by John Searles
“I did call,” she said quietly. “He’s coming next Monday.”
“He told you that weeks ago.”
“Dominick,” my mother said, gathering her mug and plate of jelly-covered Ritz crackers. “I’ll get it fixed.”
I decided to lay off for a while, since she seemed on the brink of a nervous breakdown. My father’s new job shipping Christmas trees south had kept him away from home all through the holidays. Now that it was January, he claimed to be delivering the nonsalables to a lumberyard outside Chicago. You’d think my mother would’ve been happy for the break. I was. But his long absence had practically totaled her. Watery-eyed and runny-nosed, she moved around the frigid, metallic air of our apartment almost looking for a reason to cry. The brown scabs of grease that couldn’t be scoured from the stovetop. The clogged toilet that gasped and burped as she plunged away. Instead of surrendering the scouring pad or plunger, my mother absently carried her failed weapons around the apartment after her battles. Her eyes poured tears down her face until eventually she fled to her room to call Marnie.
“We should move to Acapulco or someplace warm,” I said into the frozen air, hoping it would ease things between us. After all, I needed to make nice if I hoped to get into her bedroom tonight and pull off one of my financial transactions before sneaking over to Edie’s.
“Funny you should mention faraway places,” my mother told me. “Because I’m thinking about taking a little trip.”
That same old she’s-going-to-leave-you feeling blistered inside me and spread like poison. Here I was taking care of her while she went to pieces over my father, and she was secretly planning a trip without me. I had my own secret, I reminded myself. I had Edie. “Good for you,” I said. “Are you going to visit Truman?”
My mother shook her head no at his name. “Somewhere different this time. If your father can disappear, why can’t I take off for a week or two?”
I felt a last bit of blistering but fought it off. Her words were bold, but the way she spoke—tight-lipped, gazing at me through the genie-smoke of steam that rose from her mug—left me feeling like she wanted my approval. “Let me guess,” I said. “New Mexico?”
“Nothing’s definite. But I’ve already talked to Marnie about moving in while I’m gone.”
No. Fucking. Way. I wasn’t going to blow this vacation eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and watching monster movies every night the way Marnie liked to do. Whenever any of her pets died—which was often because she lived near Route 67 but couldn’t stand the thought of keeping an animal trapped inside or tied to a chain—Marnie holed up at our place, since her apartment felt lonely after the loss. Last year she was dealt what she called a “double blow” when a truck hit her two dogs, Fred and Ginger. She spent a whole week on our couch, hogging the television and eating cheese noodles to ease her pain. The year before that, her cat Milky had been nailed on the highway, too, and we had to go through the same pathetic routine.
“I don’t need her to change my diapers,” I said. “Just tell the old gal to stop by once in a while to make sure I haven’t frozen to death.”
My mother stared at me with that vacant, dam-about-to-burst look she sported all the time since my father had hit the road. Her lips pinched and twisted up tight, like the knot of a balloon. I made a rigor mortis face, tightening the skin on my neck and making giant moons out of my eyes, trying to get her to laugh. No such luck.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, her bruise-colored jelly wiggling atop her crackers. “I’m going to my room to call Marnie.”
“Wait.” This was my last chance. I hopped up from the chair where I sat at the table. “Your room is the coldest one in the whole apartment. Why don’t you call from the kitchen?”
“Don’t you want the kitchen?” she asked.
“I’m going to hang out in my room, then head down to Leon’s to warm up later.”
My mother considered the plan a moment, picked up the phone, and settled in at the table. “It sure is drafty in there,” she said, dialing.
On my way down the hall I listened to the steady click-click-click of the rotary wheeling its way back to zero. I wondered how anyone could possibly have that much to say to Marnie and why it was always so urgent. That’s what bothered me most about my mother: Marnie and my father always came first. “I’m bleeding to death,” I might say. And my mother would tell me, “Hold on until I call Marnie.” Or “That’s how I feel whenever your father disappears.” I let those scenarios bounce around my brain until a pissed-off feeling took hold. A fat dose of anger always made these cash withdrawals easier. Even though I knew Edie was going to pay me back, I felt guilty sometimes. But the way I saw it, Edie had been fucked over by my father even worse than my mother had been.
