One night, she invited her parents over for dinner. They were very old now. Her father had retired in 1968, and he could barely hear anymore. Diane had to shout at him across the table, and several times, he turned to his wife and asked, “What’d Diane just say?” At one point, before dessert, he stood up and began to speak. He said he’d been a math teacher for thirty-five years and felt that he’d served the town well. He had had a purpose, and had a gold watch as proof of his value and a commemorative plaque hanging in his living room. He didn’t know what a health food store was, but Middleville now had one, thanks to Chic’s brother. He asked Chic and Diane what they thought their purpose was, and both of them looked down at their laps. He said he was sorry that they’d lost their son. He said he thought about him from time to time. He said when it was time for him to go, he’d go peacefully, hopefully in his sleep. He hoped it would be soon. He was getting tired.
“Oh, sit down,” Diane’s mother said. “He gets like this sometimes.”
“Daddy,” Diane said. “You’re not going to die.” She couldn’t handle another death, not now, not after she’d finally gotten herself up and off the ground.
Her father sat down and put his napkin back in his lap. He looked at Chic and smiled.
After her parents left, Diane did the dishes and wiped the table, while Chic sat in the living room to watch All in the Family. After she turned out the lights in the kitchen, she went upstairs and sat in the rocking chair with a doll. She wanted to think about what her father had said, but there was a barrier around it—like a scab over a wound—that protected her from thinking about it. However, she did allow herself a few moments of imagination: her father and Lomax in heaven, both of them laughing. Her father throwing Lomax a baseball, Lomax catching it. Then, she snapped back into the present and looked down at the doll she was cradling.
After a while, Chic ducked his head into the nursery and asked Diane if she wanted to come to bed, but she wasn’t ready yet. He went into the bathroom, and she listened to him getting ready. After he was finished, she called him back into the nursery.
“Yes?” he asked.
“I think I want to join a bowling league,” she said.
“A bowling league?”
“We never get out and socialize. We should do more of that.”
“OK,” he said.
“I’m going to sign us up. Wednesday nights.”
“Very good, then. Wednesday nights.” He watched her for a while. They probably weren’t going to have another kid. He shouldn’t even bring it up. It occurred to him that he wasn’t sure if he was in love with her. He thought he was, but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he only felt like he loved her because of what they’d gone through. Maybe that was all love was. Anyway, it was much easier if he didn’t think about it. Just go with it. Get in the river and float along with it. Wednesday nights. It was settled, then. Bowling.
Mary & Green Geneseo
June 24, 1998
Green woke up. His neck was killing him. He’d been too stubborn to sleep in the bedroom, so he’d slept in his wheelchair, with his head slumped over on his chest. The sun peeked through the Venetian blinds. The house was quiet. What time was it? He heard a car start up on the street. He peeked out the blinds—the minivan was in the drive. He rolled into the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. The coffeemaker hadn’t been used. In the bedroom, the bed was made. The bathroom. He pulled aside the shower curtain. There were droplets of water in the tub, and it smelled like she’d recently washed her hair. In the back of the house, out the sunporch window, he had a view of the backyard—the grass needed mowing—and the neighbor’s house with its garden shed and picnic table. No Mary. Then he heard the door open. He glanced over his shoulder, sending a sharp jolt of pain through his body.
“There you are, sleepyhead.” She was holding a cordless phone. She saw Green eyeing it, and put it behind her back.
He dug out his Post-it Note pad but didn’t write anything. He didn’t feel like talking. He thought about asking about the phone, which she was obviously hiding behind her back, but what was the point. He was tired of arguing with her. He wanted to wheel himself away so that he didn’t have to be in front of her and feel like such a little man.
“So, I’m going to the Brazen Bull later today. I know you don’t want to go, so I’m not gonna make you. But I thought we could go have dinner tonight. Me and you. I shouldn’t be home too late. Around six. Seth and that guy they call Eight Ball are usually there until about then.”
Green felt the anger rising up inside of him. He knew she wasn’t going to the Brazen Bull. The Pair-a-Dice guy, or whoever, was probably going to spring for some sloppy hotel where they’d spend all afternoon watching soap operas on the television while he took her from behind.
Mary sighed. He didn’t even have to write anything. She could see it in his face.
The sigh made Green feel like a scolded dog, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to know the truth. He dug out his notepad and wrote, I ’m sorry I didn’t turn out the way you wanted me to.
She put her hands on her hips. The way she was looking at him, he could tell she was at her breaking point. He was pushing her too far.
