Driving in Cars with Homeless Men

by Kate Wisel

  “It doesn’t matter,” Selim says.

  “What did you say?” A hot day in Chekka when I was too little to speak, the sun in my eyes. I remember Rima crying into her hands under the tent. Crying because my father would not come to see us. Because my father had disappeared, and Rima lived her whole life inside me.

  “I said listen to me.” Selim’s eyes go vacant.

  “Is that supposed to mean something?” I back up to the door and Selim nods.

  I want to fly fourteen hours over the Atlantic through fat clouds and watch the low blue swirl as the plane nears. I want to walk through the Beirut airport with my head held high as I drift towards Selim like in a dream. Only to pivot robotically like some fucking model. Out of spite, just like Rima. I want to fly home with my mouth hung open, sleeping dreamlessly. If Selim is my father, I don’t want to know. I do not have that dream.

  I turn back coolly to the double doors of the building with my palms up and crash them open. The sidewalk is white with the sun’s savage sparkle. I walk in slow, vulnerable steps past ambulances parked crooked, strewn plastic cups, the garble of radios on hips until a cop grabs my elbow. I want to rip my arm free, say fuck off, walk alone, but in the street a man lies in neon running shorts, his body surrounded by EMTs. They kneel in their dark pants, scissoring his shorts clean off.

  I let the cop take me, and as we pass I see the running man’s head cocked to the side and still, darkened by blood. I walk with the cop quickly, letting him guide me away. He leads, all the way down the stairs at Park Street into the dim station, where all we hear is the scrape of the rails and a rumbling forward. He holds my elbow firmly until an advancing train bullets towards us.

  The doors open, then close in the time he releases me, before I can turn to see his face. I make my palm a cast around my forearm, holding on to it so carefully as if it is broken. The window whips by shades of blackness, blurred concrete, the eventual flicker of light and greenery. I walk all the way to JP, to Rima’s, the only place I can think to go.

  On these quiet streets, in the weird warmth, I see my spectral self. The nights I ran out for sumac and onions, blue ink from Rima’s list on my fingers. Then older, with a backpack, running away towards the woods. Birds cross through branches, ghost into the depths of leaves but tweet like jazz, unpredictable, alive. At Rima’s, I fumble with my spare till she rips open the door, squinting and pissed. I look into her eyes, see a whole world between us. And myself, her whole world.

  She yanks me in by the wrist, but I am ravaged by the absence of his grip.

  SERENA

  HOW I DANCE

  IN THE HOTEL ROOM, I hold the champagne like a rifle and aim towards the glass painting. A pastel sunset so boring I could shatter it. Before I can say “I’m kidding,” James grabs the bottle, shakes it, then pops. We show up to the reception a little buzzed off the champagne and Coronas from the hotel’s ice bucket. Dad is marrying a woman named Leona. It’s polite to call her a woman—she’s only two years older than James. She works as a waitress at Dad’s new restaurant. The room is filled mostly with her relatives, a DJ with half his head buzzed into the retarded shapes of lightning bolts, and a photographer who waves us together at the table for photos. I want to explain, say, “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t know these people.” Even their laughter has an accent.

  The rest of them are Dad’s people. Rio back from Miami, who recalls my height the last time he saw me by gesturing to the floor. Sharkey, who sulks at a table in the back and does not look at me with his bloated face. I pivot towards the bar and order three gin and tonics. “Strong,” I say. I make sure no one’s watching and down one, two. I bring the other to James. We wander over to the vinyl dance floor. It’s the prom I never went to, a hundred silver balloons bumped up against the ceiling.

  We trail our hands overhead to catch strings. I pull a balloon down to my chin so it taps my mouth, making the balloon a microphone. Lip-synching “Let’s Stay Together.” James spots me across the crowd of strangers who dance like a bunch of Sims on coke, then reaches up to tug down his own string. He’s Bono, holding the string down with his foot like a mic stand, all open arms and balloon flapping like wind while he lip-synchs with conviction. I pull down a new string, wrapping the thin ribbon around my neck, silver balloon head floating up. I hold both hands over my throat, tongue out, my eyes crossed in a choke.

  James dies laughing.

