Maybe these simple repeated gestures are all I can understand. This waitress seemed too young to have such a dexterous understanding of the bleak mechanics of her job.
“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t want to but I had to drop it. My advisor told me drop one or I might have to drop them all.”
She was smiling and I didn’t know what to say. Her stomach was showing, it was pointing right at me as she shrugged. That is, it was right at the level of my eye and it was pierced. If she was pregnant she was showing nothing.
“Then where would I be?”
“That would be no good,” I said. “You did the right thing.”
“Exactly! So then my very next class was your class and we were talking about that story? I forget the name but I loved it.”
“What was it about?”
She shook her head and squinted her eyes. She was still smiling, but it was a different smile, more at herself.
I wanted to tell her there’s more to life than the name of a story, and there is certainly more to it than the name of an author. The story itself is what matters, but even then, mainly how it moved you, mainly how it made you think. It is about the things suggested in your own life.
But she already knew that, and was trying to hide it out of pity for me, or that’s what it seemed like. It did seem like I spent my life remembering names of writers and names of stories, of course. But what she didn’t know is that it was a job, like her job.
“I just remember that the woman in the story was trapped and I knew all that on my own. You didn’t have to tell me. I knew it. I knew it on my own, before class, I mean.”
“Hey, that’s good. What do you need me for then, right?”
“Right! Well, I still wanted to take the class but . . . ”
“Well, listen,” I told her, “those counsellors — ”
“Advisors.”
“ — right, advisors, they know the best way to get the degree you’re after.”
Her fingers were spread out and touching the edge of the table. They were as thin as the bones at the front of her neck.
“Lived all my life in a college town,” Mel said across the room. “Never did go to college.”
The girl smiled over at him. He wasn’t always way off. He wasn’t always in his own world. Sometimes what he said came right from what was going on around him.
“Hey, how’s that puzzle coming?” I asked him. The girl and I smiled at each other and we walked together toward the kitchen. Mel’s face was huge and open as we approached. He wasn’t looking at me. He always liked a pretty smile. He liked girls. I told my wife it was because they smiled more than boys. You should see the way boys treat him. But the girls smile and he doesn’t know who they are. He forgets Nina’s name sometimes. She doesn’t like the way he looks at her then.
“Not too bad. Not too bad,” he said as we both turned our attention to the puzzle. There were huge gaps, of course. I couldn’t tell how much he’d gotten since last time. But I knew one day he would finish it. Out of the blue it would be done and there would be tears in his eyes and he wouldn’t talk to anyone around him. He would just look at the picture on the table in front of him like he was looking at a door that had just been closed. He knew something beautiful was in there, he knew he’d been in there, but how in God’s name do you get back?
“You’re missing something,” I told him, pointing at the biggest gap in the puzzle.
“Well, I never did go to college,” he muttered to himself, shuffling the unconnected pieces around on the table. His thick fingers would obliterate a piece just by touching it. “I signed up for the war just out of high school. I just figured, get my two years in and get out.”
“But you stayed there twenty-five years.”
“But I stayed in twenty-five years. Best thing I ever did.”
“You’ve got money coming in every month.”
“I got money coming in every month.”
“You’re missing most of the cat, here, though, do you see the cat in that pile?”
“Oh, now, she’s around the neighbourhood somewhere. Did you see a kitty laying anywhere in the road?”
I thought I might cry when he looked up from the puzzle. What cat? What cat are you thinking about, Mel? This is where I could use her help. What cat is her daddy talking about? He is about to weep over a lost cat from long ago or perhaps imagined and she stays away because he called her the wrong name.
“This orange little cat,” I told him, and pointed to a piece of the puzzle. “Here’s part of its tail.”
“Ha! It is, you son of a bitch! Good for you. Let me take that.” And as he did I heard voices at the front door.
“You have got to come in the back door,” I told the boy, but I shouldn’t really joke with them. “We’re watching the front door. Somebody’s always watching the front door.”
The boy didn’t flinch. His jaw was tight and he watched someplace behind my skull. I tried to catch his eyes.
“Wherever you go, I mean. Somebody’s always watching the front door.”
“It isn’t right, him just sitting in here like that. He should be put away.”
“Wait a minute,” I told the boy. I couldn’t remember his name, so I asked him.
“Tyler,” he said.
“Tyler, he didn’t do anything.”
“Soon as somebody’s not watching, what then?”
“Somebody’s always watching.”
“Soon as they’re not. What then? Soon as somebody falls asleep or gets caught up watching anything else. What then?”
“Tyler, we’re all doing our best. That won’t happen.”
I knew he didn’t believe me. I couldn’t remember what class I’d taught him. I couldn’t remember where I had seen him before, but I knew it was some kind of class.
“What are you up to these days?” I asked him.
