I do, so softly I’m not sure he could hear me, but after a minute or so, he comes to the door. Still in the blue suit from the meeting. He doesn’t recognize me at first, so I explain that I’m the girl with the uncle who died. He stares at me for a minute; then he asks if I want to come in.
His voice is just like I knew it would be. Low, melodic, real. He doesn’t sit down but he tells me I can have a seat on his couch. Two of the brown cushions are covered with magazines and papers, so I sit down on the third one, near the window. He stands by the TV, across the room, silently looking at me. Then he reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a pack of cigarettes. He lights one, but before he can put the pack away, I ask him if I can have one, too. He hands me one and his Zippo lighter; I light my cigarette and start coughing.
“You don’t smoke, do you?”
“No, not really,” I say, stifling another cough. “But I want to learn how.”
“Why would you want to do that?” He looks out the window. “I’m sure you’ve heard it’s bad for you.”
“It’s bad for you, too,” I say, dropping my ashes in a yellow plastic bowl filled with butts on the end table next to me. “I don’t buy all that research anyway. I think it’s part of some government plot to trick people into forgetting about the real problems in the country by making them so busy hating smokers.”
I think about what my mom would say if she could hear me. She’s fanatical about the damage people do to themselves when they smoke. She always complains about her patients who won’t quit; she told my father that she’d like to refuse to take any patients who smoke, but her HMO won’t let her.
William’s mouth moves a little. Almost a smile.
He brings out a white plastic chair from his kitchen and sits across from me. He smokes the cigarette until it’s almost down to the filter; then he tells me he has to go to work in about five minutes.
“Where do you work?”
“At the mall,” he says. “Sears. In the furniture department.”
So that’s why he has to wear a suit. But I’m not disappointed; I didn’t want him to work behind some desk at a bank or an insurance company. The mall is as good as anywhere to make a living. I remember my dad saying how sad it is when older people have to work in retail or fast food, but I don’t feel sorry for William.
“I’ve got to go, too. My parents have dinner at seven.”
He pauses for a minute, and then he says, barely moving his lips, “You haven’t told me why you’re here.”
I stand up and move toward the door. “It’s a long story. I’ll have to save it for some time when you don’t have to work.”
He picks up his wallet and keys from the top of the television.
We walk out of the apartment and down the stairs: him in front, me trailing behind. When we get to the parking lot, I ask if I can come again tomorrow morning.
“Don’t you have school?”
“Yeah, but I can skip whenever I want. I already have enough credits to graduate. It doesn’t matter what I do now.”
He shakes his head, but he says I can come if I want. Then he gets in his blue Chevy and leaves.
I resist the temptation to follow him to Sears instead of going home.
That night, I dream about William and Jessica and me, but we’re not in the hospital anymore. We’re in a silver boat and William is holding Jessica in his arms—she’s so small, the size of a baby—and he’s rocking her and singing. The song sounds like a hymn, but it’s sweeter than any I ever heard at the All Saints’ Episcopal Church. When I wake up, I don’t remember most of the words, but I still hear one line, repeating: “Go across the water, to the other side; Find the peace you’ve longed for, always been denied.”
As I get dressed to go to William’s house, I decide I’ll bring him a present.
The present is ready at ten, but I wait until eleven to knock on his door, in case he’s a night person. But he doesn’t answer. He isn’t home. It occurs to me he’s done this on purpose to avoid me, but I don’t want to believe that. I sit back down on the green rug and wait, with the present behind me, so he won’t see it right when he walks up. I want to explain it first; I don’t want him to feel strange about getting a gift from someone he hardly knows.
I don’t have to wait too long. He nods when he sees me; he says he had a feeling I might show up during the ten minutes he was gone, but he had to get a few things from the mini-market. Cigarettes and coffee, he mutters, can’t live without them.
I follow him through the apartment door, still holding my present behind me. When he motions me over to my spot on the coach, I sit down and tuck the present under the coffee table, out of sight.
