Knockout

by John Jodzio

  LILY AND ANNABELLE

  In March, Lily and Annabelle’s dad cheats on their mom with a landscape painter named Fern Greenwald. When their mom finds out, she pushes their father out of the window of their second-floor apartment. Their dad lands on his back in the muddy ground near the bike rack and starts to moan.

  Earlier that week, Annabelle found a walkie-talkie on top of a garbage can. As she and Lily run down the fire escape, Annabelle gives a trucker named Rascal the play-by-play.

  “My dad just fell out of the window and we’re going to see if he’s okay,” Annabelle tells Rascal.

  Lily stands over her father and watches his chest rise and fall. Annabelle bumps her rain boot against her dad’s ribs until he opens his eyes.

  “Jesus Christ,” he tells them. “I could’ve died.”

  It’s spring and there’s mud everywhere and where there isn’t mud there are mountains of dirty snow leftover by the plow. Their mother sticks her head out of the apartment window above them. She’s holding a big beer glass shaped like a boot in her hand and she motions the girls out of the way and she chucks the beer glass at their dad. It nails him in the shin and he grabs his leg and rolls around on the ground, screaming.

  “Now my mom threw a beer stein at my dad and it hit him in the leg and my dad yelled ‘fuck,’” Annabelle tells Rascal.

  Their dad has been homeschooling the two of them, so the next morning, their mom drives them back to Longwater Community School. Their mom hates Longwater. She hates all the teachers there. She hates the curriculum. She especially hates the principal. Last year she drove over to the principal’s house in the middle of the night and dumped a bucket of red paint onto the hood of the principal’s car. Their mom believes that there’s asbestos in the classroom ceiling tiles even though the principal showed her the paperwork that said all the asbestos in the building was disposed of ten years ago. Their mom’s hatred of Longwater doesn’t matter anymore, it’s been trumped by her anger at their dad. She’s bringing the girls back to Longwater for revenge. She’s re-enrolling them there because their father hates the school even more than she does.

  “This is crap,” Annabelle tells her mom as they drive there. “Quit using us as pawns.”

  Annabelle cut her own hair last night. The bangs are okay, but there’s a large bald spot on the top. Both she and Lily are wearing their old uniforms, their blue polo shirts and their khaki pants, but Annabelle has taken a marker and drawn a dragon on her forearm.

  “Your dad made you into pawns,” their mother says. “Not me.”

  Lily and Annabelle have been gone from Longwater for four months. When their parents pulled them out of school, their dad bought two old desks and an overhead projector at the Goodwill. He painted one of the walls in the apartment with chalkboard paint. He printed multiplication worksheets off the Internet. He let them read whatever they wanted to read. He taught them practical things, like how to bake sourdough bread and how to change the oil of a car.

  As they drive to the school, Lily remembers when her father was new again. How he returned to live with them after five years of being gone, how he talked to their mom on the phone every night for three months convincing her to take him back. One morning, Lily woke up and their dad was standing at the stove with his mother’s pink robe wrapped around him.

  “Who wants pancakes?” he asked.

  Lily ran right over and hugged him, but Annabelle stood her ground until her mom pushed her across the room and into his arms.

  Lily and Annabelle walk down the halls of Longwater, looking at what her old classmates have done since they left. Taped on the walls are self-portraits rendered in beans and pasta shells. In the showcase by the principal’s office there are shoe-box dioramas that depict the battles of Bunker Hill and Bull Run. Today the entire school smells like ass, which means lunch is either grilled cheese or pizza.

  “Oh, you two,” their old teacher, Ms. Marcellus, says when the principal ushers them into the classroom. “I thought you two were long gone.”

  The girls find they’ve lost their desks. The school supplies they left behind were shoved into a greasy paper bag and stored underneath the radiator. Ms. Marcellus hands the bag to Annabelle, scans the room for a place for them to sit.

  “We’re out of desks,” she tells them. “For now you two are going to need to make your laps into desks.”