Chic Waldbeeser
October 18, 1971
While Diane had her dolls and now bowling, Chic still had nothing. His desire to connect with someone, something, was so great that it felt like a blender was whirling inside of him, constantly churning, churning, churning with longing. He needed to find it, whatever it was. Maybe it was books, he thought. Or yogurt? Maybe that yogurt book or whatever it had been that had done the trick for Buddy? He should pay him a visit. Maybe he could recommend something. He was his big brother after all, and wasn’t a big brother supposed to help the younger brother? Wasn’t that how it worked?
Chic got as far as standing on the sidewalk in front of the health food store when he glimpsed Russ standing by the counter. He was ten now, pretty much the same age that Lomax had been when he drowned. Chic froze. He couldn’t breathe. His heart was doing a crazy dance—pitter-pat, glug, glug, beat, beat, beat. His mind flashed back to the time he took Lomax to the high school gymnasium for Little League tryouts. Lomax had brought along his briefcase and spent the morning sitting in the bleachers, shuffling papers. When it was his turn to take some grounders, he stood under the basketball hoop, his legs crossed at the ankle, his glove hanging limply at his side. The coach could tell Lomax wasn’t a ballplayer, so he rolled the ball at him instead of smacking it with the fungo bat. Lomax didn’t even try to make a play on the ball—he simply watched it bounce off the wall behind him. His own son couldn’t—or wouldn’t—even scoop up a slow roller! Chic wanted to go turtle and put his head into his shell. All the other fathers turned the death eye on him as if he’d raised some kind of oddball. And it was true. His son was different. Chic knew it. Diane knew it. Anyone who spent three minutes with the boy knew it. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe if he had pushed Lomax to hang around with the boys in the neighborhood more, he wouldn’t have gone off to Kennel Lake on some lake-diving mud-gathering science study thing. He’d be in college now, maybe down at the University of Illinois, and there wouldn’t be a room full of goddamn dolls at home, and his wife wouldn’t be dragging him to a Wednesday night bowling league, which, by the way, he hated. He was terrible at bowling. They were both terrible at it, and he knew the other bowlers were laughing at them just like the fathers had laughed at him that afternoon at the Little League tryouts. He should have forced Lomax to become a normal, red-blooded, American boy. Now, the worst thing, the absolute worst thing, the knife twisting in his goddamn stomach, was that his brother was raising a son who played baseball. A real son. A normal son. An alive son. Chic couldn’t go inside the store. He couldn’t make small talk with Russ—ask him about Little League and school. No goddamn way. And he certainly didn’t want to ask his brother for advice. He wanted to be alone—alone with this heavy rock sitting on his chest, alone with his thoughts, his me
mory, his disappointment in himself as a father. He’d find his own book.
There was a can of beer under the seat, stashed there for occasions when he needed something to loosen the strings, take a little weight off. Chic cracked the beer. It was warm, but he guzzled it anyway; a little bit dribbled out the corners of his mouth. There was another one in the glove box and three more in the spare-tire well in the trunk. He pounded them all and crushed the cans and hid them under the seat. He wiped his mouth. He felt woozy. The feelings of disappointment subsided a bit. The beer always helped. He drove to the library.
Chic tried pushing through the library’s glass front door, but it wouldn’t open. Closed! The library was closed. He couldn’t believe it. But what were those people doing inside? He stood there scratching his head until someone pushed through the door and excused himself past Chic. (He hadn’t realized that the door needed to be pulled open.) He opened the door and went inside. In his head, he heard trumpets. He was here. His salvation! Books! Which, to be honest, he didn’t really enjoy. The last book he had read was Great Expectations—in high school.
He walked toward the card catalog, stumbling a few times along the way. He was trying not to appear drunk, but he was too buzzed to be able to pretend. Across the library, he noticed his former English teacher, Mr. Haze, reading a book at a table. He had to be around one hundred years old. He had been old when Chic was in school, and that was twenty-five years ago. Chic acknowledged him with a shy wave. Mr. Haze gave him a stern look, then went back to reading his book.
Chic thumbed through the cards quickly. He wasn’t really sure where to start or what type of book he was looking for. He flipped the cards in the T drawer—Taproot. Tarrytown. Tennessee. He was looking for temple. His body was a temple; for some reason, that phrase stuck in his mind. He felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around, but no one was there. Then he noticed a girl looking up at him, a tiny girl with straight dark hair and feet the size of dinner rolls.
