by John Searles
And what she does next surprises even her.
Charlene reaches over to the nightstand and picks up the telephone. But instead of punching in the 900 number of that psychic on the screen, she calls the only person who might be able to answer the question Philip asked downstairs: what if someone took it from his body afterward? Charlene is calling her ex-husband, Richard, in Palm Beach. He’s a doctor, after all. A doctor who happened to be working at Bryn Mawr Hospital that summer night five years before, when the EMTs brought in the mangled body of their younger son.
chapter 5
PHILIP IS PARKED OUTSIDE THE OLIVE GARDEN RESTAURANT, looking over his midterm poetry portfolio and killing time before his shift. As a rule, he never ever gets to work early. But he and his mother had another one of their blowouts this afternoon, their worst yet, so he tore out of the house and drove aimlessly around Radnor and Wayne before finally ending up here in the parking lot, trying to forget the last thing she said to him before he left home.
Spread out on the passenger seat among his Madonna tapes, spiral-bound notebooks, and a soiled waiter apron are the drafts of the poems he has been working and reworking all semester, each of them marked with tomorrow’s due date: October 20, 1999. When he read over the revisions last night, Philip actually felt the slightest bit proud of his work. But as he scans the titles now—“Dark All Day,” “Unfamiliar Family,” “Don’t Try This at Home”—it is all he can do not to use the car’s cigarette lighter to set the pages on fire. He even contemplates tossing the entire portfolio into the Dumpster behind the restaurant, but a flock of dirty seagulls is hovering above, taking turns swooping down for scraps, and Philip has always had a phobia of birds.
At the very top of the pile is the poem he wrote last June for Ronnie, the one he worked up the courage to read at the funeral. Now he is mortified that he did.
“Sharp Crossing” by Philip Chase
You walked along a barbed wire fence
Between this field and the next
Ambling and happy, showing no sign of what was about to occur
You waited for the farmer to turn his tractor toward home
You waited for the horses to move to another patch of grass
That’s when you climbed the fence
You thought no one was looking
But I was
I saw you slip over to the other side
Tear your clothes
Cut your skin
But what did that matter now?
You were limping toward a new home with new rules in that faraway field
As the farmer disappeared behind his barn
As the horses returned to smell your blood on the grass
You were the one who was hurt
But I am the one who is crying
Dr. Conorton, Philip’s shaky-handed, bushy-browed poetry professor, had called Philip into his cramped office at the community college and told him that, in his opinion, “Sharp Crossing” was good enough to publish. He even scrawled the names and addresses of a half-dozen journals and reviews he thought might accept the poem for their summer issue. The news had been the first thing to remotely lift Philip’s spirits in a long while. For weeks afterward, he walked around feeling puffed up with pride and (even though he would never admit it) a tad superior to the other students. During class, he took to looking around the circle of desks at the faces of his peers—the angry, divorced woman with the shaved head; the muttonchopped Italian guy with the pierced tongue and a leather vest he never seemed to take off; the plump, daffy hairdresser with overprocessed hair and extralong fake nails, each with a different swirling design and the occasional faux diamond chip near the tip—and Philip thought, Unlike you people, Conorton actually thinks I stand a chance of publishing my work. Someday, somebody besides the ten of us in this classroom might read my words.
All of that uncharacteristic arrogance and optimism is gone, though, as he sits in the restaurant parking lot, feeling less like an up-and-coming poet and more like a waiter with a pipe dream. He begins to wonder if Conorton had said those things simply out of pity, since at this very moment, his work reads like the same kind of self-indulgent crap that everyone else in the class writes. To prove it, Philip reaches for his backpack on the floor and pulls out his folder of other students’ poetry. The first one he finds is by that divorced woman whose writing is always a free-verse metaphor for sex with her ex-husband:
“Run Me Over, You Fucking Bastard” by Jilda J. Horowitz
Go ahead, bastard
Shift your monster truck in reverse
And back over me again
Who’s going to stop you anyway?
