The Dwelling

by Susie Moloney

  He had brought the bottle of bourbon down to the dining room. With the two empty wine bottles and the dust and crumbs from the night before, it was not a pretty picture. The bottle did not have much more than a drink or two left in it, maybe three shots. When the hell had that happened?

  The drinking fairies are at it again, obviously. Terrible hosebags, those fairies. Drink all your beer, drink all your wine, drink all your brown pop and then make you sleep right through picking your kid up after school.Expensive little buggers, too. Represented on the table at that very moment was nearly thirty dollars in liquor—even if, technically, it hadn’t all been his money. But there was thirty bucks, pissed away. Not to mention (technically) a hundred-dollar promise ring and the possible earnings from the last two days, add that to the fact that his kid might never again cut his lawn for free, you were looking at a few dollars.

  Terrible prospect for a guy with so few to spare (ironically, previously due to the drinking fairies; insidious little bastards, when you gave it any thought at all).

  One drink never hurt anyone. Sometimes youneed a drink. That’s what it was there for. Medicinal purposes. You could even say a guyearned a drink, because what was that warm and fuzzy feeling if not some sort of reward for the piss-poor fucked-over world that you have to wake up to every morning of your life?

  He’d make it all right with RJ. Like no other father in the history of the world ever forgot to pick up a kid after some kind of school thing.

  He’d make it all right with Jennifer. Give up. Get a nice wedding present. Bygones and all that.

  He’d make it all right with Janis.

  He’d make it all right with his agent. Write a fucking book already.

  He’d make it all right with…

  Well, the list could just go on and on.

  He understood, perfectly and clearly, deeply and profoundly, that he could not have a drink. Not one, he could never, ever have just one, and he could not have a drink then. It would be wrong, in the grand scheme of things, cosmically and karmically, it would be wrong. He also understood that the reason it was cosmically and karmically wrong was because it was (gentlemen of the jury) absolutely the one thing that could be traced back to every fucked-up moment of his life. The drinking fairies did it, absolutely, if not directly then certainly through a chain (such as today) of events that led right back to their little lairs, buried deep in the chasms of Richie Bramley himself, host of hosts.

  I am not an alcoholic,he thought, frightened, the word so dark and large in his head that it bore no looking at, no indulgence. A scream in uniform.Of course not. I might (might)have a drinking problem.Not an alcoholic. On the heels of that thought came an equally disturbing, petulant one:If I’m not an alcoholic then I can have one lousy drink. Just one.

  He stepped forward, legs weak, and grasped the throat of the bottle. His hand shook. He carried it into the kitchen.

  Glasses dried upturned on the draining board by the sink. Glasses in the cupboards. Richie realized that he had a lot of glasses. Mugs, he had a half-dozen. He had a six-piece setting from his mother. The cutlery was a jumble of cast-offs from god knew where, but he had two sets of highball glasses and any number of short, fat Rob Roys. He had wineglasses, beer mugs, shot glasses, shooter glasses, and even a set of martini glasses that had come with a shaker one Christmas from Steve or Dubs or Brad or someone. When in doubt, get Bramley a bottle. And ice-cube trays. He had to have four in the freezer at all times, at all times full. He was meticulous about filling ice-cube trays. He might forget to pick the kid up from school, but you never had to go for ice at Bramley’s.

  His hand still gripped the throat of the Wild Turkey bottle. He stared at it, taking in the label, as familiar as most of the faces of his friends.

  Hand shaking, he dumped the rest of it down the drain, the heady, metallic smell of it flooding over him, turning his stomach at the same time that it made him yearn to taste it. He rinsed the sink. The bottle was left beside the draining board.

  His hands still shook, and the act had not made him feel strong or even better, as an action sometimes can. Instead it made him feel vulnerable and exposed to whatever evils the rest of the night could or would lay on him. For them, he would be sober. Edges would be sharp and dangerous.

  Thinking about RJ did not help. Deeply, so deeply inside that he didn’t feel any need to acknowledge it was a small seed of petulant anger toward the child, his child.See what you made me do.

