Back Talk

by Danielle Lazarin

  “It was late. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Just send a text,” he says, but doesn’t ask how I got home, who took me home.

  A few minutes later, John’s car is idling at the curb. My sister slams her door and starts unloading blankets from the backseat into my father’s arms. Dad’s glaring at John, who stares out the front windshield as though none of us are there. Dad wants to drop the blankets and be that father, the one who gets in the face of his daughter’s shitty boyfriend, but he’s too busy being the father holding the pile of blankets.

  “Some help here, Claudia,” Mich says. Her voice is hoarse, her cheeks flushed.

  “What, your arms don’t work?” I say to John through the small opening of the passenger’s side window. When I close the trunk, he drives away.

  The three of us wait for the elevator, our arms full. No one wants to be the one to say it, but after a few minutes it’s clear the elevator is broken. Dad starts up the stairs with his load and Mich and I follow. We haul each box, each garbage bag stuffed with clothes, up the five flights silently, until we are done.

  There’s a spare bedroom, but it’s the one Mom died in, the one that was mine before the cancer came, the one we all pretend isn’t there. Mich drops a bag on the bed opposite mine, into the mess of my schoolwork and discarded outfits.

  “I’ll move it later,” she tells me.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “We’ll figure it out.”

  • • •

  The first place George takes me is the diner. We’re walking around Midtown one afternoon the following week, and he asks me if I’m hungry and I say yes. It’s so different in the daylight, I don’t realize where we are till his uncles are around us, kissing him on both cheeks. They call him Georgie and wink at him while looking me over. They do not seem to share his memory of the night I was last here.

  “It’s okay,” he says as he takes my coat and hangs it on a hook between the bathrooms. He directs me to a stool at the end of the counter; he fills a cup with water for me. Through the window that leads to the kitchen, George says something to the cooks in broken Spanish. They wave him in, and he tells me to sit tight. I watch him push up the sleeves of his shirt and cook, the gentle way he moves the eggs around the griddle, his long eyelashes, the curves of his muscles under his T-shirt. Plate in hand, he motions toward an empty booth. George sits next to me while I eat, chewing ice cubes from his soda cup, taking bites of my omelet without asking. As his extended family rushes around us, looking sideways at the kitchen while they take orders, at us, George lifts my free hand and kisses the back of it. “Good?” he asks about the eggs.

  “So good,” I say. “Thank you.”

  Before we leave, he buses the table, not letting me help. This is how the next eight months will go: George won’t ask me what I want but he will give me what I need. Here I am, being a kind of girl I swore I’d never be, but it’s just for a little while, and I like letting him handle it, every time he tells me something is okay even when it’s not.

  • • •

  The dog in the apartment next door howls. We can’t ever figure out why—it’s not sirens, or doorbells, or fighting neighbors. One evening, I find Mich in the kitchen, listening.

  “So sad,” she says, and gestures to the wall with a half-peeled carrot.

  “You’ve never noticed that?”

  She shakes her head.

  “He’s been doing that for years.”

  She returns to her pile of vegetables. This is how my sister is all the time now, her hands on some long-ignored kitchen tool, or flipping through one of my parents’ old cookbooks, its pages so unused I can hear the spine cracking as she presses her weight into the book. She wears an apron more than she wears shoes, only leaving for her job at the library or grocery shopping. She turns her phone off for days. The battery drains, and when she recharges it, there are messages from her friends, whom she waits weeks to call back. She’s never been better, I hear her tell them, another lie in our house.

  The last time we went to the store together, she popped an old CD of my mother’s, Nina Simone, into the car stereo. “I love this song,” she said when “Ne Me Quitte Pas” came on, raising the volume. “Listen,” she said to me, and I let her translate each lyric for me, even though I take French. She got through the part where Simone sings about being her lover’s shadow: of the shadow itself, of his hand, of the goddamn dog. Her voice cracked on this last one. “Ugh, it’s so fucking beautiful I can’t stand it,” she said. “Right?” She smiled, but in that sad way of hers.

  There was a time when I would have argued with her, or at least laughed at her intensity, but I like coming home to find her in the kitchen; I like eating her food, sitting with her while she makes it.

  “Whoa,” I said, and she took this as agreement.

  Today, I take my usual spot on the other side of the island where she’s working.

  “Shit. It’s five thirty already?” Mich asks, pushing a strand of still-wet hair out of her face. She gets clean for cooking the way other people would for dates or jobs, so at least there’s that.

  “Five thirty-two,” I tell her, reading the time from my phone, where there are no messages from George. He’d rather see me, he says. I think of watching him come around the corner toward me earlier this afternoon, how his steps quickened when he spotted me.

  “Where were you all this time?”

  “The park.”

  “Inwood?”

  “Central.”

  “With George,” she says, a conclusion.

  “Yes.”

  Mich purses her lips before igniting a burner. “He’s taking up a lot of your time.”

  “He’s not taking it. I am giving it to him.”

  She pours oil in a pot. Her hand still on the bottle, she asks, “Have you?”

  “Not yet,” I say.

  “Well, be careful,” she says.

  “Yes, I know, condoms and all that.”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s not what I meant.” She shakes her head. “Can you grab me a clean dish towel?”

