House of Sand and Fog

by Andre Dubus III

  I went through my suitcase for the least wrinkled clothes there, which was a new pair of jeans and a white blouse with horizontal pleats in the front. Just before I left I thumbed some blush onto my cheeks that were pale from no sleep. My eyes looked sunken and I brought them out with black eyeliner.

  The Legal Aid office was in the Mission District in San Francisco. I had to drive around the block a few times before I saw the window sign on the second floor of a building on 16th and Valencia. It was above one of those New Age coffee shops this city is full of, the Café Amaro. It was a half hour before lunch and all the small tables were full of west coast men and women eating food like tabouleh salads and miso spread on sesame crackers, the men skinny and clean-shaven, a lot of them with ponytails, but I was really seeing only the women as I went by, their unmade-up look, their long thick hair tied up in back with more hair, their colorful T-shirts, their breasts small, or else hanging long and heavy underneath the cotton they probably only bought from catalogs. They had handmade jewelry hanging off their ears, around their necks and on their wrists. They wore shorts or homemade skirts or loose jeans and there wasn’t a painted finger or eyelash or lip on any of them. Some of the women glanced up at me, then looked back down again, not really interested after all, and I was back in high school walking down a hallway crowded with the girls in clubs and organized activities I wasn’t interested in but felt left out anyway, my face a doughy mask.

  The receptionist upstairs had the same soft voice as the man I talked to on the phone. He wore jeans and a bright aqua silk shirt. He was my age, thirty-five or-six, and when he stood to greet me he smiled and said his name was Gary, then handed me a clipboard with a form to fill out. There was no one else in the waiting room. On the walls were posters of women’s movement marches, announcements for lesbian poetry readings, boycotts of fruit and vegetable farms in the state.

  After I filled out the personal information sheet, including my income and how I made it, the receptionist led me to a corner conference room that was small but full of daylight from all the tall windows that faced the street below. He offered me bottled water, herbal tea, or coffee. I told him I’d take as much coffee as he had, and I laughed, but I wasn’t feeling funny; really, I felt like an old magazine somebody finds wedged under a chair cushion, and I knew that’s where I wanted to be, under a huge cushion somewhere, curled up cool and private, to sleep a long time.

  AFTER LEGAL AID, I made the mistake of taking a nap at the motel. When I woke up the room was dark and there was talking and laughing coming from nearby. The air smelled like cigarette smoke, and I didn’t know where I was. Then an eighteen-wheeler started up outside, its driver revving it until something metal began to rattle. I switched on the bedside lamp and read my watch: almost nine. I lay back down and took a deep breath that made me shudder, but I refused to cry. I concentrated on a brown water stain on the ceiling, and listened to the early drinking crowd at the truck-stop bar next door, and remembered the spring before last, when both our families gave us a going-away party at my brother’s house in East Boston. Frank had taken the afternoon off from his car dealership in Revere, and he was still dressed in a gray double-breasted suit with a loud silk tie. He was big and handsome, his black hair moussed back. There were forty or fifty people there, just relatives and in-laws, and they filled all three floors of my brother’s house. It was a party with no cocktails or beer—my mother-in-law, mother, and aunts made sure of that—not even red wine to go with the veal and sausages and spaghetti. Most of the older women stayed in the kitchen, where they warmed the food and kept telling each other the right way to cook. All the little kids were on the first floor, where the Ping-Pong table and dartboard were, and because it was a Saturday in March, most of the uncles and guy cousins sat in the family room watching basketball on Frank’s wide-screen TV. One or two were out on the second-floor deck with Nick, wanting to hear about the new job. I was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with Jeannie, sipping a coffee before dinner, my eyes on Nick out on the deck. I could see the huge Mystic Bridge behind him, the gray clouds, the skyscrapers of Boston. We were a few days from spring and it was warm enough that I didn’t wear a coat. My new husband was standing there in a bright yellow cashmere sweater and black jeans, smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash into his Coke can. He was nodding his head at something one of his cousins was saying, and I felt so much love for him right then my eyes filled up and Jeannie put her hand on my arm and asked what’s wrong, K? What’s the matter?

