The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  She couldn’t stand up without help. Recently, she had fallen on Dorchester Avenue when a pair of women were walking by. Speaking coolly and with composure from the ground, Gloria had told them she needed help to stand. One woman, in sunglasses, had had a cigarette hanging off her lip. She’d said “Here” in a gravel voice and handed her purse to her friend and tried to help Gloria stand with one hand while holding her cigarette with the other. They’d staggered.

  “I can’t hold you, honey. Ya gotta use your legs.”

  “I can’t. That’s why I need your help.”

  The woman, who was a drunk, let her fall again. Gloria fell backwards while looking up, like someone falling backwards into the gray ocean with her eyes never leaving the faces of the people in the lifeboat.

  “I can’t help her,” the drunk said to her friend.

  Men in newsboy hats hung out at 7-Eleven, drinking coffee and reading the paper. A man put down his paper, ran and helped her up. Gloria told him she needed her purse. He went around the sidewalk picking up her things—lipstick, wallet, keys, a Tibetan elephant charm. The two women had hurried away.

  Gloria said, “I can’t find my cell phone.”

  “It’s not here. Are you sure you had it?”

  “Yes. I know what I had. I’ve been robbed. Those two women took it. Can you get it back from them?”

  “Aren’t those your friends?”

  “They’re not my friends. They’re a couple of thieves. Can you call the police?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, goddamnit, I’m sure.”

  She’d lost her phone, money, the last shred of her dignity when she collapsed in front of strangers or—worse—the people at her job. Her most agonizing spill was the one she took on the ramp outside her job and had to let her colleagues help her up.

  What was wrong with her? they asked. She had always been aloof, reading art books, taking her lunches apart, skipping the office parties and balloons. Now she was getting her comeuppance. They wanted gossip.

  “I’m infirm,” she said.

  She took to wearing sunglasses to conceal her face in public. When she fell, the glasses flew off as well—another twenty-dollar pair of glasses broken, another trip to Walgreens in her future to look at the sunglasses rack and see her face in the mirror, the butterfly suture on her forehead. She knocked a tooth out in the front of her mouth. It broke her down. “I can’t go out like this!” she wept.

  Insurance sent her three different bills for the dentist, who had seemed so nice, but it must have been a lie—three steadily increasing amounts. She dried her eyes and read the statements with her bifocals on her as-yet-unbroken nose.

  “This isn’t right,” she said, and prepared to call the insurance company. She used a hands-free device with her new cell phone, a headset with a boom mike, like a telemarketer. It took her several tries to put the jack in with her hands.

  Today, she had gotten to work without falling. Now she was seated at her desk in her cubicle, the cane by her side. At the end of the day, she would face the journey home.

  * * *

  —

  At Gloria’s clinic day, the neurologist noted she had been diagnosed roughly a year ago. He assessed the state of her body. He tested her ability to generate force with her hands, lift her arms, raise her knees. The flesh was disappearing from her shoulders; a hollow was developing behind her arms at the site of the teres major. When he asked her to stand up straight, she had difficulty. Her back was humped. When she raised one foot, she lost her balance. He held her. She pressed down on his hand. Her hand couldn’t grip him; she was pressing him with the bones of her wrist.

  The physical therapist fitted her with orthotic braces at wrist and ankle—shiny plastic gauntlets that secured with Velcro fasteners. They kept Gloria’s toes from dropping. The most significant piece of equipment she got was a walker. She was graduating from a cane.

  The therapist showed her how to use it: set it in front of her, take a step with one foot, then the other, then move the walker out again.

  The therapist had a practical, no-feeling-sorry-for-yourself way about her that discouraged Gloria from opening up. Gloria kept everything bottled inside until she saw Dawn Gillespie. In Dawn’s office, at the first question from her, “How have you been?,” Gloria broke down crying. Her temples flushed, the vein in her forehead stood out, her eyes squeezed shut, mucus ran from the point of her thin nose, and she sobbed: “I think I need to talk to somebody.” In a few minutes, however, she had pulled herself together.

  Nevertheless, Dawn scheduled an assessment of Gloria at her home to see what her “support structure” was like. Shortly, the social worker arrived in Quincy with her clipboard.

  Gloria invited her to sit. She told Dawn that her hands were so weak that she was having trouble manipulating a mouse at her job even with orthotics. She was having trouble bathing and performing tasks related to hygiene.

  “Toileting?”

  “No. Not that, but—I didn’t want to say it—tampons.”

  “I always say, there’s no room for shyness,” and Dawn explained the basic human fact that we all have body functions. “Is this something we can outsource to an intimate partner?” She looked around as if someone else might be in the house whom she hadn’t seen yet.

  “Corey’s father lives with us,” said Gloria.

  “He couldn’t make it today,” said Corey. The social worker looked at him. Corey’s mother explained that he was very angry with his father.

  “I’m not angry at anyone. I’m just worried about my mom.”

  “You sound angry,” the social worker said. She added that being angry was perfectly okay.