  The girls don’t know how to transform a part of their body into something that it isn’t. They sit in the back of the classroom by the dead geraniums and the bin of construction paper scrap. Lily pulls her long hair in front of her eyes and twists it into thick ropes while Ms. Marcellus shows them how to divide fractions. Their pencils smell like fried chicken and they’re slick and hard to hold.

  When they go outside at recess their classmates want to be reminded of how, if they aren’t twins, they are in the same grade.

  “Beginning of September,” Annabelle says, pointing to herself.

  “End of June,” she says, pointing to Lily.

  Their mom eats meat, then she pukes meat up. Their father is a vegetarian and when he moved in they had all become vegetarians too. Now that he’s moved out, their mom eats only meat. Roasts, back bacon, turkey burgers. There aren’t any vegetables in the crisper now, only teriyaki jerky.

  When their mom pukes, Lily holds her mom’s hair to keep it from falling in the toilet. She massages her neck. Today when it happens, she hears Annabelle talking on her walkie-talkie in the other room.

  “My mom needs constant attention,” she tells a trucker named Jon-Jon. “And she loves drama. It’s not hard to figure out why my dad left.”

  Yesterday, after she bought a pound of chuck, a butcher at the grocery store asked their mom out. His name is Jerry and while their mother doesn’t think Jerry was all that cute, he looked stable so she said yes.

  “Let’s hope you two never have to compromise,” she tells them as she primps for the date. “Let’s pray that the first one you marry is the right one.”

  Last night, their dad limped in and dumped his sock drawer into a duffel bag. He slid his lighter off the top of the dresser and dropped it into the pocket of his pants. Their mom sat on the couch and paged through a magazine, trying to care less.

  “I brought your children back to Longwater,” she told him. “My theory is that any place you hate is the perfect place for us.”

  Their dad ignored their mom. He grabbed his bag and limped downstairs to the storage space. He held his hip as he walked, cupped the bone like there was something inside there that was going to spill out. Lily and Annabelle watched as he rolled his bike into a blue van.

  “When she pushed me out that window I could have fallen someplace hard and not gotten up,” he said. “Your mother doesn’t understand that. No matter what I did wrong, I didn’t deserve that.”

  When Lily and Annabelle go back upstairs, they find their mom kneeling down by the toilet again. Their bathroom door broke a few months ago and now the door is a green and brown afghan. She and Annabelle watch their mom’s head bob up and down through the holes.

  “It just keeps coming,” she tells them. “You’d think I would be empty but I’m not.”

  It’s Easter week and Lily thinks about how she wants to have a baby named Lazarus. She likes names with z’s, names that are not common. She wonders what her life will be like in ten years. She’s ten now and when she sits on the swings on the playground and drags her feet on the ground, she wants to know what happens when you double the amount of time you’ve been on this earth. She understands she’s doubled the amount of time she’s been on this earth before, that every second is the double of some other second.

  Annabelle runs over to the swings and shows Lily her hands. She has poked a stick into her palms and they’re bleeding. The other kids see the blood and crowd around.

  “Let us look,” a boy named Oliver says.

  “This is only for my sister to see,” Annabelle tells them. “She’s the only one who needs
to know.”

  Oliver grabs Annabelle’s shoulder and pulls her to face him. Annabelle kicks her knee into his gut and he doubles over.

  “Anyone else?” Annabelle asks.

  Their dad starts to call them regularly on Thursday nights. Annabelle will not talk to him, but Lily will. One Thursday when he calls, Lily hears someone playing the piano in the background. With the music behind his words, everything he says sounds like a sad song.

  “I wish I was there,” he tells her. “I wish it wasn’t the way it was.”

  This is the opposite of what their mom tells Lily and Annabelle—she tells them their father doesn’t want to be here, that he shacked up with a tramp who can’t paint and whose real name is not Fern, but Tammy. Her mother tells Lily that their father will have to live with Tammy when her tits sag and her ass flattens and her neck skin chickens and that stupid leopard-print coat of hers pills and frays.

  “What’s that music in the background?” Lily asks him.

  Her dad says it’s just the radio, but Lily can tell it’s not good enough. It’s off-kilter with songs that never finish. It’s too loud in some spots and too soft in others.

