by Gordon Lish
I admit it, it didn't work. There was shame attached to renting even if it was envy that inspired them to let me know that's what we were, that's what we had been, renters in a neighborhood where everyone else owned.
Moving did not defeat this, though. What I mean is, between the time I knew we were going to move and the time we moved, I didn't fight back. I didn't tell the nannies we were going to own. I don't know why I didn't. I think I must have thought moving was more shameful than renting was, even if you were going to own.
Perhaps I thought we have to go someplace else to own, that we can't own here.
I don't know.
It wasn't that terrible.
That's how safe I was, how adored I felt myself to be, even by the nannies. Especially by the nannies.
I'm telling everything.
The nannies adored me because I didn't have one. This was a bonus. It was reverence on top of what I already had from them. The shame of renting was the same. It supplemented the universal blessedness. It was shame and it was intended that I be shamed by the knowledge, but it also abetted the well-being I was supposed to have. The nannies and the boys they took care of understood that my interests were secured, perhaps heightened, to the extent that humiliation was heaped upon me.
I understood this.
I understood it was queerly superior to be less well-off.
I understood it was a good thing for me to be a child like this, but not a good thing for the grown-ups whose fault this was. The shame was really theirs. I shared in it only insofar as I could profit from it, be esteemed as more angelic because of it.
BUT THEN WE MOVED.
The old neighborhood was old in relation to houses. The new neighborhood was new in the same way.
Houses were still going up.
You have to imagine this—a plot of land, everything dug up, mud mostly, three finished houses, five finished houses, seven finished, but everything still looking unfinished.
It stayed this way for years. Even after the war was over, it still looked like this, unfinished.
They all had money from the war. This was what people said. People said it was war profits that got us these new houses. The maids said it.
There were no nannies in this neighborhood.
The maids were black and they didn't like the people they worked for. When it was only children around, the maids talked so that the children would hear them. In the afternoons, before they started getting the suppers ready, the maids stood out on the street near enough to where the children were playing. Profiteering was a word you heard because it came up a lot—them.
There was mud all over everything every season of the year. In the old neighborhood, everything was finished and had a gabled roof or long dark beams crossing darkly over creamy stucco, turrets on the corners sometimes. And there was grass.
I'm telling you about the profiteering part only to show you how charmed I was. Let's see if you understand.
Listen. Let's say I was seven and a half, eight, not yet nine. But I knew. I knew war profits was much worse than renting. I knew the maids hoped to put a malignancy abroad, hurt the children who heard it, make sure we heard them saying them.
I heard it. It didn't harm what held me higher than the rest.
Alan Silver did that. It was Alan Silver that brought me down to the level of everybody but him.
HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED.
Alan Silver moved in. He moved in when there were seven houses and four more still going up. He was twelve. Maybe I was nine by then. So that's the boys from two houses. The other five houses had boys in them too. There were girls, of course. All the houses had girls, but I can't remember any of them. Except for Alan Silver's sister. Oh, there's only one reason I remember her. Or one memory Alan Silver's sister's in.
The girls didn't count.
I can't tell you how much the boys did.
I was the youngest. Then came Alan Silver. The rest were older. But I don't know how old. There were five of them, and they were rough. Maybe they weren't rough, but I thought they were. This opinion derived directly from their policy respecting the mud. I mean, they played in it, or they picked it up and packed it and threw it at people. If they threw it at me, I sat down until it dried off. If they threw it at one another, they kept on playing.
They never threw it at Alan Silver that I ever saw. But I never saw Alan Silver play outside. I don't know where he played. Maybe he played inside. Maybe he went to another neighborhood. I never played with Alan Silver. I never talked to Alan Silver. I never looked at him up close.
But I saw him. Everybody saw him. Everybody talked about him. Not the boys or the maids but the parents. The parents said he was an angel. He looked like an angel. He had blond hair and blue eyes and was pretty the way they said I used to be but that he still was, even though he was twelve.
It was when I came across this belief that I felt changed. I hadn't been noticing what was happening. I had been outgrowing my prettiness and I hadn't noticed. Isn't this amazing? To stop being the most beautiful?
For the first time ever, I felt unsafe. For the first time ever, I felt they could get me, it could all come in at me and get me, penetrate, kill me, find me in my bed, choke me, put poison into me, and my parents wouldn't try to stop it, would sooner have Alan Silver instead.
I'll tell you how I handled this. I stopped going outside so much. I stayed away from where I might get mud thrown on me—and if it happened that I did, then I didn't wait around for it to dry first but right away went home to wash it off. This meant making worse tracks inside the house. So it didn't handle anything any better, because the maid yelled or my mother yelled or they both yelled—and when they did it, I could see them yearning for Alan Silver in my place.
I could see desire.
The way I used to feel the sky would put down its arms for me if only it had them, I could see a heart red in the sky just above the roofs—a red, red heart.
