Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

“Tell me about the house you grew up in,” I’d say.

  “It wasn’t so much of a house as a tent, with additional rooms made from cardboard. It burned down.”

  “Well, tell me about your family, then.”

  “My mother is dead,” they’d say. “My father is dead also. My uncle brought me here but he works three jobs and I never see him.”

  I’d shift gears, desperately. “What do you like most about living in the United States?”

  “Nothing,” they said. “We dislike it here.”

  “Nothing at all? You don’t like even one little thing?”

  “We dislike the houses, the way everyone is shut away in small compartments and there is no community. We dislike the way everyone goes around in cars. The loneliness.”

  “If you had to,” I said, “if there were a gun pointed to your head, could you name something you don’t mind so much?”

  “There are guns?” they said. “We were told there wouldn’t be any guns in the schools here.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I was only using an expression.”

  “What kind of expression is this?”

  “Let’s move on,” I said. “What do you want to do in the future?”

  “Return home,” they said. “Leave here and return home.”

  I spent half of my time worrying I’d be fired, and the other half relaxed in the sad knowledge that I couldn’t be let go—the school was understaffed to begin with. I considered calling in sick to work on a regular basis, like all of the other teachers. If you wanted to last at a job like that, they told me, you had to pace yourself, and pacing yourself meant calling in sick to school every thirteen days. We had enough sick and personal days in our contract, they said, to do that, and only a fool would let those days go by unused. “Take the day off,” they said. “Take yourself to a movie.”

  Most days after school I returned to my apartment and collapsed on the couch. Being around other people had always taxed me, and the climate at school was a particular strain. All afternoon I’d drift in and out of sleep. Then the sun would go down and the apartment would grow dark, and I’d get up and make myself something to eat, turn on the television and sit in its glow. Amidst its chatter I’d start preparing for the next day. Every night I told myself that I’d do better the following day—things were bound to turn, I believed—but by February I’d begun having my doubts. When I sat down to correct quizzes they were more often than not left blank, but for desperate little notes at the top. “Dear Ms. Murphy,” they said, “I did not study for this ’cuz I got in a wicked bad fight with my boyfriend. Sorry.” Or, “My friend was trying to kill himself and I was up all night trying to get him not to do it. Sorry.” Or sometimes, “Dear Miz Murphy, I don’t feel like doing this test, sorry but sometimes you just gotta say fuck it. Excuse my French.” I gave them all zeros, then wondered how many zeroes I could reasonably give out. Would I keep on failing everyone? Could I fail the whole class? At a certain point, wasn’t their failure my fault?

  Those days I was too much alone. I’d gone on a couple of dates, but they hadn’t worked out. Once I went to a Chinese restaurant with a cardigan-wearing graduate student who seemed perfectly normal (he was studying to be a civil engineer) until he revealed that he kept three pet snakes at home and enjoyed feeding them mice. With a dumpling he illustrated the snakes’ manner of devouring mice—he opened his mouth wide and inhaled the dumpling right off the table. But he wasn’t really doing it justice, he said. To get the full effect, I’d have to see it in person. Did I want to come home with him and feed the snakes, did I want to do it right now?

  For a few weeks I dated an art teacher from the elementary school. Each time we met he wore a blue sweatshirt with its hood pulled up and cinched around his face. I couldn’t see his hair, his neck, his ears, the shape of his head. It had been snowing when we’d met, and the hood had made sense, but by the third date it had begun to bother me. “What’s your hair like?” I asked. And he informed me that he never took off his sweatshirt in front of another person. Ever.

  Sometimes in the evenings I watched Les Witherspoon’s cable program, All God’s Children. It was a habit I was ashamed of—something I likened to watching pornography—and each time I did it, I swore I’d never do it again. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Les was very compelling, very theatrical. He had a habit of raising his fist in the air and throwing his head back in agony or ecstasy, as the case dictated. He liked to describe, at great length, the suffering all around us—after which he named God as the simple and universal solution. “The babies crying with their hungry bellies and no mother to feed them,” he cried, “and the children being pushed around by the devil who’s taken over their parents, and the teenagers lost to drugs, and pregnancy, and the factory workers hurting after a long day on the job, making their way to a second job, and the elderly folks suffering in their failing bodies, to all of you I say that God is with you, He is with you, lo, He is with you always.” I had to admit that Les was appealing. I’d try to tune him out but I couldn’t, entirely, so resounding was his grief. He could have played Hamlet in a community theater.

  Les’s business was the end of the world, and business was good. “It is coming,” he always said, “it is coming. And in preparation one must dedicate oneself in mind, body, and spirit to the second coming of the Lord and the end of life as we know it. One must be prepared for the long journey that stands between this life and the next. One must, in particular, invest in one’s church, for the church will be what saves you in the end. Our church,” Les said, “has bought a hundred acres of land on the outskirts of town, on a high hill, our church is making preparations to break ground for a newer, bigger church, one that will have the capacity to house all of its members through the great trial. This new church is in the works, it is being designed and conceived at this very moment, just as soon as the money is raised we will break ground and believe me, brothers and sisters, will you ever be glad you were smart for once, you took the time to prepare in advance…this church will be a fortress…the mind can hardly conceive of the planning that’s being undertaken…the food and water…the heaters, coolers, the medicine, the water purification system, the skilled laborers. It is the poor,” Les says, “that are hit hardest and fall first in times of trial, and so it is the poor who must take pains now, who must prepare, and what better corner of the world than this one, this one right here, what better time than now…”

  After Les’s sermon you hosted a short segment entitled “Margaret’s Moment.” From the church’s day care center, you interviewed a small child about the changes the church had brought to his life.