  Later, Frank led everyone out of the house to the driveway and the shiny red Bonneville. There was a wide white ribbon running from the front bumper over the roof and into the trunk. And somebody had taped to the driver’s window a huge card both families had signed, though I knew the car was from Frank, a low-mileage sales bonus he usually took for himself but this year gave to us. One of the uncles videotaped us climbing inside, then backing out for a test drive. We didn’t want a big American car, though; we were planning to buy something small. But on the drive west we kept it on cruise control the whole way and steered with two fingers. When we weren’t talking, we stretched out and played cassettes till one of us needed to crawl into the backseat and lie on the maroon upholstery with a pillow and blanket and go to sleep.

  I got up off the motel bed and washed my face with cold water and soap in the bathroom. I had cried more in the last eight months than in the rest of my life and I had to stop it because it seemed like the more I cried the less I did to change things, or to even avoid the shit coming at me. My new lawyer couldn’t quite understand that, why I threw away all that mail from the county tax office without opening it. I liked her right away, I think because she wasn’t wearing any shoes, just round glasses, a white blouse, and gray slacks over bare feet. She poured herself a cup of coffee, then sat down a chair away from me with her legal pad and pencil. She asked me to tell her everything, which I did, including that I already went to the county tax office in Redwood City and signed a statement saying we’d never run a business from our house, so why the five-hundred-thirty-dollar business tax?

  “Five hundred dollars? They evicted you from your house for that?”

  “You got it.” I lit a cigarette, enjoying my lawyer’s shock at this. She asked where my husband and I were staying, and I looked down at the table, at a worm of a cigarette burn. “He’s not in the picture anymore.” I reached for a seashell ashtray. “I’m booked in a motel in San Bruno.”

  She paused a second and made a straight line with her lips like she was sorry to hear that. Then she asked me a bunch of questions about my inherited ownership. Was there a devise in my father’s will? Was it completely paid for? Who was the bank? Do you have a copy of your signed statement to the county tax office? That’s what she wanted more than anything, and I said I could get one to her, though I had no idea where it was. After all her questions she stood and took off her glasses and smiled. “First thing we have to do is keep them from selling your home. Then we get it back. And they can pay your motel bill, too.” She checked the form I’d filled out to make sure she had my room number, then she shook my hand and said not to worry, call her tomorrow late afternoon.

  I turned on the TV and sat at the foot of the bed, but still there was only sound, a commercial for a diet drink. I heard a woman laugh out in the parking lot, and I wondered if this truck stop was like some back East: cold beer and live music in the bar, hot steak and eggs in the diner, hookers for the rooms upstairs. I sat there and listened to the beginning of some TV show about cops and DAs and the streets of New York City. Outside my window was the twangy beat of another country band playing next door, and for the fortieth time since last January I looked at the telephone and tried not to call someone back home.

  For a long time my mother would call every Sunday afternoon to catch us up on things, but really to see how we were. The first few Sundays after Nick left, when I answered the phone and heard her voice, I had to hold my hand to my mouth sometimes to keep fr
om crying. But then I’d start lying about how well he was doing at his new job. I told her how his office was on the seventeenth floor of an earthquake-proof building overlooking San Francisco, and that he was making good money and would probably get promoted in no time. This used to be true.

  Sometimes she would want to talk to him and I’d say he was taking a nap and I didn’t want to wake him up, or else he was working (she never liked hearing that, not on a Sunday), or he was playing basketball with some guys from his office. She seemed to like hearing that the most, that Nick was out making friends and doing something healthy.

  “What about you, K? Have you made new friends, too?”

  “Yeah,” I’d say. “I get together with some of the wives and we shop and, you know, do things like that.” There’d be silence on her end. “And there’s one girl, Ma. She’s my age and kind of overweight. She lives nearby and we go jogging together four nights a week.”

