Exes

by Max Winter

  I even asked her, once—what the trouble was. I was going through our boxes of books, looking for my encyclopedia, and Liza was sitting in the parlor staring at the wall. We still hadn’t decided what to hang there: I was keen on a nineteenth-century nautical map, the kind with beige water, but Liza had wanted this one oil painting her sister had done of a fat, naked gal running through a field of wildflowers. Phyllis painted only fat, naked gals doing different things.

  I walked over to the davenport, patted Liza on the knee.

  “How you settling in?”

  She looked up and closed her eyes at me. Hid her lips to smile. “I’m fine, Hank.”

  “Hell, I know you’re fine, Liza. I asked how you’re settling.”

  She took my hand and pressed it into her knee.

  “You want to hang that painting Phyllis did there?” I said.

  “Some things can only be missed.”

  “Now what does that mean,” I asked. Metaphors were one thing, riddles something else entirely.

  “It’s okay,” she said. Then she let go of my hand and went back to looking at the blank white wall.

  Moving is harder on women, that whole nesting instinct. Everything means something to them. So I went back to searching for my World Books. I wanted to study what made these shitbirds tick. Liza gave me some long looks while I opened box after box of things we hadn’t dealt with yet. I was real careful—unpacking things into stacks and dividing the stacks into rows—but it got her dander up all the same.

  “Now what’re you into?” Liza asked once I started rifling through the black and lacy underthings she no longer wore.

  “I’m just looking for my World Books. Wanna read up on geese.”

  “And you think you’ll find them in my bedclothes?”

  “Christ if I know. You pack like a maniac.”

  “I’m tired, Hank.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said and meant.

  “I can’t locate my power,” she said.

  “Well, you still give me a hard time about how I load the dishwasher,” I said, smiling.

  “It has nothing to do with you or with that. I don’t know where I am,” she said, and went to go sit somewhere else for a while. I just thought it was one of her metaphors.

  I finally found the “C” volume of my 1959 World Books tucked away in a box full of teeth molds and Xmas cards. The Canada geese entry wasn’t much use, apart from the bit about their “agnostic behavior.” I was gonna make a joke about it to Liza, but figured she wasn’t in the mood, which wasn’t like either of us, which was the whole problem. So I kept reading. Back then, the assholes were nearly extinct, if you can even believe it. This was when no one saved any kind of animal from anything, except maybe your dog from a burning barn or a bear trap, and even then only if it would’ve done the same for you. We used to let civilization take its course.

  _____________

  By the time Carlos got the spare room set up, the goslings had all been born. Now there was even more shit. I could barely step off my patio without skating on a rain-slick tangle of turds. Jesus, you’d think they’d waste away to nothing on account of how much they shat. Apparently those ChemLawn treatments didn’t so much as make the lawn taste bitter. They were probably pumping it full of vitamins and Spanish fly and Ex-Lax, for all I knew.

  But what drove me even more nuts was that right across the road was a perfectly good corporate park for them to call home. The regional headquarters for Bank of America’s pond was five times bigger than ours, easy, and surrounded by a hell of a lot more grass. And you can bet all those secretaries and cubiclers would toss them muffin hunks and sandwich crusts on their coffee breaks. But no matter how many times I chased the flock over there, they found their way back to my pond.

  A week into his stay, Carlos started spreading out, not doing his homework in the breakfast nook instead of his pantry. He’d sit there with a couple closed books in front of him and chew on his pen awhile, staring at the air between him and the wall. One time his books were still closed but he was sketching on graph paper, crossing things out, redrawing them with a ruler. “Whatcha working on?” I asked.

  “Plans.”

  “What for?”

  “Gutters.”

  “What do you know about gutters?”

  “Phyllis made me clean hers once. Up a ladder.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “These don’t need cleaning. You pull a cord, and they dump out.”

