“Until the next time,” I said. I was mad. Probably because I was afraid. I hate being afraid.
We heard Ajax on the stairs then. After they had left, I wished I had a chance to talk to his brother some more, instead of just getting mad like that, and then Ajax being there.
I used to get mad with my boyfriend in the same way, not because he had done anything, but because I would be afraid, and he couldn’t understand.
We lived in Selby-Dale, one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. I had a friend, down the street, who was raped in her apartment. It was hot, and she hadn’t locked her windows. The guy just lifted the screen out, climbed in, and raped her. In her own bed.
For a while it seemed to be happening once a week. One assault in particular got a lot of coverage because the woman was a med student and the attack damaged her brain. She was coming back from the grocery store with breakfast things for the next morning, and the guy pulled her behind a garage and crushed her skull with a lead pipe. I suppose if you think of sparing her some pain, it was probably better that he crushed her skull before he raped her. But when you think of it in terms of sex, or of a man wanting to be with a woman, it doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?
I needed to take the bus to the Gateway at night. Paul would wait with me at the bus stop. Some nights it would be more of a bother for him than others, because he’d already worked all day, and we’d have to leave in the middle of the news, so he would sigh heavily when he got up to get his coat and blink his eyes as if they were tired. I don’t know what he would have answered if I just said, “You don’t have to go tonight.” I never did. I was mostly grateful. But one night when he was acting particularly bedraggled, I said, “I’m mad at all of you. I have to ask you to protect me from some other guy. It’s not women I’m afraid of.”
“I know,” he said.
I said, “Why don’t you stick to hurting each other, and leaving us out of it.” I suppose that wasn’t fair.
I’ve never really been hurt—not badly anyway, mostly scared. Once I was coming from the edit studio about 7 at night. It was dusky twilight, not a bad part of town. A man was heading toward me on the sidewalk, and I felt, you know, threatened. It was just a feeling. I kept walking, being ready, and when we were almost side by side, he grabbed my arm. He held it really tight between my elbow and my wrist. I had expected it, but I hadn’t really expected it, because of all the times I have felt threatened and then nothing happens. His eyes weren’t all there, and he had a scraggly beard, not necessarily dirty, but as if he didn’t pay much attention to it. I looked around right away to see who else was near, but there was only someone—I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—a long way up the sidewalk. I was into my porch philosophy again because I froze, and I didn’t say anything, just waited to see what he would do. I don’t know how I looked, but he looked mean and dug his fingers into my arm. He just said very clearly, as if he’d told me the time and I hadn’t really listened to him at first. “I could really hurt you.” Then he walked on.
When I got home, I told Paul about it. Later when we were lying in the living room, watching TV, I asked him if he thought I was strong. He said yes. But I wanted to know how strong, because when I walked down the street alone, I’d always convinced myself I was—I’d always pumped myself up into believing that I could protect myself. I told him to try to pin me to see if I could get away. So we wrestled, and I really tried. Paul’s not much taller than Ajax and not as muscular. But he was very much stronger than I. He got me over on my stomach and pulled my arms up behind me so I could hardly move, as hard as I tried. Whenever you struggle like that, your muscles quiver for hours after. He stopped, and he said he hated it; he wished we hadn’t got into it. My arms were trembling all over. They wouldn’t stop. And then I cried, because I felt so weak. I’d never realized how weak I was.
When I interviewed for this job, I remember sitting in the director’s office with my short little resumé, and I had a feeling right off that it wasn’t the psychology degree that would ace it for me. It was something less tangible. I told him that I was the oldest girl in a large family, that I’d been cooking the meals since I was twelve because my mom was a career woman, and I told him that I was used to the chaos of family life, all the little dramas that pop up, that I knew how to be calm in the face of them.