  * * *

  —

  Gloria began to take The Ride to work—a free service provided by the MBTA for the disabled. In the morning, a car would stop outside their house and honk. The driver was a grizzled guy with a heavy New England accent. He watched Gloria coming down her steps, Corey walking backwards in front of her, ready to catch her if she tripped.

  “Here she comes. Take it slow and easy.”

  Gloria did not respond.

  When she reached his car, the driver made a move to help, but Corey insisted on buckling his mother’s seatbelt. “I usually do that. Never mind. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.” The driver took the walker after Corey had folded it and put it in the trunk, then jumped behind the wheel and sped away with Gloria as if she had put him behind schedule.

  * * *

  —

  The school year ended. Corey sat through his finals.

  Surrounded by her peers, who were trading hugs on senior graduation day, Molly ignored him. That is, she tried, but he forced his way into her circle to wish her well at college.

  She wished him luck in turn. The implied meaning before their onlookers seemed to be that he was the one who would be needing luck to mend his many faults. Her friends smiled and waited for him to leave.

  Corey backed away, went home in the sun, missing the ceremony. He had failed his finals and wondered what would happen.

  He got a landscaping job working for an Italian, a short stocky older fellow in a straw hat.

  With school out of the way, he planned to devote himself to a pure life of martial arts, paid for by mowing lawns and planting flowers.

  * * *

  —

  June. Corey and his mother hadn’t seen Leonard in several days. Now, in the hot weather, they lived in suspense about when he would appear. He’d be gone for days, then, in the middle of the night, Corey would wake up and know that someone else was in the house, and in the morning, he’d see Leonard lying asleep on the futon—a cheese-white shoulder stippled with purple zit scars thrusting up from the blankets; a pile of iron-gray hair. Leonard’s hair looked as full as a judge’s wig when crowned by the fedora. Without th
e hat, there was a mangy hole in it as if it had been sprayed with weed killer. The white pate glowed like a shard of bone in the nest of steel-wool hair. His morbidly alabaster calves lay heavily on the mattress opposite the head—they were hairless on the backs and gleamed. The man’s hips were wreathed in sheets like a Roman. The rest of his person—his clothes and accessories—lay around like a disassembled body. His black trousers stretched across the coffee table like a tongue. The fedora rested on a bag, creating the impression of a droid which remained awake while Leonard slept and which could zip around the floor fetching math books at his master’s whim. The aviator glasses were substitute eyes filming Corey as he reacted to the sight of his father’s body, a film that Leonard would watch when he was awake.

  Other times, upon opening his door in the morning, Corey’s eye would follow the spill of dancing shadows and golden-blue lights that shone in through the blinds across the coffee table to the futon—and there’d be no one there. But he would see the evidence that Leonard had come and gone: His things had been moved; the bed was open; the sheets cast off; the blankets were awry.

  His father left his long curling hairs and the smell of his body on the mattress. Corey’s first action of the day was to close the futon so his mother could use it as a couch. He hated touching the fabric that had touched his father’s nakedness. He smelled the man in the cotton. He rolled the sheets and blankets in a wad and set them in a mound on Leonard’s pile of bags.

  Occasionally, Leonard left his cop bag behind in the house. Corey thought of looking in it but never did. He shoved it behind the furniture with his foot and went to wash his hands.

  * * *

  —

  Now, in his second month of training, Corey began to realize that his daily defeats at the gym, where he went fresh from landscaping every afternoon with grass stains on his knees, were part of a long slow enlightenment. The experienced guys watched him getting beaten and told him, “You see how you’re getting swept? Don’t let him control you. The first thing you have to do is win the grip fight”—and he listened. In mid-June, he rolled again with Scott and actually passed his guard. There were extenuating factors—Scott was tired—and Corey’s success was short-lived—a minute later Scott nearly crushed his neck with a Peruvian necktie—but the fact remained that Corey had learned something since he’d started. Later in the month, he competed in a submission grappling tournament at Waltham High in the beginner’s lightweight division, and won his first match. Other teams sat in the bleacher seats, black guys with their hair dyed blond, drinking Pedialyte after their weigh-ins, jiujitsu girlfriends stripping down to pink Bad Boy shorts and competing too, everyone getting almost naked—the ripped abs, the mixture of celebration and fear.

  Everyone filmed the matches on their cell phones.

  At the end of June, Bestway held a smoker—a gym fight. A bunch of guys showed up from a nearby school, South Shore Sport Fighting. Moms and wives sat in folding chairs while the competitors warmed up, hitting focus mitts and skipping rope. The sun fell inside the warehouse door. A pair of whirring shop fans blew air across the seats. Eddie had a microphone. “I don’t really like talking on this thing,” he said. “Anyways, thanks for coming. Our first fight is gonna be…”

  Corey had bought a mouthpiece for this occasion. He put it in. Both he and his opponent wore visored headgear and shin pads. At the bell, his opponent rushed across the cage and punched him in the face. The punches landed short of Corey’s face and Corey didn’t move, but the headgear flew off and, Eddie, who was refereeing, ran and fetched it and strapped it back on Corey’s head. “Fight!” he shouted, and they resumed. His opponent began walking him down, nailing him with solid, whacking Thai kicks, which came too fast to block, while Corey stuck out his jab and retreated. In a clinch, he got thrown off balance. The pads kept him from getting knocked out. It felt out of control, like being in a car accident but not being hurt.