  “Pretty slick,” I said, looking down at the sketch, which was mostly cross-outs but had an exploded view of the release mechanism that almost made sense. There was a C-shaped catch connecting the cord to the gutter, but I couldn’t tell how you’d reset it. Wet leaves would probably still stick, also, but between Central Falls and Colombia what’d he know from leaves. “This for school?”

  “No, people.”

  “This place doesn’t have gutters. They cut corners.”

  “I noticed,” Carlos said, and went back to his sketch.

  The last time I saw Liza conscious, I had just come back from Home Depot. I had a roll of chicken mesh under my arm and found her sitting in the breakfast nook, drinking a cup of Sanka. I knew something was wrong when she didn’t offer me any. Normally, she’d have already had the Stella D’oro out of the Brisker and everything. Liza went to take a sip of Sanka, then stopped herself. She put the cup back down on the coaster, centered the coaster on the table, straightened the Plexiglas caddy of Sweet’N Low. She whistled a sigh through her nose.

  “What?” I said.

  She made a face and shook her head. “The geese, all the trips to the Home Depot.” I gave her another look, and Liza lowered her voice. “How is that that you have no job and yet you’re still hardly here?”

  “Goddammit, Liza. If anything, I’m here too much.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “What do you want me to do? You want me to do what?”

  “Hank,” she said.

  You know actors—I mean the real good movie kind, like that one Jewish fellow, or the one who used to be real quiet but now shouts all the fucking time—how they get when they’re trying to look blind or stupid? How they look like they honestly can’t see what’s in front of them? Well, that’s how Liza was looking at me. Like I wasn’t even there. Then I noticed that for some goddamned reason she was wearing her India rubber boots and had tucked her pants into them like a quahogger. At the time, though, I was so out of sorts that I didn’t even wonder what the hell for.

  “What the hell, Liza.”

  “It hurts.” Her face aged.

  I didn’t know what to do. “I try to be good,” I said.

  “It’s not—”

  “I watch my salt and sugar. I count backwards like they told me. I picture the horizon.”

  “It’s not about your heart.”

  “I try now.”

  “Hank . . .”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “It’s not about you. I look out the window and don’t know where I am, and now you with those fucking Canadian geese—”

  “Canada geese,” I said, because I couldn’t help it.

  Liza steepled her fingers, then pushed her forehead into the steeple, breaking it apart.

  My chest knotted. Liza was the only person I trusted who barely swore. I sat down in the breakfast nook, opposite my wife. The cushion sighed beneath me. Liza stood up. She took her cup to the sink and ran it under cold water. We both agreed hot was for real germs. It didn’t matter that I was worried more about bills than about ozone or wetlands or whatever—in the end we just liked that in the end we had the same solutions.

  “Yeah,” I said, still expecting her to tell me how I could help.

  Liza opened the kitchen door to the garage, and I caught a quick whiff of oil and naphthalene. Doesn’t take long for even a new garage to smell like an old one, I thought. “Don’t you think that
smells like a real garage?” I asked.

  She tossed the empty Sanka can into the recycling bin and shut the door. Then she sat down in the nook and looked up at me with wet red eyes.

  “Shit, Liza.”

  “I really hurt,” she said, then doubled over, clutching her belly.

  By the time I got Liza to the accident room, she was unconscious. The doctor asked me if she ever drank water.

  “Sanka,” I said. “Metamucil?”

  He frowned a doctor frown and told me she was completely dried up and might need a colon operation. She did. Then she blew up twice her size from staph, went into a coma, and it was all downhill from there.

  _____________

  At some point it occurred to me that Carlos was watching too much TV, even if it was mostly educational. Didn’t he have homework? At a school like that? But what did I know from education. So I figured what the hell, and gathered up a stack of procedurals that I had liked and carried them with me into the parlor, where I found Carlos watching something about the Incans or the Mayans. I put the stack down on the coffee table and said, “Here you go, kid. Thrillers.”

  He leaned to the left to watch his program.

  “I like the scenes where the buck gets stopped,” I told him, stepping to one side.

  He just looked at me.

  “Look,” I said. “I folded down the corner for each page where the guy takes matters into his own hands for a change.”

