Chapter 10
Morris isn't in bed but ten minutes when the phone rings. It’s one a.m. It’s after one. He fumbles for the receiver before the second ring. “Yes?” Morris asks, expecting a wrong number.
“We need to talk.”
Morris sits up in bed, turns on a small lamp. He’s fully dressed; jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes. He’s ready to go at moment’s notice. It’s a discomfort he’s grown accustomed to; he’s slept this way since age thirteen, when his father woke him at three in the morning, telling him to hurry and get ready. It was his mother. She was in the hospital, her illness racing its course. The doctor had called. They’d best come. Hurry.
Confused and half asleep, Morris flailed about his room, trying to dress. He couldn’t find a shirt. His socks were mismatched. His shoes were missing. It took an eternity. “Come on. Come on,” his father kept yelling, waiting for him in the hallway.
By the time they arrived, she’d passed. His mother was dead.
Morris now sleeps fully clothed, ready at a moment’s notice.
“Stefani?” he asks, the phone to his ear. There’s a silence on the line. “Stefani, is that you?”
“I’m outside. We need to talk,” she says, then hangs up.
He finds her out front of his building, smoking a cigarette and straddling a motorcycle parked at the curb. It isn’t hers. The night air’s pleasant, cool, holds the fragrance of broken lemons and freshly turned earth. The buds on the trees ache to open. “You okay?” he asks. He studies her closely, looking for the traces of his mother he saw earlier. They’re nowhere to be found.
Stefani hops off the motorcycle. “Don’t worry, I’m not pregnant,” she tells him, squinting from the cigarette smoke. She’s wearing low-rider jeans, a pink baby T with the words All City Princess written in gold, and a blue St. Benedict’s windbreaker jacket, the kind summer church camp counselors wear, the kind that invariably have cigarette burns in them. “But I realize things,” she says, flicking the cigarette to the street. Her face is framed in the fragile light of the street lamp. “Now that I’m eighteen,” she says, and kisses him on the chin, his nose, then on his lips. She kisses him deeply.
Like tumbling down a flight of stairs, the act is swift and bruising. Stefani stops before she’s really begun, leaving Morris’s face aflame. “Stefani,” he tells her, fighting to form words.
“Now that I’m eighteen,” she says again, tugging at his shirt, “I realize things. I realize that I like you, a lot. I like this Morris-and-Stefani thing we have, but I realize that this”—she taps his chest, then points to herself—“our ‘you and me,’ isn’t going to work. I have plans, you know, dreams,” she says. “You aren’t a part of them.”
“I’m not a part of them?” Morris says, slighted. Her words sting.
“No,” she says. She smells of sugary strawberries and Elmer’s glue, a smell that reminds Morris of elementary school art projects.
“What kind of plans are you talking about?” Morris says, now wanting to be a part of her plans. Shut a door and one wants in. It’s a human condition: we desire what we’re denied, even if we don’t want it.
“Owning my own Subway sandwich shop, for one,” she says.
He looks at her hard. “Come on, be serious.”
“I am serious,” she replies. “This boy from my class, Robby Robinovitz, his dad owns the Subway on Twenty-Third and Seventh Avenue and makes a ton of money. And Robby can have any kind of sandwich he wants at any time. He has them delivered to the school for lunch. That’s the way he makes friends, ordering them free sandwiches. It’s the only thing people like about him ’cause Robby’s kinda a sickening flab. Hands are always sticky, like he’s just sneezed in them. Or worse. Oh, Christ.” She jumps, like she’s been hit with a jolt of electricity. “Mother may I!” she says, looking past him, toward the building.
“What?” He turns to see what she’s looking at.
“Is that a rat?” she asks.
Near the trashcans, there’s a scraping noise, then movement, dark and hurried. “Oh God, it’s a rat,” she says, leaping at Morris. She locks her legs around his waist, arms to his neck. It nearly brings him down. “Kill it,” she says, her voice pitched. “Kill it.”
Morris staggers a step, two. “Get off me,” he tells her.
“Kill it!”
“Get off!”
Stefani lets go, slides off him. “It ran down that way,” she says, motioning toward the precinct. “I saw it run.” She shivers, holds herself. “God I hate rats. They’re worse than horny cousins, the way you got to fight them off,” she says. “This one time, we had a rat in our building. It used to hang outside our apartment’s door, like it smelled the frozen pizzas my dad always heated up. You had to look through the peephole before opening the door, make sure it wasn’t waiting. The Super wouldn’t do anything, so my dad put out those sticky traps and the other kind, the kind that snaps, put them all around our door. But rats are smart. Or this one was smart. Nothing worked.