  “It’s not the radio,” Lily tells him.

  “It’s the radio,” her dad says.

  For Easter dinner, Jerry brings over a glazed ham. Their mother has cleaned all day, down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the hardwood floors. Lily and Annabelle run wild, in and out of the bathroom, through the blanket door.

  “Outside,” their mom yells at them, “Jerry’s gotta piss.”

  The girls go out on the fire escape, but instead of waiting, Annabelle heads down the stairs and past the dumpster.

  “Where are you going?” Lily yells.

  Annabelle’s talking on her walkie-talkie with a trucker named Herc.

  “I’m running away,” Lily hears her tell Herc. “Had enough, you know?”

  “I hear you,” Herc tells her.

  Annabelle walks down the white line of the road. Lily follows behind her in the gravel of the ditch. Lily sees a dead fish lying there, then a bike without any wheels. There’s a torn-up mattress and small birds keep flying in and out of its guts.

  “Where are we going?” Lily asks when Annabelle turns into a neighborhood. Annabelle does not answer her, she walks for another block and then she turns up the sidewalk and pounds on the door of a gray house. A woman opens the door. She’s wearing a man’s shirt with different-colored paint all over it. Her hair is up in a messy bun. Lily can see a piano against the living room wall and an easel spread out facing the window.

  “We want to see our dad,” Annabelle says.

  Lily hates to say it, but Fern’s prettier than her mother. She’s got slender arms and her toenails are painted purple.

  “He’ll be back in a bit,” she says. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll get you something to drink.”

  Fern walks into the kitchen. Lily stays sitting on the couch, but Annabelle gets up and walks around. She picks up a wooden bowl that’s sitting on the mantle.

  “It’s margarita mix without the booze,” Fern says, handing them the drinks. “That’s all I’ve got right now.”

  A dog runs through a dog door. Its leash drags on the ground behind him. Lily holds out her palm and he licks it. Annabelle notices Fern looking at the Band-Aids on her palms.

  “This wasn’t an accident,” Annabelle says, peeling back the Band-Aid so Fern can get a closer look. “It was on purpose.”

  Fern’s cell phone rings and she walks into the kitchen to answer it.

  “Yes,” Lily hears her say, “yes, they’re here.”

  Lily and Annabelle sit on the curb and wait for their mom. Fern gave them plastic cups full of margarita mix to go. Jerry’s truck drives up. Their mother gets out and gives them a big hug.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” their mother says. “Running off like that?”

  On the ride home, their mom sits next to Jerry in the cab. She touches his knee once, but he keeps staring straight ahead, his eyes on the road. Lily notices that one of his eyes is full of red veins, but that the other has none.

  When they get to the apartment, their mother asks Jerry to come up, but he shakes his head no.

  “Early shift tomorrow,” he tells her.

  “And that’s that,” their mom tells the girls as Jerry drives off. “Even the really nice ones have a breaking point.”

  But their mother’s wrong. Jerry stops over the next night. He comes up the stairs carrying a new bathroom door. Annabelle’s sitting at the kitchen table when he walks inside. Her walkie-talkie’s broken and she’s removed the casing to see if she can get it to work again.

  “Can you fix it?” Annabelle asks Jerry.

  Jerry goes out to his truck and returns with a tool kit with some very small screwdrivers. He works on the walkie-talkie for a few minutes, pulling on a few wires. Soon there’s the cackle of static again.

  “Time for bed,” their mom tells them.

  The girls fall asleep to the noise of Jerry’s drill in the next room and the lonely sighs of truckers calling out for company. When they wake up the next morning they find the old bathroom door draped over their bodies, keeping them warm.

  ALLIANCES

  I bring a bag of balloons and a mini helium tank to the park. My dog Tater takes a crap by the basketball court and I pick it up with a baggie. I blow up a bouquet of balloons and tie the baggie onto them and then Tater and I sit on the park bench and watch everything float away.

