Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  You blew smoke out your nose, as if some sign of disapproval. I gotta fix Bill’s car tomorrow, you said. Then me and him are going up the beach.

  “Oh,” I said, the memory of what we had done to you, and you had done to us, flashing through me. “I heard there’s a party up there somewhere.” The kind of lie I was prone to telling in those days, anything to keep up a conversation.

  Yeah, you said. Well, see ya. You took a last drag of your cigarette, tossed it down into the parking lot. Then you belched long and loud, and without another word walked back inside, through the freezer and cutting room, out the swinging doors with their circular plastic windows, whistling all the while a tune that was familiar but hard to place, the notes sent off slow and halfhearted, just shivering in the air, and it took me a moment to recall the lyrics—I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener, that is what I’d really like to be—this song trailing you all the way out of the store, Jesus, Elwood, what a farewell, what an exit. It was the last time I ever saw you. Because the next morning, when you went to fix Bill’s gas tank, which had a leak and which was, he assured you, bone dry (“Bone fucking dry,” he kept saying afterward, crying at the funeral, in bars and stores and the bank and post office and wherever else he ran into people, “I swear to God it was bone fucking dry”), when you got on your back and squirmed underneath the car and touched your soldering iron to the tank it exploded, it killed you.

  “Jesus,” people said when they heard the news, “that dumb bastard.”

  At the wake, on a table draped in white cloth, stood a gold-framed picture of you, from your last year of school. In the picture you were staring off, openmouthed, your dark eyebrows pushed together in an expression of strained effort, as if you were trying to recall someone’s name, or multiply in your head. Those pictures had, I remembered, been taken in the gymnasium, and we had stood in long lines waiting for our turns in front of the camera. When we finally got to the front of the line, and were seated on a wooden stool in front of a marbled blue backdrop, our friends had stood next to us saying things to make us laugh, and I imagine as your picture was taken someone had told a joke you didn’t get, and the photographer, hating his job, having grown weary of waiting, had snapped the photo in the second before the joke’s intentions announced themselves to you, the second before you smiled.

  At the funeral the priest spoke of you, and your death, in somewhat surprising terms. “Glory be to God!” he said. “One of the Lord’s gentlest lambs has returned to his shepherd!” Your mother sat with her head turned toward the window, staring off as always. She fingered a rosary.

  After the burial people stood around saying how pointless your death was, how stupid. We did a poor job of mourning you. Mostly we spoke of the last time we saw you. (The last time I saw Elwood was at the Laundromat, he was sitting there eating sardines and the smell was so bad I almost puked…I saw him just a couple days ago, I was walking to work and he was driving around and he honked at me and he yelled out the window, What’s up, motherfucker!…I saw him in the library just sitting in one of those big-ass chairs, and I said what’s up and he said he was just there for the air-conditioning…) The nature of our talk had more to do with fear—with the feeling that death had swept down and taken you and we’d been standing right there, more or less right next to you, it might just as well have been us—than with grief. “That dumb bastard,” people kept saying, looking down, their hands stuffed in their pockets. “That dumb fuck.”

  At no time did anyone mention that there was something more to be considered, that factoring into your death was not only a large measure of stupidity but also of trust, of faith. To take a friend at his word, to position oneself on one’s back, in the dark, in service to that friend, to do this knowing that if your friend was wrong, if the tank wasn’t completely dry, it meant your life—there was something sadly noble about this, something beautiful. But we were too small to mention it.

