A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

He picks up his fork and drags the tines across the paper napkin. “Okay, what movie?”

  “What movie what?”

  He nods. “Think about it.”

  “You know,” she says, “since your hearing isn’t until Friday? Why don’t we go down to the farm for a couple of days. I’m sure Henry would like to see you.”

  “What, are you on the pipe?” He wouldn’t mind just staying right here. He looks down at his feet under the table: wet running shoes in a puddle of snowmelt. He’d patched them with Shoe Goo where the soles were separating from the uppers: so much for this, what’s the word, this canard that he doesn’t take care of himself. This duck.

  “He is your brother,” Aunt Lissa says.

  The waffles arrive, and Carl mooshes the ball of butter with his fork. “You never guessed my movie.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not following,” she says.

  He sucks the fork clean, drags the tines across his napkin again and holds it up so she can see the marks.

  “Wait,” she says. “This is ringing a bell.”

  “Should.” He puts the napkin in his lap. “You took me to see it. Film series they used to have?”

  She claps her hands. “Of course.” Shakes her head. “What could I have been thinking of? You were all of what?” She watches him pour syrup. “If I could have just a bite,” she says, “I’d be your friend for life.”

  When they get to the car, Aunt Lissa paws in her purse, then looks in the window. “I knew I left the keys in the switch,” she says. “Is your side locked?”

  “You don’t have a spare?”

  “Actually, I—Oh, damn it. It’s under the hood, and of course you can’t—Oh. This is so exasperating. Well, there’s a gas station.” He looks where she’s looking. Sunoco: sky blue, sun yellow. “Maybe they have one of those things you stick through the window. Don’t ever get old.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t worry.”

  “Pooh. Just because—I don’t know. We don’t have time for this discussion now.”

  “Good,” he says. “You want me to go over?”

  “It’s nice of you, dear. But I think I’d better.”

  —

  Aunt Lissa’s driving him down the Thruway into the snow country. It’s the pea-soup Volvo Uncle Martin bought the year he died, and she still steers strong handed, chin jutting. She’d looked older when she showed up at the jail, but now she’s settled back into Aunt Lissa.

  Drunk driving. Which is the most incredible joke in the world because he was only drinking to try to ease down off the other shit. In fact, hadn’t he gotten stopped right along here somewhere, near the exit for Coxsackie? He had Hot Country Radio going because the Best of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties had started playing Here come old flattop, which was not a helpful song when you just wanted words that hooked up to something. At one point he caught himself watching for the place where his parents died, except that was on the Connecticut Turnpike, near exit 63. Meanwhile he was working on a theory that if he could make it as far as Kingston he’d be okay. He had a bottle of Old Crow between his thighs, sticking up like a peepee, or a tepee—you know, as in “sticking up like a tent pole”—which he put there precisely because it was a joke. Here, let’s spell it out: being drunk fucks up your sexual performance. When the cop pulled him over, he turned the radio off but decided that hiding the bottle would look furtive. The cop said, “And do you know how fast you were going, Carl?” And Carl said, “I think I got carried away by the radio,” which was not a surreal saying but just the very, very traditional association of uptempo songs with driving fast. He pointed at the radio as evidence. The cop said, “You were going twenty miles an hour.”

  Black trees are sticking up out of the white hillsides. Sky seems white, too. He closes one eye and looks from hills to sky, then back again. Maybe what it is, the sky’s a darker white? Aunt Lissa’s telling him, again, the story of how she and Uncle Martin came to buy the place in Germantown. The house just spoke to her, that’s her formulation, so they stopped and an old woman came to the door. “We were admiring your house and just decided to stop and tell you so.” And the old woman said, “Well, it happens to be for sale, and my son’s coming tomorrow to put a sign up.” They bought the house, Henry bought the hill.

  Carl thinks Aunt Lissa might in fact have turned into that old woman, but maybe that’s just to scare himself. As a kid, he used to scare himself for real by thinking that his mother, to keep from dying, had magically turned herself into Aunt Lissa on the Connecticut Turnpike when she saw that his father was steering them across the divider. Since his mother and Aunt Lissa were sisters, it seemed believable. He would watch Aunt Lissa’s face and see his mother in there, coming and going.