  Richie went upstairs to the attic, hoping to salvage whatever he could from the rest of the day.

  Glenn Darnley wiped her mouth with a piece of tissue paper from her place in front of the toilet in her house. She knelt on the cold tiled floor thinking how dirty it probably was, even as she heaved a third time, fruitlessly, and spat the foul bile out of her mouth into the bowl where it joined the remnants of half a toasted bagel and some weak tea. The other half of the bagel waited in the kitchen for her and she didn’t think they’d be seeing each other for the rest of the evening. Maybe she would sip some tea but she felt perfectly awful and it was time to admit that.

  She stood up on weak legs, dropped the tissue and flushed. The smell of her vomit, stirred up by the action of the water, swirled up around her nose and threatened her stomach in a whole other way, but she managed not to gag. Not that anything more could possibly come up: everything she had consumed that day was gone. She leaned over the sink and ran water over a cloth. She rinsed her mouth.

  It was the flu, or some other bug that was always circling the globe at that time of the year, the change in weather: the dropping of the barometer, or some such nonsense, had lowered her usually stoic resistance to bugs and now she was paying for it. Likely she should have been in bed a week before, when this had all begun in earnest.

  There were lots of bugs around.

  Of course, something else bothered her. Things she hardly wanted to think about. Like the weight loss. A dress that had fitted nicely two months earlier was now hanging loosely. Her stomach had been, for almost a year, weak and uneasy. The pharmacist at her local drugstore had teased her about putting Tums on a tab. And she had no fever, no aches, no other flu symptoms. Nothing common.

  But there were lots of bugs going around. At any given moment you could find a variation on a flu bug. She’d simply been fighting the good fight and was finally conceding. A prescription of antibiotics and this would be a memory.

  Glenn changed into warm pajamas and turned the heat up in the house a notch. Without bothering to clear up the few things in the kitchen, she brought her cool, weak tea into the bedroom with her and thought to read for a moment, but instead fell quickly into exhaustion and put out the light. The flu didn’t last long; she would indulge herself with a very early night and be up and about in time for her doctor’s appointment in the morning. That was very important to her.

  She would not wander sick and vulnerable into the doctor’s office. She would go in straight-shouldered, straight up. And whatever it was he would have to say, that’s how she would hear it.

  Richie called it an early night, too. He had sat up in the attic, staring blankly at his computer for what seemed like a very long time, typing the odd sentence here and there when he could focus his mind on it, but for the most part, he ran over interminably in his head the disarray of his life.

  Everything had been there, ready for him to seize and control. And he had done that, in the beginning. He had started off with some pretty major disadvantages—although not necessarily bad within his chosen profession: sometimes a nasty childhood can be a writer’s best friend and most constant muse—but he had moved aside the obstacles of a falsely middle-class existence and risen above it. For a while. He had taken the meager tools of youth and built them into something grander than he had thought himself capable of, in the dark, lonely nights of childhood, lying in bed listening to the fighting from the kitchen, the old man drunk in his chair, his mother screaming well-earned obscenities at him, the old man mostly sile
nt through her tirades, his only contribution to it all a sort of background noise, a shuffle to the refrigerator for another beer, a shuffle to the bedroom for another pack of smokes, the occasional, heartfelt“You’re absolutely right.” His mother’s tears. The clunk of bottle or glass on table. The squeal of the sofa springs with his father’s weight.

  On those mornings when the kids woke up, they would find their father on the sofa, their mother in her room, all remnants of the night before erased, his mother sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to clean up whatever mess his father had made in the last extremities of drunkenness: vomit on the bathroom floor, urine stains on the kitchen chair, spilled whiskey/bourbon/beer on the table; if nothing else, there were the telltale ghostly rings on the table from overflowing glasses of good cheer.Salud.

  I am not my father.

  For a while he had taken all of that, the misdirected anger at his mother, the clearly directed anger at his father, and focused it elsewhere. The energy that he did not (for a while) expend in destruction he had put into the building of something. He wrote.

