Everything Must Go

by Elizabeth Flock

  This remark—in that it is directed at Craig—requires a response equally personal. Cheryl can no longer serve as interpreter between them. A classic mistake old people make, Henry thinks.

  “Um, that’s not what they sent home in the packet,” Craig says, uncertain. He has mustered all his courage to address Henry but quickly looks at his mother for confirmation.

  “Apparently nowadays,” Cheryl says, “they’re not required to wear a sport jacket for game travel days.”

  “Just a sport shirt,” she is saying. “So maybe you can steer us in the right direction? And since you’re picking it out it will be Craig’s lucky shirt!”

  Craig’s horror is now complete, Henry thinks. He takes them over to the tall stack of clear Lucite cubbyholes filled with neatly stacked folded sport shirts separated by size. One cubbyhole for smalls, two for medium, three for large (the most popular size), one for extra large. XXL and XXXL are too few to warrant their own space so instead are shamefully hidden in the back room, brought out only by request or implication. The entire display is Henry’s least favorite as it reeks of straight pins, cardboard squares and origami-like folds impossible to replicate once a shirt is undone and then passed over. He wishes he could erect a sign above it saying Please—for the love of God—Only Undo These Shirts If You Are Prepared to Buy Them. Cheryl holds up various colors and patterns to Craig’s chest, which is collapsing in agony with every passing minute. After a feeble point from Craig to a dark blue polo buttondown they move to the cash register.

  “You ready, hon?” she asks, knowing the answer. She fumbles in her purse for her car keys and then turns back to Henry and flutters four fingers. “Hope to hear from you soon.”

  “Bye,” Henry says. He watches them go, Craig stalking past him, barreling through the door in front of his mother. Outside he sees Cheryl is shaking her head and preparing the lecture on rudeness he is sure will occupy most of their drive home.

  At stoplights he has seen this going on in cars alongside his: a mother chiding a child either backward via the rearview mirror or sideways to the passenger seat. Her lips moving angrily, hands gripping the steering wheel, waiting for the light to turn, even though that won’t interrupt the tirade, the steady flow of words. Once or twice he has caught the eye of the victim, who silently telegraphs “help me” just as the light changes and the car speeds up to match the words racing out.

  And when this happens something inside Henry aches with envy.

  He replaces the mercifully still-folded shirts and tidies up the stacks. Then he checks his watch.

  Each step is deliberate, one foot carefully, self-consciously, placed in front of the other like an amputee learning to walk with a new prosthetic. He is pretending to amble, as if he’d only just thought “Oh, that’s what it is. I have a date tonight. I knew there was something I was forgetting.” He is hoping that pretending to be nonchalant will give way to genuine indifference. And so one foot steps slowly in front of the other continuing the optimistic charade as he walks down the sidewalk to collect his date.

  From the very slip of the outer edge of the most remote part of the front window Henry peeks. He sees Cathy laughing with a girl he recognizes as Cup-a-Joe’s equivalent of a stock boy. They are folding up their aprons, Cathy throwing her head back in laughter at something the other one has said. Now it is Cathy’s turn to amuse her colleague, which she does with apparent gusto—hands are involved, gestures, an exaggerated facial expression theatrically thrown in. He imagines her equally animated with him this evening, regaling him perhaps with similar stories, anecdotes from the front lines of the service industry. He finds himself smiling at her happiness. And it is with this smile still lingering on his face, in his eyes, that he pushes open the door—not yet locked for the evening (maybe she has forgotten in her eagerness to go on her date, he thinks)—and joins their mirth.

  But the revelry stops the moment the girls turn to face him.

  “Hi,” he says. “How’s it going?”

  “Hi,” Cathy says. She blushes when she looks at him.

  “You all set?” he asks. The girl, the colleague, scurries away, calling out “Bye, Cath” in a singsong way girls have, on her way out the door.

  Cath. He stores the nickname away, thinking it will be so nice when he, too, can refer to her casually in this way. Then again maybe he will continue to call her Cathy—Catherine even—to distinguish himself from her friends. In the way husbands call their “Liz” wives “Elizabeth.”

