Joy

by Erin McGraw

  It’s all set up by the time I get home, and my son laughs at my flat-footed anger. “Why shouldn’t I draw her? It’s a good chance for me.”

  “I don’t know what she’s going to expect.”

  I see his own anger rise. “She expects a fine drawing. I will give it to her.”

  He is fifteen.

  A week later we arrive at Mrs. Wright’s and find that she has cleaned for us, in her way. Books and flyers and cans of beef broth have been pushed to the side of the room, and she’s put a daisy in a bud vase on the coffee table beside a hat, a handful of pens, a sleeve of crackers, and a harmonica. Her smile trembles. She clasps the dirt-colored shawl over an evening gown, low at the back and front. My son arranges her on the couch, inside a square of light that makes her skin look dense, like yogurt.

  “Can you talk without moving your body?”

  “Don’t you need me to hold still?”

  “I’ll tell you when I need you to stop. For now, talk to me.”

  Maybe no one has ever said that to her before. She takes a moment. “I used to dream of being an artist. Artists notice things, and I’m a good noticer. When I walk into a room, I see who’s there, the way people are arranged. Later, when I hear that one couple’s getting divorced or another one’s getting married, I already know.

  “That’s why my husband went away. He didn’t like to be watched. I said, ‘What do you think marriage is?’ and he said, ‘Intolerable.’ The things he looked at were far away, and maybe already dead.

  “Your mother notices, too. She can tell when I’ve tried to tidy things up, and when I just said to hell with it. She can tell when I’m sad. She’s like a friend.”

  I come once a week and bring home her check. My son’s hand is busy on the page, making lots of curving lines. I’m watching both of them, the first time I’ve ever sat in this room.

  “Now you’re noticing me, and that’s hard. The noticer doesn’t like to be noticed. Men used to notice me, but that was different.

  “Having your mother here makes things safe. My son will never let me near anything he does. He comes home once a year, for three days. He pulls at his collar as if the air in the house is too much for him. He once told me for God’s sake to get rid of the star charts; Dad was not coming back. I said, ‘That’s why I keep them.’ He thinks I’m silly.”

  “You aren’t silly,” my son says, his voice rough.

  For a moment, silence rings through the room, except for the scrape of my son’s pencil. Mrs. Wright says, “Can I be quiet now?”

  “Yes,” says my son.

  The quiet stretches between us like wire. I go to the window and say, “There’s a boy on a bicycle and another one on a skateboard. He’s pretty good. What’s that thing called, a half-pipe?” I’ll keep talking until my son is finished, and the terrible looking is over.

  Necropolis

  This morning Ruthie Jonson died. No surprise. Her kids and grandkids are here, the youngest ones roaring down the halls and swinging from the grab bars, and the first pieces of Ruthie’s furniture have already been taken. We see this played out once a month, more when the Reaper gets greedy. Normally I don’t let it interrupt my walk to waterobics, but this morning I stopped and stared like I’d never seen an apartment full of trash bags before, my heart turning inside out. Taking pity, one of her busy children stopped, rested her box on her leg, and said, “Did you know her? I’m sorry. She went very peacefully.”

  Embarrassed by my tears, I said, “Thank you.” She probably thinks her mother and I were having a sweet, old-folks love affair. Hand-holding. Ruthie and I were not especially close, and I don’t know why this feels like a heart attack. I would welcome a heart attack. I live and live and live.

  After lunch today I’ll go up to the full-care unit and visit Syl. If it’s a good day, she’ll know who I am. After the bad days, I use the back staircase to get to my room and then drink a lot of whiskey.

  It was Syl’s idea to move here twelve years ago, when she was forty-nine and I was fifty-two. Twelve years ago, the Kenwood sounded like a smart, happy idea with its tennis courts and three different pools. We didn’t have kids; we had to think ahead and take care of ourselves. Moving here didn’t mean we were dying. It meant, said the salesman over the phone, that we were really living.

  Christ, I believed him. Here we were, Sid and Syl, really living. We came for a tour. What has happened to those hale tennis players with the killer serves who happened to have gray hair? Syl said the Kenwood sent them back to Hollywood as soon as we signed the contract. She told jokes, back when we were in this together and realizing what we had done.