  They take the exit for Catskill and Cairo and pass an abandoned cinder-block store with plywood in the windows and a Henry Craig Realty sign. “Hammerin’ Hank,” Carl says to Aunt Lissa. “Now, that has to make a brother proud.” Zero reaction.

  She takes him to Walmart, where he picks out a three-pack of Fruit of the Loom briefs, three black Fruit of the Loom pocket tees, a gray hooded sweatshirt (90-10 cotton-polyester, which is incredible for just some mystery brand), a package of white socks and a pair of Wrangler blue jeans. The darker blue to last him longer. Aunt Lissa says she’ll treat him but he says, No, no, he has money, like flipping his cigarette away before the firing squad.

  Coming around the last corner, he tries to see if he can tell independently what it was about the house that spoke to her. It’ll be a test of his—let’s say this exactly—his congruence. He squints and says in his mind, Okay, now what exactly is the charming feature here? Like, There are x number of bunnies hidden in this picture, can you find them? Could it be the wooden filigree along the porch? No, because “form follows function” is a major theme in world aesthetics, and Aunt Lissa takes the train down for shows at the Modern. Yet olden fanciness is also one of her themes; she gardens with heirloom varieties. See, this is the kind of shit he needs to be able to sort out again.

  She parks by the kitchen door, then reaches under and yanks the hood release. “Fool me twice, shame on me. Could you get the groceries?” She lifts the hood and pulls a magnetic Hide-a-Key box off the engine block. “Voilà.” Closes the hood and tucks the box up under the front bumper. “Bingo. You don’t think anybody would look there, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t,” he says.

  Up the hill behind Aunt Lissa’s house, Henry’s lights are on and white smoke snake-charms out of his metal chimney. Can you actually own a hill? Half a hill, really, but it’s like the moon in that no one sees the side that’s turned away. Down low in the sky, there’s an orange light that tints the snow. He takes the grocery bags, follows Aunt Lissa onto the screened-in porch and stands shivering while she rattles a key in the storm door. “We never used to lock up,” she says. If this were a movie scene, you’d cut right here.

  —

  He closes the door behind him and rubs his feet on the hairy brown mat. That old-refrigerator smell of an empty house in winter. Aunt Lissa clomps in her flopping rubber boots to the thermostat and the house goes bump; then she clomps into the kitchen. Carl hears water running. The foomp of a lighted burner.

  She comes back in, rubbing the knuckles of one hand, then the other. “It should warm up soon,” she says. “I keep the downstairs at fifty.” She pulls a chair over to the register. “Water’s on for tea.”

  “You have coffee?”

  “Instant.”

  He makes a cross with his index fingers.

  “It’s terrible for you anyway.” She sits down, still wearing her coat. “Supposed to be a full moon tonight. I hope it doesn’t cloud over again.”

  “ ‘When the moon is in the sky,’ ” he sings, “ ‘tell me what am I, to do?’ So what movie?” He thinks he hears a car, gets up and goes to the window. A Grand Cherokee’s pulling up behind the Volvo, headlights beaming, its grille a toothy smile. “Huh. Looks like a small businessman.”


  “Be nice.”

  The headlights go out, the car door opens. “Yep,” he says. “Big as life and twice as natural.”

  Aunt Lissa turns on the porch light. There’s Henry wiping his feet.

  “I saw you drive in, so I thought I’d stop down,” Henry says. “Carl?”

  “Yo, mah buvva,” Carl says. “You keepin’ it real, yo?” Henry cocks his head. “You know, like real estate.”

  “I’m not up on my jive talk.” Henry turns to Aunt Lissa. “Why don’t you come on up to the house while it’s getting warm in here? Connie’s making soup.”

  “Yum,” Aunt Lissa says. “We might stop up later. How about some tea? I just put water on.”

  Henry twists the sleeve of his leather jacket. “So how’d it go?”

  “Well, I suppose it was fine,” Aunt Lissa says. “I don’t have a lot in my experience to compare it to.”

  “Hell, I should’ve done this.”

  “But you had your closing. It was perfectly fine.”

  Henry looks at Carl. “So what were you doing up this way?”