“Have you been drinking, sir?” She had a squeaky voice.
Of course he’d been drinking. In fact, if he had any beer left, he’d be out in his car right now still drinking. But he had no beer left, and besides, he was looking for something different, a book or something. This is what he wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her other things, too. The baseball tryouts. Lomax. The death. His brother. Russ. Lijy. Dolls. Bowling. Everything. She could pull up a chair and they could have a conversation. He tried to talk to her, opening and closing his mouth like a fish, but the beer had stolen his voice.
“We don’t allow intoxicated people in the library.”
Chic looked around for something to write on. He had to tell her how he was feeling. He had to tell someone. His feelings wanted out. On a table were little squares of paper.
“I said you can’t be here,” she hissed at him. “You’re drunk. I smell it.”
Chic picked up a square of paper and wrote: My life is nothing but a large hole in the ground I can’t get out of. He handed the piece of paper to the girl. She read it. It had a rhythm, and although it didn’t have the right number of syllables, it was pretty close to a haiku. “Are you a poet?” she asked.
Chic had never been asked that question before. In fact, he’d never given that question an iota of thought. Chic Waldbeeser, a poet? Was she saying that he’d just written a poem? Maybe this was it. Poetry. He’d be a poet, and poetry—words—would chisel him out of the icy sadness that surrounded him.
The girl, whose name was Lucy Snell, had a thing for poets; she, herself, was trying to be one, and her boyfriend was trying to be one, too. They spent their Friday nights at One World Coffee in Peoria, near the Bradley campus, reading poems and hawking the poetry journal the two of them edited. She led Chic to the back of the library. It was quieter here, out of sight from the other patrons. The shelves reached the ceiling and were packed tight with books. She carefully picked out eight titles for him. “These two are good. And so is this one. Everyone needs to read Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ginsberg’s Howl is a must. You can only take eight out at a time,” she said. “You’ll have to come back for more. Oh, here’s a good one. Emily Dickinson. I love Emily Dickinson.”
Suddenly, not paying attention to titles or authors, Chic started grabbing books off the shelves and handing them to Lucy. The stack of books grew precariously tall in her hands, higher than her head, and she needed to peek around it to see him.
“You can only take out eight,” she said.
“I have nothing. Nothing,” he said, “and I need something. This might be it.”
Maybe it was his admission that he had nothing and Lucy Snell’s belief that poetry was the injection of “something,” maybe it was because no one ever came into the Middleville Public Library looking for poetry, maybe it was the throw-me-a-rope look in his eyes; whatever it was, Lucy made an exception and let Chic check out forty-seven books of poetry. It took him four trips to carry them all to his car.
He slid into the driver’s seat and picked up the first book, John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. He looked at the cover. He smelled the book. It smelled like it hadn’t been opened in years. He liked the title, though. He could use a dream song. That’s what he really needed right about now—dreams, some sleep. The beer had run its course. He reclined the seat and set the book aside. His eyes felt like they were being cranked shut. He’d get to the books in a little while. He closed his eyes. Everything went black.
One by one, people left the library. The sun set. The streetlights came on. Lucy Snell locked the front door and went through her closing routine. When she was done, she went outside, unlocked her ten-speed bicycle from the bike rack, and hopped on. She noticed a lone car in the far corner of the parking lot under a streetlight. She rode up to the car and saw Chic asleep in the driver’s seat. Leaves blew around the parking lot. It was starting to get chilly. She circled around and came up to the driver’s side door and knocked on the window.
Chic startled awake and saw Lucy looking at him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He rolled down the window.
“I’m fine. I have all these . . . ” He motioned to the pile of books on the seat next to him. “My eyes got heavy, and I just closed them for a second. What time is it?”
“Almost eight.”
“Oh, my gosh. My wife is going to be worried. We have bowling league tonight.”
“I liked those words you wrote.”
Chic cocked his head in confusion.
“In the library.”
“Oh yeah, right.” He took the scratch piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Lucy. “You can have it. It’s yours.”
“If you put a line break here after ‘nothing’ and another one after ‘ground,’ it’s a haiku, or close to one.”
“A haiku?” he said, accepting the piece of paper back from her.
“Take a look at that book there. Basho. He said haiku is what’s happening in this place at this time.”
Chic thought about that. He felt like so much was happening in this place and at this time.
“I publish a poetry chapbook with local poets. Mostly, it’s just me and my boyfriend’s poems, but we’re always on the lookout for other work. Maybe, you know, if you don’t mind, we could publish your haiku.”