  A week later I went off to college and for a long time I didn’t think about you. Then in my junior year I came across your name in a French literature class, given to a hapless, doomed character much like yourself. Le Poer, a variation of le pauvre: the pathetic, the pitiable, the poor. By then I had seen wealth and had realized at last that we were poor. You, me, that whole miserable city, that godawful place, bleak and ugly as hell, we were all poor. We could hardly be otherwise. Our city was a landlocked settlement that had failed long ago, that had built its factories—dozens of them, red brick, leaning smokestacks rising up from their rooftops—without taking into account its lack of waterways and the added cost of transportation this made necessary, all of its exports—wire, textiles—having to be carted out by horse, and so it was only a matter of time before these factories folded to their competitors, the city folding soon after. And of our ancestors, the people who chose to stay behind after the factories shut down, what could be said of them except that they were foolish, stubborn, hopelessly stupid, what could be said of them except that they were poor? By the time we came along, generations of decay later, the place was falling down, a third of its population jobless and walking the streets, drunks and drug addicts, crippled veterans, raving lunatics. We were poor, our lives filled with the stupid things that poor people did, the brutalities we committed against each other, the violence, the petty victories we claimed over one another, crabs topping each other in a basket instead of trying to climb out of that basket; the desperate, impulsive lurches we made at love, no matter what the cost to those around us or how fleeting we knew that love would be; the indifference; all that we drank and smoked, the serums we shot into our veins; the hours we spent at grueling, mind-numbing jobs, one day after another, how, in order to survive these jobs, we scraped our minds clean like plates, cleared them of all thought; our prayers, if we prayed at all, sent off in rages, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus goddamned Christ. We were poor.

  There wasn’t much chance for you (or Bill, who killed himself a few years after your death) to turn out much differently than you did, the pathetic, the pitiable, the poor. In order to turn out any differently one had to leave that place. One was, for a time, glad to do it, one was free—free!—one felt oneself weightless. And yet something about being poor stayed with a person and managed to trouble that person’s new life no matter how far away she traveled. If a once-poor person, say, was taken to a dinner party, and the party’s host picked up a small bell and rang it, and if, theoretically, at the sound of this bell a servant came into the room dressed in a humiliating outfit, then retreated, then reappeared producing whatever it was that the host required, perhaps a sugar spoon, the once-poor person would most likely have to excuse herself from the table on the pretense of needing air, would most likely walk back through the kitchen and sit for a long time, an unreasonably long time, on the plastic bucket being used to prop open the kitchen door, because the once-poor person—myself, yes—would have just then realized how absurd it was, the party she was at, the life she was trying to live, how miserably out of place she was there. To be poor, it marked a person, it cast its shadow across the whole of her life.

  No, there was no getting away from that place, one always returned and returned always. How strange it was to realize that everyone I had known, everything I had seen and done, was still with me. How closely, after all, we were bound together. Years later, when visiting the graves of my family, I remembered that you had been buried in the same cemetery, and went looking for you. I tried to remember which plot was yours. In poor cemeteries there are no large markers by which to orient oneself—no statues rising up to testify to the greatness of a single lost life—and it took me a long time to find it. I walked up and down the rows, reading the names, Santangelo, Cosentino, Stephanopoulos, and the biblical scraps beneath them (Come unto me, I will give you rest…I will fear no evil…The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want), all of the headstones more or less the same, many of them leaning and seemingly forgotten. Only the occasional grave showed any evidence of pilgrimage, a tin
y flag, a plastic bouquet speared in the soil. The ground was soaked from the morning’s rain, little puddles everywhere. My shoes were so waterlogged that I had to take them off. I walked barefoot through the green grass.

  When I finally found your grave, along with a few of your relations, clustered together near the cemetery’s back fence, I saw that I had circled back almost exactly to the place where I had started, that your family had been laid to rest very close to mine. Soon enough, I thought, there would be almost no difference between us. I stood for a long time before your headstone, inscribed with your full name, Elwood Eugene LePoer, and beneath it something your mother must have chosen, the last, false hope of the long-suffering: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  Elegy for

  Carson Washington

  (1972–1993)

  Fat and black, fat and black, did I have any goddamn idea, you asked, what it meant to be fat, to be black, any goddamn idea what a drag it was sometimes, what a lack, everyone else going around getting pats on the back and what you got, right in the face, was a slap, all your life alone dancing with a hat rack, what a kick in the ass it was, what a rip in the slacks, to be fat and black indeed.