This time he gets the white plastic chair right away and sits down. He’s not wearing the suit; he’s wearing blue jeans and a black, short-sleeved shirt, but he still has the wing tips on. Maybe the only shoes he has, I figure, and that’s okay with me.
He leans back in his chair. “I called Ken last night after I realized I didn’t remember your name. Stacey Janzen.”
“Pretty boring name, huh?” I’m nervous about Ken knowing I came over here, but I try to sound casual. “Did Ken tell you I called him earlier for your address?”
William exhales a puff of smoke and it swirls and disappears in the sunlight streaming in the window. “He did. He also said he wouldn’t give it to you.”
I cross my legs and smile. “But, hey, I’m pretty resourceful, huh?”
He doesn’t smile back. “Why are you here, Stacey Janzen?”
“Well, like I told Ken, my uncle Johnny was a POW, too, for a while, and I thought that maybe you could tell me what it was like.”
He puts out his cigarette and stares at the glass ashtray next to him. “Ken used to work for the VA. He mentioned something about calling a friend of his to find out exactly what happened to your uncle.” He pauses. “Do you want him to do that?”
He knows, I’m sure of it. And in a way, I’m glad. It’s hard to lie to William after hearing him sing last night in my dream.
“No.” I sit up straighter. “No, I guess he shouldn’t call them.”
William gets up and takes a styrofoam cup out of his grocery bag. While he sits and sips his coffee, I walk over to his window. It looks down on the corner of the parking lot where the green trash dumpsters are. I see a white bird feeder hanging from the window ledge and ask if he hung it there.
“Yeah,” he says. “I like to listen to them in the morning.”
I feel my breath coming quicker. “Sing to me, Stacey,” Jessica would say. She was my roommate, the youngest kid at the hospital. There were rumors that her dad or an uncle had done something to her—like half the girls in the place. “My sister used to sing to me in the morning.”
“Dammit, Jessica, I can’t do that. Okay, okay, just stop crying.”
“Do you want a drink?” William asks, pulling out a can of Pepsi from the grocery bag. I say sure, and he hands me the can. While I’m sitting on the couch, drinking, he asks me again what I’m doing here.
“I want to give you something.” I reach under the coffee table and pull out the present.
He stands up and puts his hands in his pockets. “You feel sorry for me, is that it? Some kind of charity work at school? Or maybe for your church?”
He doesn’t sound annoyed, but his voice has lost the melody. I want to explain that I don’t feel sorry for him at all, but I can’t find the words.
Finally I say, “I’ve been dreaming about you.”
He sits back down and looks at me. “And what am I doing in the dream?”
“Open the present first,” I tell him, with a note of pleading I can’t keep out of my voice. “Then I’ll tell you.”
He reaches across the coffee table and I hand it to him. He takes off the purple wrapping paper carefully, without tearing it. It’s a T-shirt, men’s size medium. I got it at this store where they’ll put anything you want on a T-shirt. On William’s T-shirt, I put in bold bla
ck letters:
Do Not Lose Hope
Our Hearts Will Always Be Free
“Thanks,” he says, and pauses. “You wanted me to have this because I was in prison in Nam?”
“Yeah, sort of. But it’s from a poster I made a few months ago. For another friend of mine.”
I taped it to the wall of our room the night before I left, over Jessica’s bed. But she was on so many meds, I wasn’t even sure she read it before the counselor took it down.
William smiles then for the first time, and I realize I’ve said, indirectly, that I think of him as my friend. I blush, something I never do, something I pride myself on being above. I hope he doesn’t notice.
“Who was this other friend?” he asks, putting the T-shirt down, carefully, on the floor next to him. “A vet?”
I shake my head. “A kid. A little kid, only thirteen. Her name was Jessica.” I realize I’ve used the past tense. Her name is Jessica. Is. Even if she doesn’t know it half the time now.
He stares out the window for a minute; then he tells me he has a kid. A boy named Matthew, fifteen years old now, who lives in Seattle with his mother.
