by Peter Orner
He’d loaded his boxes, not in anger, in bemusement, holding items up, asking, Do you mind? This pillow with the elephant on it is definitely yours. And the furry slippers. The furry slippers are yours, Gary. He was magnanimous about the wedding gift crockery. He left her all the good saucepans. He packed only what he was going to need for a small one-bedroom. Still, she could sneak a few things back now, she supposed; by law it was all hers, again. The painting, for instance. He’d packed it with styrofoam peanuts. They’d had a friend once, an angry aspiring painter. The friend had painted what he called an abstract portrait of the two of them. To Fran and Gary it looked a mound, a blue mound. Still, they’d held on to it, hung it in a corner of the bedroom in case their friend became famous. He was certainly angry enough to be famous. What happened to Yari? People, they evaporate. She stands before the mirror. But somebody who was just here? How do you remember someone who was here a minute ago? Gary used to sit at the kitchen table and read her things out of the paper. The other day he said something about Egypt. Something about the Suez. How it all started with the Suez Canal. Canals, he said, usually cause more problems than they solve. Why do you think that is? She hadn’t answered, only took another sip of coffee and went out to the garage.
1979
Jimmy Carter dead in the water, and the Democrats either can wait to be kicked like a sleeping dog or at least try to bite back. It’s 1979 and certain pipe dreams are still smoked. And Ted Kennedy shouts—call it the last gasp of the sixties—Mutiny! And Chicago mayor Jane Byrne, Mayor Bossy, Fighting Jane, backs him to the hilt. Byrne relishes any fight. She says she wants Carter’s sanctimonious presidential head on a platter for the good of Chicago, and as Chicago goes, so goes the country. Byrne hosts a whopping fundraiser for Kennedy in the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency. Giddy, rebellious Chicagoans gather to meet the Last Brother. Some people attend because they actually support him; other people want to see who is supporting him in order to decide if they support him. Since nobody can quite figure out who is who, it’s a confusing evening. Kennedy himself is present, and despite the fact that in an interview on CBS, he couldn’t for the life of him explain why he was running, Senator, could you tell the American people why you want to be President? Uh, uh, uh, uh, you see… the man is still a Kennedy. Ladies swoon as he works the room. When he reaches my mother, though, it’s the other way around. Like Roger Mudd on CBS News, she leaves Teddy Kennedy speechless.
“I’m from Massachusetts,” she finally says. “Fall River. BMC Durfee High. National Honor Society and head cheerleader.”
“I never had any doubts,” Kennedy says. And he stands there for another long half minute, his wide face sweating, mesmerized. He already knows he doesn’t stand much chance of the nomination, but what’s a primary fight against a sitting President of his own party compared to this woman, my mother, whose name he will never know?
THE VAC-HAUL
For hours we listened to it on the radio, and not once did Larry Phoebus say a word. A woman walked into a classroom of a school a couple of towns over and began shooting. She killed an eight-year-old boy and wounded three other kids. She’d also, the radio said, left homemade bombs at other schools, including a school just a few blocks from where Larry Phoebus and I were parked. I could hear the frantic sirens, like crazed, amplified mosquitoes. Now the radio said that the police confirmed that the woman had fled across the street from the school where she shot the kids and was holed up in a house with a hostage. I was sitting there with Larry Phoebus, looking out the windshield of the truck, staring at the Chicago and Northwestern tracks, at the tall weeds that grew up between the ties, listening to all this on WBBM Newsradio 780.
I was home from my first year at college. It was July. I’d wandered across that year, as I’d wandered across much else, incurious, biding my time. Waiting for what, I couldn’t say. My stepfather, who was mayor of our town, found me a job in the Streets and Sanitation Department. For a few weeks, I was proudly blue-collar. Work—who would have thought I would take to it? I worked for Streets as a jackhammerer. I destroyed curbs with erotic abandon. I will make this corner handicapped-accessible if it’s my last act on earth. I wore a sweaty red bandanna. Rudimentary biceps were beginning to rise between my shoulders and elbows like small loaves. I’d be uptown, standing on the street, encircled by a little ring of pylons, smoking, and I would tell the imaginary pom-pom girls who thronged around me, I can’t talk right now. Look, can’t you ladies see I’m a workingman?