  From here I can see Leona cutting steak, my dad’s arm outstretched across the delicate crisscross of her chair. James whips down a string, pulls it through his legs, then giddyups, trotting across the dance floor to the bar. He signals the bartender for two more stiff drinks. I yank down a string and hold the balloon to my belly, smirking at James. He holds a hand over his eyes as he sips out of the tiny black straw. I’m in labor, hiking the silvery balloon up my dress, the semen-colored head popping out. I wail, make like I’m about to faint. A little crowd gathers around me, shuffling to the beat. They snap their fingers to a Three 6 Mafia song and assume I’m the one with problems.

  James kneels down to where I’ve fainted and takes the newborn from my arms. He cradles it. We bust up laughing, an inaudible cackle against the speakers. He extends his arm above us, fake camera in his hand as we pose. I’m propped on my elbows, the lighting making spots against tablecloths. My dad kisses Leona on the hand as they get up from their table.

  James pulls down a string so he is face-to-face with his wobbling opponent, like “What, what,” then head-butts the balloon. I gear up both arms like a Bowflex, pulling two balloons down against my chest to show off my new boob job. James mouths, Ew! as I release the strings from my fingers, the dance floor turning a soft LED red.

  A slow song comes on and everyone turns as Leona lifts her dress, then wraps her arms around my dad as he dips her back slowly. Turned upside down, she is truly beautiful, with milky skin and a Colgate smile. It’s polite to call her beautiful, when there are other things I could say.

  I draw down my last string. James is pink-faced, tie swung over his back, staggering with his gin and tonic, waiting to see what I’ll do next. If my dad looked at me, just once, instead of brushing his nose against Leona’s, he would see me nine years old. If I were a photo, he could have written on the back of it: Serena, Balloon.

  But I bring it to the floor, grind my heel against the string to keep it down. I give the balloon mouth-to-mouth, cheeks thinning, a paler silver. I want to show how I can save a life. I blow till there are tears in my eyes. It’s so beautiful to give something all you have, to try. But now most of the couples are clutching each other as they slow-dance, taking turns raising eyebrows at me over rotating shoulders.

  I look up at James, scream, “Help!” My voice distorted and squeaky with helium. James dives down to the floor, pumping his palms in CPR as the rubber shrivels in my cupped hands. The music cuts as the DJ tilts his head. The dance floor is silent until a sound like chipmunk laughter rushes up my throat. I slump onto James, searching the eyes of the crowd. Eyes all around me, conscious as cameras. Eyes that don’t believe my emergency.

  TELL US THINGS

  MOM WAKES US UP in the middle of the night.

  She says, “Hello, my sleepyheads,” and, “Baby, I know.” She says, “Hold still,” as she tugs coats on over our pj’s, then takes us out to the driveway and buckles us into the van. She says, “Brrr!” from the front seat. We wait, chattering our teeth, till the ice melts on the windshield.

  On the drive into the city, Caleb slumps asleep in his car seat. I sit next to him and poke at his veiny eyelids, open them slow so his eyes flutter up. I imagine he’s dreaming about bottles, coffee tables, all the things you get to see, crawling around on the carpet. When he starts to fuss, Mom catches eyes from the rearview. My hands go back in my lap.

  It’s so boring, to drive and drive in the dark past the Citgo sign. James and I stay awake the whole ride. We say, “Tell us things. Tell us stories.”

  “Be specific,” Mom says.
She looks back at us with her eyebrows up.

  “I don’t know,” James says.

  I say, “Love story.”

  Mom tells us the story about how she met Dad when he cooked at Icarus, but we already know how it goes. Parts I remember most are how Dad wore suspenders when nobody else did.

  “Crazy guy,” Mom says.

  “How crazy?” we ask.

  “Hmm, messy-hair crazy,” she decides. She turns the wheel, Fenway all green lights and empty sidewalks. Dad walked up to her table on New Year’s Eve.

  “Dark and tall,” she says. “Like you’ll be, Jamesy.”

  James rests his chin in his palm, his pinkie dug into his lip. Dad took her walking late at night and showed her Sam Adams statues in the Common. There are only a few cars on the road. Mom turns up the heat.

  We wait for Dad in the back parking lot. Mom rests her knees against the wheel, the snow piling up on the dash. When you’re opening a new restaurant, you have to work very hard, and everything is very. Very hot, very late at night, very sorry we are so very sleepy. Waiting for my dad to come out takes forever.

  “When are we going to be home?” I ask.