Certainly not me
I’m just a stupid animal
Lying naked and splayed
In the middle of the road
Full of desire for this sweat and sex
That is certain to kill me once more
Even though I’m already dead
Go ahead, bastard
Make me see the light
As you grind your tire tracks into my soul
Deep and grooved, the way a horny bitch like me wants it
Otherwise, how will I know you’ve been here?
So plow your pitiful path in the mud
Only it’s my blood that will bear the marks you leave behind
Go ahead, bastard
Now that there’s no doubt
I am dead, yet again
Spin those fat tires onward to the rally
Where you will drink and laugh
With other man-monsters just like you
Go ahead, bastard
Forget about me
Back on the highway
Where Animal Control has come to shovel up the carcass that was once your wife
I am no different than roadkill to you, bastard
A road pizza with the works
A raccoon
A possum
Somebody’s once-cuddly pussycat
Philip groans and tosses the paper on the seat, trying his best to recall exactly what Conorton had told Jilda about this tirade she calls a poem in order to gauge the validity of his comments about “Sharp Crossing.” He closes his eyes and replays the moment she read it aloud to the class as spit sprayed from her thin lips whenever she said the word bastard, and her voice rose and fell, rose and fell, until she finished and the room went silent. Everyone in the class stared down at the copy on their desks as though searching for a teleprompter to tell them what to say. When Philip couldn’t stand the tension any longer, he cleared his throat and told Jilda that he liked her use of the truck rally as a metaphor to express her anger, leaving out the obvious fact that it was more than a little bit heavy-handed. The compliment softened the permanent frown on Jilda’s face so much that Philip got carried away and went on to tell her that he thought “Run Me Over, You Fucking Bastard” was even better than her previous week’s poem, “Attention Kmart Shoppers, My Vagina Is on Sale.”
When the back door of the restaurant creaks open and slams shut, Philip gives up trying to remember exactly what Conorton had said to Jilda. He opens his eyes to see Gumaro, the five-foot-tall muscleman dishwasher from Mexico City. Even though the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant, not a single Italian works in the kitchen. Mexico, Portugal, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, even Guam—but Italy, no. Philip watches Gumaro carry a bus bin to the Dumpster, where he stands on his toes and empties the contents over the edge, sending the seagulls into a tizzy of swooping and squawking, before he turns back toward the kitchen door. That’s when he spots Philip sitting in his old Subaru across the lot and shouts, “Oye, maricón. Como estás?”
The guys in the kitchen call just about everyone who works at the Olive Garden a maricón—faggot—so Philip isn’t insulted, though he makes sure to call him a name right back. “Bien, pendejo. Y tú?” I’m good, asshole. How are you?
Philip has learned more Spanish working this job than he did during all four years of high school. He’d be
hopeless checking into a hotel or buying a train ticket in a Spanish-speaking country, but if he ever wants to tell someone off, he knows all the right words. And since the next thing Gumaro says is, “Bien. Pero tu mamá no vino anoche a mamarme mi pinga como siempre,” which means, I’m good, but your mother didn’t show up to suck my dick last night the way she always does, Philip takes a breath and lets it rip: “Qué pena, porque tu mamá, tu hermana, tu tía, tu abuela, y tu abuelo vinieron a mi casa para mamarme mi pinga y a doscientos de mis mejores amigos ayer. Y lo hicieron gratis esta vez. Fue excelente. Tengo el video si lo quieres rentar.” Translation: That’s too bad, because your mother, your sister, your aunt, your grandmother, and your grandfather showed up at my house last night to suck my dick and two hundred of my closest friends. They did it for free this time. It was great. I have the video if you want to rent it.
Gumaro drops the empty bus bin and makes a beeline toward the car. Even though it’s a cool, cloudy autumn day, he is wearing nothing but a thin white T-shirt and the same kind of black-and-white checkered pants that all the guys in the kitchen wear, only his pair is cut off unevenly and frayed at the knees. When he reaches the car, Philip notices a thin layer of sweat glistening on his dark skin from the heat of kitchen. Gumaro grins, big and wide. “You are getting good, my friend,” he says in a low voice, leaning one of his beefy arms on the roof of the car. “See what happens when you study with the best profesor in town?”
