Woodbury, Minnesota
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How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? © 2016 by Yvonne Cassidy.
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For Danielle, who helped me write my own next chapter.
Penn Station, New York
23rd April 1999
4:14 a.m.
Dear Mum,
It’s a long time since I wrote to you—since I even wrote the word “Mum.” Over here, everyone says “Mom” and I nearly wrote that by mistake, but when I used to write to you on those Friday nights with Dad, it was always “Dear Mum.”
Do you know how long it’s been since my last letter?
I hate Penn Station at night and I hate this café. I hate that when I was paying for my coffee, the guy who works here had a porno magazine open, right there on the counter.
I hate that Sergei is so late. He’s never this late.
The last time I wrote to you was nearly eleven years ago. I remember that, because it was the summer Aunt Ruth came over, the summer before the accident. Before that, we used to write to you every Friday night, me and Dad, when we cleared up after tea. He’d sit in his seat near the back door and I’d bring my chair up next to his, so close that sometimes our elbows bumped. My letters were in crayon and I drew you pictures as well—I filled loads of pages. He took ages writing his, printing out the words in black ink, his face concentrating. His letters looked nothing like the way he talked—they didn’t match him at all.
Sometimes, I read mine out to him, even though he said it was okay if I didn’t want to because they were private. He never read his out to me. When we were finished, he’d seal them in a narrow blue airmail envelope and he let me write your name on the front, before he’d fold it in two and put it in his cardigan pocket and say that he’d make sure you got it. And even though afterwards I was allowed to have a Double Decker and a Coke when he had his bottle of Guinness, I always felt sad seeing that, the bulge of letter against the wool, because there was a whole week to go before we could write again.
I’m seven the summer we stop writing and at first I think Dad’s only messing. It’s the Friday after Aunt Ruth leaves and I get the paper and the envelope from the sideboard in the back room like I always do, but when I come into the kitchen, Dad is sitting there with his Guinness already open. He shakes his head and says we’re not doing that anymore, that it’s a stupid thing to be doing, writing to someone who’s dead. I think he’ll change his mind and I get the paper and envelope the next Friday too, but he gets annoyed and says he was an eejit for ever starting it, and I hate Fridays after that.
The porno man is walking around now, straightening chairs and cleaning up coffee cups, and I’m glad there is a lid on my cup so he can’t see it’s empty. There’s a glass cabinet up by the counter that has loads of cakes in it and I wish I had money to buy a muffin or a black and white cookie, but they’re $2.95 and I can get two pizza slices for that. I’ve already spent $2.50 on this notepad, which was a total rip-off, and, anyway, Sergei will be here soon.
I always knew you were dead, by the way. I always knew Dad didn’t post the letters. He’d already told me you were in Heaven, just like he told me that you were from America, from a place called New York, and that one day we’d go over and visit together and see all the places where you’d lived as a little girl. Before we stopped writing the letters, he used to say things like that all the time, he used to talk about you all the time. But once we stopped writing, he stopped talking too.
Before then, his favourite story was about the night you met, when he was playing in the Meeting Place. It was a Sunday night and he’d thought about not going because it was lashing and he’d nearly stayed on in the Drop Inn instead of going into town. The whole way through the first half of the session, all he could think about was his trousers sticking to him, still soaking from the rain, and that’s what he was doing when you came over at the break—lifting the damp material away from his skin. When he looked up, you were standing there saying something about a drum, and he couldn’t follow what you were talking about at all, until he realised you meant his bodhrán.
He always tells the story the same way, about how you were smiling and talking the whole time and he felt like all he could do was listen, as if he was transfixed by you or something, and how, suddenly, it was time for the second half of the session and he hadn’t been to the loo or to the bar to get a fresh pint or anything. He always laughs at that part when he remembers how he was bursting so hard for a piss, it was hard to concentrate on the music, and that between that and trying to spot you in the crowd to make sure you hadn’t gone home, he missed his cue twice.
You hadn’t gone home. You stayed till the end and afterwards you sat at the bar together and he bought you a fizzy orange and you talked for ages until your friend came over and said you had to go. You kissed him on the cheek when you said goodbye and it was only after you left that he thought that he should have asked you your last name or for your phone number or something. All he knew was that you were from New York and that you liked Irish music and that that was why you’d come to Ireland to study in Trinity for a year.