  This is Timmy, you said in your new southern drawl. And he’s four years old. Say hello, Timmy.

  And Timmy would wave shyly.

  Can you tell people about what you used to do during the day, before you came to school with us?

  “Watch TV,” said Timmy.

  And was there someone to take care of you, if you needed something?

  “No,” he said. “My mom had to work.”

  So you were alone all day? you said.

  Timmy nodded.

  Then you’d turn to the camera. Now, through our ministries, Timmy receives the loving care that all of God’s children deserve. Education, nutrition, and good old-fashioned TLC. You encouraged viewers to send money, to volunteer, to pray for the children. You were made for the camera—yours was the kind of perfect beauty that made people believe in God’s goodness. People called in record numbers to support “Margaret’s Moment” and the church made almost twice as much as it had before. Your lifelong dream of being on screen had finally been fulfilled. You had found your calling.

  When people called to donate you spoke to them on the air. They always told you how beautiful you were, what an inspiration, how you’d changed their outlook on life. You were modest in your replies. Oh, it’s not me, you said. It’s just the good Lord working through me.

  Sometimes I amused myself
by playing out little scenes in my mind. I imagined calling in to pledge a large sum, and being put on the air. “Why hello, Margaret,” I’d say. And your brow would wrinkle, a crack would form in your beatific demeanor. “I’m just calling to support your work with children,” I’d say. “It’s nice to see someone care so selflessly for children. It is. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

  You sound familiar, you’d say. Are you a church member? Do I know you?

  “No,” I’d say. “We’ve never met.”

  The longer we went without speaking, the stranger you appeared to me. At times, you didn’t seem like my mother at all. At times it was as if the real and the imaginary had been crossed—it seemed to me that Margaret Witherspoon, the southern philanthropist, was and always had been the real you. The mother I’d known—the life we’d lived together with Malinda—had begun to seem like something imagined, some television program I’d grown up watching, long since canceled.

  What a surprise it was, then, when the next summer Malinda showed up at my door holding a baby on her hip. “Can I crash here?” she said casually. As if she hadn’t been missing for years, as if appearing out of nowhere with a baby was an everyday event. I stood in the doorway, stunned, looking back and forth between Malinda and the child. Malinda had grown her hair out, and it was black again—she looked like her old self. The child she held—a boy in overalls with nothing beneath them—was fat, with an enormous round face and big brown eyes. His curly hair stood out from his head as if he’d been shocked. In his arms he clutched a stuffed dog with a missing ear.

  “Who’s this?” I said.

  “This is Michael.”

  I stood staring at him. In all the time I’d imagined Malinda—where she was, what she was doing—I had never once imagined her with a child. “Here,” she said, handing him to me. “You have a nephew. Congratulations.”

  I had never held a baby before so I held him away from me, at eye level. We stared at each other. “He’s not a bomb,” Malinda said. I held him against me and looked at his face, searching for traces of anyone in our family. But he looked nothing like us. He looked robust, hearty, tranquil—something like Buddha. He didn’t look like the kind of person who would want anything to do with us.

  “Where’s his father?” I asked.

  “OD’d,” she said, like it was the most common of fates. She brushed past me and started walking all around the apartment. She opened every door, every drawer, every cupboard. She opened the refrigerator and stood inspecting it. “Is this it?” she said. “This is your whole place? Is this all you got?”

  “I wasn’t expecting company,” I said. I was still staring at Michael, and he was still staring at me. Neither one of us seemed quite convinced of the other’s existence.

  “God, what a shithole,” she said. She walked back into the living room and sat on the couch. “How can you live in a shithole like this?”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said. “For one person.”

  “Well it’s gonna get worse,” she said. “I need a place to stay for a while.”

  In the following days I tried to find out where Malinda had been, but she was vague. “I just had to get out of this fucking city for a while,” she said. “You know?” It seemed that she had no sense of how long she’d been gone. When I asked her what she was doing now, about her plans for the future, she was evasive.

  “I gotta get some stuff figured out,” she said. “I gotta get cleaned up. I can’t keep doing what I’m doing. I need a real job, more of a career-type thing. Maybe massage school. Or hair-dressing.”

  “That’s good,” I’d say. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, “You’re always mocking me.”

  “I wasn’t mocking you!” I said.

