Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  After Ellen left, he began hearing shrieks in the night. He thought of going up there and knocking and saying, Is everything okay up here? I heard something. Some yelling. I was concerned. Was it you? But he never did go to her, and after a while he stopped worrying, because in the morning, as usual, he’d listen to her slow clack down the stairs right on time, between 7:30 and 8:00, and she was the same as always out the window, small but not hunched, curly white hair that looped up from her shoulders like a girl’s. It got to be that he’d stare at the ceiling and wait for her. The nights she didn’t shriek were the worst: that old hooter sleeping peaceful, fending off whatever haunted her, and him, never more awake, listening for his own breathing.

  Six-thirty on a Saturday evening in July and the St. Vincent De Paul’s on Calvert Street is closed. A sign says PLEASE NO DONATIONS AFTER HOURS, but someone’s already left an old computer in the seat of a baby stroller, a microwave with no door, a box of waterlogged encyclopedias, a set of Santa salt and pepper shakers, a steering wheel, a tacklebox, and a cabinet that looks like somebody shot the back out with a pellet gun. He sets the clothes in a heap on the sidewalk next to the stroller and hurries away.

  Another of Ellen’s ideas that they’d both believed in for a while was expanding the garden and selling their tomatoes right out of the driveway. He’d even found a good cache of lumber in the basement of one of their houses and hauled it over in the truck. He was going to build a small stand; Ellen wanted it to look like a puppet theater. The old lady upstairs was going to tend the counter on weekdays, when they were both away working. And there won’t be any problems, Ellen said, because she’ll figure out what to charge by the dip of the scale.

  When she didn’t come down in the morning and then again in the afternoon, he called the fire department and said, Something’s happened to my tenant. She lives upstairs. I’m at 817 Strossen. When the two paramedics moved slowly, but absolutely, up the walk with their shoulder bags and cases and defibrillator, he handed one of them the spare key. An hour and a half later, as he stood on the lawn with the neighbors, the quiet lights of the ambulance, the two police cars, the fire truck, streaking across the windows—much more commotion than she ever made in life—they brought her down. The paramedic, the one with the sandy hair and different-color mustache, the one he’d handed the key to, stopped to talk to him. The paramedic might have asked, If you thought something wasn’t right up there, why didn’t you go up there and check on her? But of course he was trained not to get involved in anything personal, and God knew, he’d seen a hell of a lot stranger things on calls. For now the paramedic needed only her full name and next of kin.

  “Husband deceased?”

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “So no grandchildren, cousins, sisters, anything like that? Anyone else?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Sunday early morning he wakes to shrieking, and he isn’t surprised that it’s himself, that the hollering and carrying on is coming from his own throat. Rain pecks at the window one tap at a time, as if someone out there is trying to get his attention. He’s at the bottom of the bed, in a gnarled wrestle of sheets and blanket. A place he used to find himself after long dreams when he was a kid, dreams he never remembered. But now he remembers the moment before waking, and it’s a vision that sweeps his old fatigue away, even as he continues to scream at the walls of his own room: himself, kneeling on the sidewalk in the rain, weeping over those clothes.

  Papa Gino’s

  THEY BLAME each other silently, and they’ve lived like this for years. Nearly a decade of silent eyeing. Here they sit at Papa Gino’s on a Friday night in December, across from each other at a tiny plastic table, so close their knees touch. Neither laughs as the other wrestles drooping cheese.

  Barry and Diane Swanson lost a child nine years ago. The story is simple. Barry, Diane, and Gene, who was then seven years old, were window-shopping along High Street in Dedham, Massachusetts. Gene kept bouncing a small orange rubber Superball he’d bought from a machine at Cookie’s Table for a quarter. He was walking behind his parents. The ball ricocheted off a crack in the sidewalk and bounced into the street. Gene chased it. It’s happened before. A blue Plymouth going too fast for High Street on a Saturday. Screech and a dull thud. Diane shrieking. Barry’s already bloody hands holding Gene, and his pleading, God, please, no, no. And when eternity was over, and Barry was hovering over Gene in the back of an ambulance, Diane ran across the street and found the ball near the rim of a sewer grate. She stooped and picked it up. The slippery little ball, now worn down from years of rubbing, has remained in her purse ever since.