  When the fight was over, his opponent took off his headgear, revealing a sweating head, brown eyes, and a heavy dark brown mustache like a forty-niner panning for gold in Jack London’s Yukon Territory.

  “You got a lotta balls stepping in with me,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  The day after the smoker, Corey met Adrian on the Esplanade. When he arrived, he found Adrian waiting at a point directly across the river from MIT. He was impossible to miss: He was wearing a shirt with the sleeves ripped off, heavy black-framed glasses, an all-black baseball cap, tiny shorts, and high-top black combat boots.

  Stalled in the middle of the sidewalk and staring into space, he was forcing joggers in spandex bras and clinging tights to run around him.

  Corey waved a hand in front of his face. “The cosine of the coefficient of the integral of the square root of the—what’s up, buddy?”

  Adrian came out of his trance. “I was just thinking of the most beautiful theorem!”

  He led Corey along the riverbank. Sailboats were bounding in slow motion over the water. A gentle silence held sway, as if, in this part of Boston, the outdoors was just another wing of the library. College girls sunbathed on the grass.

  Adrian said his summer was going well. He was in physics camp at MIT. It was such a great school! He couldn’t wait to go there in the fall! He wouldn’t have to live under his mother’s roof anymore! It was so satisfying seeing his plans work out. He was learning such interesting things! He’d even begun finding ways to enjoy himself. Since he wasn’t working, he used his free time to study here on the riverbank. The views were so exciting! It was a perfect place for physics!

  “Yep, I can see that,” Corey said.

  “Yes, it’s the perfect place for beautiful ideas.”

  “Might be hard to concentrate.”

  They went past the sunbathing women into a natural arcade of interlacing trees which formed a tunnel over the path. Adrian discoursed on the topic of his current studies: relativistic momentum and the fact that the sun is losing mass. With each step, the giant, dense muscles of his legs jumped and flexed as if they were being galvanized with electric shocks. His shorts were so short that you could see the hair growing out of his crotch and spreading down his thighs. Corey avoided the sight of him. He noticed a thin lone man looking at them through the trees.

  “Let’s go back the other way. My meter’s going to run out.”

  On the way back, Adrian asked what was on his mind. Corey said he had just fought at his gym.

  “That’s right, you said you were taking martial arts.”

  “That’s right, I am. I told you that a while ago.”

  “I didn’t know how seriously to take that.”

  “Maybe you ought to take it seriously.”

  Adrian asked if he had won or lost.

  “I lost, but it was a decision. Nobody knocked me out.”

  “That’s good. Even for a crazy person like you who doesn’t care if he gets knocked out.”

  “I’m not crazy, Adrian.”

  “I’m not crazy! Go ahead and knock me out!”

  “I did all right. I stung the guy a couple times.”

  “Who was the guy?”

  “A Thai boxer.”

  “A Thai boxer. Was he crazy too?”

  “Not sure. Couldn’t tell you. It was a good day for me. I even stopped thinking about him.” He jerked his head at MIT across the river.

  “You mean your father?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hmm.” Adrian pressed his lip. “I know in the past I’ve looked at this differently from you, probably because of my mother—well, definitely because of her! But there are two sides to everything. It might help you get it off your chest to talk about what’s been going on with your father—if not with me, then with a therapist or a counselor. It could be really good for you. I could tell you how to get a therapist for free—or almost free. You’d be
surprised at the insights you can get! Or if you want to, you can talk to me. It’ll give me a chance to try to put my mother out of my mind. I can put forth challenging ideas and maybe you can practice being open-minded. It could be really fruitful. Maybe I’ll learn something that will spark new ideas with me too. It could be good for both of us.”

  “I’ll tell you: That sonofabitch hasn’t been home in weeks. Not in daytime.”

  “But I thought you didn’t like him—”

  “Of course I don’t like him, but he’s supposed to help my mother. He’s just using our house as a hotel. Let me tell you what I’d like to do to his face.”

  “Go on,” said Adrian. “That’s very interesting.”

  They returned to where they had started. Corey said he had to leave; he couldn’t afford to get a ticket. Adrian said that was fine; he had a problem set to do. “It was pleasant to take a walk. It was pleasant to look at the babes. That made me feel good. Let’s see: It’ll be satisfying to think about the interesting ideas in my problem set. I’m learning interesting things. My workouts have been going well. Everything is going well; I’ll be very satisfied to stay here and think about the equations for relativistic momentum.” Adrian stretched and sighed, bringing his hands to his ears and flexing both his biceps, showing his abundant armpit hair, while smiling down at the sunbathers lying on the grass in their bikinis.

  The sigh, the stretch, the secret smile—Adrian seemed to be acting out a show of contentment and satisfaction.

  Corey noticed an oiled man watching them.

  “Dude, that guy’s looking at you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s looking right at you. It’s gotta be your shorts. Why are you wearing Daisy Dukes?”