  Harder to lose were the secrets. The going to school and sitting in class, the ringing of his mother’s hysterical voice in his head, and pretending they were like everyone else. The “did you watch blah-blah last night?” questions from peers, when his mother had, months earlier, thrown a full bottle of whiskey through the front of the television, teeth bared like a frenzied animal, face red, veins on her forehead near to popping, a vicious, accurate arc of her arm in full swing, aimed not at the television at all but at their father, sitting passively in the chair in front of it, his eyes glassed over, body slumped—a viciously accurate throw with a vital force that would, in all likelihood, have killed him. I don’t watch TV, he would tell them.

  His mother came to school events when necessary. She wore her hat, her gloves, her hair in place, her dress a little behind the times, but worn with dignity, like an eccentric who had found her style and elected to keep it, rather than because the old man had lost his job and money was tight. Richie didn’t participate in school things after a while, but his little brothers did. His mother went to those. No one asked about his father, and information was never volunteered.

  The secrets were hardest. No talking about his family. No talking about what went on in the darkened living room.

  No one asked. That made Richie skittish. How could there not be questions when he came to school so tired from waking up in the middle of the night to something smashing against the outside wall of his bedroom? How could no one ask when none of the Bramley kids brought lunch, or went home for lunch? He always thought it was because they knew, as though the dysfunction of his family was somewhere written on him, a telling expression or way of walking. All the Bramley boys and no one talked.

  After a certain age, no one went home any longer either. They went to friends’ houses, to the arena, to hang out in front of the 7-Eleven.

  For years it was like that, and then it stopped, very suddenly.

  He came home from school the year he was fifteen and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her sister. She looked drawn. The night before had been a long one. He noticed nothing. (Except for the fact that his auntie Elsie was there at the table: a new face around the Bramley household was rare enough, but hers was a familiar enough face for it to escape the immediate attention of a fifteen-year-old.)

  His mother stood up when he walked in. She cleared her throat, began to sit down, then stopped. Richie was just about to saywhere’s Da— when she cut him off.

  “Your father has died,” she said flatly. She stood there, her arms snaking out just a few inches in front of her as though she knew there was something she was supposed to do right then but couldn’t quite remember what it was, it being something she was not entirely motivated to do.

  Richie stared without hearing for the longest time. The house got quiet enough in that blank space waiting for the next thing to be said, and he heard his aunt sob. Upstairs he thought he heard one of the boys (probably Robbie, he was the youngest) cry out.

  His face started to squeeze in, feeling tight, and he felt like he couldn’t move. He tried to think of what to ask, but amid the dozens of questions was the absence of any order in which to put them. He settled eventually on “What?” The universal question.

  His mother strode toward him then, remembering suddenly what it was she was supposed to do, and she reached out for him, her face tear-stained (how had he not seen that? it was a state of being for her, tear-stains) and contorted into an expression of pain.Not for him, he thought.Not for Dad. He instinctively stepped back from her, anger taking him up.

  “What happened?What happened to him? Did you kill him?”

  Elsie gasped, and his mother wept, covering her face with her own outstretched arms.

  “Richie…”she started, without energy.

  Then Jimmy and Robbie came downstairs, Robbie standing on the bottom landing, his eyes red from crying, and Jimmy jumped down the last two, his expression pure unadulterated anger, hands bunched into fists, and he got right in Richie’s face, his whole body tensed and leaning into his brother, and he screeched, in a perfect imitation of his mother’s posture and inflection, “Don’t youdare say anything to my mother! He killed himself!Dad killed himself!” And his mother shrieked in horror and pain and reached out then to Jimmy—Jimmy don’t—grabbing him and trying to turn him into her body and not Richie’s, and Jimmy took a vague swing—not at her or at Richie, just a swing in general—and it clipped the edge of the broken TV and suddenly Robbie was screaming and crying and Elsie was saying something no one was listening to and the four of them gathered into a rough circle and cried together. The sounds were primal and complex, a perfect chaos of unspent, unspoken, undirected emotions, most of which were a backlog that only then found expression.