I waited around the corner for the right moment, listening to scraps of her conversation.
“I told Dominick I’m going away,” she said. “I’ve got to call about the ticket and make this final.”
Her voice was firm and serious, not the anticipating squeal of someone leaving for vacation. It made me wonder if Truman was involved in this after all. I told myself to forget it. To think of Edie instead. She wasn’t going anywhere. With a stretch of my neck I could see my mother at the kitchen table. She chewed an orange cracker and wrapped the phone wire around her shoulders and arms.
Tighter and tighter.
“You tried your best,” my mother told Marnie after a long silence.
I was about to walk across the hall when she turned my way. I stepped back and waited.
“It’s a hospital,” she said. “Trust me. People have asked that question before.”
I peeked again. This time she was facing the kitchen window.
All those icicles.
Figuring she was deep into another segment of Marnie’s bingo hell, I made my move. The door opened in a quiet hush, and I closed it right behind me.
“She’s not going to tell anyone. Don’t worry,” my mother said, carrying on.
A thin sliver of light from a streetlamp outside made its way through a crack in the shade, casting a dark shadow on the wall. The red-flowered sheets on her bed were twisted and tangled, her pillows were two dead lumps in the middle of her mattress. A draft of cold air rushed through the room, practically numbing my skin. Proof it really was cold in here, something I hadn’t been quite sure of when I said it.
I peeled back the rug where I had been skimming money for the last two months. Ever since the radiator broke, most of the usual smells of our apartment—canned food, cooked beef, furniture polish—had been muted. But beneath the rug the musty earth scent was as strong as ever. I grabbed three stiff hundred-dollar bills and shoved them into the pocket of my sweatshirt. “Just a few Bennies,” I said under my breath, thinking it sounded cool.
Here’s how it worked: I always left the top bills in the stack untouched. In place of what I took, I stuck one-dollar bills or clipped coupons—an outlaw trick I had seen on Adam-12. I kept track of how much I had taken but never counted what was left. Knowing how close I was to zero would have been a total brain fuck. Besides, Edie had caught up on most of her bills and was making money stuffing envelopes and selling off her old furniture. She promised to start paying back the whole shebang in a few more weeks.
My mother would never even know it was gone.
I let the rug flap back into place like a lip pulled and let go. Even though I should have snuck out right away, I couldn’t help reaching under the bed and taking out that picture of the man I knew was Truman’s father. I didn’t know what I expected to see there in the shot I had looked at a thousand times before. I stared down at the dark eyes, the tuft of black hair hanging over his forehead. I wondered if he looked anything like Truman. Someday soon, I kept telling myself, I was going to meet my brother. For the time being, I tucked the picture back into the box beneath my mother’s bed and hightailed it out of there.
In the kitchen my mother had absently twisted the cord up to her neck.
“I’ll be at Leon’s,” I said, throwing on my bulky winter coat.
She kept talking to Marnie but waved good-bye.
Outside, it was practically tundra weather. One of those cold, cold nights that made my shoulders automatically scrunch to my neck in a way that would leave me stiff and sore later. “Colder than a witch’s tit,” my father would say. Whatever that meant. The ride to Edie’s would be a bitch on my bicycle, but I kicked back the kickstand anyway. I was about to break into a fast pedal onto Dwight Avenue when I spotted Leon’s mother across the parking lot. She fidgeted with her cigarette lighter and car keys at the same time—back and forth, not getting her cigarette lit or the door to her flinty Datsun unlocked.
“Hey, Leila,” I called out over the wind. She liked it when people referred to her by her first name. Even Leon.
“How you doing, Dominick?” she said, finally getting her cigarette to burn. The red eye flashed at me when she puffed. “Where you off to?”
“Cumby’s Mart to pick up food,” I said. “Then to a friend’s.”
“You’ll freeze on that shitty little bike. Get in the car and I’ll drop you.”
