What He's Poised to Do: Stories (P.S.)

by Ben Greenman

  5.

  My mother was out all afternoon, covering for a friend at the hospital where she worked as a physician’s assistant, so she received confirmation of my father’s departure by telegram that evening. The pizza was a halfer: cheese for Jill, who had declared herself a vegetarian since the Goose in the Grass incident, and sausage for me. My mother took a slice from each half and nibbled at them cautiously. Normally she liked pizza, but even before the telegram arrived, she had suspected that the dinner was a bad sign. The doorbell rang. A man in a white hat and white gloves was standing there, and there was an envelope in his hand. In some ways, Alpha Settlement, still young, was unnecessarily formal. My mother read the telegram several times to herself, put it on her plate, and slid the sausage slice over it as a form of burial. “He used to send me letters all the time,” she said. And then she said no more. Had it been me, I would have closed my mouth if I had no more to say. But my mother did not close her mouth. In fact, she opened it wider, and then wider still. Jill and I, who had been staring down into the pizza, looked up at my mother’s gaping mouth. We didn’t know whether we were supposed to put something in there or take something out. Then my mother left the kitchen abruptly and went into her bedroom, where she stayed for one full month, occasionally emerging to shout at Jill or me, or drive to the liquor store, or watch old detective shows on TV. She loved to criticize the detectives when they missed obvious clues. “She’s wearing different shoes than she was before the murder,” she said. “Will you get a load of that?”

  “He can’t hear you,” Jill said. “It’s a TV.” But my mother spoke with such volume that I wasn’t sure that Jill was right.

  6.

  It would be nice to report that the love affair between Catherine and my father petered out—that she came to see him as an ineffectual man who had done his family wrong or that he came to see her as a siren who had tempted him into misdeed and mischance. In fact, his exit through the front door, and then the long pause by the fence, were the last we saw of him, at least in person. He married Catherine, moved back to Earth, helped her open the Hungry Cat, had a baby daughter named Rebecca, put ribbons in her hair, and developed a wide, toothy smile that he invariably displayed in the pictures that he sent us after birthdays and holidays. The photographs were accompanied by letters, and the letters, typed on a thin onionskin paper that allowed him to erase and retype over errors, were even more sadistic. He called Rebecca “your sister” and made outlandish promises to me and to Jill—vacations, ponies, battery-powered cars—that we believed painfully for the first year or two. The letters were addressed to me and to Jill at the house in Lunar City, for that was what Alpha Settlement had been named. Jill and I would sit in armchairs and read them, but my mother, aware that they represented a particularly efficient delivery mechanism for additional misery, seemed determined to ignore them. Every once in a while, though, she’d ask me or Jill how our father seemed to be doing. Jill scowled and refused to answer. “He seems a little unsure of himself, really,” I said, gently.

  7.

  I was gentle to my mother because I loved her. Jill was rough with her because she loved my father more. I missed my father because his departure left me without an idea of the kind of man I might become at the same time that it forced me prematurely to become that man. Jill missed my father because she had been deprived of her first love. Perhaps these things are obvious, but they struck me as insights, particularly in those first few years after my father left.

  I tried to raise the issue with Jill once when we were out in the yard fixing the fence. We were out there fixing it almost every week. She screwed up her face. “You talk so fancy out here,” she said. “It’s like the fence is making you think you’re smarter. Do you think it can see inside the human soul? From now on I’m going to call it the Shrink Fence.”

  “Call it what you want,” I said. “But don’t deny how important it is to you to feel Dad’s love.”

  “I’m not feeling anyone’s anything,” she said. “You’re disgusting. Anyway, I don’t love him. I hate him.”

  “You don’t hate him,” I said.

  “Why would I love a man who walks out on his wife and children?” she said. “Why would I love a man who puts ribbons in that stupid little girl’s stupid hair? Why would I love a man who let Goosey escape?”

  Just a year before, this memory would have brought on tears, but Jill, now fourteen, was hardening quickly, and even Goosey was more a spur to anger than a source of sadness. “And on that same topic,” she said, “why would I love a man who built this fence? Incompetent is the only way you can describe this thing.” We had been packing in dirt around the bases of the fence-posts, and now she stood and kicked at the post closest to her, and the fence buckled like a bad idea and the section closest to her went flat to the ground. Goosey wouldn’t even have needed to squeeze through the pickets. He could have just walked out, right over them.

  8.

  My mother was as angry as Jill, if not more so, but she had a different style entirely. To the untrained eye, her anger probably seemed as though it was pointing in all directions at once. It was not, not by a long shot. She hated the government, particularly the mayor, whom she held accountable for the way Lunar City was zoned.