  Barry tossed Gene the quarter to buy the ball.

  Diane told him twice to stop bouncing. He was a spunky kid who’d liked to test his parents. He kept doing it. Diane did not take the ball away.

  Barry was looking at a suede jacket in the window of Slaxon’s, and in mid-comment about the hideousness of its color when Gene’s ball sprang into the street.

  The ball bounced just to the right of Diane’s shoulder. Couldn’t she have grabbed Gene as he bumped past her in pursuit?

  Couldn’t Barry have put his foot down, said enough’s enough? Give me the goddamn ball, Gene.

  Around and around and around. Four days after the funeral Barry went to work. It took Diane a full week, but then she too was back, back behind her desk at State Farm, taking calls, making referrals, seeing clients, listening to the void in her voice as she answered question after question.

  Here they sit. Friday nights they eat out. They can afford better, but they feel more at ease in places like this. More anonymous. Less exposed. Silence is not wrong here. No one waits on them. Nobody chats them up. They place their orders at the counter and stand with a slip of paper that tells them their pickup number in red ink. You can see the lights of the highway from the window. I-95. The plastic tabletop has been made to look like a red-and-white-checked table-cloth. There are few sounds. The fuzzled ping-pang of a video arcade game playing itself in the corner. Muzak so low it sounds like somebody humming. Quick shout of a cook behind a red fake-brick wall—“Line on!” Soft yellow blankety light. Harsh if you look at the bulbs above straight on, but as a whole they combine to form a buttery glaze that drifts about the room. It is after nine and only two other tables are occupied, one by a counter girl on break. She is resting her chin on an outstretched arm and rattling her nails on the tabletop. A boy is mopping a closed section in a dark corner of the restaurant. Smell of tomato sauce and bleach. Barry and Diane eat a pepperoni with half mushrooms. Almost ten years ago, and that Saturday could just as well have been last week. Friday nights have always been tough.

  They made love for a year after Gene’s funeral. They made love for a year and nothing happened, nothing. They saw two doctors who told them nothing was wrong, that Diane was getting on but that all the parts were certainly in working order. “Go home and do it” is what the second doctor advised. “What else can I say?” That night they slept at the Comfort Inn, but it didn’t make any difference. Then one morning, a few weeks later, Diane watched Barry come out of the shower with a towel loosely slunched around his waist, and she started to despise his body, his flubby folds, his thinning hair, his clumsy fatty hands, his sweaty naked squirming over her in the dark, like the wet glob of a seal. She could think of nothing but the man Gene would have grown into.

  Barry didn’t fight her. He simply watched her recoil and endured the silence. He had lost his mother when he was thirteen, and there were afternoons in the weeks following her death when he would come home from school and creep around his parents’ room and steal things, a locket, an earring, even a bra once, which he kept hidden under his mattress. He was used to making do. So for years now Barry has been rubbing his big forehead, sighing, wandering the house, masturbating quietly in the bathroom, and reading.

  Diane takes a sip of Diet Coke and clears her throat, b
ut doesn’t say anything. She looks at her reflection in the big window. Barry wipes his mouth with the corner of a paper napkin and slides his left hand across the table, palm up. Some nights she covers it with her own.

  On a Bridge over the Homochitto

  MORE THAN HALF a lifetime away, and even now his mind wanders back to a weekday morning on a bridge in 1948. He was unemployed then, the only time in his working life that he wasn’t at a job on a weekday morning, and walking along Postal Route 31 with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, alone. Twenty-six years old and a veteran, still humbled by the things he saw in Germany and Poland at the end of the Hitler half of the war. He hadn’t seen much combat himself, but he knew then, as he knows now, that what he saw as part of the 222nd Infantry, “The Mop-up Crew,” as he called it, could never be compared to shooting at people or getting shot at. Human beings who didn’t look like people, shriveled hands grasping and fisting, like the tiny fingers of dolls, and sometimes, but not always, ditches of bodies. A place called Nordhausen, where he and another soldier found the corpse of a pregnant woman in a bloody latrine. An army interpreter told them that an SS had tried to force the birth by stomping on her with his boots. He and the other soldier, whose name he never knew, buried her. The other soldier said a prayer, which he repeated.