Then I was late three mornings in a row and the crew boss, Miguel, said, I’m taking you off Streets. You’re with Larry Phoebus now.
No, Miguel, no—please—
And don’t run to your dad. He knows all about it. He said to go ahead and fire you, but I figure, why not let you quit on your own?
He’s not my dad.
Turn in your gloves, Hirsch. You won’t need them again. Ever.
Larry Phoebus worked on the Sanitation side. He drove an enormous white truck with an enormous, bulbous hose attached to the end of it. It was called the Vac-Haul. It was rumored to have cost the taxpayers of our town two million dollars. My stepfather was very proud of it. The Vac-Haul was designed to suck up major sewage backups without the need to send “manpower down the manhole,” as my former Streets partner, Steve Boland, explained it. The truck was Larry Phoebus’s baby. He was long past retirement age. He’d worked for Sanitation for something like fifty years and was now refusing to leave. It was said that he didn’t trust another living soul with the Vac-Haul, and when it was time for him to die, he was going to drive that two million dollars straight into Lake Michigan.
Also, Larry never spoke. It was said around the lunch table that Larry Phoebus had pretty much given up communing with the rest of the human race in the 1960s when the world, his world, everybody’s world, went so haywire. Yet the precise reason for his total silence was a mystery nobody was especially interested in solving. Only Steve Boland speculated at all. He liked to hold forth in the lunchroom. Love, Boland said, what else is new under the sun? Only a woman could numb a guy like that. I hit the mute button myself for a couple of years after my first divorce. She took all my money, the house. All our friends. So I mean, answer me this, you’re living by yourself in some dump-ass rented apartment in Highwood and you think you’re going to want to chitchat?
“What the hell are you yattering about?” Miguel said.
“I’m talking about alone,” Boland said. “Do any of you even know what it means?”
Larry Phoebus himself never appeared in the lunchroom. He ate in the Vac-Haul. At lunch, he’d glide the magisterial truck into its special parking place in the garage and pull out a sandwich from his jacket pocket. We’d watch him up there in his cab, slowly chewing, looking down at us but not seeming to see very much.
Being Larry Phoebus’s assistant was the worst job in either division, and they usually gave it to one of the illegal Mexicans who’d come in looking for a day’s work, but that day, the day I was late a third day in a row, none of those guys were around, and so I became Larry’s new boy.
The Vac-Haul needed two people to operate it. One to guide the hose into the hole, the other to flick the switch in the cab.
The worst part of the worst job was that the Vac-Haul was rarely put to use. No question that it was a great monument to the progress of modern sewage engineering, but the town’s system apparently functioned just fine. Yet, in order for Larry Phoebus to be paid (and for the department and the town to justify the expense), the Vac-Haul had to leave the garage. And so every morning and every afternoon, Larry Phoebus would parade the truck around town for a while and then park behind the White Hen Pantry to wait out the hours listening to the news on the radio. And so maybe to Larry Phoebus that day was no different from any other day. Maybe the voices on the radio were a little more hysterical than usual, but it all amounted to the same never-ending drone that was life outside the cab.
WBBM News time: 3:26. In Winnetka this h
our, SWAT teams and hostage negotiators have descended upon the 300 block of…
Sweltering hot in the cab. Larry Phoebus never rolled the windows down and he didn’t run the air conditioner, either. I listened to the old man’s wheezy breathing in the stagnant air. I watched the side of his gaunt face and tried to think of something to say. Things must have been so different when you were a young kid, huh, Larry? How were things when you were young, Larry? Let’s turn off the radio and talk, Larry. You and me. Tell me your life, Larry. I’ll listen. Who’d you love, Larry? You must have loved somebody. Steve Boland says there’s no other explanation.
