Providence Noir

by Ann Hood

  “Halo.”

  When she answered in her thick accent, that lone word filled Charlie’s head with so many memories from his days back at that horrible school. He remembered watching the woman, examining the unusual beauty of her high cheekbones and long blond hair yanked back and twisted tight into a braid, as she silently mopped the filth from that cafeteria. All the while, those kids in their concert T-shirts and ripped jeans taunted her, shouting in the voice of a ringside announcer, “In this corner, we have the Hungarian Barbarian! Standing at a hulking six-foot-one and built like a brick shit-house, the other ladies in the ring better get ready for an ass-whooping like they’ve never seen!” Tünde always ignored their mocking in such a weird and trancelike way it was as though she did not hear them. That is, until a day came when some creep of a student added something new to the routine: launching a plastic cup in her direction. The cup missed, but a metal fork quickly followed and would have hit her squarely in the face if Tünde hadn’t batted it away with the fastest of reflexes. Charlie assumed she would simply go back to mopping the way she always did, but this time Tünde exploded into a burst of broken English, waving her mop in the air like a weapon. Moments like that, it was all Charlie could do not to march down the long hall to Joy’s classroom—so serene and colorful it was as though she taught at a different school altogether—and tell her it was time to begin their dream life as retired snowbirds sooner rather than later. Instead, he’d stuck to the plan and dutifully escorted the offending little bastard to the principal’s office. And when he walked back to the cafeteria to check on Tünde, he found the woman mopping the floor in that same trancelike state, as though nothing bad had happened at all.

  “Tünde?” he said now. Other than The Pig, it was the first Charlie had spoken to anyone or anything in days. As a result, his voice had a foggy, disconnected quality, one he tried to remedy when he said, “This is Charlie Webster. We used to work together at Central High School here in Providence.”

  Thus began their conversation. At first, Charlie sensed that the woman felt wary of him phoning out of the blue after so many years and at such a late hour. But he pressed on, asking how she had been and listening to an answer he did not fully grasp on account of her muddled English. At last, Charlie circled around to the point of his call: “I was wondering if you would come by, hopefully even tomorrow if you’re free, and clean the house and do some grocery shopping for me?”

  “I have more jobs tomorrow already in the line,” she said in her odd way of phrasing things. “But I need money always. I come only early if good by you?”

  Early was just fine for Charlie Webster, and he asked her to go around to the kitchen door, where he would be waiting at the appointed time. He figured that call would be the most eventful thing to happen all evening, but after he hung up the phone and walked back to the house on Arnold Street, he found this note on the door:

  Mr. Webster,

  If by any chance you made it back from Florida and are here in town and you get this, please call the number below. It is urgent!

  Todd

  Safely inside once more, Charlie checked to be certain all the doors were locked, then carried the note along with The Pig up to bed. He was no longer used to chilly nights, but since he had come home to Providence earlier than he had in years, he was faced with a long and windy March evening ahead. While he rubbed his arms beneath the pile of sheets and quilts to get warm, Charlie began speaking to Joy as was his way now. He told her about calling Tünde and the things she said when he asked how she had been doing, the specifics of which he found hard to follow but had something to do with a legal matter and her plan to move away from Providence once she saved enough money. He told her about the note from Todd, though given the muddled and weary state of his mind, Charlie could not, no matter how hard he tried, recall anyone in their lives with such a name. And then he told her how hungry he felt, how cold, how terribly he missed her, and how deeply sorry he was for so many things, but in particular, the thing that had happened during their very last fight. And as he stared into the googly eyes of The Pig, saying all that to his wife and more, at long last Charlie Webster drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  “Your head. What has happened to it?”