There are times it seems crazy to have a female on the night shift here, but most of the time it’s the best thing. Like tonight—it’s almost midnight and Peter hasn’t come home. I have special protective feelings about Peter because he came here so young, and this is his only home. What would it be like if all the guys that grew up here didn’t have any women around? The male staff hug the guys sometimes, kind of pounding them on the back while they’re doing it. But it’s Gail and I who do the main hugging. It’s not creepy, except when the youngest, Chip, who is at that fairly curious stage, lingers a little too long. And it’s awkward with Ajax too. Instead of coming and getting one, like the other guys, he’ll stand at the end of the stairway once in a while and say, “I suppose I’m never going to get a hug.” Then when you give him one, he’ll kind of take over, basically pick you up off your feet. I’ve seen it with Gail, too, where you feel trapped and overpowered.
More than hugging, Ajax’s way of being physical is to grip your hand or your arm and squeeze. It’s not like the other guys never do this, but with them I always play a little. With Ajax, I let my arm go very limp. It’s a way of not winning, but not playing either. I want him to feel silly and stop. Art says that Ajax just doesn’t know his own strength. But I don’t quite buy that. And I always feel a little hate toward Ajax, like a stone in my throat, when he does it.
Once I just said, “Take it easy, Ajax.”
And he said, “Forget it then, I’m never talking to you again.”
He’s said this before, and when he does, I do my counselor thing and say, “That’s up to you, Ajax, but I want you to understand that I don’t feel that way. People have misunderstandings, and they can be worked out.”
But he won’t talk to me for a few days. I’ll say “Hi” to him when he comes in, and he won’t say “Hi” back. Sometimes I’ll walk in the door and see him ducking up the stairway to avoid me. When he finally breaks the silence, it’s usually like this: he comes in the kitchen in the morning, starts making his toast while I’m making eggs or something, then he says, “So, are you still mad at me?”
I’ll say, “Ajax, remember, I haven’t been been mad at you. You’ve been mad at me.”
Once I was flipping pancakes on the grill and we went through this routine. He asked. I said the usual no, that I wasn’t mad in the first place.
“Oh, ho!” he boomed. “Don’t give me that. Women always hold grudges! I know how women are!”
Usually I just keep doing what I’m doing when I talk to him—it’s a way of acting nonchalant. But that morning I set my spatula down and faced him. I said, “No you don’t, Ajax, I’m afraid you don’t know very much about women at all.” It was still controlled, but that time it felt like I had walked right out on the edge of my porch, that time I got angry.
I’ve been making cheese enchiladas tonight. It’s tomorrow’s dinner. All they’ll have to do is pop them in the oven. Some of these enchiladas have cheese and onions for the guys that like onions, and some of them have cheese and olives. As soon as I finish this, I’ll make a banana cream pie, and that should put me in bed by 1 A.M. This is the dream part of my job, that I can sleep. As long as there aren’t any problems, I can sleep and be rested the next day for the film work.
But Peter’s not home, and now I wish I’d asked Art what the trouble was at work. I mean, I can guess. There’s been a lot of pressure on him lately to be “normal.” We just had a meeting with him the other day. He really wants to live on his own. We said that all he has to do is hold down his job for six months; then we could look at his plans to move on. He gets all flustered at these meetings. He’s so long-boned now an
d thin, and he wears his hair long. He was sitting on the sofa, trying to be calm—keeping himself still by crossing his lanky legs at the knees and squeezing them together. He always wears big flannel shirts, buttoned up to the neck, and corduroys. And on the left side of his shirt there’s usually one of the cardboard badges that he makes himself. He was wearing his favorite at the meeting, the one with the three MX missiles drawn on it.
He draws missiles all the time, pages and pages of them. He even has some he made out of papier-mâché that are about four feet tall in his closet. He also draws crocodiles, and people he doesn’t like being eaten by the crocodiles. And he’s into the Russians—he totally identifies with them or wants to. Our current psychologist says this is his way of identifying with someone that he feels is powerful, since he feels so powerless.
