What We All Want

by Michelle Berry

  She touches his back and he stiffens. “Don’t you want to fool around?” She sits up and takes a gulp of his beer.

  Billy clears his throat. Grace gets up from the bed and stands in front of him.

  Billy thinks about it all. He finishes his bottle of beer and places it on the floor. He thinks about her horrible little room, how depressing the whole thing is. The whole situation reminds him of his sister and mother, of lives wasted. What he really wants now is a job at the golf course. He wants that much more than he wants Grace.

  Billy touches her waist. It feels strange to him to touch actual hips, not just fat. Grace touches his shoulders, runs her hands across them. This feels good to Billy but not as good as he thought it might feel. Nothing is happening to his body and this begins to worry him.

  Grace lifts her shirt off in one sweep and her large breasts dangle down the front of her chest. Billy wasn’t expecting that. He expected a bra, at least, but there is no bra on now (removed through the armholes of her shirt in the bathroom while her mother was wiping) and her nipples are huge and unnerving. Billy can see a few tiny black hairs around each nipple. He is that close.

  “Oh God,” he says.

  “Yes,” Grace says. She caresses her nipples, making them erect. She has her eyes closed.

  Billy reaches up to touch her breasts with both hands but nothing happens. It feels as if he’s touching two balloons filled with warm water. He’s too drunk. Grace moans.

  “Shh,” Billy whispers.

  “She’s deaf,” Grace says. “She won’t hear a thing.”

  Billy stands up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I can’t,” Billy says. “I just can’t. I’m sorry. It isn’t you.”

  Grace wonders, for a moment, why she does this, why she has these men in to her home. She watches Billy stumble to the bedroom door and unlock it.

  “I have to go,” Billy says. “I’m really sorry. Maybe some other time.”

  “No problem,” Grace shouts. “No problem at all.” She throws a pillow at Billy as she watches him move away from her and rush past her mother and out the front door.

  Grace is thirty-seven years old and not getting any younger. It occurs to her that all she’s doing is waiting, waiting for someone to be nice to her. That’s what we all want she thinks, a little kindness, a little loving, the feel of a warm body close by.

  Dick doesn’t think he’s going to have any fun in the funeral home.

  Bringing Hilary here was a bad idea. Her bad idea. He turns on the lights and starts to give Hilary the tour but then Hilary turns off the lights and reaches in the dark for his hand. She finds it. Her touch is warm and damp.

  Hilary is shaking.

  “Like we used to,” she whispers. “Remember? When we were kids?” With the lights off it seems easy to hold a man’s hand. Hilary suddenly feels larger in the dark.

  “I don’t know,” Dick says. “This doesn’t feel right.”

  “Come on. Please.”

  They walk through the building together. Hilary has her eyes closed. Dick leads the way. He is sure-footed and stepping lightly. He squeezes her small hand in his.

  “Hilary,” Dick suddenly says. And then all she can hear is her name being whispered around her head as they walk. Over and over. Hill-aaa-reee. Hilary. With each step he whispers her name.

  Whisper.

  Hilary walks down the stairs to the basement and opens her eyes. But it is so dark that there is no difference between her open eyes and her closed eyes. Open. Shut. Open. Blackness.

  “Hilary.”

  Her red dress is silky and soft and Hilary uses her free hand to touch it, smooth it over her belly. Dick’s whisper is gentle, like light rain. Like a tear falling off a cheek onto a table. Wet. Liquidy. Something lurking, a catch in the throat, a tightening of the “aaa” in Hilary.

  “Is this the embalming room?” Hilary says.

  “Yes.”

  Dick leads her into the room. He doesn’t know why he brought her into this room.Why he didn’t take her into his office or into the furnace room. He supposes it is because they often came to this room. Before they saw his father. This was the tempting room, the room that symbolized death, the room that gave them both courage.

  Dick shuts the door. There are two bodies lying on the tables. One of them is Hilary’s mother. Dick is afraid Hilary will want to turn the lights on but she says nothing, she holds his hand and he leads her to an empty table. The darkness is complete. No matter where she moves her eyes all she sees is black.

