Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  But after half an hour, forty-five minutes, I began to understand just how fucking cold I was. Mid-March and I hadn’t dressed for it. You want to dress lightly on a first date to demonstrate how free and easygoing you are. The dude was still mumbling, and I waited for something, anything, to happen, while softly stamping my feet on the crumbling pavement to warm them up. I was about to whisper to Beth, whose hand I was holding, Yo, why don’t we go to a Waffle House and get some fucking breakfast? when somebody new began shouting, “Marina? Is that you, Marina?” Then other people were speaking, too. “Larry, tell your sister I’m onto her games.” “How many years did you think you could hide in plain sight, Ramon?” Even Beth got into it: “You never loved me, not a day, not an hour, not a second of a single minute—”

  Everybody was speaking at once, and I had trouble discerning individual words in the chaos of voices. And it was ridiculous, it was beyond ridiculous, but it also wasn’t. Shouts in the dark. Maybe that’s the best we can do to reach beyond ourselves. I tried to join in, too, but I could sense none of my dead, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, think of anything to just spout out. So I bought it, but at the same time, by that point, I was just trying to live through it, I was so cold. Then the candle went out and our leader broke ranks and swooped down to relight it, but his lighter jammed. Everybody stopped speaking and we all began patting down our pockets for a lighter or matches. But our leader shouted at us, “No! Don’t break the membrane! Rebond!”

  We never quite got back on track after that. The collective spirit or belief or whatever it was escaped from us, and, though our leader mumbled for another half an hour, only a few people spoke up. The guy next to me, a guy I’d been holding hands with for almost two hours without getting a look at his face, actually made a joke. At least, I thought it was a joke. He said something about the temperature of coffee in hell. I laughed out loud. No one else did. That pretty much ended it. Before we left, Beth went up to the leader and gave him a kiss on the lips that wasn’t a friend’s kiss, not by a long stretch. In the car, I asked her who she’d reached. She said she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “So you and the leader dude—”

  “That was nothing. Okay?”

  We settled back into the silence of the drive. No radio now, just the drone of the engine, which you don’t hear unless you listen for it, and then it’s there all the time. It was getting toward dawn, and the dark was giving way to gray. I’ve always loved that early morning gloom. I was about to say as much, to try to chip away at the silence, when I noticed that the car had begun to drift into the oncoming lane. Beth had fallen asleep. I don’t know why, but instead of grabbing the wheel, I seized her shoulder. She woke up but didn’t seem to realize what was happening and immediately stomped on the brakes. We jolted forward, skidded, and stopped. Headlights were approaching out of the gray. I had time for only one thing. I opened my door, got out, ran off the road into the trees, and waited for the headlights to slam into Beth.

  They didn’t. The other driver saw her in time and fishtailed around her and stopped. For a few moments, everything was still. Then I heard the birds in the trees. I walked back out to the road. The guy rolled down the window of his truck. He looked at Beth in her car; he looked at me. Then he drove away, as if a couple of idiots having some lovers’ spat wasn’t worth anything he might have mustered up to say. My door was still open. Beth was calm, motionless, her hands still gripping the wheel.

  When something happens, for better or for worse it’s happened. It has a before and an after. Maybe you can talk about it. Maybe you can’t. But what about something that almost happens? What almost happens repeats itself. I’ve come to believe this as a kind of personal gospel. We’re stopped in the opposite lane. I see lights emerge out of the gray. I open my door and run. I leave her in the car to die every time.

  Untitled

  They chose the ugliest part of Rome. Maybe they thought it would make it all seem less out of a movie. No beautiful backdrops. She knew a lot about architecture. She said Mussolini had built EUR in the ’30s. He wanted the district to be majestic, she said, but not in the way Rome already was. He wanted to assert that greatness would now, and forever, be sought in the future—not the past. That worshipping the ancients was for cowardly nostalgists. Il Duce sought intentionally anti-bourgeois architecture that would actively subordinate the individual to a grander collective cause. No, “collective” was the wrong word. He wanted, she said, to engender a kind of new worship, one where people would begin to see themselves in a new and heroic light through architecture…He wasn’t listening.

