Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  “You think I could afford a honey on the side?” Walt says.

  “Walt. Eat a little, will you?”

  “Listen, I spoke to my father last night.”

  “That man didn’t make you miserable enough when he was alive?”

  “You wouldn’t believe what used to go on in Spring Street in the twenties. Right under our noses. Just when you think the world’s exhausted its possibilities—”

  “What, the whorehouse?”

  “You knew?”

  “Eat some breakfast, Walt.”

  2

  August, Bedroom

  Walt and Sarah, the heat, the swelter, they lie, panting, separate beds.

  The air-conditioning’s been out since Tuesday.

  “You want to push the beds together?” Sarah says.

  Snowy thighs in the dark and Walt thinks, What an offer. What did I ever do to deserve anybody’s thighs, much less thighs like these thighs? When two twin beds merge! And yet, later, after, glorious after, he knows that he’ll wake up in the darkest hour with the heartburn he’s always convinced is another heart attack. Now that he’s had a real one, you’d think he’d be able to tell the difference, but the heart is a fraudster, a greedy muscle—

  “Walt?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I said do you wanna push the beds?”

  “God, yes.”

  “But you’re just laying there.”

  “I’m indulging in anticipation, one of the most unsung of life’s great pleasures. Studies have shown that anticipation is actually chemically more potent than—”

  “Walt.”

  Their little bedroom in the dark. Nice how the two words cling together so natural. Bedroom. Rolls off the tongue, bedroom. Miriam used to pitter in here more than half asleep from her room across the hall and climb into bed with her mother and immediately conk out completely. And he thinks of those nights, how he’d bridge his arm across the beds and nudge her, and Sarah would murmur, Walt, the kid, and he’d say into the darkness, This kid wouldn’t even be here in the first place without a little wadda wadda. They’d leave the sleeping kid in their room and creep across the hall to the kid’s. First time, Sarah worried they’d break the bed. What will we tell her in the morning?

  We’ll tell her it was Mama Bear.

  Wouldn’t it be Goldilocks? Isn’t she the one? Slow down, partner, slow down—

  Walt ripping her nightdress apart like a hero.

  Let’s see you, Goldilocks!

  Funny, all those nights and they’d only had the one. He’d always thought they’d end up with a house full of squealers. Run a little piggery.

  Marriage as nightly romp. Who’d believe it? Who the hell would want to know? And now, deep into their fifties? You wanna push the beds?

  “So hot,” Sarah says, “I feel like a baked Alaska.”

  “Baked Alaska’s cold on the inside,” Walt says.

  “Did you talk to Angelo again about fixing the window unit?”

  “Said he’d be here tomorrow.”

  “Didn’t he say that yesterday?”

  “Says his wife’s been sick again. He says this time the doctors—”

  “Oh, Carmela. She can’t catch a break. I’ll go see her. Walt?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing?”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Ruminating, taking stock, mulling—”

  “Listen, I’ve got Renda Grayboys coming to pick me up at seven thirty for Frieda’s luncheon. And you know she’ll be in the driveway at ten after seven. So if you—”

  “Who eats lunch at seven o’clock in the morning?”

  “We’ve got to lay the table, put out the flowers, count the chairs, do the seating, the place cards, make sure the soup—Walt, Gittleman says you can use all the exercise you can get, including—”

  “You talked to Gittleman about carnal relations?”

  “You haven’t got a bimbo somewhere?”

  “I can’t take myself out to lunch. Alf’s been picking up the tab at Gus’s. I mention it to him and he says if I don’t like it, he’ll go and eat alone at the Chinaman’s. Bimbo? Listen, Sar—”

  “Don’t start confessing, Walt. You’ve got a confessing voice.”

  “Pringle?”

  “Tonight, yes.”

  Walt reaches for the can he keeps under the bed, takes two perfect potato chips—how do they do it?—and hands one across the space between the beds.

  Together, they crunch in the dark.

  “All right,” Sarah says. “You want to get this show on the road or not?”

