny dog. Even though he had a daughter, she felt whatever he chose to do with the powder was his business, he was an adult, and it was not in her jurisdiction to police his usage of drugs, illegal or not. She needed a clean bed to sleep upon and the man had offered her a place in his bedroom, in his very own king-sized bed, a bedbug-free paradise-refuge.