  “Lift me up on it,” she says. “You used to kiss me here, do you remember?”

  “Yes,” Dick says. And he lifts her tiny body, so light, so angular, onto the table.

  Sometimes when he would kiss her, she would forget all about the laundry, the dishes, the housecleaning. She would forget about her father and forget to wonder why he left them. And then the kiss would end and she would go home feeling lighter.

  “Will you kiss me now?”

  “What?”

  “Will you? Just pretend we’re young again.” In the blackness her small voice is strong. She is amazed at her boldness. She doesn’t feel shy at all.

  They never kissed anywhere else. Only in the embalming room. Only in pitch blackness.

  Dick leans in to where he expects Hilary is sitting on the table. He can’t see anything. But she isn’t sitting. She is lying down. Hilary can’t tell if her eyes are open or closed. She blinks. Dick touches her face with his hands. He wants to kiss her but he feels frozen. He can’t move.

  God, his father made him sick. And he feels suddenly sick again. The Japanese food churns in his stomach.

  He tries to look at Hilary. He peers into the darkness but he can’t see anything.

  “Kiss me,” she says again. Erase time, she thinks. “Please.” Instead of kissing her, Dick puts his hand on her stomach and slowly moves it around. He hears her breathe in sharply. He feels her hip bones and rib cage. She’s so thin. And then he moves his hand up between her breasts and runs his finger along her clavicle, traces the line he would cut if she were dead.

  “My father,” he whispers. “I’m sorry he did that.” His hands move around her neck.

  Hilary sits up quickly.

  “Don’t touch my neck,” she says. “Please don’t ever touch my neck.” She jumps off the table. “I want to leave now.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to —”

  The room is utter blackness.”I’m frightened,” Hilary says. “Please.”

  Dick moves to comfort her. He follows the sound of her breathing. She is stumbling in the dark, closer to her mother’s body than Dick would like her to be. He touches her arm, then puts his arms around her and pulls her close. “Do you think my father … do you think he—was it often?” he whispers.

  Hilary says nothing, her face buried in his smell.

  “God, Hilary. They were dead.”

  “Worse things have happened in the world.” Hilary whispers as she pulls herself away from him. “There’s nothing you can do to change things once the person is dead.”

  “Which person?”

  “Your father,” Hilary whispers. “My mother.”

  Dick leads her out of the room without turning on the lights. In the hallway he turns on the lights. “I’m sorry,” he says. “About the kiss.”

  “I don’t like my neck being touched,” Hilary says, quietly. Her face is flushed. “I’ve never liked my neck being touched.”

  They walk slowly back up the stairs and they stand together outside of the funeral home in the cold night.

  “Will you come upstairs?” Dick asks. “I could make coffee.”

  Hilary follows Dick up the rickety metal stairs to his apartment. Dick makes coffee. He takes it to the couch and then turns on the TV. Hilary sits and puts her feet up on the coffee table.

  “This feels comfortable,” Hilary says. “It feels so familiar.”

  “I don’t know what to say
about my father,” Dick says.

  Hilary nods. “Sometimes I studied with you over there by the

  window,” Hilary says. “Do you remember?”

  “You used to cheat.”

  “You were smarter than me. I had to save myself.” Hilary pauses. “It all seems so useless now.”

  Her mother below her. Hilary above, having coffee. She thinks about her home, about her dolls and her puzzle and the loneliness that will hit her hard when everyone leaves. She wonders where the Madonna’s face is, where she lost those puzzle pieces. Where could those puzzle pieces have gone?

  “Can I hold your hand?”

  Hilary nods.

  Dick takes her hand.

  He wonders what the rocks on Hilary’s living room floor mean, he wonders about all the dolls. He wonders how it happens that horrible things can be buried so deeply in your soul. The memory of his father’s sickness came crashing down on him today. The impossibility of it all, the horror he experienced from watching it and then the quick burial of it in his subconscious. Always there, lurking, just not on the surface.

  Hilary thinks of how her mother’s death took forever and yet was over in seconds.

