If You Lived Here You'd Already be Home
Page 17
Since I am up late almost every night now, I turn short-tempered and impatient. Everyone pays the price. Jillian pays the price because I do not want to suffer her never-ending chatter about her upcoming nuptials to William Bryant. She brings the mock-ups of her invites to the coffee shop, wants me to help her choose a wedding cake. She asks my opinion on whether or not she can pull off a dress with an empire waist.
I am distracted. I stare out the window of the coffee shop at two high school kids standing on the corner selling candy bars.
“What’s going on with you?” Jillian asks.
“I haven’t been sleeping,” I tell her.
“That’s it?” she says. “That’s all?”
For a second, I think about telling Jillian about the girl, but if I do I know that Jillian will make me stop. Either she’ll talk me out of it or she will call someone in who will show me the error of my ways. I do not want that yet.
“That’s all,” I tell her.
“Nothing else?” she asks. “No urges? No backsliding?”
“Nope,” I say. “Nothing like that at all.”
The kids pay the price because my patience has grown thin. We are horribly behind on the time capsule now. I can’t find the right words to help them understand why we are doing this.
“I need you to imagine one hundred years from now,” I explain. “I need you to picture someone cracking open the capsule. What would be interesting for these future people to see inside?”
The kids look at me vacantly. One child, Peter Cedeno, holds up a pencil.
“Would a pencil be something interesting to them?” he asks.
Another child, Eloise Randle, holds up a pair of scissors.
“What about these?” she asks.
Jacob Moscovitz raises his hand.
“Can we put my cat Moses inside it?” he asks.
I shake my head no.
“Think of it like a present for people who are not born yet,” I tell my class. “Like a present for your children’s children. Or their children’s children.”
The kids still don’t understand. Alex Tambola asks if he can put Greta Houser’s doll in the time capsule so that Greta will cry. Greta asks if she can stuff Alex Tambola inside so that Alex will die choking for air.
One night as I sit outside the girl’s house waiting to go inside and carry her off to bed, Steve Senior taps lightly on the passenger window of my car. He gives me a little wave. I roll down the window.
“I’ve been stalking you for the last couple of days,” he says. “Just so you know.”
I unlock the door and let him in. I imagine this is the point where he will start blackmailing me. He won’t call it that though. He’ll call it an agreement. He will probably get mad whenever I refer to it as blackmail.
“I think I understand what’s going on here,” he says.
“What do you think you understand?” I snap.
A delivery truck drives by us, its headlights tracking slowly across both of our faces like they are being scanned or copied. The lights slide away and I realize how short the days are getting now, how the days are mostly darkness now.
“It’s not your job,” he says.
“Then whose fucking job is it?” I ask.
“I don’t know whose, but I know it’s not yours,” he says.
Steve Senior’s face is close to mine. I notice he has a small band of freckles that stretches across the bridge of his nose. I hadn’t noticed them before. I can’t tell if they are new or if they are fading away, if they are something that is disappearing because he is aging or if they are age spots, something that will grow darker over time.
“You are going to lose everything,” he says. “You understand that, right?”
I look inside the girl’s house now. The light in the living room is still on. It’s started to drizzle and from here the light stretches out across the lawn like a beacon on a far away shore.
“You’re going to stop?” Steve Senior asks me. “Now that I caught you, you’re going to stop, right?”
The class is coming in from recess now, red faced from the spring wind. We are going to start filling our time capsule today. The children have brought things from home. I know I will need to explain it to them again. I will have to tell them about how we will dig a deep hole. I will tell them about how we will put everything inside the metal capsule and then how we will drop the capsule into the earth.
They will still not understand. This much I know. They will stare at me and wonder what good this will do them. They will squirm in their chairs and whisper about me when my back is turned. What is that stupid lady talking about? they will ask each other.
I will tell them that when the time capsule is unearthed and popped open what we’ve put inside it will be scrutinized to death. All of us will need to live with our choices, with what we’ve put inside. We’ll need to be careful, I’ll tell them, because not a single damn one of us will be around to explain any of it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, this book would not exist without my wife Kate Condon, my parents Greg Jodzio and Cilla Diethelm, and my sister Clare Jodzio-McDermott. Unconditional love is a great thing. A large and boisterous cheer to all of the Jodzios, McDermotts, Streckers, Condons and Diethelms for their unflagging support throughout these many years. To my boys, Adam Johnson and Neil Vachhani—each one of those spots on my liver was absolutely worth it. My eternal gratitude to the McKnight Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, The Anderson Center, The Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and L’Associazione Culturale Torri Superiore for providing me valuable time and solace. Please raise a glass to Baker Lawley and Robert Voedisch, who saw many of these stories in their infancy and knew exactly what needed to be done. Lastly, a huge debt is owed to Bernard Cooper, Hannah Tinti, and to my lovely aunt, Susan Strecker Richard, who have helped me in innumerable writerly ways that I doubt I can ever repay.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Jodzio’s is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship and the author of the story collections Get In If You Want to Live and Knockout. His work has been featured in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney’s, and One Story. He lives in Minneapolis.