  A year and a half later, there he was—amazed that such a thing as quiet could exist again in the world—rambling down Route 33 in Sibley, Mississippi, ten or so miles from his mother’s place at St. Catherine Creek, in the middle of the morning. He took long walks that year, mostly to think about the things he’d seen and to get out of the house, away from his mother’s hasty breathing and droning. Someone who’s done for country as you’ve done deserves to rest, and don’t for twelve seconds believe you’re lazy, or not worthy, or that you haven’t done your share. Fists jammed into pockets, surrounded by the desolation of home, the woods, the gurgle of the Homochitto River. He turns off the road and begins to cross a bridge. A simple, twin I-beam girder, wood-planked, unscuffed, about the width of a truck. Back then it was still some optimistic architect’s fancy. A little bridge to nowhere really, no houses up the hill that way, just a dirt road that ended a hundred feet from the end of the bridge on the other side of the river. Beyond the end of the road, woods and a steep grade upward, what his father used to call Steve Glower’s Hill. Maybe they’d planned to do some building up there, but that never came to pass.

  Nothing is left now but the crumbled ruins of the two arches of a bridge that has fallen into a river.

  But that morning long ago he’d stood at the railing of the little bridge, his chin resting on the backs of his hands, and looked down at the water and dreamed of a girl, not a particular girl, not one he could describe or name, but a formless one, hair and smile, quick-tongued and laughing. He saw her and didn’t see her, and it was safer that way. But then, as if nudged out of the woods by the finger of God, she came out of the trees upriver, naked and white as vanilla pudding, followed closely by a man, dark-skinned, but not black, Indian maybe, naked too. For a moment the girl looked familiar, a little like his cousin Jackie, the one with all the curly sticking-up hair everybody teased her about, but this one was older than Jackie, maybe a lot older. This girl could have been thirty. It was hard to tell from up there. He watched her step fast across the rocks by the water’s edge and plunge in with a wordless shout. With much more hesitation, the man followed her across the rocks and stepped off, without a peep, into the water. Neither of them looked up at the bridge. Maybe for the same reason he didn’t look away. Who’d have expected the other? Who’d be standing on a bridge that didn’t lead anywhere? Who’d be swimming, naked, in March? He watched her breasts float above the water; he watched the man watch her, not smiling, as though he was already counting the seconds he had left with her, with this woman who was so obviously—even from up there on the bridge—someone else’s wife. (Her flailing joy in the water too free to be everyday.) Which is why both men, the man in the water and the man on the bridge, stared with such useless desire. The couple didn’t speak. This he remembers—cherishes, really. That neither of them succumbed to the temptation of lying about what they didn’t have. Just the heavy pant and flap of swimming in the wrong season. He remembers the pressure of his erection and the awkwardness of walking away with it down the road. He remembers the man’s hands as they reached out over the water and how for a single moment he wanted nothing more than to murder him so those could be his hands.

  And he remembers remembering this. In 1977, driving through a snowstorm in St. Louis at 2:00 in the morning, and he’s standing on the bridge. No trigger, no reason for her to come to him. Nothing in that blinding whirl to take him so far back. But there she was, amid the battering plunk of the flakes on the windshield: the way her wet hair twisted around her neck like a scarf. The sweep of her thin arms. The way she ignored men and the cold. Another time, eating with Manda and her father in some hoity-toity place in Atlanta, putting a forkful of steak in his mouth, and again, for no reason except maybe the happiness of that food, the river. Again her emergence out of the trees. His wish granted and ripped away the next moment; the dark man’s head and shoulders appear. What you wish for and what you can never have—both come out of the woods at the same time. You didn’t fight a war. You cleaned up after one. Still, you’re your mother’s hero. You don’t want to work right now. You want to wander the old roads. You want to stand on the bridge and watch.

