Eli was mindful of our space and of our habits. If friends came over, he asked our permission before herding them all out to sit on the roof. Once outside, if he found out Zoë and I were writing, he stopped his friends’ intermittent guitar strumming or hushed their near hysterical tirades against the war. He didn’t mind that I blessed my food before eating it, and bowed his head in respect if not accompaniment. (Zoë had never participated.)
Though he had no interest in seeing the sanctuary of Copenhagen Baptist, he gladly came with us for one of our first of the month Saturday grocery giveaways. We drove together in his van to the edge of town to deliver turkeys and children’s coats to families who couldn’t afford either. I enjoyed seeing the children, but always felt awkward around the parents. Eli talked to them as if he were visiting his own family. He got into a discussion of baseball with Mr. Jones that went on so long we had to leave him behind to get to two other homes. He prayed for five minutes straight with Lawrence Kennedy, the resident alcoholic. And Bertie Lewis adored him. Bertie was a widowed black woman who weighed all of eighty pounds, had been on an oxygen tank for as long as I’d known her, and called me Honey. On seeing Eli with his long hair and beard, she grinned and announced it was like having Jesus come hisself to deliver her milk.
As we were leaving she clasped my hand in hers. Her palms felt dry and fragile as autumn leaves. “You hold on to that one now,” she said. “That’s one of the good Lord’s better creations. Don’t you let him outta your sight.”
Instead, I took to avoiding Eli altogether because I couldn’t talk to him without betraying the fact that I found him incredibly attractive.
Zoë was upset. She wanted to know why I didn’t like Eli.
“Who says I don’t like him?”
“No one says. It’s obvious to anyone who’s in the room when the two of you are forced to share it. You do everything in your power to avoid him. ” She reached into the last of the remaining grocery bags and stacked the leftovers on the shelf with the twenty other cans of peas and kidney beans. “When I asked him what was up, he said he didn’t know how to talk to you; he said you’re a nervous person.”
“I like him fine,” I insisted. “I treat him just like I treat you.”
“No, you treat him like an infestation. He’s our guest.” She slapped the empty bag against her knee to deflate it. “It wouldn’t kill you to treat him like one.”
“He’s not our guest, he’s your guest. And I’ve never treated him any different than I treat you.”
I rotated the cans she’d just put away so their labels faced outward.
“He said I was nervous?” I asked. “That’s a terrible thing to say about a person. Do you think I’m nervous?”
Zoë watched me situate the last can so the Green Giant on the carrots stood identical to the Green Giant on the corn. She answered carefully. “I don’t think you’re a calm person.”
“Eli doesn’t even know me.”
“Right.” She shrugged, already resigned to the fact that he and I would never get along. “So why should you care.”
“Sometimes I worry that people think I worry about what people think of me.”
She’d looked at me plaintively before rolling her eyes and leaving the pantry.
The next night she had to work the closing Sunday shift, leaving Eli and me home alone. I carried my stack of textbooks into the living room. He was sitting on the couch with his legs crossed the way women do, a posture that highlighted the length of his body to admirable effect. His reading glasses were wrong for his face, too square and thin-rimmed and out of decade.
“Mind if I work in here with you?”
“Sure.” He got up to flick on the second lamp. He returned to his magazine, the first of a stack of sloppily piled Art in America magazines. He flipped through each quickly. He was looking at the pictures.
“Anything interesting?” I asked.
“Some,” he murmured.
I made a few more gentle attempts at conversation. He met each with a succinct reply. I finally gave up. I worked; he read pictures. Had a stranger walked in the room, she might have found the situation companionable, but I felt acutely aware of his silent rebuttal.
Around eleven he tossed the last magazine aside and wandered into the kitchen. The fridge door open, shut. He returned to the living room empty-handed.
“Are you at all hungry?” he asked.
I hesitated. It was late, a school night, and all I really wanted was to sleep.
“I could eat,” I said.