“That’s far…. Do you ever get to see him?”
“No. Not since my ex-wife remarried when Matthew was five.”
I lean forward. “But you’re still his dad.”
“Not legally,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “I signed some papers so he could be adopted by his stepfather.”
The pack of cigarettes is lying on the TV; I ask William if I can have one and he says sure. When I walk across the room, I notice William’s hands are trembling.
“Give me a light, okay?”
He picks up the lighter; I put my hand under his wrist to stop the shaking. He lights my cigarette, but I don’t let go of his wrist.
He looks up at me. “I really don’t understand what you’re doing here.”
I drop his hand and walk to the window. There’s a red bird perched on the feeder. “I told you already; I keep dreaming about you.”
“You’re a kid, Stacey,” he says quietly. “You shouldn’t be dreaming about me.”
I take a puff of my cigarette, without coughing this time. I turn around and stare at him. “It’s not a sexual thing. I’m not here for a fuck.”
He doesn’t seem shocked or embarrassed; I knew he wouldn’t. “You don’t have an uncle though?”
“No.” I sit back down on the couch. “But I do have a friend named Jessica. And I can’t see her anymore because she’s locked up.”
“Your friend’s in prison?”
My throat is burning from the cigarette; I can’t answer his question. I pull the skin on top of my hand until it hurts, until the surrounding skin loses all its color. Then I take a deep breath and tell him that Jessica is in a mental hospital.
He sits there for a few minutes without saying anything; then he picks up the T-shirt I gave him and goes through a door on the other side of the room. When he comes back out, he’s wearing the shirt, and he asks me if I want to go to McDonald’s for lunch. I tell him I’d rather go to Wendy’s because it’s farther from school.
He whistles a song as we drive to Wendy’s in his blue Chevy. It might be the hymn in my dream, but I’m not sure. I can’t hear that song anymore now that William is whistling.
author inspiration
I was a big grunge fan in the early nineties, and one of my favorite albums was Pearl Jam’s Ten. I loved the band and the lyrics suited me: angry rants about poverty, violence, alienation—and especially, the treatment of children. I was in grad school at the time and the topic of my dissertation was youth politics. Songs like “Jeremy” and “Why Go” seemed especially meaningful.
I started the story inspired by “Why Go” back in 1995, when I was on my third copy of Ten and still pissed off about all the kids who were “diagnosed” and sometimes even institutionalized because they couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in. As the story evolved, though, it became less about child politics and more about the human condition. The world is full of people rejected by mainstream culture; Stacey isn’t as alone as she thought. This is a possible answer to the question of the song “Why go home?”—to make a connection with the other strangers, to maybe even achieve a limited form of transcendence, with anger still intact.
ALL THE SECURITY GUARDS BY NAME
aimee bender
So I go down to the lobby, and everybody’s there, and they say: “Take off that foolish hat Put down the chain.”
“The Lobby”
Jane Siberry
I moved in ten years ago, with one suitcase and a brokenness, like the bird that has hit the window by accident. If you’re that bird, you are surprised for the rest of your life, because air, which you know better than anything else, is not supposed to turn hard and painful. The air should be soft enough to soar inside. That’s the worst of it for the stunned bird, whose body heals fast enough; for me, too.
I had my suitcase and a small hat on, a proper hat with a brown band, and the building rose up next to me on the corner and the front door was open, and there was a For Rent sign up in one of the high windows, enough to invite anyone inside, except no one else on the busy street was stopping but me. The security guard at the front smiled and asked if I was interested in looking, and I nodded, yes please. My one suitcase, getting hard to hold. The handle slippery with my anticipatory sweat. I hardly even noticed the lobby then, what with its silvery walls and the tinkling sound of glass mobiles above.