  Once we were in, we were in. Might as well have heard an iron door slam shut. We signed away not just our salaries, but our retirement. Now we couldn’t get out unless the place burned down, and I’m half ready to try a little arson. At night, my mouth filled with Johnnie Walker smoke, I imagine our old house. The last thing Syl and I did was shell out for cement board to replace the never-ending pain-in-the-ass siding. The new owners can rejoice in the knowledge that I, not they, paid the $20,000 to have the whole house re-clad, not just the damaged parts. “Oh no,” said Sid, king of the homeowners. “Let’s do it right and forget about it.” On that decision alone I could have saved $12,000, enough to bankroll me at the Kenwood for an extra ten months, if I need them, and I hope I don’t.

  Syl’s care is round-the-clock. I imagine I can hear the costs go up, like the meter in a cab. “Our first concern is her safety. You want to keep her safe, don’t you?”

  Once it was clear we couldn’t change our minds, we were determined to make the best of things. We found the other Kenwoodians who weren’t, in Syl’s phrase, decrepit yet—one guy who’d suffered a head injury and had been living here since he was thirty-eight, and two couples who came here together, lived next door to each other, and took cruises together so they could play bridge. Syl’s and my jokes got more and more brittle, but we were holding it together until the day I came home early from a run and surprised her in our tiny apartment, her face buried in the sweater she was using to muffle her sobs. “We’re living in a tomb,” she howled.

  “Shhh. We’ll work around it. We can come home from five o’clock dinner and have cocktails. We’ve got friends on the outside. They’ll smuggle us a file in a cake.” That made her giggle, at least. We had each other.

  And then we didn’t. One afternoon, when Syl calmly put the milk in the pantry, I realized how long I’d been not letting myself notice things—how she couldn’t remember how to fasten the clasp on her necklace, the words that fell out of her brain, like nest and doorbell. On the spot I decided I would continue to cover up for her for the rest of my life, because I’d rather have sour milk and Syl than no Syl. But she left anyway. The day the director of nursing kept calling, I refused to pick up the phone. She caught up with me at dinner, and inside a month, Syl was upstairs and I was still downstairs and sometimes she called me Mort.

  It took maybe half a day for the whole place to know that Syl and I were separate now, and for the first time in my life, I was a catch. “Sit with me, Sid.” “Sid, can you come over here and make a fourth? We need a dummy.” “Sid, are you going to entertainment hour this afternoon? There’s a pianist who’s going to play songs from all fifty states.” They don’t ask about Syl, restlessly calling out upstairs for Mort. Sometimes I tell them anyway, and they squeeze my hand.

  One of them, Brenda, is persistent. She wears goggly glasses and her fingers are humped up with arthritis, but she has a throaty voice and a lazy purr of a laugh. Last night I went down for dinner—itself a rarity—and Brenda and I sat at the table well past coffee, until the staff chased us out. We were talking about the guy with the squeaky voice and the goatee who came in to teach us how to paint landscapes, and Jesus, it was a relief. This morning my next-door neighbor pointedly walked past my table “so you can save room for Brenda.” If a DHS official brought the nuclear codes to my room in a locked briefcase, they�
�d be all over this place by lunchtime.

  Brenda didn’t come to breakfast, and I felt ridiculous. Then I found out about Ruthie, and I ran upstairs to see Syl even though I knew I couldn’t get in between ten and eleven, when the nurses give out meds. I paused in my apartment for only long enough to pick up my car keys. The rooms were too tight. Syl said that if she turned around, she bumped into herself. I remembered her exact tone of voice, a tone I will never hear again, and allowed myself one minute to crumple with missing her. Then I went to the parking lot. Who cared where I was going? I was going.

  “Sid! Sid-neee! Are you going out?”

  “Sure am, girls. Do you need anything?”