  As we sit there, a homeless man flops down next to us. He’s wearing cutoff camouflage shorts and a T-shirt with the words “Cabo San Lucas” on it. There’s a paper clip and some rice caught in the man’s long beard. He’s a bruiser, large biceps and big thighs. He’s perfect.

  “Excuse me,” I say, “would you like to form an alliance?”

  The man looks me over. I’ve just turned fifteen. I’m dressed like a skater, even though I don’t skate. I’ve gotten sick of trying to grow a moustache, so I’ve just penciled one in.

  “Is this some sort of dicksuck thing?” he asks. “Because I’m not down for anything dicksuck.”

  “It’s the furthest possible thing from being dicksuck,” I say. “The furthest possible thing.”

  The man pulls a bottle of whiskey from his backpack and takes a swig. He takes off his shoe and reconfigures his sock.

  “Would this alliance get me some of that helium?” he asks me.

  We’re sitting near a water fountain that looks like a big dandelion. The fountain was recently shut down by the city because people kept getting caught having sex in it. I can see the fountain from the window of our apartment. I miss its soft lighting and the people who used to grope underneath its spray.

  “You’d get all the helium you could ever want,” I say.

  The man runs his tongue over his chapped lips. He’s not looking at me at all; he’s staring right at my helium tank like I’m not even there.

  “Then we’ve got a deal,” he says.

  I shake his hand and hand him the tank. He puts the release valve up to his mouth and inhales. I watch as his eyes roll back in his head.

  “My name’s Frankie,” he says to me in a very high voice.

  When I get back to my apartment, my sister, Ellen, is sitting at our dining room table. She’s wearing sunglasses. She has a cardigan sweater draped over her shoulders. She’s running her fingertips over my mother’s old braille book, Braille for a New Century, moaning gently like my mother used to moan whenever she read braille.

  “Are you still pretending to be blind?” I ask.

  Ellen just turned twenty-two. She became my legal guardian two years ago, after my mom died. For a long time it was just Ellen and me and it was wonderful. Then she met her new boyfriend/acting coach, Cal, in an acting chatroom and a few days later he just showed up at our apartment with his suitcase. Now, through a variety of week-long method acting exercises, Cal is training Ellen to become a world-class actre
ss. Last week Ellen pretended to be deaf. Before that she wore a hockey helmet and was mesmerized by jingling keys. The week before that, she wore an overcoat and talked with a British accent.

  “Who’s your new friend?” she asks me.

  I see my binoculars on the kitchen counter and realize she’s been spying on me.

  “If you’re blind, how did you see what I was doing in the park?” I ask.

  Ellen’s hands graze over the bumps in the braille book lightly, like she’s playing a harp. She chuckles a little—like there’s a joke her fingers just relayed to her brain.

  “My other senses are heightened,” she tells me. “That’s what happens when you lose one of them. The other ones step up.”

  Ellen taps her way over to the refrigerator with my mom’s old cane. She slides her hand inside the fridge and rummages around exactly like my mother used to rummage. She opens a jar of pickles, pulls one out, and takes a snapping bite.

  “That guy in the park asked for directions,” I say. “That’s all it was.”

  Ellen makes her way out to the living room. On the way there, she smacks me in the shin with her cane. Hard. Her face shows no emotion. It’s like she’d smacked a parked car or an ottoman.

  “Sure,” she tells me, “sure.”

  When Ellen goes to the grocery store, Tater and I turn on the TV and watch our favorite reality show. There’s a very exciting race happening. To win the race you have to paddle a log boat out to a totem pole in the middle of a river and then you have to shimmy up the pole and grab a red flag. Whoever does this the fastest won’t have to eat beetles for dinner.

  While we’re watching, Cal comes home. He takes off his coat and walks into the living room. He stands right in front of the TV, blocking our view.

  “Didn’t we already talk about this shit?” he asks.

  Cal and I talked about this shit last week. He sat me on the couch and gave me a stern lecture about how reality television is killing legitimate acting, how television is killing legitimate theatre, how everyone only wants to watch dumbass people doing dumbass things and if I watch them doing these dumbass things, I am, by extension, a dumbass.