  “Yeah,” she says. The fact that she blushes when she looks at him ignites an animal surge of protectiveness in him.

  “I’m psyched to see this,” she says. And then she forces and stifles a cough. He is aware she is trying to be cool. First-date cool that requires a measure of nonchalance he, too, is gunning for. But strangely his nervousness decreases as hers increases. He imagines there to be a finite amount of it between them so when one is using it, the other has to wait.

  She holds the door open so he can exit first and she can lock up, taking the key with the little purple dot out of the bottom lock and then inserting the key with the black dot into the top lock.

  The walk down Main Street to the theater is short and involves passing Baxter’s, the hardware store, a long-boarded-up storefront that used to house a children’s toy store and before that a beauty parlor. Next to that, the real estate agency (Train and Assoc. in chipping gold stenciled lettering) that has so many pictures of houses for sale an interested buyer could barely see in through the window to the bustling office. Next to the real estate office is a liquor store that has begun to carry various incongruous items like milk, tampons, razors, dog food and Kaopectate. At the end of Main Street, after Transitions, the women’s clothing store, but before crossing to the small theater where their tickets are already on hold, is a two-pump, full service gas station with a dirty office where, if you don’t pay the attendant with cash, he will take your credit card inside and clip it to a small plastic board. In the winter that plastic board barely ekes through the slit in the window his patron will allow, unwilling to let even a moment’s worth of heat escape the cozy interior. A receipt is traded back for the board and the window is sealed back up. Shutting out the freezing and jump-suited attendant who will then inhale exhaust fumes while blowing on his bare hands on his way back into the tiny office to await his next customer.

  They wait at the corner for the light to change. Henry is aware of a suffocating need to speak. To say something—anything—to fill the silence that is bearing down on both of them. He has already asked her about her day at work, a question that elicited a shrug and a simple “fine.” Panicking, Henry fears silence is rapidly becoming the third wheel on this date. Finally and thankfully Cathy coughs.

  “Are you cold?” Henry asks. “Do you want my jacket?”

  “No, thanks,” she says. But she coughs again so he slides out of his coat.

  “Seriously, I’m hot,” he says. “I was going to take it off, anyway.”

  She smiles at him as he drapes it over her shoulders and his chest swells with a caveman sense of control. He sees her tiny hands—less-benevolent eyes might view them as scrawny—clutching the lapels of his jacket, pulling them closer together, and it stirs an animal pride. He has created warmth where once there was cold.

  When they walk in, Henry’s friend Joey Young waves them over.

  “Hey,” Henry juts his chin out as a greeting, reasoning that anything more enthusiastic would be uncool.

  “Whatdya think?” Joey points to himself and Henry recognizes the shirt he’d sold to him a few days earlier.

  “Looks good, looks good,” Henry says, smiling. And to Cathy says: “I sold him that shirt earlier in the week.”

  “I got your tickets right here,” Joey says. He moves into the booth, edging out a confused teenage ticket-taker, and rings them up.

  The problem is this: because they are at the first showing—the five-thirty—there is no line. Having tickets on hold ma
kes him look too eager. Completely uncool. Henry clears his throat and decides to look surprised that this man would set aside two tickets for him. Cathy does not appear to understand the nature of the transaction, anyway, he thinks, so this won’t be too hard.

  “Wow, thanks.” Henry bends his knees and says this through the mousehole opening in the booth window. “Huh. How about that?” He turns to Cathy in faked surprise.

  “I thought…” Joey starts to give away their plan but Henry interrupts him quickly.

  “Thanks again, man.” He takes his change while steering Cathy to the concession counter. “What’ll you have to eat?”

  “So what, you’re some big star, getting tickets on discount? Jeez,” she says, smiling into the Milk Duds and Jujyfruits.

  Her interpretation is, of course, misguided, but he does not correct her. He is pleased by it. Joey Young is safely back in his movie office doing God knows what movie theater managers do in their offices and Henry revels in her characterization.