  Richie fell into the moment of remembering with perfect clarity everything about the rest of that day. The silence broken only by sounds that were mostly unfamiliar. The quiet click of pots on counter as Elsie fixed them supper, his mother drained of energy, but also of the anger that usually began around then(salud), no matter how good the day. The sob cries of Robbie, so little still, he seemed, sitting on Dad’s side of the couch, curled up like a kitten, just staring into the air and crying quietly once in a while. Richie had felt for him; but he had not gone to him. His mother would get up and wander around the house, as though at a loss for something to do (something to be angry about) but she wandered anyway, like an out-patient, eyes taking in her children, going to them, touching heads, then, as if forgetting what she was supposed to be doing and suddenly remembering, going to the phone, where the boys would hear her uncharacteristically soft voice explaining what had happened to someone at the other end of the line.

  He’d hanged himself, anchoring the rope to the upstairs railing, then using the landing as his jumping-off point. It was more than a week before Richie had thought to ask, and years later he would wonder if finding that out was what made a writer of him, truly. He hadn’t thought about thehow. It hadn’t occurred to him that the old man hadn’t just somehowwilled himself to die that day. Finding out thehow gave him a whole new perspective on his dad. To hang himself in that way would have required a certain amount of planning. It wasn’t immediately obvious. It would take Richie years to realize that fact. There were moments growing up after that when he just assumed that it was the sort of thing adults knew by some kind of osmosis, like the fact that you had to file taxes before April 15, or the mechanics of sex, or how to pick a good steak.

  Richie took it so much further than just that one fact. Further than just knowinghow he did it. For a while he became nearly obsessed with it, imagining it in detail. The way the rope was tied, how it held his weight. The drop, straight down, from the upstairs railing was a height of about twelve feet, and his body would have swung wildly, away from the stairs and then back again. At the last moment, had his dad grappled with the closeness of the stai
rs? Did his legs scramble and pump in a last-minute effort to gain purchase?

  Every day for the previous week? month? year? did he walk down those stairs and think,There, that’s where I’m going to tie it; there, that’s where I’ll be when she finds me. Did it make him sad to think it? Had he tested the integrity of the railing before he tied the rope?

  There, that’s where I’ll be when she finds me.

  His mother had come home from work and found him hanging. The front door, through which she came, opened directly onto the stairwell. His feet, dangling (maybe still moving), were what she would have seen, his body still swaying with its weight and the force of the act. What she had thought or seen remained her memory alone. Richie had never tried to get her to talk about it, and she had never volunteered anything. He didn’t even know if the old man had been drunk at the time.

  What he had asked her waswhy.

  “Your father was a troubled man whodrank,” had been her curt and final answer. A troubled man.

  Richie had tried, in the days that came after, to find a hook to hang the whole thing on. He could remember nothing. The old man had been drunk, his mother angry. There was nothing that stood out as a final straw. No shouted ultimatums that had not been shouted before. No penetrating threats. No unusual violence. When Richie had left for school that morning, his dad had been sleeping on the couch, on his back. The living room had smelled of booze and cigarettes. His mother had already left for work. The house was quiet and dark in the way it always was in the early morning. Breakfast bowls were left on the kitchen table, half-filled with milk, cereal floating desultorily and forgotten, sharing space with a nearly empty bottle of whiskey. Richie had left that morning, his mind on other things, lost to him now. He hadn’t said good-bye to the old man, partly because he was sleeping and partly because he never did. The funeral was a closed-casket affair.

  A troubled man and a drunk.

  Richie digested the memory and let it go. He read the last line he’d written on the computer, in all its ragged, meaningless glory:Porter stood up from the desk and wandered out of the room. Richie didn’t even have a room to send him to. He sighed deeply and closed the document, shutting down his computer for the night. It had been a long one, and he was dead on his feet, in spite of the nap.