  “It’s his fault that we have almost no neighbors all the way out here,” she said. “I blame him for our loneliness.” She hated television detectives, as I have said, and pizza delivery boys, of course. But that was about it. She loved nearly everyone else, and she expressed that as passionately as she expressed her hatred. When Jill turned fifteen, she started to date a pizza delivery boy just to antagonize my mother, and she was always taunting her by saying things like “We were there at the store late because it’s his job to lock up” or “I think I left my sweater in the back of his van.” Jill confessed to me that she didn’t really like the guy, and that she hadn’t let him do more than put his hand up her shirt, but that she was driven to get my mother’s attention by at least pretending to be committing these transgressions.

  “Driven to get attention by committing transgressions,” I said. “Sounds like someone has been standing out by the Shrink Fence.”

  “Whatever,” Jill said. My mother was in the room now. “Anyway, I’m heading over to Eric’s place. He has a new mattress.”

  My mother didn’t take the bait. She never did where people she loved were concerned. “Bye, Sweetie,” she said. “I can’t see what you see in him, but I trust that if you see something, it’s there. I believe in your judgment, because I feel that you are capable of great things. I hope you agree, or that you’ll come to agree.”

  “Leaving,” Jill said. “Leaving leaving leaving.”

  9.

  But Jill didn’t leave. I left. I worked hard in high school, happier in class than at home, and spent afternoons out by the fence, thinking things through. When it came time to apply to college, my mother pressured me to attend Lunar City University, which was a fine institution, staffed by some of the best minds in America, many of whom had jumped at the opportunity to teach on the moon, others of whom had been reluctant initially but found the large salaries persuasive. “What do you like, business?” my mother said. “You can study business there. They say on TV that lunar franchises are a big deal now. Lunar franchises: Will you get a load of that?”

  “I don’t like business,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “What, then?” she said. “The law?” Her lip curled when she said it. But she loved me, and if I had said yes, she would have been right on it, weaving an elaborate defense of the law as a legitimate career.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to go back to Earth.” And so I did, to a nondescript four-year university in a nondescript state in the broad middle of the nation, only fifty miles or so from where my father had settled with Catherine and Rebecca. At first, my mother and I spoke on the phone every week, but the conversations grew strained. There was something in the extreme long distance of the cal
l that diluted the tone of our voices and made each of us less liable to believe the other. For example, she suspected that I was secretly spending time with my father and Catherine there on Earth, though I told her plainly that I wasn’t. And I suspected that she was angry at me, though that seemed impossible. One day, near the end of the first semester, she was worrying about what she should cook when I came back for vacation. I told her that I wasn’t sure I was coming, that I was thinking of spending the holiday in Maine with a roommate. “It might be easier if you and Jill just ordered something,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it, though I realized as I said it that it meant everything. My mother didn’t speak for a few seconds. I imagined that her mouth was wide open. Then she told me that I was acting just like my father, which I took as a sign not to call her for a while.

  10.

  My relationship with Jill was better. We didn’t talk on the telephone or send each other electronic messages. Instead, we exchanged letters, and in those letters she was able to give a fuller account of how she was feeling. In fact, they seemed to encourage her to try to understand her own motives and the motives of those around her, and to analyze before she judged; they were like a portable version of the Shrink Fence. At the start of my sophomore year in college, she visited me. By then, she was a swan of a young woman, tall and beautiful and capable of cool irony along with the silliness and surliness that were her trademarks. At least two of my friends fell in love with her during the week she was on campus, and one of them went so far as to spend his winter break working on the moon, calling her daily and offering to take her to expensive restaurants. He returned to college in the spring, defeated because Jill had spurned his advances. In the next letter she sent me, she explained. “It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Anton,” she said. “But I met a guy here and I think I’m in love. He’s a pizza delivery boy. Ha ha. I am just joking. But you know the irony of it? He owns the pizza store. His name is Jack Holland, and he moved up here from Earth just last year. He is a quite a bit older than me and divorced. He is also the tallest man in town, I think. He’s six-eight if he’s an inch. On our first date I told him about Moonesota and he laughed so hard he fell out of his chair. This is not an exaggeration or colorful language. He fell out of his chair. Sitting there on the ground, he was almost as tall as I was.”

  11.

  In that same letter, Jill told me another piece of information, which was that my father had stopped writing her. This surprised me because I hadn’t received any letters from him since I started college, and I had assumed that he wasn’t writing to anyone. “I got them at a regular clip until last month,” Jill wrote, “and then they stopped suddenly. I had come to depend on them, even though they were growing steadily more boring. A few months ago, he and Catherine took Rebecca to the zoo and then let her nap in the back office at the Hungry Cat while Catherine chalked the specials on the board. I know this because it’s exactly what his letter said. It was so boring that even writing about it is boring. But it was a piece of him. I would like it if you would investigate and find out why he stopped writing. If you don’t want to do it for me, do it for Mom. I’m pretty sure she has noticed that the letters have stopped, and I’m pretty sure that it bothers her. She grew accustomed to seeing them piling up in our rooms. It comforted her, if you can believe it.” I folded up Jill’s letter and slid it to the side of my desk.