  The dip in the ceiling where the dormer cuts into the roof where he always knocks his head whether he remembers to duck or not, history of a room, this room. The single window where the three of them watched Hurricane Carol lift the roof of Vicente Alves’s house next door like a big housewife in the sky lifting a lid off a pot. And Sarah said, The basement, Walt, we’ve got to get to the basement. And Walt said, You think I didn’t buy you a sturdy house? And Miriam begging to go out in the yard because she wanted to fly. Cars and houses were flying, why couldn’t she? Sarah’s closet, the room’s only one (Walt keeps his clothes in his study), how there’s always at least one shoe poking out. Other castaways, his shirt, his belt, his pants, lying on the room’s only chair in the corner. Has ever a pair of buttocks sat on that chair? No, that chair’s only for the stray clothes Walt’s just taken off, nothing more, nothing less. Is buttocks singular or plural? The chest of blankets at the foot of the bed. How some nights, in the ’40s, before Angelo installed the central heating, they’d pile their beds high with blankets, and he thinks of the time before the cold went away. That was the best, when you were still so cold but you knew that soon the warmth being birthed in the blankets would engulf you, smother you. The gap between the beds, that alley, that trench, that chasm, that abyss made for breaching. Always got to have a border to smuggle across. Why else maintain the fiction of the sovereignty of the flesh? But people do. Alf says he hasn’t been laid since last Thanksgiving. Who’d want to hear that Walt and Sarah had found a way to still believe they were reinventing it even if they did it pretty much the same way every time? Sarah on top until she got tired, and then she’d flop on her back or stomach, depending, and say, All right, Walt, finish the job. I got Renda Grayboys coming here…But even amid the sameness there was always the hint of something novel because of some shift in position, or a thrust at a slightly different angle, or, yes, a finger exploring (again) regions heretofore said to be unexplored. That they could still think there were forbidden territories was itself…

  Our exotic smells, our coughing, our strained muscles.

  And now, again, Sarah’s snowy thighs. My God, who’d believe it? And after, still, even these days, we pant like a couple of sweat-greasy horses. Slowed down a little, of course—who wouldn’t?

  Oh, but back in our day! Sarah used to fret. You think Mirry heard?

  What if she did? Hurt the kid to hear us happy?

  And think of the ’60s, when the whole country got a little wilder and we joined in and did it twice a night? You remember, Sar? Now twice would be like rising from the dead, but history is history, and if not set down on paper it should at least be ruminated upon. Sarah and Walt Kaplan, one night, more than once, two entirely separate fornications. You got to acknowledge it, all of it, otherwise…

  Otherwise what? What, Walt, what?

  To ensure we don’t merely exist in the dead present? Is that it? What do I even mean? That the oblivion of the now as opposed to the ecstasy of looking back—but wait, wait, if the present is the past, you fool, dissolving this very moment—then it is incumbent upon us now, now, to create the past because—so obvious! so rudimentary!—it’s the uncreated past that is dead, not—yes! Push the beds, I wanna push the—

  “Sar?”

  No answer.

  “Sar? Sarah?”

  And Sarah’s puttery
snores in the dark and Walt lying spent in that same dark and Renda Grayboys (Renda? short for Brenda? must be) will be here at seven thirty—no, ten after—and why not just call it lunch. Why the extra eon?

  3

  Gus’s Highland Spa

  Walt and Alf Dolinsky lodged in their booth, the third one on the left if you’re facing away from the door, slurping cold coffee, Gus’s at Highland Avenue and Robeson Street. Only Gus calls the place the Highland Spa. The place is empty, but for them. Eleven a.m. on a Monday. Walt’s having a salad. In unhappy solidarity, Alf’s having one also. When Noreen got done howling, she went into the kitchen, and Gus howled for a while. Five minutes later, Noreen brought them both a bowl of iceberg lettuce and a half a slice of a blue-looking tomato, topped by a thick crown of bumpy Thousand Island. Neither man has taken more than a few bites.

  “So how do you feel?” Alf says.

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “I’m asking.”

  Walt stabs a piece of lettuce and with determination and grit brings it to his mouth and masticates it for the roughage and essential vitamins.

  “I feel reborn,” Walt says.

  Alf laughs.

  “Took one look at Irv Pincus,” Walt says. “Thought I was a goner.”

  “I heard. Sarah told Ruthie.”

  “Completely rejuvenated.”