We took his van, driving slow over the mounds of accumulating drifts, fat flakes of snow getting mashed in the windshield wipers. I suggested Bailey’s Bistro or the Chinese restaurant, but both were closed.
“The Lucky Tavern?” he asked.
“Sounds good to me,” I replied as enthusiastically as I could manage.
There were more bars than restaurants on the downtown strip. I hadn’t been in a single one since the last time my graduate workshop had met to celebrate Valerie’s thesis defense. I counted The Lucky Tavern among my least favorites. It was the hot spot for upperclassmen jocks who came in droves to watch The Big Game. It was crowded and dark and perpetually damp. Everything came with grease: fried pickles, oily onion rings, and soggy menus.
While the waitress led us to a booth, Eli eyed me skeptically over his shoulder, as if his first glance around the room had been enough to tell him how little such a place could possibly have to offer and how unlikely it was that a person like me would actually prefer it. His skepticism rallied what little school spirit I had. I resolved to have a wonderful time. I resolved Eli would have a wonderful time.
“All burgers are good here and the curly fries are superior to the French fries,” I said as he reached for his menu. “But I wouldn’t recommend the veggie burger. It’s a patty of beans squashed between toast. The taste is bad and the texture is even worse.”
“Anything burger, no veggie,” he echoed.
I considered the menu without any real interest. I couldn’t think of what Eli and I could possibly talk about for an hour and a half. And there was the problem of what to drink. I never touched beer, but it seemed wrong somehow to order wine in The Lucky Tavern.
When the waitress returned, I ordered the cheeseburger and a Guinness. Eli ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke.
“You don’t drink?” I asked.
“I don’t. ” He pulled a Sharpie marker from his back pocket and began drawing on his napkin. “So I hear you typing away all the time. What are you working on?”
“I have a few stories I’m revising.” This was an exaggeration. Aside from my slavish transcription of every classic on my shelf, I’d been retouching one story—the one I’d been farming out to rejections since last summer. This mostly involved swapping limp words for synonyms and reshuffling commas. Since graduate school I’d lost the faith and enthusiasm that serious revision required. “I haven’t been making much progress,” I admitted.
“That’s all right,” he said. “As long as you’re working.”
“Teaching’s the real work.”
He glanced up from his drawing. “I’ve tried to imagine you as a teacher. I can’t see it.”
I tried not to feel offended by his remark. “Why not?”
He thought before he spoke. “Maybe I just never had a good English teacher.”
“Maybe you were a lousy student.”
“Unfortunately, that’s a distinct possibility.”
The waitress returned with a pint of beer as black as coffee. The glass was enormous—I’d meant to order a bottle.
“How long have you been at it? The teaching,” he clarified.
“Two years? I lose track. It feels like so much longer … I think people who teach age in dog years.”
I was surprised to hear him laugh.
“Sometimes in the middle of class I’ll suddenly realize where I am and what I’m doing,” I said. “It’s like I’m waking up in the mid
dle of someone else’s life.”
He tried to return to the subject of writing, but I told him I didn’t like talking about my stories.
“Why not?”
“It’s a little self-absorbed, don’t you think?”
“Not if someone asks.”
“Why don’t you tell me about your work.” I nodded at the napkin he’d now covered in ink caricatures and hatch-marked clouds.
“This,” he said with an affectation of pride, “is Pew Art.” He signed his name on the ribbed margin of the napkin and slid it over to my side of the table.
“Pew Art?”
“That’s what my Aunt Jenny used to call the drawings I did in church when I was supposed to be listening.”
“I didn’t think you went to church,” I said.
“I didn’t think you drank Guinness,” he replied.
Apparently, I was the only one at the table trying to make an impression, and I was making entirely the wrong kind. I already felt guilty about the beer. It had taken years to drain a modest, ritual glass of wine from an accompanying sense of transgression. Walking around at parties with a plastic cup of five-dollar Merlot, I sometimes felt that I’d switched teams in the middle of a very important game.