  Carl looks at the tabletop. Honey oak with flamelike grain. “I don’t know, long story.”

  “Aren’t they all. The hell happened to your face?”

  Carl shakes his head.

  “Christ,” Henry says. “Shouldn’t he be back in detox?”

  “I hate to do it,” Aunt Lissa says.

  “He goes up in front of a judge in this kind of shape, they’ll do it for you.”

  “I think what Carl needs most is just to get some rest,” she says.

  “I think what Carl needs most,” Carl says, “is a good old pop of Demerol. Speaking as Carl.”

  He knows Henry heard this because something jumps in that fat throat. “They’re probably going to want him in some kind of a program.”

  “Hey, Teletubbies,” Carl says. “Believe it or not that’s an incredibly cool show.”

  “This is funny to you?” Henry says.

  Aunt Lissa gets up, so whatever the noise is that’s been going on for a while now must be the whistling teakettle. Good that it’s something. “Now, what’s anybody’s pleasure?” she says. “We have Earl Grey, plain old Lipton’s, chamomile…green tea?” Sad: back when she used to read him The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she said camo-myle.

  “Actually I better hit it back up the hill.” Henry looks out the window. “Supposed to snow again.”

  “Sorry, this is kind of getting to me,” Carl says and goes into the kitchen, where steam’s whistling out of the little pisshole. He takes the kettle off the burner and the noise stops.

  “Lissa,” he hears Henry say, “are you sure you’re up to this?” Or maybe he said “listen.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she says.

  He hears the door close, and Aunt Lissa comes into the kitchen. “You had to show off for him.”

  “He’s a dick. Pardon the expression.” Carl hears the Cherokee start up.

  “I know the expression,” she says. “Now help me put this stuff away.”

  “Is that a denial?” he says.

  “You,” she says, “are wicked.”

  —

  How all this current shit started, he’d gotten involved with a person in the city who was also originally from Albany—okay, Schenectady—and when they’d been together a couple of days, she’d thought up this idea. Rent a car, both get as much cash as possible from their cash machines (this was like a Saturday night), buy whatever they could find, drive upstate to her parents’ house, her parents being in Florida, and sell it at a major markup to all these people she still knew. This was a very young person: cigarette smoker, chopped-off hair bleached white. Tiny stud in her left nostril like a blackhead and seven gold rings around her left ear, nothing in her right, so when she tried out for modeling jobs she could give them two different looks.

  She was temping at the place he worked, filling in for somebody’s assistant. Carl at this point was sort of not living at home anymore, big troubles in Our Marriage (Elaine’s formulation), staying with people, carrying his laptop and a duffel bag with clothes and DVDs. What was weird, he didn’t feel weird. This was thanks to the Paxil, which he was now getting through two doctors at two drugstores, because the one doctor had said 40 milligrams was “rather a lot.” And he was using again on top of it, but not big-time, and mostly to help him write: he’d been posting stuff about 42nd Street on what was really a very serious website.

  any dickhead can see that dorothy brock (bebe daniels) is the same person as peggy sawyer (ruby keeler), but the scrim of gender may prevent said dickhead from discerning that julian marsh (warner baxter) is also mutatis mutandis a projection of the “sweet” sawyer’s nut-cutting inner self, the very name suggesting she’d “saw off” your “peg” to “get a leg up,” it being no accident that brock’s “broken” (note further pun) leg is sawyer’s big “break.”

  He told the temp with the rings in her ear that there were all too few outlaws on the seventeenth floor, and said Albany was their shared shame. Then she was bold enough to show up at the Christmas party when she’d only worked there a week. He said could he get her a drink—he was on like number three—and she said, “So how much of an outlaw are you?” He held up his left hand, worked his wedding band off and said, “Observe me closely.” He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, showed her both sides, put it in his mouth and swallowed. It scraped going down, but no worse than swallowing, say, a hard candy. And it would, in theory, be recoverable. He chased it with a last swallow, put his glass down and pulled his cheeks open with his forefingers. She looked in his glass, then looked at him. “How did you do that? Let me see your hands.”