  Those were the first words Tünde spoke when she stepped through the back door into the kitchen and removed her scarf and wool coat. Standing before him in the gentle early-morning light, no longer wearing a bland beige cafeteria uniform, but dressed in a thick dark sweater, old jeans, and mannish boots, she looked beautiful in her own peculiar way. Her hair was still yanked back in a single braid, and she wore no makeup from what he could tell. He examined those dramatic cheekbones, the wide flat expanse of forehead, and her deep brown inset eyes. In this corner, we have the Hungarian Barbarian! those kids shouted in his memory as he studied her. As if to erase the words, Charlie said, “You look different than I remember. Very nice, I mean.”

  “Yes, well. I was fired from cafeteria. So no more eating that shit food for me. I dropped pounds as result. Now back to your head. What has happened to it?”

  Charlie reached up and touched the wound that had been there since leaving Florida. It was on its way to healing, or mostly so, except for the bruising and scabbing. “Bumped it” was the only explanation he gave.

  They were standing at opposite sides of the kitchen table, littered with the remains of his microwaved meals. Crumpled aluminum foil. Cardboard trays from frozen dinners with hardened rings of sauce clumped to the sides. An empty box of fish sticks and another box of breaded cod fillets. Charlie watched her sizing up all of it, probably calculating how long it would take to clean, until her gaze came to rest on his pill container parked by The Pig among the mess. The days of the week were marked in giant letters on that container—M, T, W, T, F, S, S—and at the start of each week, Joy used to count out his various pills and fill the compartments for him so there would be no mistakes. Charlie explained this ritual to Tünde, letting her know that, without Joy to keep things on track, he had not been taking his medication the way he was supposed to. As a result, his mind and memory were hazy at best, so he hoped she would understand and give him whatever help he needed.

  At this information, Tünde fell quiet. Charlie watched as she picked up the two fish boxes and squashed them in her large hands in preparation for the trash. The Pig watched as well. At last she spoke again, asking, “And where is your wife?”

  A big part of Charlie had counted on her broken English and what he had always sensed as her pure lack of interest in others to keep this conversation at bay, but here it was anyway. He did not want to tell her the truth about their sudden surge of fighting after so many years of marriage in their final months in Florida. He did not want to tell her about his screaming and breaking things and about Joy’s weeping out on their tiny third-floor terrace. He did not want to tell her about any of it, because it was all too unbearable to speak of ever again. And so, his only answer was to point to The Pig, who smiled at her with a mouthful of crooked teeth.

  “I am not understanding,” Tünde said, grabbing more garbage from the table and compacting it in her arms before cramming it into the trash can beneath the sink.

  “The Pig is an urn,” he said in a voice full of shame. “A temporary one. I have to get something proper, and I will. But for now I put the container with her ashes in there.”

  Tünde ceased with her garbage crunching and stood upright to look at him. “Mrs. Webster is no longer living?”

  Charlie glanced down at the cracked tiles of the kitchen floor, nodding his head, afraid tears would come the way they so often did now.

  “When?” she asked. “How?”

  He took a breath, lifted his head. “This winter. We were at our apartment in Fort Lauderdale. She fell.”

  “Fell how? Down some stairs, you mean?”

  “I don’t . . . I can’t . . . It was just one of those freak accidents. That’s all.”

  “I see.” Tünde
released a deep sigh then offered up her condolences, though in truth, it just seemed like words she was tossing out, because she moved on to cleaning again and moved quickly on to another topic as well. “You must be rich to have place there and here. I did not know security guard make so much. Art teacher either.”

  “I’d hardly call us rich. Joy’s parents left her this house a long time ago. Since we never had kids, we were able to save and buy that apartment in Florida for retirement.”

  “Sounds rich to me.”

  By then, Tünde had found a sponge and was wiping the scum of his leftovers from the table with such force that it rocked back and forth. The Pig shook back and forth too, and Charlie listened with a shiver to the rattle of remains inside. Finally, when Tünde paused a moment, she looked up and said, “I tell you again: I am sorry about your wife. She liked me. Then she didn’t like me. So no loss for me. But I am still sorry for you.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, picking up The Pig because he had grown worried about it falling and crashing to the floor, about Joy’s ashes and tiny chips and slivers of bones spraying everywhere in that once-happy kitchen.