We were two of five people in the entire pub, but our food took forty minutes. In that time Eli managed to cover three napkins with drawings and inquire about everything personal: how I’d voted in the last election, why I wasn’t dating, who I’d last dated. To my surprise, I answered every question at length.
“Am I talking too much?” I asked.
Laugh lines framed his smile. “I think you should talk like this all the time.”
He ate like he hadn’t seen food in days. I imagined the calories burning on impact, like water evaporating on contact with a hot, greased skillet. You had to admire such a body.
I said, “So you still haven’t told me what your tattoo means.”
“I thought I did.”
“No.You told me I disapproved of it and then you didn’t say anything else.”
He wiped his fingers on his one still-blank napkin. “You want the long version or the short version?”
“Whichever’s better.”
He sat back in his seat. “I was in a car accident when I was twenty-three. It was on an old country road. I don’t remember seeing headlights behind me, but right after I wrecked the car, a man in a pickup truck driving around the corner saw the fire from the accident and came running to pull me out. If he hadn’t gotten me out, I’d have been badly burned, at the very least. He was a total stranger. I couldn’t tell you a thing about the accident, about this guy’s face or what he was wearing or what he said to me in that ER, but I can see the tattoo on his arm like he lifted me up out of that car five minutes ago.” He examined his arm. “It was this same pattern.”
I admitted that was an amazing story.
I asked if that was the short version or the long version.
He considered the question. “If I tell you the long version, you may not want to talk to me again.”
I crossed my arms. “I hate to think what Zoë’s told you about me.”
“Only good things.”
“She’s right that I grew up in a strict environment,” I said. “The First Fundamentalists.”
“Never heard of them.”
Remembering a jingle Grandma liked to sing, I said, “They don’t smoke, chew, or go with girls that do.”
“Sounds like about every denomination I know.”
We were talking about me again.
I said, “So you grew up in church …”
He wiped bits of salt from the table onto the floor. He folded and unfolded his napkin. “My Aunt Jenny was a Methodist,” was the unlikely beginning of the long version.
Eli’s parents despised the church almost as much as they despised each other, but he’d grown up under its influence nevertheless, his aunt and uncle being devoted Methodists charged with the duty of civilizing him.
Aunt Jenny and Uncle Rod lived across town from Eli’s family in a ranch house with a steep front yard they decorated with porcelain ducks dressed in raincoats for April, polka-dot frocks for May and June. In winter the ducks were replaced with a plastic Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus who glowed. In texture and color the nativity figurines reminded Eli of Nik-L-Nip wax bottle candies, the Virgin Mary’s cheeks two cherry dots floating beneath her milky complexion. He understood Virgin to be synonymous with Queen and always thought the word lovely and holy, even when, in the fifth grade, he was educated as to its true meaning.
Eli and his brother, Aden, never saw their father after the divorce. Weekdays their mother worked as a housekeeper for the Marriott and on weekends she took a second job cleaning house for a well-to-do family whose garage was bigger than two normal-sized houses. By rule, his mother did not bring her work home; it therefore fell to Eli and Aden to throw the beer bottles away and empty the ashtrays the mornings after late night parties and poker games. Eli topped off whatever beer was left in each of the bottles before finding inventive ways to make his little brother clean them up. They played Monopoly or poker, betting their chores, Eli winning easily every time. When bets didn’t work, he resorted to sheer physical intimidation: locking Aden in the closet, pinning him down and threatening to drip loogies on his face until he gave in.
Their mother had boyfriends, one the same as the other. They got drunk, stayed over, slept it off. There were a few who showed kindness, treated the boys to playing cards, gum, little gifts of recognition. The truck driver (Eli couldn’t remember his name) had been a decent man. He let them sit up front in his big rig just to drive to the grocery store, just to rent a movie. That was a good summer.
