On screen Judy Garland sang “Get Happy,” and a dozen men in tuxedos collapsed at her feet. She was wearing a black jacket and nylon stockings, black heels. A black fedora was tilted on her head. What she had to say was this: that our troubles were meaningless and should be cast aside, that the suffering we endured would all be forgotten in the end, would be set ablaze in rapture. A line of static scrolled up the screen, again and again and again, over and again.
Judy finished her song and you said: Guess who’s in love? My mother sat tossing out names, offering the most brutal and heartless people she could think of—Fran Palmintere, Sheila Scalia—but you kept shaking your head. You kept smiling.
Finally my mother said, “I give up.”
Me, you said, stabbing your chest with your thumb. Fucking me.
“Yeah, right,” my mother said. She snorted, she scoffed, she said, “Bullshit.” But from the way you sat there, bent at the waist and holding your head in your hands, anyone could see it was true, anyone could see you had fallen at last, anyone could see you were, as you might have called it, fucked.
“Girls,” my mother said to us, “go to your room.”
This was pointless—from our room we could hear everything. At night we lay together on our mattress and listened to every word our mother spoke into the phone to her sisters, to Michael Collins, sometimes even to our father, but we went anyway.
You talked about this girl for the longest time. Her name was Sam Keller and she was a nineteen-year-old cashier at Stop & Shop. You’d met her, you said, just like every other girl: in a bar. You’d been out with friends watching the Red Sox blow another lead and there she was, sitting across from you with a group of her friends, drinking a Shirley Temple, twirling a finger through her ponytail. Red hair, you said, I’m a sucker for red hair. You kept staring at each other. Finally you got up the nerve to ask her out on a date, and she’d agreed. On the first date you’d taken her to a Mexican place. You’d ordered the beef enchilada, she the bean burrito, and you’d sat at a small table covered with a red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloth, a table by the window looking out at the street. You’d gotten to know each other in the way that people do on first dates: she lived with her parents, devout members of a religion you’d never heard of; she was the oldest of three sisters; she was working as a cashier but what she really wanted to do was hair, beauty school, or maybe open a bed-and-breakfast. All through dinner she’d eaten with her mouth full and chattered on and on in a high, tinny voice about this bed-and-breakfast—somewhere up the Cape, or maybe New Hampshire, she said, a fireplace in every room and four-poster beds. She’d stayed at a place like that once with her grandmother and she’d wanted to stay forever.
It was like any other date, you said. You’d been bored, struggling to pay attention, stifling yawns. You’d sat scrutinizing her features: brown eyes, pale skin with a veil of tiny brown freckles, her lips chapped, her earlobes fat, her body short and thick. Altogether she was pretty but not beautiful, what you’d call fuckable. After dinner you drove her home and without much longing you’d tried to kiss her—you’d rested your arm on the seat in such a way that it was more or less around her—but she’d slipped out of the car without your making further progress. You watched her walk into her house, her ponytail swaying behind her, and then you drove off feeling sure of yourself—it seemed to you a game had begun, a game which would end with the two of you in bed together. You’d gone out a few more times—ten, to tell you the truth, you said—and each date had ended the same way, with her stepping out of your car as indifferently as she would have stepped from a taxicab. On your last date you’d gone after her, followed her to her door, grabbed her arm, but she’d broken away from you and closed the door in your face. After that you’d called and called, left messages with her mother and sisters, even with her father, but she never called you back.
Your voice was like a machine, something droning in its labor, all your words were heavy and flat and ran together. You kept saying: I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. This girl, she was average-looking, petty in her interests, dull, young, prudish, and none of this made sense to you. But I guess, you said, that’s love. You’d said you’d gone back to the Mexican place a few times, alone, and relived the date. You’d ordered the enchilada for yourself and even a burrito for her and sat there eating them both. You’d tried to remember everything you’d said, everything she said. You’d written all you could remember on cocktail napkins.
“Don’t tell me,” my mother said. “You’re carrying around a NAPKIN in your wallet! Oh JESUS!”
She talked a lot about her dog, you said. A corgie named Snuffles.
“Snuffles?” My mother said. “SNUFFLES?”
I think that’s its name, you said.
“Jesus!”
I know. It’s so fucking stupid.
“Jesus H. Christ,” my mother said. When she was baffled this was all she could think of, Christ and his various pseudonyms, derivatives, and embellishments. She laughed—a short, loud bark whose sound filled the air for a second and then died, like a popped balloon.
I know, you said, I know. It’s pathetic. You said you’d lost your latest job, tending bar, because you kept calling in sick, preferring instead to sit in your car in the parking lot of Stop & Shop, watching Sam Keller ring groceries.
“Christ,” our mother said, “on a cracker!”