  This was 1990, your first and only year of college. You were eighteen. You had come to the state university (that fine, fine place conceived and built and haunted by a president, with its green lawns, its flower beds and cherry trees, its magnificent brick buildings, the money so thick there you could smell it in the air like a blossoming crop) on scholarship from your dusty hometown, population nine hundred, where you lived with your mother and father and sister and her infant son in a four-room cinderblock house. Your father worked in the fields—tobacco, hay—your mother and sister part-time at the county nursing home, and the same sort of life was expected for you. Until you’d gone and shown a talent for school, until the teachers had made a fuss over you and sent you off to that place where we met, roommates, and lived together for a time.

  The first thing you ever said to me was: That all you got? A phrase of assessment and disapproval. I was standing sweat-soaked in the doorway of our room, holding a blue duffel bag. You had already arrived and made up the bed by the window with bright pink sheets, you had already tuned your wood-paneled thirteen-inch television set to one of the few channels that came in. Casablanca was playing. Humphrey Bogart slouched over a drink.

  All you got’s a duffel bag, for real?

  “I took the train,” I said. “I didn’t want to carry too much.” I stood there staring. You were the fattest person I had ever seen, so fat I wondered how you moved. Two suitcases lay open on your bed and you were busy fussing with their contents, shaking out clothes and putting them on hangers. You wore a purple smock-like dress that snapped up the front, and your head was wrapped in a purple scarf.

  Boy, you said, you took the train? Your parents didn’t even drop you off or nothing? You shook your head and laughed, like I was some kind of joke. You looked me over, up and down and up again, and when our eyes met I saw that yours were strange, different from any I’d seen before, amber-colored and gleaming, shot through with flecks of yellow.

  Then—having reached a decision about me, having seen in my eyes no kind of threat or even resistance—you started in talking like we’d known each other all our lives. You just missed Daddy and Sharon and Regis, you said. Momma stayed home ’cause she on shift at the nursing home. She and Sharon work all day wiping asses down at the county home and they figured me too but I said I got better things to do than wipe an ass, thank you very much, so here I am. Your talk was quick, high-pitched. You rifled through one suitcase, then the other, until you found what you were looking for—a plastic bag full of snapshots and a roll of tape. You started taping the pictures to the wall over your bed. This is the only picture anyone have of my father, Merriweather Washington, you said. You held up a three-by-five snapshot of a short, stout man standing with his arms crossed, seething and shirtless, in front of an old rust-colored Mercury. The only picture of him in the world except his driver’s license. Otherwise he hate to take a picture. Why I’m hanging it up I don’t really know. It’s not like we get along so good. You should see his temper. Break a dish and look out, spill something and look out. One time he even threw a cat out the window. The only person he got any patience with is Regis. Here you produced a series of wallet-sized photos of your sister’s baby, fat and smiling, fat and smiling, fat and smiling. This is my sister’s kid. We had all kinds of pictures done. Regis in sailor suits, Regis in a ball uniform. You held them up. Regis in his christening gown. Regis butt naked.

  “He’s cute,” I said. I moved to get a closer look, dropped my bag. That smile!

  He’s a pain in the ass is what he is, you said. Going around the house turning everything upside down, screaming, like it wasn’t a small enough house to begin with before he came along, let me tell you. You taped up the pictures of Regis in a star pattern. The walls were cinderblock, painted white, the kind of walls you wanted to cover over with something, but when you did the effort looked sad.

  You held up another picture, a beautiful girl with a sly smile, with long, wild hair like the tentacles of a squid. Here’s his mother, you said, my sister Sharon. She the dumbest thing on two legs if you want the truth. Dropped out of high school. All she does all day is sit watching TV in some kind of trance, twirling her hair around her finger, you should see her sitting there with her mouth open, ten hornets could fly in there she wouldn’t even notice. You turned Sharon’s picture and looked at it for a moment, then put it back in your bag. I don’t need her looking at me all the time, you said. Staring over my shoulder, no thank you.