  “Great.”

  “I don’t wake up tired anymore.”

  “All right already.”

  For a while the two of them listen to the low babble of the television that hangs on precarious chains over the lunch counter. One day it’s going to flatten somebody. A weatherman presides over a map of Massachusetts, an otherwise uneventfully shaped state. But for the flexing bicep of the Cape, we’d be as square as Nebraska. The weatherman predicts high humidity throughout the rest of the week.

  “Now, there’s a job right there,” Alf says. “How much you think this jackass rakes in to tell us in August we’ve got high humidity?”

  “But there’s something,” Walt says. He picks up a sugar packet and shakes it one way, shakes it the other way. Always the right amount of wiggle room. That’s good packaging. You don’t want too tight a fit.

  Alf’s watching a commercial. “What is it?” he says. “You’re reborn. But what?”

  Gus’s. The Formica tabletops, the babbling TV. The little booth made for a couple of shrunken biddies. Walt and Alf hardly fit and are forever trying to prevent their knees from touching. There’s the fly Walt murdered last week, still on the wall beside the steel napkin dispenser. A little bloodied asterisk. Hello, old friend, and my apologies. Only a lucky slap with an open palm.

  “Sarah doesn’t know,” Walt says.

  Alf pushes his salad away in disgust. “Sarah doesn’t know what?”

  “You know Sarah.”

  “Sure, I know Sarah. What doesn’t she know?”

  “I’m saying. She knows and she doesn’t know.”

  Alf takes a long sniff at nothing. “Maybe you ought to see a shrink? They say it eases the mind. You’ve been through the wringer last couple of years. All you have to do is sit there and talk in circles. You’ll love it for thirty-five dollars an hour.”

  “I talk to you free.”

  Alf’s sleepy. He’s always sleepy. With some people he actually falls asleep in the middle of the conversation. Ask Ruthie. But not with Walt. With Walt he’s sleepy, but Walt has a way of keeping him just this side of conscious. Because with Walt, you never knew what was on his mind. It was always possible he could say something you couldn’t see coming from here to Boston.

  “Ruthie’s got a nephew,” Alf says. “Young kid but a little Einstein. Went to Brown Medical, the whole shebang. Doctor of psychiatry. I could give the kid a call and—”

  “Alf, listen to me.”

  “So you got secrets. Big deal. You think I don’t have a couple of secrets from Ruthie? And, listen, I, for one, don’t give a damn where you were walking up President Avenue—”

  Walt talks to what remains of his fly. “I’m telling you. Not a secret, just a thing she doesn’t know.”

  “That’s a fucking secret.”

  Noreen swings by with the coffeepot. “Hotten your sludges?” She pours, struts off.

  “I’ll say it again,” Alf says. “That’s one friendly set of buttocks, friendlier than her mouth, I’ll tell—”

  “It’s all the walking,” Walt says.

  “Something to be said for it.”

  “Listen, Alf—”

  “Christ almighty, Walt, I’m listening.”

  “I love my wife.”

  “I got to get back to work. I got linoleum to—”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand you’re nuts is what I understand.”

  Walt eats more salad. Alf takes a long swallow of scalding coffee and examines his friend, his oldest friend, the brother he never had. But how often do you look straight at a friend’s face? All these years? You ever notice the changes? A friend’s face never changes until one day you look straight at it and you find it’s aged. It droops. It’s tired. Wrinkles don’t radiate out from his eyes only when he squints. Upper face crowded with tributaries. Because this whole time you’ve been seeing it—not seeing it—you’ve been seeing someone who’s not there anymore, someone younger, a lot younger. You thought you were younger, too.

  “I’m listening, Walt.”

  “You won’t laugh?”

  “I want to laugh, I’ll laugh.”

  Walt shakes the sugar packet one way; he shakes it the other. “I’m afraid of dying because I love my wife. Before, and you know this, I welcomed dying almost like a hobby. More than that, often I craved it. And now—”

  “Kid’s name is Rothstein. Dr. Edward Rothstein. I’m telling you, he’s smart. Maybe he can give you some pills.”

  The two hold their eyes on each other. First time, truly, in how many years? Walt Kaplan, Alf Dolinsky, such good buddies they bought family plots side by side at Beth El Cemetery.