It turned out Leila was headed to the store anyway—and probably then to the packy, though she didn’t mention that part. Riding in the car alongside her, glancing at her big-jawed face and don’t-fuck-with-me stare, made me think of Leon. I hadn’t been down to see him in at least a month. Ever since I had been hanging out with Edie, Leon’s stories seemed predictable. A girl who blew him at the quarry. Some lady’s bush he spied through a window. The cashier at Svelletski’s who wanted him to lick her crotch clean. Who needed to listen to that crap when I had Edie all to myself? Maybe she wasn’t my girlfriend, but the way I took care of her made me feel like we had something.
The first time I went to Edie’s house with the money, I was smothered by my own nervousness. It felt like a date, or not a date exactly but like something official and adult was happening between us. Edie made dinner—two chicken pot pies from a box because she said she had no clue how to cook anything real. I loved the burning-hot crusts and mushy insides, so her lack of culinary talent was fine with me. As we sat in the silence of her house, I tried my best to make real conversation, like something you might hear on a TV date. I asked her where she was born and she told me, “Santa Monica, California.” I asked her what she did for fun and she said, “I have dinner with you.” Finally, when I asked what her sign was, Edie reached across the table and stroked my forearm. My sweatshirt sleeves were pulled up and my arms were the one place on my body where I had a lot of hair besides my head, so I didn’t feel shy. “Dominick,” she said, “you don’t have to be so formal. It’s me, remember. I feel like we’ve been through a whole lifetime together already.” Technically it was only our third time together, but I knew exactly what she meant. Our history already seemed to add up to something solid: the night we met, the kiss in her basement, her letter in my mailbox, the hug she gave me when we saw each other again, her bruised face, the baby, the money. The details of our relationship left me feeling like our lives had always been webbed together. So I stopped asking my TV-date questions and settled into normal conversation.
We talked about a lot of things, but what I remembered most was this: She told me that for as long as she could remember, she had been a lonely person. She was an only child, but her mother had miscarried a baby boy the year before Edie was born. Sometimes she thought that if that boy was alive, if he weren’t missing from her life, she wouldn’t feel so alone. I opened my mouth to tell her about Truman, about the way I felt when my mother talked about starting a new life, but something made me stop. I decided not to work my parents into the discussion, since that could lead down roads I wasn’t interested in traveling. I told Edie I understood how she felt, since I was an only child, too. We both stayed silent for a moment after that, and I wondered if she was thinking what I was: We had each other now.
After dinner Edie walked me to the door, stroked my hair with her hand, and wrapped her arms around me. A part of me wanted to turn my lips to her, to kiss her again, but her swelled belly and the baby inside came between us. “Thank you for the money,” she said. “Will you be back next week?”
“Yes,” I told her. “I will.”
And I came back until we were up to a three-night-a-week routine. I lent her the cash in dribs and drabs so I had a reason to keep visiting. Edie didn’t seem to mind the setup. On my way over I’d stop and pick up a bag of groceries that I pedaled on my bike. Eggos. Frozen dinners. Fish sticks. After a while we skipped the dinner table and shared our meals on her pillowy peach bed, watching Marcus Welby or The Flip Wilson Show. During commercials she told me about her doctor’s visits, her plan to sell Stanley’s dusty furniture and maybe rent out some of the rooms in the place when she was back on her feet. Leon had his dog-in-heat life, my mother had Marnie and her mystery vacation, and my father no doubt had a new girlfriend somewhere, but I had my nights with Edie.
“So,” I said to Leila, the smoke from her cigarette warming my insides. “What’s Leon up to?”
She was too busy exhaling an endless stream of smoke through her nostrils to answer. It had to be one of the ugliest sights I’d ever seen. Then she said, “Flunking school. Messing up his life as much as possible. He wants to guarantee a future as pathetic as that deadbeat father of his.”
Believe it or not, her answer surprised me. The last time I had been down to see Leon, I found him in his room surrounded by books instead of motorcycle and stroke mags for once. “Check it out,” he said, pointing to the wood-paneled wall beside his bed. I stared at a bunch of notes taped up there, all of them in Leon’s crooked handwriting.
This is where I get off.
Absolutely no reason except I had a toothache.
I can’t struggle anymore. Good-bye.
Do not notify my mother. She has a heart condition.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What are they?”