  Dick watches TV but he can’t focus on what is going on. He is holding this woman’s hand.

  She’s below me now, Hilary thinks. Right underneath me. Hilary moves close to Dick. He lets go of her hand and puts his arm around her shoulders. He turns the volume up on the TV.

  Like a married couple, Hilary thinks.

  Maybe the rocks are covering dirty carpet, Dick thinks, or scratched-up linoleum, or unfinished wood. Maybe it’s a practical solution to an expensive problem. He thinks that Hilary’s dolls are perhaps a collection of antiques, perhaps they are valuable, maybe even an inheritance.

  The doctor said that her mother would soon lose consciousness. He said that she would drift into another world. He said that she would stop crying out all the time, begging for morphine, begging for release. But she didn’t. And Hilary couldn’t stand the sounds.

  Dick’s arm around her is warm and forgiving. She feels safe.

  Hilary prayed all Thursday morning long, prayed until her arms hurt from holding them up and clasping her hands together, prayed until her faith stopped. Until something in her body gave, like a dry leaf breaking in half, a bitter, crackling sound to Hilary’s ears.

  Hilary leans into Dick. She is so tired. She looks up into his face. He has fallen asleep and she didn’t notice. There was no relaxing of muscle, no heaviness of the arm on her shoulder. Hilary stares at the TV, at the flashing images A man runs across the screen but Hilary can’t seem to focus on what he is doing. She closes her eyes. She shuts everything out.

  11. Back from the Dead

  Hope is all Billy needs as he sits in the hospital waiting room with his pregnant daughter and a large cup of coffee straight from the machine, lukewarm and watery. He feels as if his actions last night led to this. If he hadn’t gone home with Grace…if he hadn’t touched her breasts…then none of this would have happened. Tess would be fine. Billy is itching for a drink right now. He wishes he had something strong to put in his coffee.

  “She’s had this coming,” Sue says. “She’s just so damn fat.”

  “Shut up, Sue.”

  “But it’s true.” Sue says, “Where did you go last night? You came crawling in this morning looking like shit.”

  Billy stands up. He wants so badly to raise his hand and knock some sense into his daughter, teach her a little respect, but he sees the people around them in the waiting room looking at him, staring him up and down. He has never before hit his daughter but something in him is growing and he is afraid of what he might do.

  The people in the waiting room are also looking at Sue, at her garish makeup and black clothing, at her piercings. Billy wonders when Sue has the time to put on all that makeup or if she, perhaps, sleeps wearing it. He thinks of her pillow in her bedroom and what it must look like covered in makeup and he realizes that he hasn’t been in her bedroom for months and months. For quite some time. Maybe, Billy sighs and sits back down, maybe if he’d just go into her room every once in a while, show some interest, none of this would have happened. Maybe she wouldn’t be pregnant.

  Billy spent the night in his car in front of the Greenhomes Minigolf Course. In the parking lot. He slept sitting up and now he’s stiff and uncomfortable and his breath stinks.

  He wonders if he should pray. He tries to remember when he prayed last. Billy remembers going to Sunday school when his father lived with them. But all that stopped when his dad shut the door behind him and disappeared.

  Billy remembers praying for the Oldsmobile and he got it. He prayed for the house and he got it.

  He prayed that Sue would be born with all fingers and toes and he got that (he should have prayed for a brain for the girl, he knows now).

  But he gave up praying recently when his two biggest wishes, that he would find another job and that his daughter wasn’t really pregnant, didn’t come true.

  “I’d pray,” Billy says to Sue, “but praying is for the gullible. Praying is for idiots. It doesn’t get you anything.” Billy taps his forehead. Sue looks at him. “Real life is for the smart ones.”

  “So?”

  “I should have left a long time ago,” Billy says. “I should have moved away from home. I should have started my own photo-finishing shop. But I stayed here, damn it, and life went around in circles and now I’m too old, too far in debt, to skip out and move on.”

  “Why are you telling me this? Why are you telling me that you wanted to leave us?”