Larry Phoebus watched the railroad tracks, the weeds. Finally, I got down out of the cab and went in the White Hen and bought some doughnuts, a box, an assortment. Back in the truck, I held the box out to Larry Phoebus, and in my memory, my ceaselessly lying memory, Larry Phoebus turns to me, and though he doesn’t exactly speak, his eyes look at me and say, No, but thank you.
Maybe I thought the doughnuts would provide a little fellowship, break some bread, at a time like this. A time like what? What was that time like? I sat there with my doughnuts. Every once in a while I took a bite out of one and put it back in the box. I figured I’d sample the whole assortment. I seem to remember maple frosting was a new, radical flavor then. You’re dead, Larry. You would have to be long dead by now. The Vac-Haul is probably not such a marvel anymore, either. You were a man I sat next to, a man who for hours and hours I sat next to.
When I think of that time, I think of the tenacity of that man’s breathing. I think of her also. For weeks, her name was everywhere. She grew up not far from where I did. Like me, she was a suburban Jewish kid from just outside Chicago. We are legion; we hail from a place called the North Shore, a graceful place on the bluffs of Lake Michigan. I never knew her, she was about eight or nine years older, but I did go to high school with her cousin. She—we don’t say her name out loud—went to college in Madison, like my brother, like my father. She was a member of the same sorority that my grandmother was a founding member of in 1926.
Valerie Bertinelli played her in the TV movie.
We listened to it on the radio, Larry Phoebus and me. The radio said another shot fired. The radio said SWAT teams. The radio said house surrounded.
We were still in the truck, in the parking lot, waiting out the hours before the Vac-Haul could go home to the garage, when the radio announced another shot, a lone one. The empty parking lot, the train tracks, the tall weeds growing up through the ties. I thought something should change, that at least the light should change. But it was July in Illinois and the sun refused to sink. Only the radio voices were moving. I gripped my doughnuts. The heat in the cab rose with every breath Larry Phoebus took. The side of his motionless face. The radio said stormed the house. Was he hearing any of this? His sharp jutting chin pebbled with gray hair. A strong, ready chin. Even hiding in the parking lot, Larry Phoebus never slouched. In the event of a catastrophic sewage emergency, Larry Phoebus would be there, on the scene. Flash-flood warnings called to him in dreams. The radio said hostage in critical condition. The radio said suspect shot herself in the mouth. The guy from the White Hen came out with a huge bag of garbage and launched it, shot put–style, to the top of the already heaping dumpster like another body.
PART III
In Moscow
Everything Will
Be Different
The time I said it was only an emotional affair and you took your clothes off in front of a train. Not in front of the train as in front of the engine, in front of the side of the train. It was after eight o’clock in midsummer. The shadow of the water tower hovered over the town like an enormous bulbous spider. OTTUMWA. Amtrak was three hours late from Chicago. Freight causing delays. You waited until the train began to arrive to let me know what you thought of such idiot phrases as emotional affair. You want some fucking emotion? Always you see a train before you hear it. At first, it is only that burning headlight charging forward out of the wet haze. You didn’t say anything. No unbuttoning or unzipping. Only that sudden pulling apart of your shirt and wiggling your jeans shorts off easy. Those weary passengers got a good look at you. One woman, I remember, nodded her head again and again. The body I knew so well and loved but had never seen before in public or in this vinegar light.