In near the doorway the sun played tricks. His glasses glinted so I couldn’t really see his eyes. I saw where his eyes would be. I saw movement and shapes there in the sockets, but I also saw some sketch of my reflection, and when I spoke my mouth moved awkwardly; the words didn’t match its shape at all.
“You were in a class of mine,” I told him. “Which one? I can’t remember. Was it just one?”
“It was one.”
He stared at me, waiting, but I couldn’t remember.
“Do you remember Of Mice and Men?” he asked me.
“The book or the movie.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and he turned and left.
These are boys in love with their first real girlfriends. I’ve stopped trying to explain things to them. They don’t like the way Mel looks at their girls. And because the old man moves so slow and they are all speed, he watches them like they’re on TV. He comments and he smiles. His vocabulary is shrinking. He remembers small words, crude words that mean the same as big words.
They don’t like the things they think they hear him say. They don’t like the things he actually says, either.
“Maybe they’re right,” she said, when I got home in the evening. “Maybe there’s something to it. What kind of life does he have anyway?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean he just does that puzzle. He’ll never finish that puzzle.”
I pictured her daddy with his oily glasses staring down at the dirty cardboard pieces. He smiled when someone he knew came in. He thought they were coming in to see him, and when he didn’t know them, he assumed the same; either way he wanted to be alone with his puzzle.
“He enjoys it, is the thing. What kind of life would he have in a home?”
“He’d sit in his room and do another puzzle. He’d have the same life.”
“Not the same. Not the same at all,” I said, shaking my head.
“How?”
“Nobody’s coming and going in the home. Nobody’s coming into his room.”
“There’s a room they all go to. He could sit there.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Usually I told her we’ve done it this long, let’s keep going. What’s the harm? I don’t mind and her brother doesn’t mind, our nieces and nephews don’t mind. I didn’t want to bring up her mother. Her mother had died long ago. Part of Nina’s problem with her daddy was that her mother died long ago.
“Did anyone come in looking for him today?”
This isn’t the kind of question I wanted to answer. There was orange juice in the fridge and I poured some. I took a vitamin because I couldn’t remember if I had in the morning. There was some pineapple there on the top shelf, and I wanted it, but couldn’t decide if it was worth the sticky mess it would make on my hands. It would get on my chin and then onto my shirt, too. I had to bite into it. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t put a whole piece in my mouth no matter how small it was. It was too sweet. I needed air in there too.
“Yeah. They’re just worried about nothing.”
“How do you know?”
“He never did a thing that you know of, right?”
“I see the way he looks at girls sometimes.”
“He likes the way they smile,” I told her. “They smile at him.”
“Not all of them,” she said. “He doesn’t even remember who I am. He forgets I’m his daughter.”
“He never sees you anymore. Where would he remember you from?”
She didn’t speak and I didn’t want to continue. It was the wrong thing to say. I had said the wrong thing.
“I’m sorry, Helen. He knows you sometimes. He talks to me all the time about you. He remembers when you were a child. He never touched you then, right?”
“Of course not.”
She stood watching me from the other side of the kitchen island. I closed the fridge and turned to smile at her. What had happened to her? There were a million things I could think of, but didn’t want to. Why wouldn’t she tell me?
Her hands were brown and the fingers turned white at their tips as she pushed them down on the counter. Her hair was tied back but one dark strand hung down on the left of her face. Her bottom lip jutted out slightly when she was thinking.
I remember the first time I noticed she dyed her hair. It was ages ago but she isn’t that old. It was over a year after we moved in together and I was proud of her for keeping it from me for so long. What an odd thing to be proud of, but I was. She was on her knees behind the house, planting something beside the patio. I walked up silently behind her and knelt there. She kept her hair short then and I saw the smallest edge of grey at her roots as I kissed her neck.
I hadn’t surprised her, of course. And what I was proud of wasn’t that she fooled me, because she hadn’t. What I admired about her as she planted all sorts of colours in the sun around our new house, was that she still had something that was just her own. I tried to keep secrets but I couldn’t. I told her everything I knew, every day.
“Remember that first house?” I asked her there in the kitchen.
“Of course,” she said, but she wasn’t in the mood. “Yes. Yes, I remember that house. It was great. It was fine.”
“He’s still your daddy,” I told her, even though I hadn’t meant to.
“That doesn’t change a thing. You say that every time.”
“Just ’cause you don’t see him, or just ’cause you don’t call him that.”
“You say that every time.”
She’s right. I say that every time.
On Monday I’ll try to get her daddy out of the booth. He’ll curse me and ask me why can I never leave him alone, just leave him to it.
“You’re so goddam jealous of me it makes me sick,” he bellows. “Every one of them girls — you can’t stand it ’cause you’re an old man.”
When I start to push him gently toward the door, the pain and exertion from his shuffling take over. He tells me life is hell and don’t ever get old.