  “I’m telling you this because it’s not too late for you to learn something about life, Sue. Soak it up now, because soon”—Billy points to her belly—”you won’t have time to concentrate on anything but that baby.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Sue says. “I’m going to stay right here with my friends.”

  “Your friends? Jesus, Sue, your friends won’t mean anything in a year or two.”

  “Mr. Mount?” A nurse pats him on the arm. “Will you come with me, please?”

  “Is she okay? Is Tess all right?”

  “Come this way, please. The doctor would like to talk to you.” “I’m coming too,” Sue says. “I’m coming.”

  The nurse looks Sue up and down. She shakes her head. Sue gives the nurse the finger behind her back. She follows her father and the nurse down the long, white corridor of the hospital which is strangely empty. Shining. Gleaming A young man, a doctor, in a white coat meets them in front of Tess’s room in intensive care. He takes Billy’s arm from the nurse and smiles openly at Sue. Sue scowls. Billy thinks it’s strange that so many new people have touched him lately.

  “Let’s sit here for a minute,” the doctor says.

  “Oh, God,” Billy says, “she’s dead.”

  “First thing’s first,” the doctor says.

  “Is she dead? Oh, God.”

  The doctor looks at Sue. “Your mother”—he looks at Billy—”your wife, is fine. Just fine.”

  Billy feels like crying. He swallows loudly. He releases a gush of air, a choking sound.

  “She’s had a mild heart attack.”

  “I told you,” Sue says. “She’s too damn fat.”

  “Sue.” Billy glances at the doctor. For a minute there his life almost turned completely upside down. For a minute there he almost lost something. Now he feels right-sideup again and sitting straight. Now he feels solid.

  “She’s right, in effect,” the doctor says. “Mrs. Mount’s heart can’t take all that weight.”

  The doctor says she needs rest. He says she needs to lose weight, stay away from fatty foods, exercise, stop smoking …

  “She doesn’t smoke.”

  …eat properly, get plenty of sleep, have no stress, be able to sit down and put her feet up for a while, take time to smell the flowers, be quiet and peaceful, do yoga, perhaps, or Tai Chi, something, anything, to make her live a long and happ
y life.

  But for a little while she needs to stay in the hospital and be hooked up to machines to monitor her heart. They need to make sure she is fine, that she won’t relapse, that it won’t happen again. Just for a while. She can go home on Wednesday. It was a small heart attack, a blip on the screen, nothing to worry about this time.

  Billy thanks the doctor. He shakes the man’s hand.

  “You can see her now,” the doctor says. “Just for a bit. Try not to upset her.”

  Billy pauses at the door to Tess’s room, he hangs back a bit and watches Sue slouch up to her mother’s side. He stands at the door and takes it all in. Tess strapped to machines, looking pale and drawn, looking sick of the world. Sue stands beside her mother, not knowing what to do, fidgeting, looking like the child she once was. Billy stands back.

  “Come here,” Tess says. She pats the bed. “Billy, come here.”

  Billy walks into the room. He feels moisture on his face. A sudden coolness.

  “My God,” Tess says. “Are you crying?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are,” Sue says. “Feel your face. Look in here.” Sue holds up a makeup mirror she finds in her purse.

  Billy moves to the mirror. Takes it from Sue. He stares at his reflection. His face is contorted, squinched like a bawling baby. His eyes are red and leaking tears, his nose is running. “I didn’t think I was crying,” Billy blubbers.

  “You’re crying, honey.” Tess pats her bed.

  “I think he’s feeling guilty that he didn’t come home last night,” Sue says.

  Tess sighs.

  “Are you feeling all right, Tess?” Billy asks. He tries to compose himself. He blows his nose into a Kleenex and dries his eyes.

  “I feel all bruised. I feel like a truck ran over me.” Tess tries to laugh.

  “I told you that you have to lose weight,” Sue says. “Even the doctor says that. Doesn’t he, Dad?”

  Billy nods. He reaches for Tess’s hand.

  “Lose weight? Is that what this is?” Tess swallows hard. “How?” Billy sits on the side of the bed. He starts to cry again.