“Suicide notes,” he told me. He lay back on his bed and clasped his hands behind his neck. He wore gray cords the color of a battleship, tight and faded in the crotch. Not only had his mustache fully grown in, but the sides of his face and chin were sprouting hair, too. He obviously didn’t plan on shaving anytime soon. I imagined that dark, coarse hair growing and growing until all I could see were his squinty brown eyes, thick nose, and fat red lips.
I stared back at the wall and wondered about someone ending his life with nothing to say but The survival of the fittest. Adios, Unfit. “For real?” I said.
“I’m doing a term paper on suicide. I found those in a chapter on the shortest notes ever written. Imagine,” he said as we gazed up at his collection, “scribbling some bullshit like that on a piece of paper, then blowing your fucking head off.”
“Weird,” I said, glancing at a note that read I’ve had enough. See you on the dark side.
“After that, Pindle, there’s nothing. You’re dead. No more.”
“Okay,” I said to him. “I get the point.”
Leila wrestled with the steering wheel and managed to score a bonus spot right in front of Cumberland Farms. When we got out of the car, she had a coughing fit outside by the ice machine. For a moment I thought she was going to blow a lung. “Are you all right?” I asked.
She hawked up a wad the size of an egg yolk and spit through the cloud of breath that surrounded her head. Make that the ugliest thing I had ever seen. “It’s just this piss-ass cold,” she said.
Did she mean her cold or the cold? Either way, she finally swung open the door, and Cumby’s heater blew out air hotter than a Bunsen burner. Compared to my subzero apartment, this place felt tropical. I ditched Leila and made my way up and down the aisles, grabbing a six-pack of Dr Pepper and two TV dinners. One chicken. One turkey. Both with mashed potatoes and chocolate cake.
In front of me at the counter was that skinny girl who had been picketing the sale of the police station last fall. She was carrying a kid in a snow
suit, and there were two boys at her legs, pushing each other and grabbing at the candy. “Stop it, you cretins,” she said. “Or I’ll burn you at the stake.”
She looked at me and smiled, rolling her brown eyes. I smiled back, even though something about her seemed a little odd. The kids must have been her siblings, I figured, since she looked only about my age. But why hadn’t I ever seen her in school? She took one of them by the hand and said, “Okay, midgets. We’re finished here. Let’s go.”
“Do you have anything smaller?” the pock-faced guy behind the register wanted to know once she split and I stepped up and handed him a Benny.
I shook my head no. He bent down to break the bill in a drawer beneath the counter, and my hands went for a pack of Juicy Fruit, shoving it in my pocket to help my mother through the international gum shortage. Welcome to the wonderful world of shoplifting, I thought. It was my first time stealing anything outside of my mother’s money, which technically I was only borrowing. But more and more I realized that if you acted like you owned the world, you got away with whatever you wanted.
Look at Leon.
Look at my father.
Mr. Cumberland Farms popped his head up and counted out my change with a lick-lick of his thumb between bills. Leila was still in the back by the soda. Probably choosing between Tab for her rum or tonic for her vodka. I grabbed a pen off the register and wrote a note on the back of my receipt: I had to split. Thanks for the ride. Dominick.
“Can you give this to that lady when she pays for her stuff?” I asked. He barely nodded, but I figured he’d follow through once Leila started bugging out and asking for me.
Outside, I rolled up the top of the bag with my gloveless fingers, tossed it over my shoulder, and clomped off down the road. I was within walking distance of Edie’s now and didn’t want Leila to find out where I was headed. I was smart enough to know about secrets and the way things got around. Once you let one person know what you’re up to, you might as well tell the whole fucking world. Say I let Leila drop me. Once she got tanked up, she’d mouth off about it to Leon, and Leon, after getting over his shock that I wasn’t bullshitting all those times when I told him about Edie, might run off about the whole thing to some chick he was trying to lay, and that chick might mention it to her mother who worked at the hospital with a bigmouth named Marnie Garboni, and she would definitely blab to Marnie because they had nothing better to do than talk about other people’s lives, and before I could say “Bingo!” Marnie would practically climb through the telephone wire and spill the dirty beans to my mother. Basically, I’d be in a lot of hot shit.