His eyes get wilder and wetter as we get to the door.
“I just want to finish that goddam puzzle,” he hisses as I push him out into the world. Once he hauls himself up the step from the sidewalk to the barber shop, once he’s balanced again, he sees Ernie and smiles.
He grows and straightens out as he puts his hat and coat on the rack. He stands like he’s ready for anything that comes.
“My son-in-law, Ernie,” he says, gesturing toward me.
“Never catch me chumming around with my wife’s daddy.”
“Well, we’re all grownups here, Ernie. When he first came sniffing around I didn’t much like him. But what can you do? He turned out pretty good.”
The kinds of things Mel says are okay in the barbershop most times. I take him on a weekday, just in case, when usually there are no mothers and children in there. Ernie doesn’t take offense. Talking’s just talking, anyway.
Well if you get in there and ask the wrong question he’ll go on a tear. He never got hired at the plant, back when there was one, because of what people thought of him. That was back when the plant was running and back before Ukrainians were white. He gave coal away to the women in the ’30s when he was working for the railway. He’d walk along the tops of the cars and throw it down to the women, who would gather it in their aprons. To hear him tell it he could’ve been in Marvel comics with the Sub-Mariner or Sgt. Fury, only he was winning the war at home, standing atop a high-speed train dispensing coal to the peasants as the rich industrialists tried to stop him. That’s one thing I loved about him; it was a war, that one. He was right.
I’ve heard all these stories, though, so I mostly sit and look out the glass front of the barber shop. We get him a shave, too, and Ernie takes his time.
People walk by now and then on the sidewalk. Their faces are hidden unless the shadow of a cloud passes over and darkens the scene; then we can all see everything from where we sit on the wine-coloured chairs. I am always
surprised when the unbearable lightness breaks into shade and someone walks by with a smile. The shapes without faces seem angry.
Old guys have their hands stuffed in their pockets, even on hot days. Unless they’re like Mel, then they need them out and ready to hold onto some kind of building or rail, just in case.
We go right to his little room above the restaurant. He sits way back in his chair and rubs the back of his neck.
“That son of a bitch does a good job,” he says.
Just once, she could come by, and see her daddy talking to Ernie. She could be one of those people walking up the sidewalk, listening to the world around her, smiling at something somebody said. She could help me bring him home after his haircut, all shined up and feeling fine. He breathes deeply and has all sorts of plans. He’s got no time for the puzzle. Let’s get out to the track, he’ll say. I feel lucky.
Make the Soup
YOU BUILD THE FACTORY. YOU MAKE the soup the workers eat. You build a house about twenty minutes by bus from the factory. The bus route doesn’t matter to the story; all you need is twenty minutes from end to end. Those twenty minutes work either way, whether the line is crooked or straight. All you need are the facts:
A factory.
A house.
The boy’s father works at the factory and it takes him twenty minutes to get there, twenty minutes to get home at night.
Now the man’s got a son, but not a wife. Why doesn’t he drive? Why doesn’t he have a wife?
The boy’s got red hair and pale skin. He sits tapping at his computer at night, inventing reasons his father’s alone. He’s got a good imagination. It could be any number of things.
1) His mother died in the car crash that hurt his father’s eye. It takes care of the driving. It takes care of the wife.
2) His father never needed nothing that wasn’t on the bus route anyway, so . . . Safeway, the little branch of the city library, the walk-in clinic, the Credit Union, etc. . .
3) But those twenty minutes he is on the bus. The boy knows his father has ten minutes at the factory before his job starts, and ten minutes waiting fo
r the bus on the way home. In those ten minutes each way, ten minutes twice each day, anything can happen. Women must work in the factory too. Women must take the bus.
4) His father must have had all he would ever need with the boy’s mother. Her name was Linda, and she cooked exotic food. Nobody ever went hungry before she died. There was hot clear soup and creamy thick soup. There was homemade bread, fresh vegetables from the garden, and his father smiled. He took the bus to work because his mother needed the car to do good things all day — search for ingredients, feed the homeless downtown.
5) Now there are three closets filled with no-name vegetables, soups, and fruit. Nobody starves even though the mother is dead.
6) The women at the factory see the boy’s father but maybe to them he has too big a belly, though he has no belly at all. Maybe to them his teeth are not straight, though only one at the bottom is out of place. Maybe to them he is just a short man with a skinny pale son.
7) The boy looks in the mirror every day. He is too thin. His hair is too red. On his mother that red was beautiful. He is so pale he feels blue.
8) The women at the factory seem shy. They see his father and have heard of his mother. Who am I beside this beautiful ghost? they think. I am too thick in the middle. I am too wrinkled near my eyes and my smile seems childish compared to her smile in that picture he keeps in the living room.
We Don't Listen to Them Page 3