  EUR was falling apart by then. This was the early 2000s. Government office buildings, once white, now were dirty-looking.

  “It really is hideous,” he said. “Brutalist.”

  “No,” she said. “Brutalism came later. A lot later. This is functionalism. Or maybe rationalism? I forget which.”

  It was late morning. They were lying on a patch of dry grass by the Metro station entrance, watching people saunter by on their way to work. No one is ever late for work in Italy. And they were in love; they almost couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t stop talking about it. To talk, really talk, about it, they’d have needed a year, maybe even two years, of near-constant conversation, but as it was they only had an hour, at most.

  They were both with other people. They hardly touched because that would have been almost too hard to take. It was enough to lie side by side on a patch of scratchy grass by the Metro station entrance in EUR and try not to think of the future. She always had a cold. She said it was allergies, that everything in Italy made her sneeze. I look at something and love it—Keats’s grave—and I sneeze. She wore leather shoes with straps and brass buckles. Like shoes Rumpelstiltskin might wear. Lying there. The two of them. They had year-long fellowships. Every morning they woke up in separate beds with different people. Roman mornings. The old ladies shouting, the pink light, the laundry stretching from window to window. Side by side on the grass by the entrance to the Metro. To Italians on their way to work, they were invisible. Tourists had been part of the Roman landscape for how many centuries?

  She rubbed his knuckles with her fingers, and he said, “I wish I could say something original about time.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “Bold lover, never, never canst thou—”

  Twelve years later, they meet in a hotel room in a city unfamiliar to both of them. The room looks out upon a parking lot and an office building across the street. It’s the middle of the day. He begins to close the curtains, but she says, “Nobody can see in with the glare, and even if they could, who cares?” It’s awkward and fumbling. They know each other and at the same time they’ve got no idea who the other is. Skin to skin, they’re ridiculous. Far worse than if they’d been strangers. Lying in the hardly tussled sheets, they begin to talk instead. That’s better. She tells him her daughter has an imaginary friend, a poltergeist.

  “Mine,” he says, “has heart-to-hearts with the vacuum cleaner.”

  “The poltergeist is named Queenie,” she says. “And she lives in the closet in one of her old shoes. A living presence that’s dead. She’s very adamant about this. That Queenie is dead but that Queenie sees in the dark, that Queenie remembers things. You’re supposed to say I look amazing. That after a couple, three kids—”

  “I already did,” he says.

  “You’re supposed to keep exclaiming it as if it’s some kind of miracle.”

  “I exclaim, I exclaim.”

  “Fat and old.”

  “If this is fat and old,” he says.

  “People don’t do this anymore,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Meet in motels.”

  “They don’t?”

  “It’s completely passé. It’s past passé. Also a little gross. Not as gross as I thought it would be, but—”

  “This is a Marriott Courtyard,” he says.

  “You never saw a therapist?” she says.
>
  “No.”

  “Helps.”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “I’m not talking about this,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “Helps to get out of your own head. You of all people.”

  “You told me that before,” he says. “You have any Tums?”

  “What?”

  “My stomach, it gets—”

  “You used to want to talk so much. You craved the talking as much as anything. More so—your guilt, you talked a lot about your guilt. You were guilt’s desperado, agonizing daily—”

  He kisses her again so he doesn’t have to say anything else. Her lips less unfamiliar now, and she moves her mouth toward his—no, jams, beautifully, beautifully she jams her mouth into his—

  He pulls away. “Those shoes,” he says.

  “What shoes?”

  “With the buckles. Like a pilgrim’s shoes, you don’t remember—”

  “No.”

  Maggie Brown

  That year I drove a battered ’79 Corolla, my brother’s old car, and collected parking tickets. I had an eight o’clock class. Even with a car I was late. I’d shove the bright orange tickets into the glove compartment along with the expired condoms and the map of the Upper Peninsula, where I hoped to disappear one day without a trace.