The room they were offering was everything in its right place, and the spectacular view of the far-reaching corners of the city made me finally put the suitcase on the floor and stretch out my clenched hand, and take off my proper hat and sit down in a chair. I’ll take it, I told the security guard, who apparently felt safe enough to leave his post for longer and show me the excellent bathroom and spacious closet. We signed papers together, and someone came rolling by with a sandwich cart, and I ate a turkey on sourdough and lemonade with cherries floating redly beside the ice cubes. When the security guard left, I rolled around on the towels, white as salt, still warm from the dryer.
It took me honestly a year to notice that I had not gone outside once. Who ever needs to do such a thing? When there is a fine restaurant and bar, and so many different rooms galore from floors 1 to 42. And the security guard team there twenty four hours keeping it safe for all of us, and a basement in case of war. A bomb shelter. A greenhouse terrarium. Iron balustrade fire escapes and ballrooms if you want to throw a ball. On the seventh floor, you’ll find rooms of mothers, and they will hold you on their laps and stroke down your hair. I try to see when they leave to go home, but whenever I knock, they are always there. Beautiful mothers, with tired, warm eyes. I bring them armfuls of flowers from the nursery on the third floor, and I take hours to make the decision: who gets the lily, who the rose, who fits with dahlia, who is all orchid. And then there’s his room, down the row from mine. Our meeting in the hall, oops, was that your foot? Sorry, sorry, hello. Hello. That first lunch together, in the squares of reflected sunshine. Who would notice the absence of fresh air in the presence of all this? The thought did not cross my mind for a year and then it crossed it so fast I missed it and it took three more years for it to cross again for long enough to consider, and then three more after that to gain the strength to form some questions and then three more still to decide on an answer. After all, did I really miss the rest of the world that much, which I could see so clearly outside my window? I could hear the nasty traffic outside, and sometimes the yelling. And him in his room, and me, lying in bed together on Sunday mornings with someone bringing us coffee, and the liquid look of his eyes, and the way he says he loves me and knows me. I love to let him know me for me. He hates it when I return to my room to shower.
But all that is other information. Don’t get sentimental on me now. All that is past history, and the ten years is up. You, all of you, standing around here in the lobby, don’t you have other place
s to go? Aren’t you late for work already? Everyone is in perfect gray suits, both men and women, but the heels for the women are all different heights so that each woman becomes the same height, or that appears to be the grand plan. The very short woman is wearing heels that are almost a foot and a half high. She is wobbling like crazy but she understands the power and purpose of unity. The tallest woman is in flats. There are men here, too, but their heights are different: it’s the women who want to be alike. They want to perform their oneness, against me. They turn in profile and become a series of portraits over the tall glass windows. Over the growing whiteness of the snow outside.
They all speak at once. There is no reason, they tell me, to leave here except for the reason of leaving, and there are seminar sessions they hold in the conference halls to remind me that leaving makes no sense, that it is a foolish idea. And that that new hat is foolish and that the idea, once again, is foolish, in case I did not hear the first time. Put down the chair. All I need. And he is here. And love is here. And the building is enough, isn’t the building enough? A building, with everything you need in it, should be enough. The warmth of a welcome lap. Look, outside, at the tumbling, cold snow. There are starving people, and not only in China.
On this day, the day I decide it is not enough, he is reading the paper. No, he is broken in pieces on the floor. He is about to die; no, he is reading the paper. He is unconscious. He is bleeding on the floor from pain, the pain in his heart starting to flow out his mouth in red rivers. No, no, he is reading the paper: the funnies section. He likes to read me the comics out loud even though they don’t make sense without the pictures. I don’t ever understand the joke.
He is dying, they say, in tinny voices, through the intercom into my room. Look at his pallor. Soon he’ll be dead on the floor from your callous departure. He is choking. He is suffering a wound inside his gut that is eating him, wormlike, from the inside out. I have to look again. Listen, I say out loud, it’s true that he is sad, but he is also reading the paper. I say it as firmly as I can but the intercom only works one way. I make the finishing touches on my new hat, made from discarded towels, and dead flowers from the room of mothers, and seashells I tore from the mirror border. I tie it under my chin in the now unbordered mirror while he reads the paper aloud.
Lit Riffs Page 10