It was desire. It was the desire of a neighborhood. It was everything, all earthliness, God too, deciding it desired Alan Silver instead.
THE FIRST THING I heard was the siren. I was in the back of my house, staying clean. Maybe the maid heard the siren first. Maybe she ran to the front door first, or maybe I did. But what I remember is the both of us at the door looking out.
The fire engine is up the block. By the time we are there looking out, the firemen aren't in it. Then there is screaming. But the maid and I stand in the door.
The screaming's from over there, from over on this side, and from this side comes Alan Silver's mother and Alan Silver's sister, and they are the ones screaming, and I never heard screaming like this before, all this screaming all the way from over on this side to all the way up the block, and Alan Silver's mother is pulling at her hair, or maybe she is pulling at the sister's hair as they go running—up there to where the fire engine is parked. Then everybody is running out of all the finished houses. They are all screaming and going to where the fire engine is, but keeping a little behind Alan Silver's mother and behind Alan Silver's sister even if they started out from a closer house.
I don't know what thing amazes me more—people pulling at their hair, or the fire engine on the block, or seeing the whole neighborhood outside all at once.
The whole neighborhood is out there where the fire engine is and where the firemen are coming out of an unfinished house, the very last one at the end of the block. Then they go back and then they come out and then they go back and then they come out, and it's then I notice the maid's not standing with me where I am standing anymore.
My house is empty except for me.
You know where they all went? They all went up there where I knew something terrible was.
I WENT IN.
I went back to the room where I'd been. I think it was the kitchen or the breakfast room. I went back to eating my milk and cookies again.
In the whole neighborhood, I was the only one who didn't go up there. But wasn't I too young to se
e a thing like that?
I knew it had to be a thing like that.
Days later, they started talking about it—the parents, the maids, but not any of the kids.
I could tell in the doorway—or I could tell when I was eating the milk and cookies I went back for.
He lived in a coma for a while.
But I knew he would be dead.
They said the five boys were playing with him when he fell. They said he fell from where the top floor was going in. They said he fell down through the shaft where the chimney was set to go in—to the concrete they had already poured down in the basement for the basement down below.
I remember thinking, "What was Alan Silver doing playing with those boys?" I remember thinking, "Was he always playing with those boys when I was staying clean?"
"Someone pushed him," I thought.
I thought, "Which boy did?"
I wanted to tell everyone I didn't.
I am forty-seven years old.
I still want to say it wasn't me, it wasn't me, that I am innocent, innocent—I swear, I am.
I'M WIDE
MY WIFE AND SMALL SON were away for the week, having removed themselves from the day-to-day predicament for a brief travel to a place of better weather. I was fine the first night, and remained equally fine the second and third, feeding myself from the cabinets and cupboards and pantry and doing what seemed expectable in the way of tidying up. Yet each night I would put off my hour of retirement a trifle longer than that which had found me seeking the sanctuary of my bed the night previous—so that by the fourth night, it was virtually daybreak when I sought the security of blankets and pillow. Mind you, I was not passing the sleepless hours in any particular fashion, aside from the regularity of those few moments that saw to my nutrition and the succeeding clean-up of the premises. But I cannot tell you what precisely I was doing, save that I think I spent the greatest particle of the time moving from room to room and regarding the objects that appointed them. At all events, it was during the course of the fifth night of their absence—of my wife and small son, I mean—that I was suddenly, in my meanderings, captured by the sense that I had happened to come upon the thought of my lifetime. It was while beholding the seat of a wainscot chair of the Jacobean period, and while losing myself in the patina my week-by-week waxing of its surface had achieved, that I thought, "Why wax?" I mean, it was utterly stupefying, this notion—Why wax? Why, indeed, wax anything ever again when one could instead coat a surface with—ahh—shellac!
I was positively beside myself with excitement, gripped by a delirium of a quality I am not competent to describe. I remember thinking, "My God, just look at me, an ordinary fellow abandoned by wife and child, now exalted in his possession of a piece of the most exquisite invention!" I was quick to consider the punishing labors of all those persons who, for years by the eras, had applied themselves to the rude practice of spreading on and then of rubbing and buffing, this when one layer of shellac could end such brutish industry forever.
I went first to the shelves that we used for the storage of all inflammables, took what I wanted in the way of a can and a brush, and then made haste for my closet, there taking up the two pairs of shoes I then owned and carrying them into the living room, stopping en route to gather several sections of the Sunday paper from the stack it is our habit to keep accumulating from Sunday to Sunday.
Oh, you goon! Did you honestly think it was the furniture I meant to have a go at? Great heavens, no! Shellac on wood has been done and done—whereas who'd ever thought of shoes?
I arranged things.
I laid out paper.
I pried off the lid of the can.
I inspected the brush for dust, for hairs.
Have I said that wife and son are endowed with hair of the finest filament? In any case, I went to work, and left my efforts to dry, sleeping more satisfactorily than it had been my fortune to do in years.