  I find one in the drawer next to the sink. My mother’s mind, efficient till nearly the end, is still at work in our kitchen, even if she rarely used it to cook, not like this. Mich pours me a glass of wine from the bottle she’s cooking with. When she hands it to me, I can smell herbs on her fingertips. She says, “But that’s it,” though I haven’t even asked for any.

  She bangs a wooden spoon against the top of the pot, shaking off bits of onion. “You should invite him for dinner.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to meet him.”

  “Yes, but does Dad?”

  “Dad just wants us to be happy, that’s all.”

  I picture George at our table, the way he spreads his elbows when he eats. He’d sit in the chair my mother used to sit in, next to my father, because that’s the only one left. Would doing so cause Mich to cry into her food again? Just last night I caught her looking at pictures of John online, with new girlfriends, perhaps. He is leaning into the laps of so many different girls in these photos, it’s hard to tell if he’s committed to any one of them in particular.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I just want to know.” She had a glass of wine in one hand, the rest of the bottle on the windowsill next to her bed. Dad buys these for her, too.

  “It would be okay if you did care,” I said.

  “But I don’t. I just want to see again that he’s a douchebag.”

  “He is.”

  She nodded her assent but kept clicking.

  “It isn’t worse, right?” I ask in the kitchen, after a few sips of wine have made us both comfortable. “A love heartbreak, over what we went through with Mom?”

  She rolls her eyes. “That’s stupid. You don’t even know how stupid that is,” she says.

 
“How could that feel worse? I don’t understand.”

  “Not worse, but, well, you don’t understand. It’s just . . .”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yes, fuck,” she says, and stirs her soup.

  • • •

  One Friday morning Val and I are on the same bus to school. She stands above me, her hip against the pole. Her earbuds dangle from her hands, as though she is thinking of putting them back in.

  “You going tonight, to that party on the East Side?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know yet,” she says, the start of a string of maybes till, by spring, she’ll barely be talking to me at all. She scrunches up her pale face before she says, “You think it’s a good idea to bring George?”

  The week before, George, a little drunk, forcefully removed the arm of one of our friends from my shoulder. The friend said he was bruised, but he’s a known exaggerator.

  “He goes to an all-boys school; he doesn’t get it,” I say. And then, “George is the nicest guy I’ve ever met.”

  “To you, maybe.”

  When we get off the bus I start up the stairs without her; I’m late for French. I overslept this morning; Mich must have turned off my alarm, and though I’m planning to be furious with her for it, midway through class I reach into my bag for my workbook to find she packed me a lunch. Today it’s a stack of handmade summer rolls, pomegranate seeds, and a hunk of cheddar she made me promise not to tell Dad the price per pound of, each in its own container, and a five-dollar bill, her backup plan, folded in thirds at the bottom of the brown paper bag. I eat in a corner of the library, hiding the bag behind a physics textbook, alone and happy about it.

  That night, I go with George to the party. On the train uptown afterward, I lay my legs across his lap. We make jokes about the couple standing by the doors fighting, a pair of earbuds stringing them together. We think we won’t ever be them; we can’t possibly. Mostly, though, we ride in silence—a good silence, not like the one Val gave me at the party, not like the one that settles over the dinner table at home after we’ve run out of things to say about the food Mich has made.

  I drank too much at the party. We get off a stop early so I can get some air. We walk along Seaman Avenue, Inwood Hill Park dark and empty next to us. Tipsy, I think the puddles of smashed car windows on the sidewalk are works of art. So many little pieces to reflect the streetlights, and I want to get closer, and I do, and then George’s arm is across my ribs, holding me up.

  “Hey,” he says. “You’ll hurt yourself.” He waltzes me away from the glass to a bench. He sits next to me.

  When he pulls out a cigarette, he apologizes. He always does.

  “I don’t care,” I say. “Really. It’s not like I’m going to marry you and you’ll die on me like my mom did.”

  “Whoa.”

  “I’m joking.”

  “Which part?”

  “Um, all of it.”

  “You are going to marry me, then?”

  When I turn to look at him, George is staring back at me as though he wouldn’t be afraid if I said yes, even if I meant it. No man has ever looked at me so fearlessly, not even my own father.

  “Smoking had nothing to do with it,” I tell him. Then, I still believed my mother had stopped smoking before either of us was born. I didn’t know that she’d walk to the park after Mich and I had gone to bed, sit on a bench like the one we are sitting on now. Then, this belief mattered.

  “I didn’t mean that, to upset you.” He puts his hand on my knee.

  I take his half-smoked cigarette from his fingers, stealing a drag before I stub it out under my boot. I climb onto his lap and draw my legs around him, kissing the bones around his eyes, his jaw. Underneath his coat, I find his belt buckle.

  “Not here,” he says, and takes my hands out.

  When we are pressed against each other somewhere—at parties; lately, midday at my apartment—the only thing George will say about it is “No rush.” He says it into my ear, with that sweet smile of his, and even though I will say to him that I’m fine, that I want to keep going, he is the one who stops us. Maybe he is afraid of me after all.