We make rules about how he should behave. We say he can wear his big, furry Russian hat around the house, but not in public. We used to say he must always be normal. But that was wrong. As soon as he stopped one weird thing, he would only move on to another. When he was younger, he was as crazy about rock stars as he is now about Russians. He would draw pictures of Mick Jagger, and that’s all he would talk about. If someone happened to have pop music on the radio, he would cover his ears and run out of the room. “Wimp rock,” he called it.
Then he had a short spell in between the rock stars and the Russians, when he started drawing road maps. They were good. He was a kind of genius in that department. I would tell him I’d been to Chicago, because I’d know he’d be interested, and he’d tell me exactly the roads I would have taken. It seemed to me at the time that this was his own way of knowing where things were. And it was a way to know where he was. Drawing maps gave him confidence.
When he’s not drawing, he spends a good deal of his time sitting in a chair with a radio pressed to his ear. Sometimes he wears earphones like Ajax. It wasn’t until this year that I learned he doesn’t really listen to the music. I asked him what the words to a certain Pink Floyd song were, and he said he didn’t know. “But you listen to it all the time,” I said.
“But I don’t hear it—just the sound—and then I think about two white birds flying.”
“Two birds?”
“But one wing, two birds with one wing.”
I don’t know. You have to be around them for a while; you almost stop noticing how weird they are. You start calling Peter Petrovitch just because he wants you to, and you let him take a shower at 3 in the morning (as long as he’s quiet), so he can be the first one. Both Ajax and he want to be the first in. Peter always used to be, but when Ajax came, they had a regular competition. It would have been okay, except Peter was so noisy. He’d get up at 5:30 and start banging his drawers, dropping his shampoo. He’s so gangly and uncoordinated. Ajax would hear him and leap up, grab his stuff and get in first. One night, probably when Peter finally realized that this was the way it was going to be, he threw himself on the shag carpeting in the upstairs hallway and moaned.
Most of our guys do various things to get attention, but not Peter. So when he does, I tend to respond. I got up and told him to come downstairs, and we made a deal: if he was really quiet and could get away with it, he could shower in the middle of the night. That way he would never have to feel desperate about it.
I wish Peter would call. The custard is almost thick enough. I usually don’t make banana cream pie until the summer, but it’s been so cold, I think everyone deserves a change.
Somebody’s bed is creaking against the floorboards upstairs, “rock and rolling,” as Art puts it. Masturbating, another thing you get used to. I went my whole first year not catching on, climbing up the stairs to see what the racket was about. I even began to think someone was trying to get my goat—making noises and then, when I came up the stairs, tricking me by pretending to be asleep. It wasn’t until I walked in on someone…
I think that’s Terry’s corner of the house. He’s Ajax’s roommate. Sometimes, one of them will start, and in a little while you’ll hear two or three other parts of the floor creaking—the kind of chain of events that occurs when a dog starts to howl in the neighborhood. Maybe I’m being disrespectful. It’s just that I’m here by myself, quietly cooking, and it starts up. Sometimes it feels absurd, like I’m a cook in the galley of a ship, and the ship is rocking and groaning on the waves.
This is a private thing for them. Though Ajax has talked to me about it—not at first, but later, after he’d started going to sex education class. When he first began visiting me at night, he talked about wanting a girlfriend, but not necessarily sex. He’d be talking about Fire Explorers, getting excited, describing the number of valves in the fire truck’s engine, how he and three other guys practiced manning the hose the other day, and he was the only one who didn’t fall down. “I need this training!” he’ll say. “Someday, I’m going to be out there, and people’s lives are going to depend on me.”
But then—and he always does this—he’ll hear a certain song on his Walkman that brings back memories for him. I can’t hear it, but he’ll say the name out loud. “‘Arc of the Diver,’ Steve Winwood,” he’ll say. “Nineteen eighty, yeah.” He’ll get kind of gleeful. “I remember this. This was when I was ten…years…old. My brothers used to play it out the windows over the patio, and I’d listen to it. I’d practice diving to it.”