But when I returned from my office the following evening, both pairs of shoes were still wet—two nights thereafter (I was appalled), they were no drier. It was only then that I realized I had been wearing galoshes.
I went at them with a razor blade, the shoes, scraping. I scraped and then I tried a solvent. I admit it—this time I didn't bother myself with newspaper. I no longer liked the floor any better than I liked my shoes.
I won't make this last forever.
I murdered those shoes.
I hacked at them—I dug and delved at them, and stabbed and stabbed.
Toward dawn, I dumped them in the trash, and got out the vacuum cleaner to suck up the shreds of leather. But I could see where there was no repairing the floor by such measure. The solvent had eaten holes through the varnish. It was festered, the floor. It was an infestation.
I skipped my office after scrubbing off the stain on my hands. I went in galoshes straight to a shoe store, took a seat, stuck out a galosh, said, "Nine-and-a-half, E. Give me a brogue."
"You mean a blucher?" said the simp.
"That's it," I said. "E. I'm wide."
"In a jiffy," he said, and the purchase was made, the whole ugly affair accomplished in minutes.
I was fine. All the way home, I was fine. For the rest of the day I ate biscuits and tidied and waxed those shoes. It was not until the new shoes seemed as shiny as they would get that I left off and squatted there gazing at things, studying the chairs and the tables, all the surviving surfaces that gleamed. It was then that I was willing to reckon with the rest of what I had said to that fop of theirs when he had asked why in the world was it that I was wearing galoshes now that the streets were empty of snow.
Oh, listen to me listening to myself!
"Listen," I said, "I got this boy, God love him, he's seven, and all he wants to do is do for me. So what happens? So when I'm not looking, what happens? Listen," I said, now raising my voice for all of them in that whole shoe store to hear, "that kid, that wonderful kid, he takes shellac to every last one of my shoes to put a lasting shine on them!"
I even laughed when everybody laughed.
Do you understand what I am saying to you?
I winked my goddamn head off—me, a man.
IMAGINATION
X WAS A TEACHER of story-writing, and Y was a student of same. X was a remarkable teacher of story-writing. In the opinion of A to Z—exclusive of Y—X was the best teacher of it there ever was. Still, Y sought out X for instruction—for although Y was not willing to hold X's skills in the very highest esteem, Y nevertheless held them in esteem high enough. Perhaps he viewed X's great gifts as a teacher as meriting X the status of second-best, whereas the first-best had nothing to teach Y.
Y was a hairy person, and very grave in his manner. X, on the other hand, tended toward the bald, and was light-hearted in all save two respects—his wife being one and stories the other. In these two matters, X kept up his purchase on the world as he thought it was, never cracking a smile in relation to either topic, a practice that Y thought foolish and tiresome. But of course Y had neither wife nor a vocation for living inside stories. Y wanted to write them, create them—and, as for women, he amused himself with reptiles instead.
Listen to X commenting on Y's stories, the which he judged the weakest among those produced by the class.
"What's this dragon doing in here? Why a dragon?"
"Dinosaurs are extinct. Write about the world as it exists in our time."
"Very good, except for the snake. The snake's a deus ex machina. Don't you see you can't just stick a snake in here to resolve a difficulty people have produced?"
X shouted. X was passionate about stories. In X's opinion, that's where reality got its ideas from. Y, for his part, listened with interest. After all, Y had sought out X to learn.
"For God's sake, man, why pterodactyls? Can't you make it a family of farmers instead?"
Y would smile. He had such a lot of hair and it all seemed to smile right along with him when he did. It made X think of Samson, all this ferocious growth,
and of his own near-hairless self. Poor X, his body was weak, but his mind, he observed, was very strong.
THEN X MET Z.
Oh, Z!
Z was neither teacher nor student of the writing of stories. Z cared not in the least for stories, and surely would take no position in the debate between X and Y. Z's tendencies were restricted to the parts of her body and to the uses that might be made of them.
How can it be that such a creature would come to fall within the ken of X?
In one version, Y proposes her, presenting her to X as Y's barber, the person whose attentions account for the vigor and abundance of Y's hair.
In a second version, X's wife is the agency through which X and Z meet, the former woman having heard that the latter could do wonders in the contest against thinning hair—restore growth, prolong vitality, work a miracle.
In either version, Z did—barbering X before and after his classes, a program Z kept up until Z's husband came back to her, thus making it necessary for X and Z to find another privacy for Z's talents to continue going forward in the matter of X's hair.
Insufficiency of it, that is.
HERE'S WHERE Y comes into it again.
In one version, X and Y are quarreling about one of Y's stories, and X decides to give ground in order that he might then beg of Y a certain favor—in vulgarest terms, the use of Y's bed.
In a second version, Y remarks on the improved condition of X's hair, whereupon X, for whom everything is a story except stories that are not real, sees the way to make this one "come out," resolving the conflict that people have brought about, this without resort to some damned deus ex machina.