by Habash, Gabe
She’s at a booth, facing the door. She watches me walk toward her, and the second I see the mechanics of her eyes, her fingers holding the handle of her white mug, she ceases being the key to my moral emancipation and becomes Mary Beth.
I pause at the booth, unsure how the greeting is supposed to happen. There’s no one else in the diner. “Hello,” I say, and lean down and kiss the top of her head, the smell of which unwraps my loins. It’s unclear whether I’m supposed to sit on the opposite side or next to her, but she takes my hand and sort of guides me across the table. Her fingers find my weight calluses.
“Just like how Allnighter was supposed to be,” she says, and I see I’m to push us through the early weeds.
“How long have you been here? Did you wait long? How are your classes?”
“I’m doing them accelerated. In March, about the time Kenosha is starting up, I’ll be done.”
“Great!”
“Stephen, this—”
“You said you had people interested in your work? Tell me about that.”
“Stephen.”
“And your own work? It’s going well. I mean, it’s going well?” I feel like a doll who’s quip cord is being yanked over and over. “Why won’t you tell me about it?”
“I did. I did tell you about it.”
“It seems like you’re speaking somewhat metaphorically around the bush.”
She blinks and turns her mug around in a circle on the table, which is very sticky with something. “You know something? I haven’t masturbated since I left. I’ve been tired, but that’s only part of it. Instead, a lot of the time I’ll just stand at my window and watch people drop off their laundry across the street. It’s almost as fun and illicit as masturbating. I’ll admit I got excited when I first got in the car, but it went away by the time I got to Wisconsin, before that. You won’t even come.”
“As soon as the season’s—”
“No—”
“I’ll come right now if you want me to. Right now, on this table.”
“Will you? Will you come right now?”
Her smile is the same, the exact same, individual strands of hair and how her face hasn’t changed. One morning, I woke up and she was asleep next to me, and her hand was covering my eyes. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too, but I’m not sure this was a good idea.”
“But you agreed to it.”
“Did I have a choice?”
“Why isn’t it a good idea?” Suddenly, I’m aware that there is no waitstaff, there’s only a distant clanging noise in the kitchen. I get out of the booth and stand by the cash register, knocking on the counter. “Service, please, for the lady?” My nose is running and I’m also crying and so I take a napkin from the dispenser, which distorts my face and fingers. I clean myself up with my back to her, then put the napkin away in my pocket. I sit back down in the booth. “Why isn’t it a good idea?”
“Here, have some.”
She hands me her tea, and I drink the rest of it. My intent is unintelligible. “Is there someone else? Is there another man?”
“No, there’s not.”
Then what’s the problem? Why isn’t this working? Why can’t I make things agreeable for once? Why is what I want an expense? Why is she letting me hold her hand and rendezvous if her intention is not the same as mine? “Then what’s the problem?”
“I told you. I have a different life now. I explained all this on the phone. What did you think was going to happen?”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“Basically what is.” Just for one moment, I have the notion that I’m reenacting a trauma, my trauma masterpiece, and I’m in the wrong place, that I messed up the directions and came to the wrong diner. But then how do you explain her being here?
“You aren’t answering me.”
“Why are you talking with, like, air coming out lispy? Open your mouth, let me see your teeth.”
“You aren’t answering me.”
“Are you O.K.?” She spits in a napkin and dabs some recent dirt mark I didn’t know was there. Only once did I call Dakota Grid, the local electric company, after I figured out their phone number routed to an answering service that spawned a stream of safety tips in a pleasant faceless female voice, such as be mindful of snow buildup, while promising me an employee would be on the line shortly. I called at three in the morning, when I had no chance of getting someone real, when I could just listen to the cycle.
Sometimes you need to tell a story about something that happened to you, ten times or a hundred, only to get it off your back, to clear it out. But this particular story I needed to tell just once, because when I told it to Mary Beth, she just nodded and forgot it, which is why I told her. To her, it was just something that had happened. A few minutes later, I heard her laugh and my stomach fell open. Like that.
“I really miss you.”
“Did it ever occur to you to think about why I liked being with you?”
“Oh.”
“I’m glad to see you. But did you ever think that maybe neither or both of us weren’t ready for this? To meet in a highway diner halfway between? I’m not the jewel in your story, I don’t just go along with your story as, like, a prize. You don’t look well. Are you O.K.?”
“I’m wonderful.”
“How much thought did you really give this?”
“All the thought in the world.”
“What did you think about on the drive here?”
“Your face, which is pretty enough to be put on the silver dollar.”
She sighs and says, “I’m sorry I left you behind like that,” which I take to be my cue for the big reveal. I hold her hand.
“Look out there. See anything unusual about it?”
She sees that I’ve really done it, then says, “Are you stupid?”
“It’s Silas’s truck. I took it! It’s a gesture.”