  “That’s not how things change.”

  So I said, “That’s why you start another right after.”

  “But that’s the whole problem,” he said. “The next one picks up where the last one started, not ended.”

  So I go, “You could say that about anything, you know.”

  “In real life, it takes more than one guy,” he said, and went back to his program.

  “I just try and think of it as one long book I’m never gonna finish,” I said, leaving my stack and the room.

  Carlos hadn’t been around for more than a month before Phyllis called to tell me he might not pass junior year.

  “Why the hell not?” I said.

  “He’s been skipping gym. He and some other boys like to nap in the cloakroom.”

  “They’d hold him back for sports? Sports!” I could feel my blood. I pictured someplace else. Someplace wide open and far away.

  “It’s a policy. They said they’d let him make it up if he apologizes.”

  “There you go.”

  “He won’t apologize.”

  “That beats everything.”

  “His adviser says he just shrugs.”

  “Well, maybe he’d like it better in Newark. Maybe he’d like to go back to Central Falls instead of napping in the goddamned cloakroom.”

  “This won’t help.”

  “Not sure I care.”

  “Hank.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Please.”

  “Why’d they call you?”

  “I called them.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  “I know you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you and Carlos talk?”

  “Of course we talk!”

  “I know you, and knowing you, you don’t ever ask him anything.”

  “I tell him plenty.”

  “How about how was your week? You don’t ask that, I bet.”

  “Where do you even come from with this crap? Kid needs a place all of a sudden and I took him in.”

  “You sure didn’t ask Liza—”

  “Phyllis.”

  “Look, Hank—”

  “You don’t start a sentence with look when you talk to me. Where do you get the brass to tell me look!”

  “Carlos—”

  “I’m gonna call that school. I’m gonna straighten things out.”

  “My sister—”

  “Okay,” I said, and hung up. I sat back in the nook and looked up at the ceiling fan, noticed some cracks in the tiles at its base. There was a little too much play at low speeds. Maybe I could adjust the motor some.

  Carlos was in the parlor, drinking a chocolate soda and watching a program on beavers.

  “So what’s all this about cutting gym?” I asked.

  Carlos shrugged.

  “Look, kid, I’m not angry with you. I just want to help grease the skids a little.”

  “Gym is stupid. They make us climb a rope.”

  “Gym class is for assholes. But sometimes you gotta think about the big picture.”

  On TV, a beaver swatted mud with its tail.

  “Don’t you want to graduate next year?”

  Carlos shrugged, his walnuts still fixed on beavers. His goddamn glasses looked like Pacer windshields. No wonder he couldn’t climb things.

  “Look, I know life dealt you a shit hand, but if you just play your cards, you have a lot of options.”

  “I want to go to RPI,” Carlos said.

  I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, but it was the first remotely positive thing to come out his mouth, so I figured I’d humor him. “There you go.”

  Carlos took a sip of soda.

  “Look, is there something else you could do instead of gym—you know, like game clock or something? Equipment manager?”

  Carlos nodded. “Fencing.”

  “Christ, kid, you gotta wear that beekeeper outfit, and isn’t it all in French?”

  Carlos shrugged.

  “Okay, okay. Fencing it is. So all you gotta do is go and apologize to someone and you’re all set: no rope, no staying back.”

  “I’m not going to apologize.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I’m not sorry. Gym is stupid.”

  “Look, you don’t have to be sorry, you just gotta apologize.”

  “I don’t apologize when I’m not sorry.”

  “All right, have it your way. See how much fun junior year is the second time around. The Bill of Rights only gets worse.”

  “I’ll fence, but I’m not going to apologize to anyone about anything.”

  “It’s no big deal. People say they’re sorry all the goddamned time. You think they mean it? You say sorry at the market, for christsakes. You say sorry at McDonald’s. That’s just life.”

  “Where I come from, you don’t say I’m sorry.”

  “Look, kid, when you talk like that, my mind goes blank.”

  “Talk like what?”