That’s the part of the story where he always pauses—used to pause—to get a fresh Guinness maybe, or to light a cigarette. And then he tells me how he couldn’t get you out of his head, that the whole next day he thought about the next Sunday and if you’d come again, even as he was telling himself a young one like you would never be interested in an auld fe
lla like him.
But he didn’t need to wait until the next Sunday, did he Mum? I’m getting to his favourite part of the story now, the Tuesday afternoon when he’s wrapping up Mrs. Hannon’s three quarters of round steak mince, when the bell tinkles and he looks up and you’re standing there behind her, bold as brass, smiling that smile.
I used to love that story. I’d make him tell it over and over and the part after, about how he closed the shop early and took you for a walk on the beach and you got fish and chips from Joe’s. I loved that the door in the shop was the same door you touched, that the tinkle of the bell sounded the same, even Mrs. Hannon with her mince was the same. But I was a kid then, and kids love stories. Now I’m seventeen—in two weeks and five days I’ll be eighteen—and I’m old enough to know that stories are only stories and that happy beginnings don’t mean happy endings and that when people are dead, they’re just dead.
And I’m sure Sergei’s fine. He’s probably fine, there’s no reason to think he’s not fine. It’s just that it’s 4:42 a.m. and we were supposed to meet by 2:30 at the latest, and the bars close at four and he never, ever, goes home with any of them, that’s his golden rule. And even if something has happened, it’s not like writing to you is going to do anything about it, it’s not going to change it, but maybe it makes me feel better to have something to do, maybe filling up this page with words makes it easier to ignore the porno man staring at me from behind the counter and the guy outside in the hallway talking to himself and beating the wall with one hand with a bandage around it and a stain that could be blood.
If you were here, what would you get from the cabinet? Would you choose a muffin or a piece of coffee cake or one of the cinnamon swirls? Or would you prefer a cookie? The cookies are huge, much bigger than in Ireland, and even bigger than they are in Florida. They’d probably take longer to eat than the muffin would. Would you get halfway through and push it away and say you were full? Or finish every last bit and lick the crumbs off your fingers, the way I always do? Did you miss New York food in Ireland the way I missed Irish food in Florida? Did you already know that Tuesday you walked into Dad’s shop that you might stay? That you might marry him? That you’d never come back here again?
These are the small things and the big things that I want to know.
Rhea
Columbia University, New York
23rd April 1999
5:46 p.m.
Dear Mum,
I only noticed when I wrote the date on this letter that it’s been over three weeks since the university results were all sent out. Three whole weeks. After all this waiting, it’s fifty kinds of crazy that there could have been an envelope from Columbia University with my name on it on the hall table in Coral Springs for the past three weeks. I wonder if Aunt Ruth has opened it. I bet she has. She knows my future before I do—not that it’s my future anymore anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.
Sergei finally showed up last night, by the way, with a roll of dollars he lifts out of his pocket like someone from a gangster movie. When I ask him where the hell he’d been and what he thought he was doing leaving me all on my own, he smiles his perfect smile and says he’d been “swept up by some yank” and that he’ll buy me McDonald’s.
I don’t say much while we eat our Big Macs, so he knows I’m annoyed. To make it up to me, he pays for a room in some hotel on Eighth Avenue. It’s a dump—the hotel—but they only charge us half price because it’s nearly six o’clock by then, and I’m so tired I don’t even care about the stain on the bedspread or the dip in the mattress that means we keep rolling into each other.
When the chambermaid shouts through the door at half eleven, it feels like the middle of the night and Sergei shouts back at her in Polish. She shouts something back in another language and Sergei starts cracking up and I do too. He’s like Dad—when he’s in a good mood, it’s hard to stay mad with him for long.
We met at the Y, Sergei and me, not even three weeks ago but it feels like we’ve always known each other. And in case you’re thinking he’s my boyfriend or something, he’s not. He’s gay, you’d know as soon as you saw him. That’s how we met, some big black guy was giving him hassle outside the bathroom at the Y—he had him up against the wall, saying he wasn’t going to share the shower with some faggot—and I went over and tapped the guy on the back.
It’s not like I’m really brave or anything. Aunt Ruth is always telling me not to get involved in other people’s business, but sometimes I can’t help it. You should have seen his face, the black guy, when he turns around and sees it’s only a girl—a short girl, with only one arm instead of two. He stares at the place my arm should be and I want to cup my stump, but I don’t. Instead I stand up taller and tell him to get his hands off my friend. Sergei’s not my friend yet, but the guy doesn’t know that. He’s not scared of me or anything, but he doesn’t know what to do with a girl involved so he just laughs and gives Sergei a final shove before he walks away.