  That helped, a lie about making friends and taking care of myself. As soon as she seemed satisfied with my news, she’d go on about Frank and my nephews, their house, her thinning hair, the gambling trip to Atlantic City her two sisters were planning. But behind all this talk was the question she‘d never ask: have you been going to those recovery groups out there, K? And that was one lie I couldn’t pull off, anyway. So instead she would finish her calls by asking me the other true question stuck inside her like something she could only ease out by hearing me finally give the right answer:

  “When do you think you two will have children, K?”

  And for once in our calls I could tell the truth: “As soon as I can talk Nick into it, Mom.” Which was true when Nicky still lived with me. Saying this long after he’d been gone though, my voice sounded hollow.

  ONLY THREE YEARS ago we were both into our second week at the program, and we had the same double dose—coke and alcohol—but the day before in Group, Nick had owned up to a third, porno. A lot of us couldn’t accept this as a real addiction, but Larry told us to pipe down and “hear” Nick. That wasn’t hard for me to do because even then, Nick’s body still coming off the ten-day binge of lines and beer and Southern Comfort that got him into an emergency room then the program, his fingers always trembling while he smoked, I couldn’t not look at him, at those hard blue eyes, at his thick black hair and pale face with pimple scars on the cheeks. His arms and legs were skinny, and he had a belly that showed more when he sat down, but all I ever wanted to do from the start was to feel my whole wasted body up against Nicky Lazaro’s.

  Whenever he talked he threw me because his voice was so deep and didn’t go with his boy-look, and also, he spoke well, like he was educated or else read a lot of books. He said it was always worse when he was trying to stay straight, that instead of drinking or doing lines he’d be doing dirty movies. Sometimes he even called in sick at work and he’d rent a half-dozen hard-core tapes and spend hours and hours with them.

  “Hours?” I said, and I started to laugh, though I felt pretty disgusted. Larry cut me off and said how “inappropriate” remarks like that were in Group. I looked at Nick. He was studying the burning cigarette in his hand like he wasn’t part of this conversation at all. Then he glanced at me, his eyes dark and a little shiny, and my cheeks got hot and I had to look away.

  On visitors’ day, while I was waiting for my brother and his wife, I kept watching Nick on the other side of the room sitting straight across from his parents, who reminded me of my own, though Dad was dead and Ma couldn’t face seeing me anymore. Sometimes he’d glance in my direction and I’d look away. All around us were visiting families in plastic chairs around fold-out tables, some of them hardly looking into each other’s eyes, others loud, telling stories and jokes like they were relieved everything had only come to this, a Get Well helium balloon floating in the haze of cigarette smoke above them.

  But I felt grateful just to be sitting there. In the two weeks I’d been at the program, the lining inside my nostrils had already stopped bleeding, I hadn’t drunk anything stronger than coffee, and the only stranger I would wake up to was me. But more than that, I had already stopped wanting what I’d been craving off and on since I was fifteen, for Death to come take me the way the wind does a dried leaf out on its limb.

  QUITE EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, AS I LIE SLEEPING UPON THE CARPET near the open sliding screen, my son touches my shoulder and wakes me to a glass of hot tea and four cubes of sugar. Outdoors, in the trees below us, a bird calls, but the sky is gray and the air through the screen is cool.

  “Bawbaw-jahn. Man goh khordam. I am sorry.”

  My son is already dressed in shorts and T-shirt, his hair dry, but combed. I sit up and take the tea and drink it without sugar. I look through the screen at the small concrete terrace outside, and I hear my Esmail sit upon the carpet beside me.

  “I know you work very hard, Bawbaw. All the days and almost all the nights of the week.”

  I look at my son, at his brown eyes that on a woman would be beautiful, and in Farsi I thank him for his apology and for the tea, and I tell to him he must begin preparing his room for moving.