  “When you talk about a place or the people who live in it, instead of about yourself.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Now what is that supposed to mean?”

  “That I got it.” Carlos took another drink of soda and went back to his nature program. Turned up the volume good and loud with the remote. At this point, those goddamn beavers were making an ungodly mess of what had once been, in all likelihood, a perfectly good creek—drowning saplings, turning land to swamp. I thought about the geese and Liza’s ashes, and my shoulder tightened. Took a deep breath, counted backward from six, and let Carlos alone with his show. So what if they held the little prick back, I thought, I’d be shipping his ass to Newark soon enough anyhow. Hell, I’d even send him back to Benefit Street to breathe dust and eat food with nothing in it and go to meetings all weekend long. I had enough to worry about between Liza being gone and these goddamn geese without foster-kid nonsense keeping me up at night. Way things were going, I’d wind up in the accident room for sure. It’d only been two years since I took my last heart attack and still had the sugar and was hardly in the clear.

  “Look, I know how it is. How your old man split.”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  “Oh. Liza would’ve known that,” I said.

  “Look,” he said, “you don’t know me, and I don’t like you, so let’s just give each other some space.”

/>   “I!” I didn’t know what to say. “You don’t know me, either,” I said.

  “Sure I do.”

  “What makes you so sure.”

  “Because that’s all white guys do is talk about who they are and how everybody else should feel.”

  “I don’t tell you anything!”

  “Don’t have to.”

  “Well, maybe there’s more.”

  He shrugged. “White is an absence.”

  “Well, I got a niece who says all us French-Canucks are all part Indian, if you go back far enough. She read it in a book.”

  He looked at me long enough for me to notice he wasn’t blinking.

  “It’s true!”

  “It’s also stupid.”

  I had something else to say, but I forgot it as soon as I opened my mouth, which felt dry all of a sudden. But instead of getting a drink, I walked around the living room twice, then sat down and watched the program with him, which was no longer about beavers, but about aqueducts and how to make them now the way they used to. It was pretty interesting, actually. But Carlos was sitting where I used to sit, and I had a hard time focusing. I could feel my heart everywhere but in my heart.

  That night I didn’t sleep all that well. I used to think the dead needed an address, and that’s why I hadn’t cast Liza’s ashes like she wanted and instead kept them in a sextant box on the mantel, but now I wasn’t sure that I had done the right thing. But I couldn’t do it—sprinkle her here and there, like fertilizer. “Like wedding rice,” she’d said.

  I pictured the wind carrying away scoops meant for the spot where Roger Williams first landed or the Great Swamp or wherever. “Why are we even talking about this!” I said. “You’re gonna put me in the ground. This’ll be your sister’s problem. Or else your goddamn nephew’s, if he’s not too busy.”

  “Oh, Hank. You’ll know what to do.”

  “I’m going first!”

  In addition to not getting buried, Liza also didn’t have a funeral. Instead she had a memorial at the Quaker Meeting House. Phyllis set it all up. It was run like one of their meetings, where everybody gets a chance to talk. Some people take too long. Some say dumb things, or things that only sound good and in the end mean way less than the dumb things. But that’s just how it works.

  I didn’t get up to speak, because I didn’t have anything to say—not to these people, most of whom I didn’t know from Adam. Phyllis also had a hard time saying her piece, or her peace, or whichever. I mean, physically. She couldn’t find her voice. She got out her own name—which is just how they do things, I gather—and the part about being Liza’s sister, but that was it. Nothing else came out. We all waited. Phyllis was sitting next to me. I looked up at her and put my hand on her back—without any strength; I wasn’t holding her up or anything—and waited along with everybody else. It felt funny, my hand on her back, and even funnier when it slipped to her hip, then quickly back to her back, and I’m not sure it helped any, but I had to do something. “Sorry,” she mouthed, and sat down so fast that my hand got stuck there, between her back and the pew. She gave me a flat, trembly smile, and I gave her one back. I let my hand go numb behind her, and we just sat and listened to everybody talk about my wife.