  The one who called out is round as a tomato, and adorable. Round little curls all over her round head, hands plump as a baby’s. Syl couldn’t stand her. Now the woman’s smile is dimpled and coy. “Not me. Brenda. She’s right over there.” The woman gestures with her chin, and I see the group sitting on the patio, getting their fill of me charging through the parking lot as if I’m saving a damsel, as if I could save anything.

  “Where are you going?” Brenda calls. Even when she’s shouting, she has a nice voice.

  “Jailbreak.”

  “All by yourself?” That’s a gutsy thing to say, right there in front of her friends. She puts a lot of faith in me.

  “This time,” I say. “Next time, we’ll see.” I let the others giggle while I back out, drive for half an hour until my hands stop shaking and meds hour is over on Syl’s floor. When I come back, I park in a different spot and creep up the back stairs, which might as well be my private staircase. Syl is still in bed. She doesn’t even look up when I come in. With Brenda’s voice rocketing around my head, it isn’t enough to take her hand, the way I usually do. I strip down to my boxers and slip into bed with her, a tight fit. She doesn’t protest when I put my arms around her, and eventually she starts to snore. I’m wide awake, waiting to be discovered in bed with my wife, and the scandal that comes next.

  Honor

  Here’s what I say: My dad walked out on us after he promised he wouldn’t. The last time I saw his car in our driveway, I was nine years old. By the time I was twelve and knew he wasn’t coming back, I swore that I would never make a promise I didn’t keep. It’s easier than you think.

  Here’s what I say: Use your head before you open your damn mouth. Every word you say chisels your place in this world. My mother said she always knew where she stood with me, even though we only saw each other when I was between foster homes. Once, when I was mad at her, I started to say I didn’t want to see her anymore, but I stopped myself. Now she comes to see me once a month, and I look forward to her visits.

  When you give as many interviews as I do, you learn what works. After ten years on the inside, I’ve learned to control my message. I’ve got the rest of my life to refine it.

  In school, my teachers couldn’t figure me out. Sometimes I’d hand in a report so perfect that they went home and spent hours on the Internet, trying to figure out what I’d copied it from. A lot of time I didn’t hand in anything, explaining the GED I eventually got to make up for the high school diploma I didn’t. It was a history teacher my senior year who pulled me aside and said, “If you say you’ll do this assignment, you will, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you do it, you can pass this class, and you can maybe graduate. You can help yourself, do you see that?”

  “Yes.”

  “So will you?”

  “No.”

  I know who I am, is what I’m saying. Once you know, you don’t ever have to change. I’m like the rock the water swirls around.

  Girls like that. Some girls. Even here, during visiting hour, I see them slide their eyes over to me when they’re supposed to be looking at their boyfriend or brother. “You said you were going to write,” they say to their man, and they can tell that I wouldn’t let them down like that.

  I told Lola, “If you need anything, I will get it for you.”

  “What are you, my knight in shining armor?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed, but she looked at me after that.

  “Did you love her?” my lawyer asked. He was asking so he could craft an argument, and I didn’t want to get out that way. I didn’t kill Murphy because I loved Lola; I killed him because I told her I would. So I didn’t answer my lawyer. He found every way he could to ask, but I muled up every time. Finally he just went with his own version anyway, making me sound like a fourteen-year-old emo cutter instead of a grown man who knew how to make his own choices. Didn’t matter. I’m still looking at ninety-nine years, no parole. No Lola.

  After a year here, I knew what everybody else was thinking. I knew the sights they were seeing, the songs they were hearing. I had a cellmate for a while who sang “Brown-Eyed Girl” every time he pissed. A guy named Morris who’s in for armed robbery thinks about his ex-girlfriend, and another guy named Ajax thinks about getting high even though he’s been clean for three years, and one of the guards thinks about Ajax’s ass.

  They don’t know what I’m thinking, because nobody here thinks like me. When I lie awake for hours, it’s not because I’m seeing Murphy with his head bashed in or even Lola kneeling on my bed wearing just a T-shirt, though that comes back to me every day whether I want it or not. I think about how she lied to me, sitting on my lap, fiddling with the button on my shirt. Murphy didn’t beat her, he didn’t make her turn tricks. None of that stuff. If she’d said, “I just don’t like him. Can you get rid of him?” my life now wouldn’t be pretty, but at least it would be seamless. Instead, my existence has a lump of untruth at the center, and it’s my life, and I can’t change it.