  Anyhow, you’ll never guess what happened: they ended up using most of the shit themselves. They pretty much stayed in her parents’ bed, watching cable, DVDs on Carl’s laptop and a video called Barely 18 that her father kept duct-taped up inside his radial saw. And Monday Night Football, which is how they figured out it was now Monday, or had been. Carl called his supervisor’s voice mail and said he had the flu. This Kerri—he’d briefly thought the i was a turn-on—called whoever’s voice mail it was and said she had food poisoning. Carl pointed out how stupid this was because she’d have to come up with something else tomorrow. And she said, “It would’ve been nice if you’d said that before.”

  They’d gotten like two of their eight hundred dollars back when they had this fight—literally a fight, where she was hitting him and he hurt her wrists trying to hold her and she told him, “Get the fuck out, just get the fuck out.” She’d dug it that it took him forever to come—the Paxil plus the other shit made an orgasm just too high to climb up to—and then she stopped digging it. “I don’t like you, I don’t know you.” She hit first, remember that. He grabbed her wrists with both hands, found he didn’t have a third hand to hit her with, then tried to get both her wrists in one hand to free up the other, and she broke loose and hit again, “Get out get out,” in the middle of the night, middle of the afternoon, actually.

  So he got in his car and made it onto the main drag, just barely, where he pulled into some non-Dunkin’ donut place, like an indie donut, guided the car between yellow lines and closed his eyes: it looked like all these flash cameras going off. No chance he could drive all the way back down to the city like this. Had to get something to take the edge off, and he had no idea where you went in Albany anymore. Sure, Aunt Lissa would put him up, but he was in no shape to deal with her: she was in the sort of space where she’d be “hurt” if he’d “come to town and didn’t call.” He had an incredibly scary thought that it was her sitting in the car next to his, but when he nerved himself to look it was just one of those Winnie-the-Pooh pictures.

  He went in and bought a fat old sugar donut, which he thought might weight him down, take him earthward, but he had to spit the mouthful into a napkin. In all fairness, maybe it really did taste nasty. At least there must be a liquor store open, unless it was already Sunday
again.

  —

  Morning sun on snow. Clean blue sky.

  Carl’s sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window. Aunt Lissa’s gone to town for the paper and left him with what she biblically called “tea with milk and honey,” though it’s hard to trust its dimensionality: it appears to be a flat khaki disk fitted into the cup. Halfway up the hill, Henry’s house is hanging there and snow clings along the tops of the tree branches in simplified versions of their shapes, and dead apples, like dog-toy balls, hang from the leafless tree. Some of the apples have a curve of snow on top, like a phase of the moon.

  When he hears Aunt Lissa’s car, he gets up and turns the radio back on. The good-morning classical music had been sounding too much like thoughts racing. What we’ve got now is some sprightly guitar piece. Almost certainly not a harp.

  She sets the Times before him like the dainty dish before the king. “Voilà,” she says. “Glorious morning out.” She drapes her coat over the back of a chair. “Now, what would you like? I can fix pancakes, we have oatmeal…”

  He shakes his head, holds up a hand.

  “Toast? You can’t not eat.”

  “Let me guess. Is breakfast the most important meal, do you think?”

  “Stop.”

  “What about the importance of dietary fiber?” That was when he remembered about the ring. Long gone. Must be.

  “You’re welcome to sit here and make witticisms to yourself,” she says. “I’ve got to work on my presentation.” Aunt Lissa’s reading group is doing To the Lighthouse next week.

  “Don’t we all,” he says.

  He manages to hold back from retching until he hears her on the stairs, then gags up nothing and feels sweat popping out of his face. After a while, he stands up and sees how that feels. He scrunches up a slice of bread in his fist to make a bolus and eats it just for something solid. Then pops his Paxil and puts his mouth under the faucet. The cop got a hard-on, of course, when he found the Paxil—“And what’ve we got here, Carl?”—but they had to give it back. Actually, he really needs just to get off absolutely everything and purify, purify, purify. On the other hand, don’t the laws of physics suggest that all this not-unhappiness will have to be paid for by an equal and opposite period of negative happiness, an equal distance below the baseline? Lately he’s big on the idea of being nice to the right people on the way up because you’re going to meet them again coming down, “people” meaning entities in your mind.