  2.

  The Famous

  Cousin Tuck’s

  SHE HAD TROUBLE getting dates, so some nights she’d march into Cousin Tuck’s and wait for the one-eyed man to finish playing pool. His name was Tito, and he wore a black patch over his left eye. He was a small-time hustler who could clear tables at will, using a combination of ball-smacking power and quiet, surgical, intricacy. He was also a teacher. Really more of a teacher than a hustler, because those of us who were regulars didn’t dare play him for more than a few quarters a game. But some of us would play him to learn. He’d set up your angles, a little left, a little right, pick out spots on the ball, call pockets on shots you would never have dreamed of making had he not whispered that if you hit the 13 into the right edge of the 7 with just enough oomph to bank it off the left side—fuckdawango—you could make that shot. Tito made you feel that you could be consistently good at the game, that you really were capable of mastering the geometry. The click of the balls as beautiful as your own heartbeat. On those nights, after four, five beers, you’d be soaring and people in the booths would start to murmur about you, point the necks of their bottles your way. You standing against the wall, chalking your cue and kissing your knuckles as if all of a sudden Cousin Tuck’s was Bally’s in Atlantic City and you were the guy. Everybody’s guy. But on those nights Tito wasn’t around, you’d be back to hitting slop, back to whacking the ball all over the table, because it was Tito who made you and without him you went back to being nobody.

  Her name was Nadine. She was very short and had a flat, almost squashed face, with a little chubbiness all over and eyes that, as Marty Patowski put it, were too big for a single head. But her heart was as wide and as long as the English High School football field across from the bar. She was our, Jamaica Plain’s, locally famous community activist. This was 1987. In our humble edge of Boston, she was like a pioneer. People said that she worked as a paralegal in a legal services office, but she was known for her attendance at any and all J.P. community-based events. She’d be at the Voting Rights for Legal Aliens rally (VRLA), a featured speaker at the bimonthly meeting of Latina Women Against AIDS Project (LWAAP), hustling money for the Youth Build summer employment program for at-risk teens in Roslindale (YBEP). You’d see her on Centre Street stapling flyers to telephone poles with that big carpenter-sized stapler she lugged around in a filthy-bottomed canvas tote bag. You’d overhear her in Woolworth’s quietly grilling the cashiers—Maureen and Donna—about working conditions and insurance plans. Every time you saw her riding he
r bike in a wobbling rush to a meeting, you’d be reminded of all the contributions you weren’t making to the betterment of society, you gluttonous hog. But Nadine never chastised. She simply tried to infect you with her enthusiasm. Hey, I’m glad I ran into you. Oliver or Cynthia or Fernanda or Carmen or Frankie T. There’s an interactive poetry reading tonight at St. Mary’s to raise money for the Art Council’s day-care center, and all you have to give is three dollars and come up with one line about what day care means to you. No kids? That doesn’t mean Reagan’s evil doesn’t affect you! I’ll have some ideas on notecards that I’ll pass around. So just show up and you can read…

  Tito wouldn’t make love to her. That was his rule, because he was honest about the fact that he wasn’t in love with her. Admitted that even with his one eye he was a sucker for beauty and couldn’t get around it, so why lie. But he’d take her home with him after the bar and hold her and kiss the scratchy backs of her arms. His bed always had clean white sheets, hotel sheets, and Nadine would feel a little guilty and decadent in that bed, the sheets slick against her bare thighs. She couldn’t help thinking of all the people who would never know a bed so clean, the men and women wrapped in garbage bags sleeping in the park on Vermeer. But she usually got over it, thinking that a lot of people actually got laid once in a while, damnit, so she should be entitled to her little nibble.