  I had a roommate who’d come to Michigan from Dix Hills, Long Island. Flegenheimer thought the Midwest was a quaint experiment. An interlude before he assumed the helm of his father’s sanitary-supply business. He said there wasn’t a shithole in New Jersey where they didn’t install the broken towel dispenser. Flegenheimer also told me that because I had out-of-state plates (Illinois) the Ann Arbor parking gestapo would never track me down. “You’re home free, man, park the fuck away.” And I remember driving to Sociology 202 with my left arm out the window, sweeping away the rain because the windshield wipers didn’t work, and looking at all my fellow citizens stomping down the sidewalk with their umbrellas and their backpacks, and wondering senselessly what I’d done to deserve this exile. Why wasn’t I out there in the rain with everybody else?

  In February, they towed me, Franco Magocini and his twin brother, Joseph, the local towing duo. It wasn’t my first time meeting them. But now they refused to release the car without a notarized authorization from the Ann Arbor Police Department that I’d paid at least three-fourths of the violations. That’s three-fourths plus a storage fee of forty dollars a day. There was a sign. STORAGE: IT’S NOT A FEE, IT’S AN ASSESSMENT. Franco did the towing, Joseph the accounting. They weren’t identical, but both wore the same yellow snowsuit.

  “What the hell is this, parking at the Ritz?”

  “Listen, kid, I’ve got vehicles to displace,” Franco said.

  I sold them the Corolla for $175. Joseph said he’d take care of the paperwork and have my slate wiped clean. Franco reached deep into his yellow suit and pulled out a sweaty twenty, told me to go buy myself a steak at Myron and Phil’s out on Zeeb Road.

  “How am I going to get there?”

  “For ten bucks,” Joseph said, “my brother will take you anywhere, so long as it isn’t past Dexter or north of Washtenaw.”

  Maggie Brown was around then. She liked the whole bit about the car. It was worth the Corolla to make her laugh. She liked it when I chewed my lip and talked like Franco. This was before she dropped a hit and a half of acid and disappeared to follow the aging Grateful Dead to Hamilton, Ontario. Maggie Brown was her first name. She was from Montgomery, Alabama. Her great-great-great-great-grandfather owned slaves. Not that many, she said. This was her nod toward going to college with a bunch of sanctimonious Yankees. She played the cello in the university orchestra. Her accent alone burned a hole in my lower intestines.

  On our first night together she undressed me slowly from the shoes up. We were in her room on East William. She left the lights on. Her bed had no sheets. That mattress like striped pajamas, like the uniform of some sad old convict. Her cello case loomed in the corner, an elegant beast. When she unbuttoned the last button on my shirt, Maggie Brown looked me over, stared me down, and bit me so hard in the stomach I bled. I’ve hardly been alive since.

  A few years ago I saw her at the Minneapolis airport. She looked right at me, didn’t know me from Adam, and marched onward. Maggie Brown in a business suit. One of those sleek, purposeful rolling suitcases trailing after her like a well-trained dog. You end up forgetting the people you shouldn’t and remembering the people who’ve forgotten all about you. For me what echoes, what reverberates, what I often relive and relive, are those times that were cut short, times so fleeting they hardly even happened.

  That week in February, for instance, when Maggie Brown disappeared into Canada and I slept on her porch in a sleeping bag until she returned home at three in the morning, passed out in the arms of a skinny Deadhead in a Dr. Seuss hat.

  “She your girlfriend?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  He looked at the sleeping bag basketed at my feet. “Lose your key?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, shit.” He picked up one of my shoes. “Mind if I?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Hold her a sec?”

  She felt lighter than I remembered. I dove my nose into her smoky hair and stood there with what I can only call a weird sort of triumphance. The Deadhead knocked out the front window with my shoe, cleared the shards with his hat, and climbed into the apartment. When the front door opened, I handed Maggie Brown back across the threshold and went home to the dorm.