  “Do I love you?” Mom says. She waits.

  I nod, yes, and she says, “Then you are.”

  Mom tells us the story about the day I was born. It snowed four feet that cold night in March. Dad was cooking at L’Espalier. Mom drove herself down the same snowy roads we drove through to get here, past the Citgo sign, Fenway, and the dark water. On the other end of the phone, Dad said, “Call her Snowy.” Like how he wanted to call James Mookie if the Red Sox won the series two years before. But he was too late. She’d named me Serena. Nothing to do with the storm.

  She turns back to give Caleb a paci, but she’s run out of stories. The guys standing by the back door are crouching on milk crates, flicking cigarettes. Dad comes out the back.

  He says, “Attaboys!”

  They say, “See you Jef-AY.”

  They stand so he can pat them real hard on the back like he’s saving them from a choke. Then he climbs into the front seat of the van. The light comes on. His shirt is stained with red splotches. The door slams as he leans back onto the headrest. It’s dark again as the car fills with his scent: soy sauce, onion, sweat. Mom looks at him gripping his hair back as she’s pulling out. If he shook it, flour would dust his shoulders.

  On the ride back, I copy James. He’s really asleep. I fake dreams to seem more believable, letting my head hang on my shoulders with hair in my face like Cousin Itt. Streetlights on Mom’s cheek when we pass over the bridge.

  “Please,” Mom whispers. “If you did it then, you’ll do it again.”

  “Goddammit,” he says. “Shut up. Just shut up.”

  Mom turns off the bridge and I know we’re taking him to Columbus Ave. She parks and the lights come back on. She turns, holding up a finger because she knows I’m awake. They walk up the steps to the door of Dad’s new apartment, but I can’t see them past the gate. The orange click click click of the van wakes up Caleb when Mom rushes back with a scarf around her mouth.

  Mom takes us to the new restaurant for dinner on Friday night. We take the T eleven stops. She wants a picture of James and me outside Rocco’s, but it’s freezing.

  Mom says, “Act like you like each other,” as she waves us closer together.

  There are too many people walking past on the sidewalk, and I don’t smile, not once. We walk up dark wood stairs and sit in a black booth in the back. It’s our booth. Dad told us so. It’s raised so you can see the whole scene through pillars: a bright blue rug with confetti polka dots, tables with handcrafted roosters and pigs, men in suits who sip on dark drinks and women dangling forks over their plates, and the highest ceiling, higher than our church’s. Dad and Lester Levine hired painters, and they stood on ladders for weeks drawing old naked angels that Dad called rococo and Mom called Gothic, then insane.

  By Christmas, famous people are coming into Rocco’s. There’s frenzy by the door with Marco, the doorman who looks like a CIA agent. Roxanne stands at the front in a black skirt. She leads people all around. She weaves through tables with a big black menu held tight to her chest. Everything about her is black. Her hair, her huge dark eyes, her bra strap. She smiles when she sees us and twists down in her skirt, shaking a tin can of lollipops. Mom waves her off and pulls us forward, saying we’re not supposed to talk to Roxanne. She’s here to work, not to talk to us.

  But I like Roxanne. I want to talk to her. In the fall, she took us to the Science Museum on a Tuesday while Mom cut hair. We took the T and passed Northeastern, the school she goes to. We put our hands against the glass to see dinosaur bones and then curled up in our seats for the movie. The lions on the giant screen licked their cubs, carried them with their teeth by the scruff of their necks. Later, in the bathroom, Roxanne slipped a lipstick out of her purse and bent down, her necklace hiding beneath the buttons of her shirt.

  “Make your mouth an O,” she said, her eyes crossing over my lips as she sketched. “So pretty,” she said, then hoisted me to the mirror. I pressed my lips, they parted pink, and I saw it. I was.

  At our booth, Mom scoots us all the way in. Sometimes we eat with rock stars or Red Sox pitchers. When Harrison Ford came to eat at our table, we lay on Mom’s lap while a white screen dropped from the ceiling. We watched a black-and-white film of a prom from the fifties. The girl dancers swung back smiling and looked like Mom without the color, the way she laughs with her tongue between her teeth and holds people close, your heart like a sponge in her hand.

  “Those are called poodle skirts,” she told me, her breath tickling my ear.

  I whispered back, “Who is Harrison Ford?” Everyone laughed.