For a while you fell quiet and Malinda and I listened to the television. Every business in our city, it seemed, was failing, promoting its own ruin with crazed commercials. The spokesman for a furniture store cried: EVERYTHING MUST GO!!! TOTAL LIQUIDATION CLOSEOUT!!! Upstairs the neighbors called to one another from one end of their apartment to the other, curt phrases of inquiry and accusation. “What you do with the damn scissors?” said the man. “I don’t know,” said the woman. “Get off your lazy ass and look yourself!” The woman was hugely pregnant and we were dreading the delivery of the baby, its pending squalling. Long gone were Michael Collins and his pleasant three-bedroom ranch; this was the life we were living now, apartment life, and what one did in this life was go around pretending one could hear nothing, and see nothing, and smell and taste and feel nothing, and remember nothing, nothing, nothing at all.
When you spoke again it was to ask the question Malinda and I had been waiting to hear. Hey, you said, as though the idea had just occurred to you, can I stay here a while?
A month later we couldn’t remember life before you. Our mother, having taken one of the jobs she’d circled in the want ads that day (keypuncher at an electric company, nine to five at a metal desk, entering data), turned us over to you entirely. That fall we spent more time with you than we ever had before or would again. You were our parent. You made our breakfast in the morning, drove us to school, picked us up in the afternoons. All of our problems became your problems. When our teachers sent us home with notes (three times Malinda had burst into tears for no reason at all; I spent most of the day staring out the window and often failed to respond when called on; when Malinda and I were together, at lunch and recess, we held hands and wouldn’t speak to anyone else; we tended to show up to school wearing the same clothes for several days in a row. And all of these things were considered, in the language of the school, to be “red flags”), you were the one who received and addressed them (Quit crying, you said to Malinda. Quit staring out the window, you told me. To us both you said, Change your clothes, and quit holding hands, for chrissakes).
In the evenings, while our mother went out for drinks with a man she’d met at the electric company (an executive ten years her senior, twice divorced, she always spoke of him with deference. “Mr. Greenburg,” she’d say, “is a very important man. Mr. Greenburg is a very busy man. Mr. Greenburg is Jewish, a fascinating religion. They’re very close, they’re very loyal, very mysterious, lots of tradition, the Jews”), you took us all around the city in Michelle. You had friends tending bar at a number of dark places, and one after another we stopped to
visit them. Your friends served you beers and Malinda and I sat at the bar beside you, spinning ourselves around on those vinyl-upholstered stools. We made meals out of tiny bowls of pretzels and cheese puffs, little plastic spears stacked with orange slices and waxy red cherries. We sat doing our homework as you talked to your friends (all of them blue-eyed and red-faced, Irish, looking somewhat like lesser Kennedys) about Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. You reminisced, strategized, you considered and rejected advice. “What you oughta do,” your friends said, “is go out and get another girl, go out and get yourself another girl and fuck her.” Here they stopped, looked at us, and said, “Wope. ’Scuse my French. Bang her. What you gotta do is go find yourself another girl and bang her. Clears the head.”
After the bars we always stopped for a while in the dark parking lot of Stop & Shop and sat staring at its glowing insides as though at a movie screen. On the nights Sam Keller worked we watched her standing at her register, punching its keys, we watched her chat with the other cashiers and baggers. She had a habit of making minute adjustments to her ponytail, pulling it tighter and tighter. I sat in the backseat looking at Sam but also at you, studying the changes in your expression, from rapt to wistful, from keen to plotting to hopeless. Malinda sat in front and spent the whole time fiddling with the radio. She liked the music our mother liked—Helen Reddy, Carly Simon, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand—songs regarding the thrills and disappointments of love. She knew all the words and sang them in a voice much older than her own.
Christ, you often said, how long do we have to listen to this crap?
“How long do we have to sit here?” Malinda would say. “How long are you gonna stare at your girlfriend?” This was a technique she’d picked up from our mother. They fought whenever they saw each other, and Malinda had developed a talent for Socratic argument. “Do you think you’re living up to your full potential?” our mother would say, frowning at one of Malinda’s failed math tests. “Do YOU think I’m living up to my full potential?” she’d say. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Back at the apartment we’d take our positions. Malinda went to lie in our mother’s bed and listened to the radio, indulging private fantasies of fame and fortune until she fell asleep, and I sat next to you on the couch watching whatever happened to be running on Channel 38—The Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry, Creature Double Features. You’d go through can after can of Schlitz, until you were so drunk that the distance between your dreams and the actual terms of your existence no longer embarrassed you. Me and Sam, you’d say, are gonna get married and move up the Cape. She wants to live up the Cape and open a bed-and-breakfast. What I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna buy a place up there and fix it up real nice. Then I’m gonna pick her up from work someday, a surprise, like on a Friday, and tell her to hop in the car and then drive her down there and show her. For a while you’d sit around hatching absurd plans, working the problem of Sam Keller like a rosary. There was a solution and you would find it. You were hopeful. The obstacles standing in your way (you had no money, she didn’t love you) were minor details if they occurred to you at all.
But as the night wore on your mood would turn. After a while the television had the effect of a hypnotist, and you’d come to face the truth, you’d start to talk in a droning voice. She doesn’t want me, you said, and I don’t want any other girl. It was a problem, it was a pickle, it was a bitch. If there was some solution to the whole mess, you didn’t know what it was. Fuck, you sometimes said, and clutched your head. You pressed shut your eyes, rubbed them with the heels of your palms, hot tears ran down your wrists. Fuck, you said. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I listened without answering, nodded but nothing more. If it wasn’t for you, you told me once, I don’t know what I’d fucking do. It’s like if I talk about it I feel better, it’s like talking about it is the only time I can stand it, if I don’t talk about it, I swear to fucking God I’ll explode.