“Gracias, profesor,” Philip tells him.
Gumaro motions toward the passenger seat with his chin. “What’s that?”
“Just some school stuff.” Philip wishes he had thought to put his portfolio away, since he doesn’t want to be teased about it from now into eternity.
“It looks like poetry,” Gumaro says. “Te gusta poetry?”
Philip asks him how to say “You are a nosy bastard” in Spanish, but Gumaro doesn’t answer. Finally, Philip surrenders to the moment and nods. Yes, he likes poetry. He braces himself for a crack about only maricónes going for that sort of thing. He even prepares a comeback about what Gumaro’s mother likes to do with the sheep in the barn late at night while his father sleeps. But all Gumaro says is, “In my country, we have peoples who know how to paint the most beautiful pictures with words. Do you know José Emilio Pacheco?”
Philip shakes his head, grateful he’s not being teased, but also embarrassed because he himself cannot paint a picture with words. Whenever he tries, for example, to make the sky bluer by describing it in writing, his poems end up reading like a combined listing from Webster’s Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus (“The azure, cerulean celestial regions as seen from earth…”). One more reason to believe that Conorton had probably said those things simply out of pity. “So how’s it going inside the old Olive Pit today?” Philip asks to change the subject.
Gumaro casts his dark eyes toward the restaurant then back at Philip. “We got hit with an early rush. The boss is doing The Robot for almost one hour now.”
The Robot is what the staff calls it whenever Walter—a self-proclaimed “top graduate” from hotel and restaurant management school—starts waving his arms around like the robot in those Lost in Space reruns used to do whenever there was danger. In this case, the danger is that Walter can’t handle more than a few tables at a time if he’s stuck on the floor alone. “There’s no one on the floor to help him?”
Gumaro shakes his head. “He cut them loose because we were dead before. Big mistake.”
Philip figures he should get in there and save him, not that Walter will act the least bit appreciative. He gathers up his poems and puts them in his backpack, then grabs his apron and gets out of the car. As he and Gumaro walk toward the back door of the restaurant, Philip looks beyond those birds still hovering above the Dumpster to where the sky is turning even more gray and cloudy. He thinks, for a moment, of a trip he and Ronnie took to Cape Cod with their grandparents when Philip was only twelve or maybe thirteen years old. When they first drove into town, the sun was shining and people were out on the streets in brightly colored T-shirts and shorts. But an hour after they checked into the hotel, it started to rain, and it kept on raining. Even though their grandparents came up with activities to occupy them (from Chinese checkers to regular checkers to Old Maid to a trip to the Pirates museum and endless shopping excursions), Philip and Ronnie did almost nothing but stare up at the sky for seven days, in hopes of spotting a glimpse of sun so they could go to the beach. It never came. And the small Cape town, which seemed so happy and full of life when they first arrived, took on a bleak, infectious kind of dreariness. The feeling Philip had on that trip seems like a childhood version of the way he feels mourning his brother—as though everything around him is damp and gloomy, as though there is only darkness where there should be light.
“So how is your beautiful wife?” he asks Gumaro.
“Bien.” He holds open the kitchen door and lets Philip go first. “Working hard. Always working hard. I don’t know why you work this stinking job if you don’t got to.”
Philip shrugs and steps inside, passing through the maze of oversize pots and strainers hanging on the wall, shelves full of industrial-size containers of olive oil and minced garlic, into the heart of the kitchen. A few weeks before, Philip made the mistake of mentioning that his father was a doctor. Ever since, Gumaro insists on asking Philip why he works at the restaurant instead of living what he calls “the good life.” Philip has already explained to him that he wants to make his own way in the world so that neither of his parents can have a say about how he lives his life. But Gumaro doesn’t get it. As Philip scans the rack by the metal clock in search of his time card, he listens to the usual speech about all the other things he could be doing with his time.