  Today, on the freeway crew of garbage soldiers, we work the southbound lanes of Route 101 where it runs along the tall evergreen trees of the Golden Gate Recreational Area. I wear my new blue hat all the day long but of course the morning fog never lifts and I wish for a light sweater. At the lunch break I eat quickly beside Tran, then rise to speak with Torez as he sits behind the wheel of his truck, the door open very wide, as he studies one of those odd crossword grids in the newspaper. I stand there a moment until it becomes clear to me I am standing at attention. I discipline myself to relax my shoulders and speak.

  “After today I will no longer be working here, Mr. Torez.”

  He completes writing a word with his pencil, then he looks up and says: “You tell the office, Coronel?”

  “No.”

  “So why tell me, man?” He regards his newspaper. “You know another word for hurricane?”

  I return to Tran and my tea and I have a wish to tell the Vietnamese goodbye, but when I point to my chest then to the road, he smiles and nods his head as if I were telling to him a very old and humorous story.

  And now it is evening at the convenience store and my legs are heavy, my eyes are beginning to water from fatigue, but I am filled with cheer as I work my very last shift. Rico, the young man working beside me, has always possessed the habit of chewing gum which on other evenings bothered me a great deal—that nasty sound it makes in the mouth—but tonight this is not the case; none of the usual irritants have their power over me, not the bright fluorescent lighting over all the shelves of overpriced boxed and canned food; not the university students who enter with their stupid smiles after drinking too much beer to purchase chocolate bars and cigarettes; not even when people hand to me a gasoline credit card and I have to use the cumbersome machine beneath the magazine display rack; and even those kaseef and dirty magazines of naked women on their covers, which I have always despised having to touch or sell, even they cannot upset me as they have so many times before. Because this I know of life’s difficult times: there is always a time for them to begin and a time for them to end, and the man who knows this knows he must thank God for each day he has suffered because that is always one day closer to the sun, the real sun.

  But many nights after many long days in America, I have forgotten God and thought only of my troubles, of the manner of jobs I was forced to work here, jobs I would not have assigned a soldier under me back in my old life. Here I have worked in a tomato cannery, an auto wash, a furniture warehouse, a parking lot, two gasoline stations, and finally the highway department and this convenience store. Yes, I have earned enough to slow our spending, but each check cashed felt to me like one less bone and muscle in my back, those a man needs in order to stand straight.

  My young colleague and I close the store promptly at one in the morning. We lock the evening’s receipts into the small safe in the rear office, and w
e post our inventory sheet for the day gentleman before removing our paychecks from the coin drawer of the register. We lock the doors and walk beneath the light over the gasoline pumps to our vehicles, and to the young man I only say, “Good night, Rico,” nothing more, and as I drive my Buick Regal down San Pablo Avenue beneath the streetlights so early in the morning, my body feels sewn into the car seat with tiredness, but I nod five times to the east and thank God, my mouth beginning to tremble, for the freedom He has granted me once again, for the return of the dignity I was beginning to believe I would never recover.

  FRIDAY WAS THE BEST AND WORST DAY SO FAR. IT WAS BEST BECAUSE I worked it straight through, cleaning my normal residential plus the reservoir house job and the pediatric office I’d skipped the day before. There was a fog bank pushing in from the beaches and on another day it could’ve sent me over the edge, the way it covers the town in gray, but Friday I just tuned it out and cleaned with more energy than I’d had in a long time.

  My customers leave me a key in their mailbox or under a rock on their lawn, which means no one is ever there except for a dog or cat, and I can work alone and fast, chewing gum and listening to the Walkman I keep clipped to my shorts; Nick’s old tapes mostly, loud fast rock that keeps me moving at a good pace and keeps me from thinking too much. When I woke up early Friday morning at the El Rancho, I made up my mind I was going to stop wallowing in my problem and start concentrating on the solution instead. I had to turn it over to Connie Walsh. She was my lawyer. By the time I was dressed, I’d convinced myself I’d hear something positive by the end of the day about getting my house back. So instead of booking my room through the weekend, I went down to the office and paid another thirty-one dollars for Friday night only.