As you talked you’d stroke my hair and in your mind, I could tell, you were stroking hers.
The thing is, you said, the weirdest thing is that sometimes I think all this has nothing to do with her. It’s like I was going along fine and then I got stuck, like I’m a car that broke down or something, and I just happened to have gotten stuck at a time and place where Sam was. It’s not like she’s that great, it’s not like she’s anything at all. To tell you the truth she bored the crap out of me. Something’s wrong with me, you said. What I wanna do sometimes, if you really wanna know the truth, what I wanna do sometimes is die. Often I fell asleep as you talked and woke the next morning in my own bed, with no memory of being carried there.
This went on for weeks, and all that time there was the feeling that things were strange, out of order, that the life we were living was temporary, that things couldn’t possibly go on this way for much longer. And as with us, so too the world. It was a strange season, violent and foreboding. The upstairs neighbors fought so often it was like a feature of the house, like the heat coming on. They had long, screaming battles that started with obscenity—“Fuck you, you fucking motherfucker!”—and escalated beyond, into a place where words failed and there was only screaming and crashing and the stomping of feet. You, or my mother, or both of you, would call up to them—Shut the fuck up or we’re calling the fucking cops! There’s kids down here!—and they’d quiet for a bit, but never for long. From the looks of the pregnant woman it seemed she couldn’t carry the baby another day, it seemed she would burst at any moment. Meanwhile American hostages languished in Iran, and Reagan was elected president. There was something about all of this—even an eight-year-old could tell—that was out of order, something about all of this that begged to be explained. The world had gone crazy.
In December the first snow fell and for a brief day everything was beautiful, for a brief day it seemed the world had released to us one of its bright secrets. Everyone was walking around pink-faced and happy, waving to one another, filled with something—hope or nostalgia or joy. When you dropped us off at school that morning you seemed happy. You honked Michelle’s horn twice as you drove away and when we turned you gave us an enthusiastic wave. That afternoon you picked us up from school and drove us to Friendly’s, where we sat at the counter watching the fry cooks flip burgers. We drank cup after cup of hot chocolate. One of the cooks, a skinny guy with a patch over his left eye, said to you, “Cute kids,” and you said, They’re my pride and joy, I’ll tell you, as though we were, as though we were yours.
That night, while we watched from the car, you walked through Sam Keller’s checkout lane with a bouquet of flowers. After she rang you up you gave them to her and tried to explain yourself, your suffering, but she only stared at you with a bewildered expression. As you spoke her eyes darted, she stood with her body turned away from yours, she chewed her gum. She said something, and then you left, walked out of the store with your head down and your hands in your pockets. At home you got drunk and talked about her, on and on, going over and over what was said to whom, and how, then launching the numerous rebuttals which you’d been unable to conjure in the heat of the moment. She thinks I’m too old, but I’m not, if she got to know me she’d realize we’re made for each other. You went on and on. When my mother came home, and we all sat down to leftovers, you repeated the whole story, then started it again when you’d finished, on and on until my mother reached across the table and slapped your face. “How goddamned pathetic,” she said, “are you going to get?” She was tired, she said, tired of this. Tired of you lying around scratching your crotch, bitching about Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. “Jesus fucking Christ!” she said. She walked to the living room, to the couch, and yanked off its white sheet. She brought the sheet into the kitchen and held it up to your face. “This sheet is like fucking sandpaper!” she said. “Look at this! This is pathetic! This is disgusting!” She balled up the sheet and shoved it in your face.
You pushed it away. Gimme a break, okay? you said, and hung your head in your hands. Christ, you said. In front of the kids.
“Th
e kids are fine,” she said. “The kids aren’t the ones with problems here.”
They’re not? you said. They’re not? You think the kids don’t got any problems? You think the kids are fine? Have you even met them? Do you even remember their fucking names?
And then you were both standing, screaming at each other, your faces red and an inch apart and Malinda and I were looking at each other, staring right into each other, it was one of those moments, searing hot and trembling around the edges, as in the moments just before a migraine. Everything was difficult to hear, nothing was difficult to hear, all at once something was said about your debts and your drinking, your lost charm, something was said about a girl you’d gotten pregnant last year, something was said about your heart being bullshit, an invented ailment, something you claimed for profit, something you used to get out of anything and everything you didn’t wish to endure, something was said about your changing unrecognizably from the fun-loving rebel you’d once been, about how the only reason anyone was willing to tolerate you was long gone. Concerning Malinda and me something was said about our poor diet, our lack of discipline, our staying up till midnight, the circles underneath our eyes, the deadening amount of violence we took in from the television, something was said about our clothes and knotted hair, the trouble we’d gotten into at school, something was said about Michael Collins, about our drunk father.
Elegies for the Brokenhearted Page 2