  People make appointments to see me during the visiting hour. I’m interesting; I get that. People haven’t seen honor before, and they look at me like I’m an endangered polar bear. I’m not pretending I’m a saint. I’m a murderer, and I say it every day to make sure I don’t forget. If you think that’s something no one would forget, you’ve never been on the inside.

  Guys approach me. Nobody else has a ninety-nine-year sentence, crazy long, not even life but ninety-nine damn years, and it makes me a king. “There’s somebody I want taken care of,” they say. Then they say, “He’s a douche. The world will be better off without him,” because they’ve heard that I like moral arguments.

  “No.”

  “C’mon, man. He pimps out kids.” Or he steals his grandma’s oxy, or he lights puppies on fire.

  “No.”

  Eventually they get mad and threaten me, and everything gets all tense, and then they just go away and spit at me when they get the chance. Never anything worse than that. They know I’m not like them.

  In ten years, exactly once has somebody almost gotten to me. A kid, only just eighteen, looking at fifteen for second-degree murder. He wanted to hear from me how the system was unfair, because if he heard it from me, it would be true. He said, “I meant to harm nobody. I didn’t hardly know how to drive. I was scared. When I hit the accelerator the car jumped, and when I looked out the windshield, she was gone.” A lot of that was probably true.

  “Why’d you tell them you could drive?”

  “They needed me. It didn’t look hard.”

  “Who do you figure you let down?”

  “Jesus, man. I killed that woman.”

  “You know what killed her? Your lie. Not even a planned murder that you could man up to, just a mistake from a piss-ant lie.”

  The kid’s eyes went big, and then his dawning sneer half turned his face inside out. “Must be hard to see, looking out your own asshole all the time. You know why you got a fucking ninety-nine-year sentence?”

  “Yeah. ‘No remorse.’” The judge had waited after he said that, as if I was going to change my mind.

  “Because you’re such a goddamn prick. He was trying to teach you something, son, but your head’s so far up your ass your ears are plugged.”

  He stormed to the
other side of the rec yard to complain to Ajax, but I stayed where I was until the guard yelled for me to come in. Everything I told the kid was right. He would have to learn it for himself. A bird was whistling somewhere and I wanted to memorize its song, but it’s just as well I couldn’t. Fuck it. It’s his song, not mine.

  Bucket (1)

  I thought I knew all the drawbacks to writing an advice column, the job I took on so I could keep editing Features. No holidays, no gratitude, no end to the world’s misery. I’ll read a letter written in pencil from a kid whose mother beats him, and the next writer will be upset because her boyfriend farts in bed.

  Yesterday I read a letter from my wife, detailing her unhappiness in our marriage. She didn’t sign it, but I recognized her phrases and rhythms, her way of telling me we’re very wrong, we’re over. I’ve been waiting for it. She shows me—I see—more than she thinks.

  “I don’t know when it stopped being happy. Now my heart is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, and it can’t hold anything anymore.” Not many people but Lonnie would have come up with that. My God, she is my wife. I know how she talks.

  When I come out of my office she’s at the kitchen sink, washing spinach. I pull her into a hug, braving her wet hands on my back, and say, “My heart is filled with you.”

  “Ugh. What have you been reading?”

  “Letters.”

  “Find letters that don’t make you sound like a ’70s pop song.” She touches a damp finger to my eye. “Why are your eyes red?”

  “Allergies?”

  “There’s Benadryl in the cabinet.” She goes back to the spinach and for exactly two seconds I imagine saying, I read your letter, but my heart is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom. Lonnie is my whole life. I will do anything to make sure she is washing spinach when I come out of my office.

  The letter is signed Secretly Unhappy in Omaha. Lonnie and I live in North Carolina, but this is the Internet, where everyone lives everywhere, and Lonnie has always used “Omaha” as her shortcut phrase to mean misery. When she says she spent all day in Omaha, I fix her a drink. Now she thinks she lives there.