“You could be hanging out on the beach in Miami or gambling in Vegas, my friend. Que es lo que pasa contigo?”
Philip is about to tell him that he is not interested in the MTV version of the good life when The Robot bursts into the kitchen from the bar, his arms full of empty glasses but waving frantically about nonetheless. He takes one look at Philip and says, “You’re late!”
Philip punches his card and glances down at the tiny blue stamp: four-fifty-one. “Actually, I’m nine minutes early. But if you want, I’ll come back when I really am late.”
Walter slams down the glasses with such force that they sound as though they might shatter. If anyone else did that, he’d throw a fit. Gumaro moves in from behind and whisks them away with the speed of a magician, mouthing to Philip as he does, “Que es lo que pasa contigo? Tu es loco trabajas aquí.”
What’s the matter with you? You’re crazy to work here.
“I don’t have time to argue now,” Walter says, wiping his hands against the front of his pleated, overpressed khakis. He is one of those tall, wiry men with a disproportionate gut. And the way he dresses doesn’t help, since his pastel shirts are always too tight and his khakis are forever ballooning out in front of him. “Just get your ass on the floor. It’s like a fucking insurance salesmen convention descended on us out there.”
Philip thinks about asking Walter if he learned such stellar motivational lingo in whatever Podunk hotel and restaurant management school he earned his toilet paper certificate from, but he’s already suffered through one argument today. Don’t think about it, he tells himself, pushing his mother’s words out of his mind as he ties his apron around his waist and steps onto the floor.
What Walter described as an insurance salesmen convention is really just a mob of sloppy, drunk corporate-types still in their office getups—or mostly in them anyway. The majority of men have peeled off their rumpled jackets and loosened their ties. The women have kept their blazers on, but a few have kicked off their pumps beneath their chairs. Just one look at them, seated at a long, pushed-together table for twenty near the bar, and Philip knows—the way only a waiter can know—that they’ll linger here for hours. They’ll keep right on drinking and ordering the occasional appetizer
, then act shocked when the check comes. After that, it’ll take them a good fifteen minutes to divvy up the bill, then cough up five different credit cards and a mountain of rumpled tens, fives, and singles, only to screw him out of a decent tip in the end. Since there is nothing he can do about it, though, Philip takes a breath and heads toward the table.
On the stereo, Dean Martin is singing about the moon hitting someone’s eye like a big pizza pie, and Philip overhears one of the women say, “Oh, I love this song. I just love it.”
So did I, the first ten thousand times, he thinks as he makes his way, counterclockwise, around them, taking orders for a dozen drinks and two appetizers. After he enters it all into the computer at the service station and waits for the bartender to start pouring, Philip cleans the ketchup bottles and checks to make sure the rifle-size pepper mills are fully loaded while eavesdropping on their various conversations.
A tall, broad-shouldered woman, who has made the mistake of wearing shoulder pads when she shouldn’t, is keeping the people around her enthralled with a deadly dull story about a proposal that she saved on her hard drive, only to find that it wasn’t there when she got back from her business trip to Chicago. “I called the help desk, and it took two days for a technician to show up,” she says in a horsey drawl. “They should rename it the slow desk.”
They all burst into laughter, and Philip looks a few seats down to where a bald man is telling his friend, “I faxed Cathy the parameters of the deal first thing Monday morning. She had the nerve to request that I cc her on all correspondence with the main office from now on. I mean, does she need to get laid or what?”
At the seat closest to the bar, a tiny runt of a woman with shiny black hair and severe Cleopatra bangs is saying, “The doctor found a lump on her breast so she’s been on a leave of absence for the last month. The thing is, I know this sounds awful, but I am already getting used to not having her around. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish anything bad on her. But maybe when she gets better she’ll decide she doesn’t want to come back to an office environment. That happens a lot to sick people when they recover. And if it does to her, then well, I’ll finally get promoted.”