  “H-hardly,” he stammers on purpose, to convey just the right “aw shucks” mix of modesty and pride.

  The date is now going well. Henry imagines his biographer following not so far behind, like a private detective. There goes Henry, he writes, pulling two napkins from the dispenser. Henry with his hand tentatively and ever so slightly on the small of Cathy’s back, somewhere underneath his jacket. Henry letting his date lead the way to whatever seat she prefers. Henry helping her remove his own jacket, depositing it on the empty seat beside him. Henry offering the tub for her to hold—“or I can hold it here in the middle if you want.”

  “We’re here early,” Cathy says. “It’s only five-fifteen.”

  “What?”

  Several rows behind them, the biographer’s head snaps up. Uh-oh, he says under his breath.

  “It’s five-fifteen,” she whispers even though the lights had not yet dimmed and there are only six other people in the theater.

  Five-fifteen.

  Shit. Five-fifteen!

  “Oh, my God.” He turns to her and nearly upends the popcorn. “I completely forgot something.”

  “What? What’re you—where are you going?” In one hand she is holding the soda he has handed her, in the other she clutches the bucket of popcorn. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No!” he practically yells at her. Really it is a regular volume but for a movie theater it comes across aggressively. Calibrate, he tells himself silently. Calibrate. “Don’t get up. I’ll be right back. No, seriously…sit back down. I just forgot something. I’ll run up the street and be back before the previews even.”

  Reluctantly she sits back down, clearly bewildered at his frenzy to leave.

  “Is it the store?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” he says, crab-walking out of the aisle. “It’s something I forgot to do at the store. I’ll be right back.”

  Main Street is a straight shot perpendicular to the theater but never has Henry been more aware of its slope. The muscles in his legs are twitching by the time he reaches his car.

  He nearly runs the only red light at the top of the street, turning right just in front of an oncoming car that justifiably honks.

  Bridge Avenue—the road he is now careening along—takes him past mostly single-family homes. Starter houses. Houses young families are thrilled to pay mortgages on.

  Five minutes have passed. Henry pictures Cathy looking over her shoulder for him as the theater starts to fill up. Sorry, she will say, this seat’s taken. And other couples will file past her winched-up legs—women never stand to let people usher past.

  Six minutes. He pulls up to his childhood home and lets himself in the side door.

  Don’t look—no time today. There is no time. This is Henry talking to himself under his breath as he rushes past and through the door that leads into the kitchen, stale with the smell of spattered grease from meals long ago. He figures he has gone back and forth past it probably more than a million times in his life. The thing is—in telling himself not to look he is thinking about it. So he might as well have looked. The time expended thinking don’t look is undoubtedly greater than the time spent taking that one glance at the inked-in names and height marks on the door frame. There has not been a time he had passed through the doorway and not noted the markings. It is superstition. Like when the Yankees won the pennant in 1976 and he happened to be wearing a checked flannel shirt and so from then on he pulled out that same shirt every year during the playoffs.

  “Hello?” Henry calls out without bothering to close the front door. “Mom? Dad?”

  No lights are on in the house.

  The living room is silent. Empty. The only sign she has been here is the glass on the coffee table with melting ice cubes. So she’s not too far away, he thinks.

  Heart thumping with hurry, he takes the stairs two at a time, practically vaulting up to the master bedroom with its upholstered headboard and matching comforter that used to be fluffy but now is flattened with years of bodies punching down any remnants of the synthetic down.

  “Mom?”

  She is facedown on top of the comforter. He puts his face right up close to hers and is reassured to feel her thick breathing. Out cold.

  He turns her over and sees the imprint of the comforter on the right side of her face. But then he remembers about the vomit and how someone can die this way…choking on their own bile…and half turns her so she is on her side.

  He takes her shoes off and pulls her up so that her head rests on the pillow.

  Back downstairs he scrawls a note to his father on a blank legal pad in the center of his father’s desk in the darkened study. Hi, Dad. I was here. Mom’s upstairs asleep. See you tomorrow. H. He turns on the desk lamp to serve as a spotlight on the evidence that he had indeed checked in but he purposely leaves the time off the note. Normally he would have written 5:15 p.m. at the top. His father won’t question it. He is sure of this.