  Alf calls over Noreen.

  “Yeah, Tubby?”

  “Two turkey clubs. Hold Walt’s mayo.”

  Noreen shouts, “You hear that, Gus, now they want turkey clubs. Tubby says hold Walt’s mayo.”

  From the kitchen, Gus shouts, “Don’t tell the chef what to do. If it goes good with mayo, I’ll put on some mayo.”

  Noreen returns to her post by her coffeepot, under the TV.

  “I’m telling you, that ass,” Alf says.

  “The walking.”

  Alf can hardly repel an urge to reach across the table and stroke Walt’s face. Wan, stubbly, no matter how much Walt shaves, his face is always stubbly.

  “Sarah says you want my Exercycle.”

  “I never said—”

  “Take it. You think I ride the thing? Every time, I fall off. It’s a hazard. You were going to do yourself in?”

  “I had a notion. I had more than a notion.”

  “By walking up President Avenue? It’s steep, but not that—”

  “I wanted to be dead. That’s all I know. I left the store and started walking. I wasn’t thinking of anything else. I hardly even thought of Sarah. I was going to take High Street west and circle back down to the bridge. I don’t know, Alf. I can’t explain it. I must have wanted to see the city one last time. Love this city.”

  “Somebody’s got to. Irv that bad?”

  “You think I’d do it because of him?”

  “So why?”

  “You’d think I’d be able to explain it. Only this tiredness that wasn’t even making me tired anymore. A tiredness that wasn’t tiring. Because I was past all that. Which is why it felt over. All I had to do was finish the job. Does this make any sense?”

  “No, but Rothstein—”

  “Forget Rothstein.”

  “So you start walking.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And God said, You want to say goodbye? I’ll show you goodbye, you fat bastard.”


  “Exactly. One ungrateful atheist Jew down. How many more to convince?”

  “Walt, you think I wouldn’t have had a heart attack if I’d tried to march up President Avenue in July?”

  Walt just looks at him, his tongue poking out his left cheek, like a kid.

  “And now?” Alf says.

  Walt shrugs. “You know who President Avenue is named after?”

  “No.”

  “Taft, when he visited in 1918.”

  “He’d need a crane to get up that hill,” Alf says.

  Beneath the table, Alf slides off one of his brogans, and with socked toes he tries to scratch his left ankle. Yeah, I love Walt Kaplan like the brother I never had. We were kids together in Fall River and we got old without noticing and we bought burial plots side by side on a lark, as if—what?—we thought we’d never need them?

  “And now?” Alf says.

  “Now I want both.”

  “To live and to die?”

  “Right.”

  “Join the fucking club,” Alf says.

  “No, I mean it.”

  “You think I don’t?”

  Noreen clatters two plates before them. “Held the mayo,” she says.

  4

  Gang Plank (at the Cove)

  Walt wonders, as he always does when he and Sarah get together with Milt and Pearl Feldman, what the four of them could possibly have to say to one another that hasn’t been said. The truth is there’s comfort in the repetition of the same stories, jokes, complaints, and petty jealousies, the same sneak attacks on absent mutual friends. You hear Goodyear’s gonna fly Alf Dolinsky over Fenway? Sure, the ailments are becoming nastier: cataracts, back trouble (though the new arch supports help), hemorrhoids (ever-present open wounds), and, yes, people in their circle have begun to die. But hadn’t they always? Burl Wanger, who’d been one of them for years, dropped dead in his driveway at what? Thirty-nine? And before him, others. What about his nephew Jacob, eight years old and nobody knew he was a hemophiliac until he stepped on a piece of glass in—what?—1937? 1938? Did Jacob bleed to death in the kitchen of the house on Woodlawn the same year as the hurricane of ’38? Why can’t he remember? Here they are again, Sarah and Walt, Milt and Pearl, and amid the breathless rush of talk, the drinking, the food, the chewing, isn’t it easy to lose yourself in the uproar? Sarah and Walt planted together, squeezed, at the head of the table, sporting plastic bibs with happy cartoon lobsters, presiding over the dismemberment of real (a lot less happy) lobsters.