  “That lady—your wife—she fired me from this place. Told me she did not want me cleaning here no more. That is why I felt the surprise of your call. But I need money to leave Providence so I come back.”

  Charlie said nothing, remembering that thunderbolt and that squiggly line. He had never known Joy’s doodles to have any particular code of meaning, but for the first time, he began to wonder.

  “Now,” Tünde said, “table is all clean. I help with pills, yes?”

  “Okay,” he told her.

  For the next few minutes, he watched as she studied the prescription containers on the counter, reading labels and instructions. At last, she popped open the days of the week and dumped the various medications inside. “Here,” she said. “I am no nurse so you should make certain with your doctor. But for time being, I think this is the way it is meant for you. Today is Tuesday, so start. Get water and take pills.”

  Even if he was not so good at remembering the specifics of his various medications, Charlie knew that taking them on an empty stomach would only make him nauseous. That led him to show Tünde the grocery list he had written out for her trip to Whole Foods. She examined it, then took what he offered from his wallet before pulling on her heavy wool coat and scarf and heading out the door.

  The instant she was gone, that old house on Arnold Street became unbearably quiet once more, and the quiet brought back all the loneliness and remorse Charlie had been suffering from since leaving Florida. He carried The Pig to Joy’s art room and sat at her desk, gazing around and thinking of the life they lived as snowbirds, migrating south each year to avoid the unpleasant weather. In the beginning, that life had seemed the greatest of ideas—the ocean! the pool! the sunshine! the lack of responsibilities and fixed schedules!—but it was those last two that became something of a problem for Charlie. While Joy took to their new situation with unbridled enthusiasm, signing up for book clubs and foreign film nights and sculpture classes and lectures, Charlie didn’t do much more than walk along the nearby golf course every morning and afternoon, collecting stray golf balls and stopping on occasion to stare up at the vast blue sky, so different than the wintery gray ones that hung over Providence that time of year.

  He had never been much of a joiner, but Joy nudged until at last he met up with a group of other retired men to actually play golf on the nearby course. Those old farts in their sherbet-colored shirts, plaid pants, and enormous sunglasses talked almost exclusively of their various ailments, their kids and grandkids, and the big jobs they used to have, all of which left Charlie out of the discussion. His body was in relatively good shape, thanks to a lifetime of regular push-ups and sit-ups, and Joy diligently keeping them on a healthy diet. As for children and grandchildren, back in the days before fertility was such an exact science, he and Joy had been unable to conceive, though for no clear reason as far as the specialists could tell. And when it came to career, working as a security guard was meant to be a temporary job on his way to learning some trade or perhaps going to the police academy and becoming a real officer. But then he met Joy one morning when she needed help carrying art supplies from the trunk of her car to that peaceful classroom of hers. Once they began dating, he liked the comfort of working in a place where the person he loved most in the world was right down the hall. And so, in this way, the years had passed giving him great success and comfort in his romantic relationship, though not much to speak of in the way of a family or career. Still, because he knew it made his wife happy to see him doing something, Charlie kept riding around that course on a golf cart with those men, swinging clubs and taking mulligans and sipping their bitter-tasting cocktails a few times a week. After all, wasn’t that the snowbird life they had planned and dreamed of for years, and wasn’t it better than his former one spent patrolling those insufferable derelicts at Central High?

  But as soon as he’d gotten used to his new routine it changed again. One winter’s day, a few years before, Charlie and the other retirees had just finished eighteen holes and were returning to the clubhouse when he asked why they were calling it a day when they had yet to start playing. Those men in their clown clothes and wrinkled faces had stared at him with such an odd look of concern it sent a chill right through his body. And after a few more incidents like that, Joy took him to a doctor who gave the diagnosis they both feared. That’s when the ritual of the pill container began. And that’s when Charlie went back to just walking along the golf course at the start and end of each day, collecting stray balls in so many bright happy colors. There were orange ones. There were red ones. There were blue and green and yellow and even the standard, old-fashioned white golf balls too.