She pulls her hand out of mine, still looking at the truck, not at me, which is where I thought she’d be looking by now. “Why, Stephen?”
I had eight hours sitting behind the wheel to reconsider, but not once, not until I made it to Winona, looking at Mary Beth’s lovely, lovely face, did it occur to me.
“Shit.” There must be police out all over looking for me. “There must be police looking all over for me. Are you excited?”
“You need to get that back right now. Now.”
“But I got the asshole’s truck for a reason. A real reason. I brought it here for you. So we could …”
“So we could what?”
“So … we could get intimate in it.”
“What?”
“As in, defiling his memory. Together.”
“Stephen, go home right now. Put the car where Silas can find it but not see you. Or you will be arrested. Go home, and pretend like this terrible idea never happened. Any of it.” She floats the word “arrested” out above the table like a theoretical precept, like a big bubble from the soap bottle. Theory, theory, theory, the air between us seems to be made of different nitrogen levels, and the difference is vast, vast enough that I could never get her to interpret my gesture the way I’d wanted. “I can’t believe we both drove eight hours for this. This is fucking crazy.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and something about saying these same old words, for the sixtieth or sixty-first time, brings about my realization that Mary Beth is the only real component of this whole symbolic gesture, which has fallen apart, as if I had shown up at the doorstep with dead daisies.
I pay and hold the door for her. In the parking lot, she kisses my cheek in the disinterested European manner. “For Christ’s sake, take care of yourself.” And it’s only after she’s gotten into her car and disappeared that I remember her earrings glittering on the dashboard.
Well, I have eight hours to think things over but I don’t use them, just like that woman who was determined to use the state house for her headache cure. I drive excessively fast to get back to w
here I came from, without ever really coming to a conclusion why. I leave the truck teetering over a ditch just down the road from Silas’s house and then take a circuitous route home, where everything is just as I’d left it, as though I’d never really been away.
I try Mary Beth’s number again, and as it’s ringing I tell myself not to be surprised when she doesn’t pick up. That’s not how this works.
But when I replace the phone, still in my fingers, it rings again.
“Steven, honey, don’t hang up. Just listen.” The voice comes so quickly that it’s a moment before I realize it’s not Mary Beth, it’s Aunt Lorraine. “Don’t hang up. Don’t. I couldn’t come, I can’t come, because I got fired. I fucked up again, I’ve really made shit of my life this time.”
“What did you do?”
“I made a lot of bad decisions, Steven. I can’t.” She’s crying.
I have no experience with a crying woman, so I keep my mouth closed, full of patience for the opportunity to right our toppled relations, listening to her monologue of tribulations, increasingly aware, as it winds toward its finish, that this will be quite easy, after all, to fix.
“I owe a lot of different people a lot of money. I feel really bad I did this to you.”
“How much money do you need?”
The fire alarm wakes everyone up in the middle of the night. We go out and stand in the snow for half an hour. The problem turns out to be that someone set a bag of hair on fire.
Well, the last semester of classes! Time to get to work and finish up my education! Honest to goodness, I didn’t know if this day would finally be here, but hello, here it is!
Mr. Gorman is the fat Geography teacher. I start sliding, attention-wise, during attendance.
“Mango?”
“It’s Margo,” a female voice says from the back.
“Says here ‘Mango.’”
By the time we’re a few paragraphs into the syllabus, I know Geography will be a class I sleepwalk through, to be forgotten by summer in the white void. To most people, college is for growing your concepts, such as the location of Lebanon, such as what “ethos” means, such as what exactly the United Nations does. But sometimes I regret that I’ll never have the intensity of feeling I had growing up, you never do, emotion like pins and thorns, intense happiness, intense dismay, missing my parents, blindly pining over Tiff, crying over blowing it in the match against Clay Goodchild, or James Davis, or Andrew Shipp. When you’re younger, and for me it stopped when I finally got tired of being angry after they died, you walk around hating everything and loving everything equally. I guess when you’re at the tail end of growing up you’re susceptible to thoughts of your growing up, but that doesn’t make them interesting or useful. Sadness for the past is sadness for circumstances that no longer exist.
While the teacher summarizes the overarching important shit to know, I look around at all the other students. Taking in information. Human husks, husks of humans. It becomes an all-day job not turning into everyone else, keeping myself from old, tired dreams.
Jazz is no regular-sized classroom, it’s a big goddamn room in Opal Hall, hundreds of seats, all of them empty. I’m the first one there. I’m paying attention to every detail as though I’m an investigative reporter for Mary Beth, and though I hope to talk about all this with her, this year has finally taught me not to expect anything I hope for to come my way. And so I just scrape the sleep gunk from my eyes and blink, content to watch. With strategic care, I pick my chair, most of the way toward the front, dead center. Before long, two students come in, then two more. One of them is male. They pick out seats the farthest away from anyone else, so that when we’re all situated, the five of us cover the room like a life-sized graph of inner desolation.