“This?” He held up the scrap of paper.
“Yeah. If you want us to.”
“Other people are going to read this?”
“Well, yeah. A few other people. My boyfriend and his sister. And me. Maybe a few students at Bradley.”
“Take it.” He held the poem out to her. “Do whatever you want with it.”
“Let me just . . . just a second.” She got a notebook from her backpack and copied down the poem.
“You really think that poem is good?”
“It’s heartfelt. Confessional. I like that kind of stuff. Hey, I need a bio for the chapbook. What do you want me to say about you? So, after someone reads the poem, they’ll know a
little more about you. Like, you know, who you are.”
“A terrible father. Put that. Chic Waldbeeser was a terrible father.”
“Really.”
“I don’t know. Who knows anymore?”
She put her notebook away. “Come back in a few weeks and I’ll give you a copy of the chapbook.”
In the rearview mirror, Chic watched Lucy ride across the parking lot. He liked what she had said about haiku being what was happening in this place and at this time. He put his fingers to his neck and felt his pulse—the thudding of the blood in his veins. He tried to center himself. Concentrating on his pulse almost always helped him do this, but he couldn’t relax. It felt like he was running at the bottom of the ocean. Fish were watching him. A shark swam by. Diane would be waiting for him at home to go to the bowling alley. He re-read his haiku:My life is nothing
but a large hole in the ground
I can’t get out of.
Mary Geneseo
June 24, 1998
Mary was in the minivan, staring at the house and the closed mini-blinds in the front window. She’d told Green she was going to the Brazen Bull and that she’d be home by six, and then they’d go to dinner at Avanti’s or some other shitty Peoria restaurant. The loud voice in her head told her to run. Get out of Peoria. Go to Florida with Chic. Just turn the key, back out of the driveway, and drive away. If she stayed with Green, she was going to be stuck here. She would be trapped playing pool at the Brazen Bull, watching Pretty Woman alone after Green went to bed, slinging drinks at the Pair-a-Dice, wiping Green’s ass, giving him a washcloth shower, and taking out the garbage for the rest of her life. Jesus, she hated this town. Hated it. Hated it. Do you really hate it or do you just hate what has become of your life here, the whisper voice asked. Flagstaff was bad, the loud voice said, waitressing at Chi-Chi’s, but Peoria is even worse. The Pair-a-Dice. A husband who had a stroke. This is Muckville. What would happen to Green if you ran? the whisper voice asked. Who the hell cares about him, the loud voice said. Take care of yourself. He needs you, the whisper voice said, and you need him. You actually like taking care of him. That’s horseshit, the loud voice said. You do not like taking care of him. Go to Florida with whatever his name is. Chic, the whisper voice said. His name is Chic, at least learn his name. She saw Green peek through the mini-blind. Green needs you like no one else has ever needed you. And you need him. You’ve always wanted someone to need you. Bullshit, the loud voice said. You want someone to take care of you. You don’t want to take care of someone. Never the caregiver, always the cared for. Don’t listen to that voice, the whisper voice said. It’s the part of your mind trying to convince you to do something you don’t want to do. You have run away your entire life. You haven’t loved anyone but yourself your entire life, the loud voice said. Why start now? You loved your father, the whisper voice said, and the loud voice made you run away from him. Remember. You were eighteen, the loud voice said. It was the right thing to do. He was dating that woman and he was choosing her over you. Now look at you, the whisper voice said. You’re still thinking, all these years later, if you did the right thing. What about all those men you ran from? You loved them but you were afraid. Don’t be afraid. Just be with him. Be with Green. He needs you. She was right, or it was right, the whisper voice was right, she thought to herself. You’re coming to your senses, the whisper voice said. Look at him peeking through the mini-blind, the loud voice said. He doesn’t trust you. He thinks you’re going to run. Trust is the most important part of a relationship, and he doesn’t trust you. He said it himself. You saw it yourself. He’s accusing you of having an affair. Because you are having an affair, the whisper voice said. You have to put an end to it. You can’t be around Chic anymore. Tell him this afternoon. You met him for a reason, the loud voice said. Everything happens for a reason. Don’t you believe that? I’m not leaving Green, she thought. He needs me. So does Chic, the loud voice said. Green peeked out the mini-blind again. She had to get going before he suspected something. He already suspects something, the loud voice said. Wave to him, the whisper voice said. She waved to him. Then, she started up the minivan and backed out of the driveway.
Onward Toward What We're Going Toward Page 23