  Malinda spent much of her time on the phone. She was trying to settle an argument she’d had with a boyfriend, someone named Zeke who lived in upstate New York. They were fighting about child services, and which of Zeke’s friends or relatives might or might not have called the New York State authorities to report Malinda for neglect. “I make one little mistake,” she kept saying, “one tiny little fucking mistake, and I’ve got a social worker up my ass.” She kept calling Zeke and fighting, then hanging up, then calling him back not a minute later. Then he’d hang up on her, and she’d announce that she didn’t need Zeke anymore, she was going to start a new life for herself. Until she called him again.

  It took Malinda two days to mention you, during which we both pretended that the subject had merely slipped our minds. But finally, after Michael had gone to sleep, she asked how you were. “Don’t tell me she’s still married to that preacher,” she said.

  “I think this is her longest marriage yet,” I said. “Sometime you can see her on television, raising money for the church. She’s always got all these kids around her. It’s weird.”

  “That bitch,” she said, “never even met her own grandson.”

  “To be fair,” I said, “she doesn’t know she has a grandson.”

  “Well she should,” Malinda said. “If she ever tried to find me she’d know.” She sniffed sharply, her eyes wet.

  Malinda had always been erratic, moody, unreliable. But she was far worse now. She couldn’t keep a conversation going and had a number of nervous tics that grew worse as the day went on. She bit her fingernails, the inside of her mouth. She paced the room, drummed her fingers against the table. She smoked constantly. Sometimes she rocked herself as she sat in her chair. “I gotta get out of here,” she said, whenever we got a conversation started. “Can you watch Michael for a few minutes? I’ll be right back.” She’d be gone for hours.

  I watched Michael while she was gone. He was almost two years old, and went about doing the kinds of things that two-year-olds do, which was to say that he was always making a mess. He pulled drawers out of the dresser and emptied them, flinging their contents across the room, he placed his dog inside the drawer and draped a blanket across it. He made leashes out of belts and strings and tied his dog to chair legs, he scribbled on paper with crayon, he sat tearing pages out of books, tearing them down to confetti.

  I had always been uncomfortable around kids. When I was with them I felt vaguely nervous, vaguely threatened, like I did when I considered that there were nuclear weapons in the world. But gradually I came to appreciate Michael’s company. We went on long walks around the city, during which I told him stories about our family. “Your mother and I used to live there,” I’d say, pointing to an apartment building. “Your grandmother, that is, your mother’s mother, liked to move around a lot. We lived in all kinds of different places. When we lived here, our uncle lived with us for a while,” I said. “Do you know what an uncle is? He lived with us for a while, and he took care of me and your mom sometimes. He was our favorite person for a long time. And so I think it’s safe to say,” I told him, “that you’re named after him. You’re his namesake, they call it. You look nothing like him, of course. But that doesn’t matter. You might be like him in other ways. You might have his voice, for instance. He really liked music,” I said. “Do you like music?”

  I wasn’t sure if Michael understood anything I said. When I asked him a question, he simply turned his face to me with a curious look. I remembered the time I’d spent with Uncle Mike, listening to his stories, looking up at him, giving him the same look. I began to think that Michael and I were suited to one another.

  “Maybe you’re quiet like me,” I said. “Normally I don’t talk so much.”

  One night, when she had been in town for two weeks, Malinda woke screaming and shaking, her cries so desperate and loud they woke up everyone in my apartment building. With the help of two of my neighbors I had to carry her, raging, to the car. We had to check her into the hospital, into detox.

  While Malinda was in rehab I called to tell you that I’d found her. You weren’t home, and I had to leave a message with your housekeeper. “Tell her her daughter called,” I said.

&nbs
p; The housekeeper was confused. “What’s that now?” she said.

  “Her daughter. Mary. Tell her I called.”

  “Oh,” she said. She was silent for a moment. “Oh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware Miss Margaret had a daughter.”

  You called back that evening. “Surprise,” I told you. “You have a grandchild. It’s a boy. His name’s Michael.”

  I know, you said. The good Lord told me I did. He told me in a dream.

  “He’s Malinda’s,” I said, “not mine. I found her. Or she found me.”

  I know, you said. I knew God would bring her back.

  “Well maybe you should come up and see them,” I said. “I think Malinda would really like to see you. She’s not doing so well.”

  Maybe you all should come here, you said. It’s better here, you belong here with the church, you belong here with our family.

  “I have a job here,” I said. “I can’t just pick up and leave.”

  You come here, you said. I have so many responsibilities here, I can’t get away, you come here.

  A vein started throbbing in my left temple. There was a long silence.

  Can you hear me? you said. Hello?

  “Yes,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  Yes.

  “Because I want to tell you something,” I said. “It’s important.” I was speaking through clenched teeth.

  Go ahead, darling, you said. I can hear you loud and clear.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said. I hung up. I didn’t think I would ever speak to you again.

  When Malinda came back, she was shaky and distant, ashen, like someone whose brain had been damaged by shock therapy. It took her an hour to eat a bowl of cereal, she’d sit staring at it until the cereal decomposed and the milk turned warm. She slept much of the time, watched television. Eventually she started going out, to AA meetings, or to look for a job, but she started coming home later and later, after Michael was asleep. One night she came home smelling like a bar, and we fought bitterly. “You can’t do this,” I said. “You have a kid. You need to take better care of him.”