  In spring, I began walking. I’d skip class and wander down State Street in the early afternoons. I’d take a left on Packard and head out of downtown until I reached the ’50s-style neighborhoods of north Ann Arbor. Ranch houses, open windows, curtains lilting sexily in the late-March breeze. I lusted housewives who weren’t home, who were probably at work. It was that brief time, the early ’90s, when there weren’t any housewives. I fell in love with open garages, all that beautiful equipment stored away. Old boots, basketballs, storm windows. Garden hose, miles and miles of garden hose. It wasn’t loneliness; it was a numbness I was trying to prick so that I could feel something. I’d walk with my hands in my pockets and greet the citizenry. The elderly men in hats walking long dogs. The sashed eleven-year-old crossing guards who kept the intersections safe after school. I’d greet them all, dogs included, with a subtle nod of my chin, as if I’d been roaming those crumbling sidewalks my whole life. I thought about getting a job. Instead, I took a bus to Ypsilanti and bought a cheap gun. It wasn’t much to look at. It had a plastic handle. The bullets, though, were impressive. I found that walking around with a gun in your pants is very different from walking around without a gun in your pants.

  I switched on the overhead light. One of Flegenheimer’s large, hairy feet was hanging over the side of the loft.

  “Fuck you been?” he murmured. “Shut the light, fuckhole.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just stood there and stared at that hairy tarantula foot. That Chewbacca foot.

  “I said shut the light.”

  That overhead light, its buzz. I noticed that fluorescence doesn’t seem to create shadows.

  “Yo, fuck’s the problem?”

  Above all, Flegenheimer hated silence; it completely freaked him out. Curious how simply not talking can throw even the most confident bastard off. Flegenheimer didn’t go to class. He didn’t own a single book. He slept and went out to the bars, Charley’s, Rick’s, and back to Charley’s. He delivered life lessons and commentary from the top of the loft. You fuck and you get fucked. Fuck and get fucked, around and around and around. Any questions? I was a complete bafflement to him. Even the city of Chicago rang no bells. A Jew not from New York? What’d your grandpa do? Rub some rah-rah at Ellis Island the wrong way? Flegenheimer wore his fat with the same sort of swagger that he wore his gold chains. Girls in sweatpants were incessantly knocking on our door. I’d answer, and their faces would drop
. “Jeremy’s not around?”

  “Shut the light,” Flegenheimer said, “or I’ll kick your face in.”

  Only the dead can sustain it. That’s the amazing, awe-inspiring thing. We, the not-yet dead, can never hold the silence. Sooner or later we’ll talk. Sooner or later we always, always talk. Flegenheimer stretched his foot out, flicked it at me, but he couldn’t reach my face. And I stood there with that foot, that hirsute foot reaching, flicking—

  We used to talk, Flegenheimer and me. He didn’t need books. He wasn’t that stupid, not that stupid at all. If I ever run into him in the airport, I wonder if he’ll remember me.

  “The crossing guards,” I shouted. “They wear orange sashes and they guard the streets with their very lives, the little heroes!”

  He’d fallen back asleep. I stood there in that buzzing, aching fluorescence. I liked Flegenheimer. I may have even loved him, and so help me God in the spring of 1988 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I pulled that toy-seeming gun out of my waistband and aimed and thought long and hard about blowing his foot clean off his ankle.

  In May, Maggie Brown held a solo recital. She sat alone on a stage amid a crowd of music stands, awkward skeletons, facing all directions. She wore a sleeveless black dress, and she looked almost miniature with that big cello between her legs. Until the music. I wish I knew now what it was. There were programs, but I wasn’t the sort of person who might have noted what was about to be played. Whatever it was, it was sudden and frantic and shrieking. Then it went low. Long stretches of deep, somber tones followed again by more streaking jabs, Maggie Brown’s elbows flinging. I felt every note—high and low—in my groin. But her face: placid, detached. It was as if she weren’t even in the room, as if the music had nothing to do with her and the present moment, as if she knew, but it didn’t concern her, that this music, her music, would continue to reverberate in some forgotten head long after she quit playing and sold the cello, or donated it, or just left it somewhere because it was too expensive to keep lugging around.