  On the bench, I whisper to him, “No one is here. No one is watching.”

  He laughs, says, “Someone is always watching,” before giving my longest finger one hard suck, before he convinces me it’s time to go home.

  • • •

  One Tuesday I cut pre-calc to meet George. Mich is at work; I check her shifts, which she puts on a calendar she’s bought in the kitchen. Her life is the only one on it. The elevator is broken again, but I make it up the stairs without seeing any neighbors. I drop my backpack and jacket by the front door, which I leave unlocked for George, as he knows it will be, as he knows to lock it behind him. I’m early, and I have to pee. I walk past my father’s bedroom, the door to which is open, which is odd; he shuts it every morning, though Mich tells him it’s better to air the apartment out, and she’ll crack the windows till we have a nice draft going that no one wants either. She must have opened the door before she left. When I go to shut it, I see them: two sets of soles, a mass arching the blanket that’s always folded at the end of the bed. Just feet, but it’s enough. They don’t hear me. He won’t know, but I’ll know, always.

  I grab my things and shut the door, push the elevator button, forgetting. I get down the stairs as fast as I can in socks. I run into George on the third floor.

  I have to sit down; I can’t even make it to the next landing. I put my head on my knees and breathe. A school social worker taught me this in sixth grade, when I thought I was having a panic attack. My mother wasn’t even dead yet, but I practiced it, because I knew I would need it one day.

  George rubs my spine. “Hey,” he says. “What’s going on?”

  “My dad is fucking some woman in our apartment,” I say from between my knees.

  “Come,” he says, taking my shoes from me and undoing the knots. “Let’s go.” He slides them on my feet, ties the laces again. We go out the front door of my building together, quickly, but George holds my hand, makes it seem like we’re in no rush at all.

  • • •

  On Sunday Dad and I are in the car, the trunk full of groceries. He is whistling, though the radio is tuned to a talk station. It is one of those moist winter days when you could be tricked into believing spring will be here soon, except for the gritty piles of snow that sit at the edges of the sidewalks, for the fact that the calendar is just over the hump of March. At the supermarket, we followed the pattern we’ve fallen into when shopping for Mich: my father steering the cart, calling out the contents of the list to me. He doesn’t like reading the boxes, and he is easily confused by the various green leaves of herbs, so I bring the items to the cart, which he still fills with what we’ve always eaten: the same shape of pasta, rotisserie chicken, presliced cheese, things Mich rolls her eyes at when she puts them away. Every week, as my father watches her items move across the scanner, he mumbles, “Cheaper than therapy,” and half-grimaces.

  I spent the past few days recalling to George the odd hair clips or new kinds of pens that have surfaced on the coffee table, the multiple confirmations of my spending the night out every now and then, and these kinds of moods—whistling and an unfamiliar lightness—that overtake my father so rarely I don’t want to ruin them by asking where they come from.

  “What if he marries her?” I said to George.

  He shook his head. “He won’t,” he said, but I thought of my father reciting the mourner’s kaddish at my mother’s funeral when I’d never heard him utter a prayer, of all the things I don’t know about him.

  Dad takes the Dyckman exit off the highway, and as we take the hard left onto Henshaw, the CD, the Nina Simone, starts playing. The car does this sometimes; no one cares to get it fixed, but usually one of us switches back to the radio or shuts the CD off. Neither of
us does that today. It’s in the middle of that song, the one that Mich played for me.

  “What language did you take in high school?” I ask him.

  “Latin.”

  “Useful,” I say, trying to be sarcastic, but when I’m nervous everything I say is monotone and even, and he misses my joke.

  “Not really,” he says.

  “I’m worried about Mich,” I say, in the same tone.

  “What about?” he asks, his eyes on the road.

  “She seems . . .” I search for the right word, but the best I can do is “bad.”

  “You mean about John? That’s just a little heartache. She’ll be fine.” He goes back to whistling; the track has switched to something that’s more in line with his birdsong, and he picks it up.

  Of course he believes this, because what is love in my family if not inked in suffering? Mich crying in her bed in the mornings before she thinks I’m awake, the line of women who leave my father by various means—cancer, growing up—the girlfriends who will never last more than half a year at best, or who he’ll push away (I’ll never know; I’ll never be kind enough to ask). Even my mother’s favorite stories were about the outrageous fights of our downstairs neighbors, all the words and shattering objects we were privy to. “It was like a war,” she’d say, gleefully. Ne me quitte pas, everyone in my family sings, happy to hear about suffering, willing to be the shadow of someone’s dog. But I am not yet sixteen, and I am still afraid of pain—for myself, for all of us.

  I shut off the music. “I know about your girlfriend,” I say.

  “She’s not my girlfriend. Not that that is your business.”

  “Whatever. I saw her on Tuesday, at the apartment.”

  “And why weren’t you in school?”

  I don’t answer. I didn’t plan to mention the woman; I didn’t plan to have to explain myself.

  “Claudia. Why were you home?” he asks again.

  “I was meeting George.”

  We turn onto our block. All the questions that follow cross his face. He pulls a U-turn up to the hydrant by the side entrance of the building. He pops the trunk of the car but doesn’t unlatch his seatbelt.