  You kept talking. On and on about your family, immediate and extended, taping up their pictures. Your father had thirteen siblings and you named them all, named their spouses and children, a biblical litany of names. In fact one of them was named Jesus. Jerome, Penny, Louisa, Sherman, you said. I stretched out on the bed and used my bag for a pillow, half listening to you and half wondering what I had gotten myself into, what I could have possibly been thinking when I’d left the house that morning and walked in the dark to the train station, past the bars on Shrewsbury Street with their signs still lit, with muffled music still coming from their insides; past the diners glowing yellow, their patrons slumped on their stools and staring down into their coffee mugs, and finally the train station itself, at five-thirty in the morning no less, a depository of lost souls, someone in blue coveralls mopping in a corner, some old man in a dirty trench coat bent over with his arm deep up the bowels of a vending machine, making desperate straining noises. All summer I’d wondered whether I’d leave home or not, and had more or less decided against it. But then again I’d taken note of the train schedule, so that was something. Up to the last minute, when I boarded, I was going back and forth. Then I got on and settled in, the train lurched, and it was done. I watched that wretched falling-down city—its brick factories with their crumbling smokestacks, their busted-out windows—pass by and felt, surprisingly, nothing. When we passed my neighborhood I thought how my mother and her boyfriend were still sleeping and wouldn’t wake up, wouldn’t know I was gone, until past noon.

  When I’d finally stepped off the train it was into some southern translation of the life I knew—leaning houses with peeling paint and burned-out lawns, sagging porches, rusted cars parked helter-skelter in the front yard, kids going around shirtless and barefoot. But as I walked toward the campus the buildings straightened up, grew larger and more polished, their lawns filled out, there were flowers spilling out of window boxes, there were mailboxes painted to resemble the houses whose mail they stood to collect, there were waxed cars gleaming in driveways. And then, finally, there was the campus itself, every leaf, every blade of grass bright and smacking, impeccable, people going around in blue blazers and white pants and tasseled loafers, blond people walking in large groups talking riotously, laughing, one of them exclaiming to another, “We used
to summer there!” and all up the brick walkways, in my T-shirt and jeans and flip-flops I dragged my bag behind me, having long since given up carrying it on my back, then in front of me like a corpse, sweating and exhausted I dragged myself to the dorm, stopping now and then to consult a small campus map I kept unfolding and then folding and then unfolding again, as if looking at it would explain what I’d done, what I’d been thinking that morning when I left home. The last light was in the sky, pink and violet, and it was too late to go back.

  Now here I was, arrived at last, having done something significant for the first time in my life, but it didn’t matter. However far I had traveled and what I had left behind was of no significance in that room, which was yours from the start, entirely. You were still talking. My second cousin, you said, hardly any blood between us, she went up to Washington with a boyfriend and got herself killed in a parking lot ’cause she got mugged and wouldn’t give up her purse, which was ugly, you ask me, you wouldn’t see me getting killed for no patchwork piece of shit purse like that, I’d be standing on a corner trying to give it away. You held up a picture of the dead girl, pigtailed and smiling, and shook your head. No kind of sense, you said. And here’s Emily who died in her crib, poor thing. And here’s a picture of Uncle Clarence who died of natural causes at ninety-four, a pervert if you ever met one. And here’s Aunt Fanny and Aunt Florence, dead and also dead, twins, one of them or the other, I can’t remember, was working in the fields and got struck by lightning, it came out of the ground and up through her leg and out her shoulder, and from then on she could speak French, nobody knows how come. You were taping all of the dead people some distance above the others, as though the dead were floating in heaven. Here’s a kid from my high school, Wallace Hudgins, dead of a heart defect right in the middle of a basketball game, you said, and taped him up—skinny and bucktoothed, red-haired, freckled—off to the right of your family, in a separate heaven for white people. Pathetic, you said.