I reach down my sweatpants to unstick my sex from my right thigh and at that moment, a brown-haired female enters the front of the room and sees me doing the feature presentation. Eye contact happens. Her expression shows disappointment, though we’ve never met, and by way of explanation what I come up with is: “Sorry.” When she finally chooses a desk in the farthest back corner, I try three different times to get her attention and convey that my sorriness is true, but she pretends to be looking for something in her bag for five full minutes.
It’s past start time. At the front of the giant room, before the chalkboard, there’s a table with one of those music players, the kind with the horn, like the big colorful bell flowers in the jungle that lure in bugs.
Levi Silas opens the door and comes in. Something mystical or tectonic happens.
I am repulsed and fascinated by the secret things he’s done, repulsed and fascinated the whole time he talks. He politely and briefly introduces himself and then gets us to admit we’re not in the wrong room.
He does attendance. As there are six of us, this takes fifteen seconds. When he calls my name, there’s no hitch to indicate he knows I’m the car thief. The last name he calls is “Pervis Robinson.”
I turn around, all the way, because I refuse to believe there’s a person with this name. Eight or nine rows back and off to the left is the only other male, Pervis.
Silas digs through his black leather satchel. He extracts a stack of papers and sets them down on the table. Then he pulls out a big black record and tinkers with it on the player.
“Grab a syllabus on the way out. That’s it.”
Music starts playing. He doesn’t identify the song. In fact, he takes his bag and goes out the door! Is he coming back? I turn around with my eyebrows up as though to say “What gives?” to the five of them behind me, but already two of the girls plus Pervis are descending the aisles. They each take a paper and leave. The song continues. The two other girls chat as they head up to the front and take a paper, leaving me listening to a weird song in a cavernous room by myself. I first double-check that I’m alone, but I don’t feel safe so I go all the way up to the last row just to make sure Silas hasn’t snuck in and started watching, or that he hasn’t voodoo-sprinkled his wife’s burned hairs in the aisles. I look down at the whole room, almost the size of the gym, while the illogic of the situation crashes down on my brain. And as I listen to numerous instruments blat around the musical scales, which sounds like it was recorded during the fucking Civil War, I realize Silas is beginning his routine, the same routine he’s had for years, this song has been played on the first day of every single Intro to Jazz class since the start, since before Mrs. Silas was dead. I’m surprised then not surprised that he’s treating this time like all the previous times. But then I’m happy that I get to show him why this time will be different. I’m the one he can’t fool.
First thing Tuesday, I wait for Hargraves. He doesn’t come. After they get everyone going on the drills, I go up to Fink, who is saying something to Linus, but quickly dismisses him when he sees me coming.
“Where’s Coach?”
“Not feeling well.” He has one hand in his shorts pocket and uses the other one to hold his whistle up to his mouth, tilted ninety degrees, so he can tongue the tiny ball inside.
“O.K.,” I say, turning to join the jogging line.
“Where are you going?”
“Drills.”
“No drills. Bike.”
“I did the bike last week.”
“So?”
“The plan was to do the bike for a week. Today’s Tuesday. It’s been a week.”
He glances down at my knee. Licks the ball. “You been taking care of yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Bike today. We’ll talk to Coach when he’s back.”
I bite down so hard on my teeth they split like cracked nuts. “When’s he back?”
The world’s slowest shrug. “Maybe tomorrow.”
It takes all my moral energy to turn away from him, and I yell into the gym, “Something’s fucking fishy here!”
In a position of extreme disadvantage, I decide it’s best to let whatever’s happening play out, at least for another day or two. And so I let my h
ead loose like an untied balloon, fill it and fill it with hot air.
I shower and sit in the locker room with the rest of them because I don’t want them to think I’m flustered. I listen to see if anyone mentions Hargraves.
Kryger has stopped calling me fancyboy. He’s stopped acknowledging me altogether, he’s wrapped up in his new place on the team, winning his first two 133 matches, handily, a surprise to everyone including himself, though he pretends it’s not, pretends it’s natural and expected, stomping around the locker room, shouting louder than anyone else. He thinks I’m no longer a threat to him.
Linus doesn’t wait for me to walk with him. He just leaves.
Rudy Unger’s office is across the highway on the nice side of town. I walk in, tracking mud and snow onto his entrance rug like it’s rayon. My distaste for this place and for Rudy is nothing he could’ve prevented, he reminds me of my parents, specifically the fact that they’re dead.
His secretary buzzes me into his mahogany office. He sighs and stops writing in the ledger on his desk or whatever it is.
“Sorry about the rug. I need some money.”
“O.K.”
“I want you to send it to here.” I put the paper scrap in front of him, on top of his significant documents.
“Who’s this?”
“Aunt Lorraine.”