When the brothers were alone, Eli was in charge by virtue of being older and a handful of inches taller. He protested this arrangement every morning, cussed at his mother, said he shouldn’t have to waste his time taking care of a baby. He complained so he wouldn’t look like a sissy girl; really he liked the responsibility. He made Aden do his homework. He made him SpaghettiOs and grilled cheese sandwiches. When there wasn’t any food they walked to the nearest Kmart and slipped Twinkies and Snickers bars and M&Ms in their coats, a feast they shared on the living room floor, laughing riotously, the sugar rushing through their skinny bodies and out their open mouths, molars packed with half-chewed candy.
When their mother met Carl Roker, this comfortable routine changed. Roker was different than the other men, enormous and unkempt, with a temper that flushed his cheeks a blood red. He made them stay in the house even though he never wanted anything to do with them—he didn’t like their running around. He brought their mother novelties, new highs to take her where the alcohol couldn’t. Eli knew the little baggies of white for what they were—he wasn’t stupid—and the sight of the powder on the living room table gave him a sinking feeling of dread. The school had presentations on the campaign against drugs regularly. He was everywhere accosted with his mother’s sin: “Just say no,” the smiling teachers singsonged. Just Say No, the high school students’ T-shirts declared.
Roker and their mother snorted lines of coke from the living room table. They watched television for hours, never ate, had sex. One night they forgot to shut the door. Eli only wanted the remote control. He’d thought they were sleeping. “Little perv,” Roker said, laughing.
Eli ran from the room, his cheeks burning with shame. Roker pulled Eli aside the next day, wrapped the impossibly fat weight of his arm around the thin boy’s shoulders. His breath was sour with cigarettes and alcohol. In the other hand he held two magazines. A different woman on every page, each exposed in creative and gymnastic ways, a world Eli had never known existed. “You want to watch?” Roker asked. “You’re gonna have to study.” And then, the only gesture of affection between them, he tousled Eli’s hair.
Eli took the magazines to his room and locked the door. He read every page, studied the pictures slowly. The next morning, sick with the same burning hea
t on his face that he’d felt at the sight of his mother’s nakedness, he stuffed the magazines into a trash bag and set fire to them in the backyard. Roker saw the flames from the kitchen window. He ran out of the house, doused water on the fire. When Eli tried to run away, Roker grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. He twisted the arm until Eli cried out in pain, terrified his shoulder would pop from its socket. Roker dropped him to the ground, kicked him twice in the stomach, and returned to the house without looking back.
Eli took the beatings. He never let himself cry out again. In the bathroom, after brushing his teeth, he sometimes dug a razor blade into the flesh of his shoulder, making neat bloody lines in careful rows, learning to feel the pain without fearing it. Roker at least did him the service of keeping the bruises in easily hidden places. Eli sometimes wore long sleeves, but he never had to hide his face. He told no one: He didn’t want Them to take Aden away.
Eli liked school inasmuch as it gave him an eight-hour reprieve from anxiety. During school hours he could relax, knowing Aden was safe. His teacher, Mrs. Davis, was nice and very pretty. She let him draw in class, a rare privilege. “… from a broken home …” he’d heard her admit, somewhat smugly, to a fellow teacher in the hallway.
Mrs. Davis liked art. She did her bulletin boards in Monet lilies and Van Gogh shapes. She took the students on a field trip to a local art museum. Eli stared at the paintings. Like the magazines, the men had clothes, the women didn’t, but these pictures were different. He couldn’t explain why. He wondered why there would be naked women in the same paintings as Jesus, and he stared five whole minutes at the wounds in Jesus’ side, the sliver slits of blood, like the engravings on his own arm. He didn’t believe Mrs. Davis that someone had made them with so much pencil and paint. He wrote the names of the artists on his hand intent on investigating the matter for himself. The next day he got a hall pass to use the bathroom. He walked out of the school and hiked the five miles to the library. He could only find pictures from one of the painters, but the librarians wouldn’t let him take the book home: It was expensive and it was inappropriate. He kicked the librarian’s desk. “Young man,” she warned. He ran home, surprised to find himself weeping.
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