  Anton came by a minute later, saw the handwriting, and pulled up a chair. “If there’s any way you’d give me another chance,” he said. “I’ll do anything.”

  “She can’t hear you,” I said. “It’s a letter.”

  12.

  I made some calls and read some articles and was able to find out more news about my father. He had gone on a business trip to the Pacific Rim, during which time he had contracted a bacterial infection from shellfish. He recovered from the infection, but it left him weak, and when he returned to the States, he was unable to climb the stairs to his office, even though it was only on the second floor. He took the elevator, and as he was impatient, he pressed the CLOSE DOOR button repeatedly. I mention the CLOSE DOOR button because it was the last button he ever pushed; the elevator panel had been removed and replaced, and the tongue end of a live wire had somehow been connected to the metal plate. The numbered buttons, the ones that instructed the elevator to travel to specific floors, were rimmed in rubber and consequently grounded. The OPEN DOOR and CLOSE DOOR buttons were not. Electricity pierced the tip of my father’s finger. A blue flame traced the outline of his hand. Current ran around his heart, which chased the current until it was exhausted and collapsed. The newspaper account I read mentioned a possible lawsuit. It also mentioned that he was survived by his wife Catherine and his daughter Rebecca. I omitted this bit of information when I wrote to Jill with the news. She called me immediately when she received the letter. She was crying. “I need to go talk to Jack,” she said, and her crying tapered off a bit.

  13.

  I kept writing letters to Jill. I thought she needed to receive them, and I knew that I needed to send them. Increasingly, though, she responded to my letters with phone calls. I tried to explain to her why this was a mistake, but she wouldn’t listen. As a result of whatever she thought she was feeling with Jack, she was in the mind of doing something new—new for herself, new for the world—and that meant pushing past what I now saw she believed was an antiquated practice. It hurt me at first. We entered a brief period of opposition, which came as a shock to me, not because it arrived with any particular violence but because it arrived at all. It had been a long time since we had allowed ourselves to be enemies. The memory that came back to me most vividly during that time was the moment when I told her that we were eating Goosey; I was wrong to fix on it, of course, but I must have believed that it triggered the entire process that led my father to notice Catherine, to leave the house, to tie a ribbon in Rebecca’s hair, to press the CLOSE DOOR button. For a week or so, I dropped into a deep depression, and my only consolation came from the fact that it was so theatrical that I knew it would not last. Then I met a girl who came from a town very near to where my father had lived, and then Anton started dating her friend, and I was all at once in a new thing of my own. I called Jill when I wanted to talk to her, and though this felt like a concession, it also felt like progress. The only persistent negative effect of the calls was that they brought into sharp relief the fact that I was still not talking to my mother. It had been nearly a year, and she had not asked for me, and I had not asked for her. She would watch as my sister spoke to me, but we were both too proud to end the silence. When Jill told me that she was starting to fail a bit, that she would sometimes forget Jill’s name or insist that my father was just late coming home from work, it should have encouraged me to call directly, but it had the opposite effect. I had broken off talking to my mother while she was still vibrating with hatred for my father and the mayor and love for everyone else. I did not want to find her again only to discover that she had been diminished.

  14.

  One day, out walking in a neighborhood near campus, I had a very clear vision of the house where I grew up, as seen from overhead: the brown rectangle, the green rectangle, the white fence. In my vision, my mother was there, standing forlornly in a corner of the front lawn, and I suddenly came over with an idea. Since I could no longer write letters to Jill, and since I could no longer speak to my mother on the phone, I would write letters to my mother.

  The first one was written with the kind of unthinking innocence that always reveals itself, in time, to be a form of deceit. I decided to type it because my mother had always complained that she could not read my handwriting. I obtained onionskin paper because it was the best lightweight paper available at the campus bookstore. (Perhaps the Shrink Fence would challenge both of these statements.) In that first letter, I affected a more adult tone because I wanted to impress her with my independence. “I know we haven’t spoken for a while,” I wrote. “I wish it weren’t the c
ase. Life in the States is good.” The rest of it was small talk about the news, save for one long sentence at the end where I tried to communicate what I understood of human connection: “The way in which I faded away is unforgivable and I would not blame you if you agreed,” I wrote, “which is why I am not asking that you write back, only that you continue to let me write to you.” I was helping my girlfriend move some furniture at her parents’ house that weekend, and I deposited the letter virtuously in a box at the corner of the street.