When he talks about diving, I’m always reminded of the incident with his mother, but we’ve never talked about this. I’ll ask him about the diving instead.
“You have to make the perfect entry,” he’ll say. I’ll picture him on the board, and I can’t imagine him ever making a perfect entry. “No splash, just…” He smiles and lowers one hand in a graceful motion. “Then you’re in, completely in.”
“Completely in? What do you mean?” He’s used this expression before.
But he ignores the question, and it remains one of his private ideas. “There was another song, just before the diving one, that I used to listen to on my tape machine by myself. That was called ‘While You See a Chance.’ ‘While you see a chance, take it…” ’ He’ll close his eyes, singing and smiling, smiling and moving a little. I like Ajax when he’s like this, when he forgets himself and acts silly.
“You must have been happy more than three seconds then,” I’ll say.
“Exactly three minutes and one second” is his answer. “If you play it ten times in a row, how many minutes is that?”
Then he thinks of a girl—there’s usually a girl who goes with one of the songs. “Wendy Britter,” he’ll say. “I used to follow her home, until her dad got mad.”
He’s desperate to have a girlfriend. That’s even how he puts it. “I’m desperate!” he booms, and raps his knuckles against the hood of the stove.
“That’s kind of extreme,” I’ll say.
“You don’t know.” He crosses his arms over his chest.
He finds all the numbers for the cheerleaders and other girls in the upper echelon at his high school. They think he’s weird, and they’re not completely wrong.
“Nobody wants to go out with me! Lisa Daniels says she has a boyfriend. Stephanie Zimmerman told me she had to baby-sit, then I saw her at the mall with her daffy girlfriends.” Some of the girls that he has called repeatedly simply hand the phone to one of their friends, who pretends to Ajax that she is her friend’s mother. He sent his threehundred-dollar class ring to a girl he hardly knew in his hometown, and she sent it back with a puzzled note. Art has taken him aside on several occasions, trying to explain how he’s coming on too strong. But this makes Ajax angry. He wants what he wants.
He wants a girlfriend, he wants to marry her, and he wants to have a baby with her. Boom, boom, boom, it’s a cure-all.
“You need to take things slow, get to know each other first,” I’ll say to him, “or you’ll scare them off. You’d scare me off.”
Maybe that was the wrong thing to say because he began to consider me. “Say?” He’d be leaning against the counter, h
is arms across his chest, not looking at me. “If you were in my school, do you think we could?”
“Could what?”
“Be boyfriend and girlfriend?
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?” He’ll get hostile.
“Depends, on how we got to know each other.”
“We just would.”
“You have to start somewhere. I mean, if you saw me in the hallway, what would you say to me?”
Ajax turns to face me and kind of sways his shoulders like he’s walking down the hall of his high school. “Hey, baby,” he says.
“Nope,” I say, “that wouldn’t do it.”
“Wouldn’t do it!” he spits out his t’s like they’re nails. “Hey!” he’s louder than ever. “You’re just being too sensitive. I hate it when women are sensitive.”
I talked to our psychologist about how things were getting a little personal with Ajax. How should I handle it?
He said that it was good he was opening up. That these were important issues with him. That I could be open with him, at the same time guiding him in appropriate feelings toward me.
Two years ago there was another resident who didn’t have appropriate feelings toward me. The first night that I met David, he was polite in that phony way kids get when they’ve been through the system time and again. He was tall and bony, and I guessed MI, because his eyes had that sleepy drugged look, and he kept wetting his lips, which is one of the side effects of Haldol. He shook my hand, which was not really a shake, but like a quick, dry pass over my palm. He said, “Oh, what are you making? Pea soup. That looks delicious. Well, it’s good to meet you.” The whole Eddie Haskell routine. Then he went out to have a cigarette with Jackie. Jackie came in a little while later and said, “Do you know what he said? He said, ‘So, do you fuck her?’” Jackie kept his head down when he told me this.
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