  Tonight, there are no famous people and I’m glad. Mom runs her fingers through my hair, fans it out across my shoulders. “Can I cut your hair, baby?” she says.

  She’s wanted to cut it all year. She wants to give me bangs. Short, like Gidget, but I won’t let her. I want my hair to grow back long so she can braid it like she did when I was little.

  “Nope,” I say, shaking my head as my hair flies free from her fingers.

  Sharkey comes to our table and holds out a tin can full of crayons. James and I pick out our favorite colors, and he gets all the good ones: forest green, jet black, navy blue. Sharkey waves waiters over to our booth. They bring us cheesy flautas that we lift to our mouths as the goo dribbles off the plate. Sharkey works for Dad. Dad’s the boss of Sharkey, but Sharkey’s the boss of everyone else. Sharkey isn’t his real name, but no one here has a name like Sam or Bob.

  “Ugly picture, Rena Bird,” Sharkey says. He kisses the top of my head, then leaves his hand by my neck. I get shivers in my middle, the way I did when Roxanne dragged the color across my lips. And secretly, I think Sharkey is a funny guy, because he’s handsome, in the way only funny guys can be. He’s pale like me with blue veins through his forehead. I’m trying to draw his face on the back of my menu with a white crayon, but I can’t make his blue eyes look like the ocean when the water creeps toward your feet. And I can’t make his hands move, the way he talks with them, like Italian men do, but he isn’t Italian—he’s straight from Ireland like Mom. We watch his hands as he leans over the side of our table and sends us colored plates.

  “Eat, eat, eat!” he says, with his apron folded over at the waist. He tries to make Mom laugh when he says her name. I look up at her when she does. Her laugh doesn’t sound like other ladies’. She gets breathless and hits the table with her palm, her eye wrinkles wincing. She gets pink. Caleb bounces his knees on her lap, his tiny fists gripped tight around her fingers, spit dripping from his only tooth onto her jeans.

  If Sharkey were my dad, I think he would be sitting next to my mom in the booth, instead of leaning over the side of our table. James and I would face them, and Sharkey would hang his arm over my mom’s shoulders like they were in high school. He’d watch her get pink. He’d let Caleb wrap his finge
rs over his and he’d lift him into the air like Caleb was a superhero. Sharkey would butter my bread and call me Rena Bird, and I wouldn’t be mad about it anymore.

  Inside the restaurant the candles glow in the whites of eyes, but downstairs the kitchen is like a different channel on TV. It’s easy to crawl out from under the table, freeze like you’re going to be caught, then sit quietly on the stairs with the rubber mats and bits of lettuce. I’m expecting for someone to pull me up by the arm, but the cooks are all scrambling around in aprons, bumping into each other. They wear backwards hats, wiping sweat from their foreheads with their shoulders. Stoves and refrigerators match knives and pans. Steam blows from a pot as knives smack through meat onto wooden boards.

  Dad holds a giant pan’s handle with a damp cloth, red sores spotting up the length of his arm. Tape on his knuckles and a stub where his thumb was sliced clean. The pasta in the pan flies up as he flicks his wrist and catches it back, fire underneath like a ghost’s jaw thinning down electric blue. Dad’s head is bent but his hands are quick and moving, pinching salt from high above a plate. He chops an onion to bits, stirs and tastes sauce with a wooden spoon.

  Lester the owner skips down over me on the stairs with his heels clicking. He puts his hand on Dad’s shoulder, but Dad keeps working. Lester has white hair like a priest. Dad says Lester treats him like his only son. Lester fostered him when Dad was James’s age exactly. He sent Mom and Dad to St. Martin for a honeymoon, and bought the house we live in on Kenney Street. Dad stirs and chops, Lester behind him looking red-faced.

  “Have a glass of black champagne,” he says, holding up his wineglass.

  “Church is in session,” Dad says, waving Lester away. He turns back to the counter where a pig in black sunglasses sits dead. She’s belly-down on the cutting board till Dad flips her and thrusts both arms into her stomach. He hacks her ribs out one by one, cleaning the bones till they’re dry, going from the belly to the shoulder, cutting her into smaller and smaller pieces. Then he gets to her tail, the rag over his shoulder spotted with finger-streaks of blood. Rio brings me a strawberry, and I chew through to the stem.