  Unless…unless his father was here at five-fifteen, checking his watch, waiting. Five-twenty even. He might have just left, only moments before Henry’s car came screeching up the block.

  He has no time left to figure out what to do. He pictures Cathy standing up to look back over the sea of heads in the now-darkened theater. He imagines her leaving. Worse, he imagines Joey Young walking up the aisle with his flashlight landing on her, puzzling out why he had left her there alone, telling her how Henry had even requested tickets put aside for this date.

  The car screams back up Bridge. Its blinker, signaling a left turn down Main Street, sounds Edgar Allen Poe loud. “Why is this light so long?” he says out loud. Jesus.

  To save time he should drive directly to the theater, but he can’t because he’d told her it was something at the store. He would have had no need to get into his car, which had been parked in a now-occupied space directly in front of Baxter’s. Maybe she hadn’t noticed where he’d parked. Several spaces down—twelve to be exact—there is an empty one which he jerks into, barely remembering to lock the doors in his haste.

  He sprints back down Main, now grateful for the gentle hill. Ticket stub, ticket stub, he is saying to himself, trying to wrestle it from his pocket as he is running.

  The rush of cold outside air floods into the seat with Henry.

  “Hey,” he says, stifling his panting, “sorry about that.” The glow of previews lights her face.

  “Is everything okay?” she whispers sideways, without tearing her eyes from the screen. In between previews for The Jewel of the Nile and Fletch she looks at him and hands him back his drink.

  “Yeah, no, everything’s fine,” he says. He takes a deep breath and exhales as quietly as he can.

  Chapter nine

  1977

  “Boys, I’ve got to tell you, I like what I’m seeing out there,” the coach is saying. “So I’ve decided, Powell, you’re starting this week. We’re going to feature you if you can keep up some of the stuff I been seeing after hours….” He pauses to let it sink in tha
t they’ve been watched. “You think you’re up to it?”

  Henry’s attention does not waver from the coach but Henry feels Steve Wilson nodding, too.

  This is one of those moments, he thinks. One of those moments I’ll tell my kids about. “I remember the day it all turned around for me, kids,” Henry hears his elderly self talking to the children gathered at his feet. “If you apply yourself like I did back there on that football field, every day, after practice, bone tired,” Elder Henry says, “then you can make it happen for yourself. Like I did.” It occurs to Henry this will warrant at least one chapter in his biography. Words like underdog will join triumph and, again, the reader will be reminded of the Extraordinary Life of Henry Powell.

  Somewhere off in the distance a radio is playing Leo Sayer. Henry is thinking he wishes he had dried off properly before talking with the coach because his wet skin is now covered in goose bumps. Also, since Steve Wilson was already dressed, he feels naked even though he has his towel around his hips. But the towel is ratty, threadbare after so many washes.

  “You with me, Powell?”

  “Yeah,” Henry says. “I mean, yes, sir. Coach.”

  “Good,” the coach says. “Tomorrow we’ll get started building plays into the rotation. Go home. Get some sleep.”

  “Yes, sir,” they say in unison.

  Outside the gym locker room Wilson says “way to go” to Henry.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Thanks,” he says. “See ya.”

  Henry wonders if this means they will no longer be able to work drills after practice.

  It is still light out when he emerges from the gym. He shields his eyes salute-fashion, letting them adjust before setting off for home. He does not mind walking home when the weather is still relatively nice. His knapsack does not start to feel heavy until he turns onto his street so he has no reason to complain. The only drawback, he thinks, is that the two-mile walk sucks up time. There is barely enough time as it is between school, practices, work and homework.

  But then, a miracle.

  “Henry!” The arm is waving out the driver’s side window, accompanying the voice calling his name. He turns toward his mother’s voice, so startled to hear it but so happy not to have to keep walking. The sun is hitting the windshield so he does not know until the family station wagon advances toward him that his mother is in her nightgown.