Sergei smiles and blows his hair out of his eyes and I see that they’re dark brown—like your eyes—and they’re shiny, like he might have been going to cry.
“Thank you,” he goes, all formal, with a little bow.
“No problem.”
“What happened to your arm?”
He asks straightaway. Most people don’t ask. That’s one of the things I like about Sergei, how he always says what’s on his mind.
“I lost it in ’Nam,” I go. “Dirty war.”
He laughs and asks me if I want to go for a beer with him, so I do.
It’s nice having someone to talk to, even though he does most of the talking, which is fine by me. That night he tells me that he’s been in New York since January, that he came here from Warsaw. He says he’s twenty-one, but I don’t know if I believe him because the barman doesn’t ID either of us. He tells me he can’t get a proper job because he has no visa, but I don’t know if I believe that either because a few days later, we’re passing this restaurant near Grand Central and he says he had a job there waiting tables for a week before they fired him for being late two days in a row.
I hate that he tells me that, because then I know the visa thing is a lie, and because I’d love a job in a restaurant like that and if I got one I wouldn’t be late, even by one minute. No one will give me a job because they don’t think I’ll be able to wait tables, to serve customers, to do anything with only a left arm. I’ve tried everywhere, every restaurant, every bar, even a butcher’s I found on a scummy block on Ninth Avenue, but they all look at me like I’m fifty kinds of crazy that I think they might hire me. I tell them that I worked in Cooper’s restaurant, but this is New York and they don’t care about Florida and no one has ever heard of Coral Springs. No one listens long enough for me to tell them I was the quickest busser in the place, how I had tables cleared down and set up again while the other lazy asses were hanging out by the waitress station talking about what to spend their tips on before they’d even made any.
At times like that I wish I’d brought the stupid prosthetic with me, instead of leaving it on the floor of my room in some “up yours” gesture to Aunt Ruth and Cooper. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss all those stupid straps, and it would make working way harder, but maybe someone wouldn’t notice until it was too late and they’d offer me a job.
It was Sergei’s idea that we should move out and live on the street. What was it he said? “Pitch our wits against the city.” Something like that. My money was running really low anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to afford another week at the Y. And he made it sound like fun, like it was an adventure, a game that we could be in together—which we are most of the time, except when we’re not.
We do our own thing during the day sometimes, even when he’s not in the bars. We’re not joined at the hip or anything. My favourite thing to do is to go on the subway. The first day I got the map, it was horrible because it wasn’t t
he same as the one on my bedroom wall, the one that used to be yours. I wished I’d taken it with me, even though it was tearing really badly along the folds and the sun had faded the top half. Two of my favourite lines have changed—the AA is just the A and the RR is just the R—but I’m used to it now, the new map. It’s not that different really.
I can spend hours on the subway, once I was on it nearly all day. Sergei came with me one time last week, but he was bored after twenty minutes so now I go on my own. I like it on my own.
These are the things I like about going on the subway:
For $1.50 you can ride it all day and go anywhere in New York.
You can sleep and no one cares. The E train is the best for sleeping and if you get one of the corner seats, like I did today, you can sleep for a couple of hours sometimes with no one bothering you.
One of my favourite things is when you see another train in the tunnel, a whole carriage of other people next to you, or sometimes the front of the train with the letter lit up—a big yellow Q floating out of the dark, like Sesame Street.
I like watching the people in the carriage—the books they’re reading and what they wear. I imagine them getting up in their apartments all over New York, taking those clothes from hangers and drawers and putting them on, not knowing they would end up here with all these other people, just for a few minutes, a group that will never be the same again.
Most of all, the thing I like best about the subway is that I get to play my game in real life. I made up the game when I was ten, using your map. It’s easy, you just have to choose two stops with your eyes closed, and when you roll the dice that’s the most transfers you can make to get from the first stop to the second one. Lisa never liked playing, she said it was boring, and then when I changed it so you got more points for using more lines, she said that wasn’t fair because you couldn’t see half the stations anymore and I had an advantage because I remembered them all. After that we didn’t play much but I played on my own sometimes, at night when Dad was out, and sometimes I played it in bed, even when the lights were off, even when I could only see the map in my head. I bet if Lisa was here now, she’d get it, I bet she wouldn’t think it was boring anymore.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 1