  * * *

  “What are you doing here in dark?”

  Charlie looked up to see Tünde standing before him in her wool coat and scarf. She must have already deposited the groceries in the kitchen, because those big hands of hers were empty. Looking at those hands, he recalled the way she had so expertly used them to bat away that metal fork and shake that mop at those crummy kids. The memory led him to think of how often he used to long for genuine authority at that school, the sort he might have been granted if only he had gotten his act together and become a police officer back in those days. God only knew how many times he’d fantasized about whipping out a Taser or handcuffs or simply grabbing them by their concert T-shirts and shoving their pathetic faces against a locker to teach them a lesson once and for all. Instead, he was left to swallow the fury he felt watching their obnoxious behavior, since his only authorization was to escort any bad seeds to the principal’s office, which he did time after time, though no meaningful punishment was ever exacted there as far as he was concerned.

  “I’m just sitting here thinking,” he told Tünde, looking away from her hands and up at her unusual face, where those deep inset eyes watched him with fresh curiosity.

  “Maybe you don’t need light to do thinking. But you need light to do seeing when you are done and want to walk around. Otherwise, head gets bumped all over again.”

  With that, Tünde moved to the curtains and pulled them open. She was about to tug the lip of the window shade and send it flying upward too, but Charlie stopped her. “Let’s just turn on a lamp, if you don’t mind.”

  “But sun is shining outside.”

  “I know. But all that sunshine reminds me of Florida.” He paused before attempting to explain something he had only ever explained to The Pig: “What I mean to say is that there was always too much light down there. All that blue sky—so blank and open and empty above. It started to feel that way in my mind too. Does that make sense? Like that vast blue emptiness seeped into my brain somehow. The only thing of substance were those clouds. But try holding onto a cloud and see where that gets you.”

  When he was done, Tünde stared at him, keeping her face still, much like The Pig’s when Charli
e had said the same thing. At last she closed the curtains, then walked to a lamp in the corner and snapped it on. “Who knows of you being here besides me?”

  “Nobody.”

  “No family? No friends?”

  “My brother is in Detroit, so no family here in Providence. And most of our friends retired and moved away or died. I’m starting to think the people in that last category were the luckiest. Because you know what’s worse than dying? Waiting to die.”

  She considered that a moment before saying, “If your mind works so funny now, the way you say, how is it you drive home many miles from Florida?”

  Not easily, he thought, remembering the robotic voice of the GPS and so many road signs and rest areas where he stopped to ask the same question again and again: “Am I still on I-95 North?” He kept checking the entire way, because he knew if a “little mental slip” led him to turn off the interstate by mistake, it might be difficult to find his way back even with that machine barking orders from the dashboard.

  “It’s one highway and one direction. More or less. So I managed. But it took me longer than it used to. And I slept in my car to keep from getting distracted.”

  “Ask me, it is lucky you did not kill someone or kill yourself in wreck. I suggest no more driving for you.”

  These words put him in mind of the final conversation on that little third-floor terrace where he and Joy ate dinner most evenings when they were in Florida. She had just poured herself a glass of wine, just scooped a heaping portion of salad onto each of their plates to accompany the broiled fish she had made, then she smiled at Charlie in the flickering candlelight. She had been wearing her hair shorter since they’d begun spending winters in Florida, and she let more of the gray come through too, which had a way of making her appear elegant in her older years. That terrace of theirs overlooked a garden full of bougainvillea and jacaranda and palm trees, but it overlooked a small slip of the apartment complex’s parking lot as well. Down below, a truck was making an after-hours delivery. The driver blasted rap music and created quite a clatter as he slammed his door and rolled up the big one in the back before hauling out his dolly full of boxes. Charlie waited for some hiccup in the commotion before finally speaking the words he had been planning to tell his wife all day: “I don’t want this life anymore.”