OTTUMWA, IOWA, 2001
AT THE FAIRMONT
After the war they met in San Francisco. Bernice waited for him at a hotel on Nob Hill for five days before she got word that his ship had arrived. It is those five days she thinks of, not the reunion itself, which even then she knew was less the beginning of a new life than the start of a long end to the only one she’d ever have. She thinks of the park across the street from a cathedral and the hours she spent sitting with her hands in her lap. It was April and cool and she sat there coatless, not waiting, her mind drained, enjoying it, the days away from the children who’d remained in Chicago with her mother. Men, older men, spoke to her and she didn’t discourage them. They talked about the weather. It was nice to talk about something and not care a lick about it. She can’t remember another time in her life, even during blizzards, when she ever had much to say about the weather, and yet there she was on a bench, in the chill wind, goose bumps on her bare arms, cheerfully saying things like “Who would have imagined it would be so cold in California, and here I am with no coat. My girlfriend Gloria warned me, but I didn’t believe her!” Words flung out her mouth like tiny birds in every direction, that’s how good it felt just to say whatever nonsense came into her head. Because the words themselves meant nothing. It was only the thrill of talking to strangers, men, old men in tweed and scarves, in an unfamiliar place.
“My husband’s in the Navy. He’s coming back from Tokyo, Tokyo, can you imagine? He wrote that if you took the street signs away it looks just like State Street. He says the department stores are even bigger than ours. We’re from Chicago! My husband sells insurance!”
And one or another of the tweedy men would nod respectfully, but even then they could sense, she knew, that she was only talking to fill the air, the space that separated her bench from theirs.
“Ah, yes. Your husband is a true hero.”
“And at home he’s just a scared old tubby!”
And then, unlike talking about him, unlike being genuinely proud of him and half-pretending not to be, suddenly there he was, Seymour, the flesh and the body of him, sharing her bed at the Fairmont. His chatter from the bathroom.
“This head’s bigger than my entire quarters. Can you beat that?” His voice echoing, booming off all that shiny porcelain. “What a life, what a life.” And what surprised her most was how unvoracious he was. She’d prepared herself for him to be voracious, to leap on her with his usual frenzy, burrowing his head into her neck like an excited gopher, and jabbing, jabbing. She’d been ready to do her part for the war effort. Out of appreciation and gratitude and patriotism. All those hours on that terrible ship. Now what Seymour wanted was love, and she couldn’t possibly give that to him. After two years away he was lean, tan, and wanting to be held—held?—and that first morning after that first endless night of his tenderly cooing (My darling, my precious darling), she’d kept inching away from him across the sheets, his fingers gently kneading her upper arm, until, sometime after dawn, she dropped off the bed. Thunked right down to that thick white Fairmont carpet. It was embroidered with roses, and she ran her palm over one of them as Seymour, confused, peered at her from up on the mattress.
“Man overboard?” he whispered playfully.
“Come here,” she said.
And he rolled off the bed right on top of her, and his weight, though there was less of him than in the past, had crushed her, and yet this was more like it—and there on the floor things got back to normal for a while, and soon he was sleeping again, his snoring low, that familiar snuffling, and she lay there with him still half on top of her. Again, she ran her hand over the carpet roses. She looked up at the ceiling with
the naked cherubs holding up the latticework at the corners and thought, home, soon enough home, the children, his work, his office, a blessed secretary.
All that came after. It was those days alone, the wind in the trees, the church rising, not an old church, a new church, not especially beautiful, but welcoming in its way, though she never went inside, only watched the people come and go, in and out, through the big doors. The polite old men on the other benches, in their scarves, weren’t old. She knows this now, of course. They were at most in their early fifties. But then she was, what, twenty-eight? Something so peaceful in that waiting that wasn’t waiting, and what Bernice finds herself doing today is mourning those five days as she mourns so many things, including Seymour, dead three years this June.
The day before she got word of Seymour’s ship, one of the men had asked her for a drink and she’d accepted with the blithe unhesitation of those days, of that city—a city she hadn’t seen much of aside from the hotel and the park, and yet all the lingering hours had at least earned her a temporary place inside its rhythms. What made things even more exciting was that it really could have been any of the men on the benches in the park. It just happened to be Anthony who came to her out of the joyous blur. You could love someone simply because he stepped forward and spoke.