“So this one morning,” she continues, “my dad heard the rat scratching outside our door and got so angry that he grabbed a mop and went and killed it himself.”
“He killed it with a mop?”
“Well,” Stefani says, “he tried to kill it. He went out in the hall naked except for his underwear and the rat was sitting there with this ‘What do you want?’ look and my dad whacked it with the mop, but it was one of those sponge mops, you know, so it didn’t hurt the rat much.”
Morris’s skin prickles. Rats he can handle; it’s the thought of Jetski in his underwear that gives him pause.
“After he hit it, the rat took off. Cut down the stairs. But my dad chased after it. He gave it another good wallop, really hard, you know, and somehow, the rat got hooked on the mop. Its tail or something wrapped around the handle, and as my dad yanked the mop, the rat came flying up, doing flips and twists like a gymnast or something. And for a split second,” Stefani says, “for a tiny, split second, the rat came face level with my dad.” She holds her hand horizontal to her nose. “Came up to right here,” she says. “They looked each other in the eye.” She claps her hands. “My dad said he’s never seen so much evil as he saw in that rat’s eyes. Then the rat fell down the middle of the stairwell, hitting the banisters as he went down, bang, bang, bang,” she says. “When my dad went down to look, the rat was gone.”
Stefani pulls her brush from her purse, rhythmically strokes her hair. Her tone shifts. “I don’t mean much to you, do I? I’m just another girlfriend to you,” she says. “One of probably three zillion you’ve had.”
“Three zillion’s on the high end,” he says. One of three was closer to the truth.
Aside from the awkward school dance date and/or the homely girl he was paired off with at a church function, Morris’s first girlfriend was in eleventh grade. Mandi Haggisbottom. They dated for only two weeks, but it was an intense two weeks.
Raised in a military family—her father and both her brothers served in the Army—Mandi entered Morris’s high school as a transfer student in the spring semester. She sat directly in front of Morris in German class. Her hair, a deep auburn, the color of dead leaves, was cut in a severe Dorothy Hamill style that left her pale neck exposed. At the base of her skull was a mole that looked like a chewed licorice Jujube or a replica of a Hawaiian island, a mole that emerged each time she got a haircut, like a rock at low tide, then would slowly, slowly disappear under a growth of hair with each passing day. Sitting behind her in class every day, Morris got a terrible, urgent desire to poke her mole with a sharpened pencil, to see how it reacted, if it broke open. To see if she even felt the prick of the lead. He imagined what she’d look like naked, wondered if she had any more moles, if they glowed large and dark against her watery, white skin.
Mandi was always formal, terse, even addressed her teachers as “Sir,” no matter their gender, a habit Ms. Strom, the German teacher, found irritating. Fo
r the mid-semester class project, Mandi, Morris and two other girls were assigned to perform Little Red Riding Hood in German. Mandi took charge of the venture, arranging the practices at her house after school, where her mother would lay out after-school snacks of caramel popcorn and black pepper cookies and then disappear into the kitchen to nip on her vodka and ice tea.
That first practice, Mandi established the roles. “I’m the hunter,” she informed the group. “I’m the one who kills the wolf.”
“I guess that means I’m the wolf,” Morris said, unhappy because the wolf had the second largest amount of lines. Only Red Riding Hood had more.
“Tammy’ll play the wolf,” Mandi said, and forcefully landed a hand on Tammy’s shoulder like she needed to be reminded who she was. Tammy was born for the part. She looked like a wolf, with a long, pointed jaw and sharp eye-teeth that flashed when she smiled.
Morris said, “But that means—”
“We’re relying on you,” she answered. “You’ve the most important part. Odile will play the grandmother, and you, you’ll play the title character, Red Riding Hood.”
Morris protested. “No way am I playing a girl. You play Red Riding Hood, I’ll be the hunter.”
Mandi’s body went taut and she instantly seemed taller, larger than Morris, bigger than anyone else in the room. “I play the hunter,” she said, her voice clear and cutting. Her focus fell cutting on Morris, bore into him like a scorching, blue-tipped skewer hitting a brick of butter. “I kill the wolf,” she told him. “Is that understood? Do we all have an understanding?”
“I’m not playing Red Riding Hood,” Morris said, though not as firmly as before.
“This is not up for discussion,” she said, and ended the rehearsal. “Same time tomorrow,” Mandi told the group, then dismissed everyone. “Have your lines memorized. As of tomorrow, no looking at the script,” she said, leading the two girls to the door.
Morris followed, determined to quit the group, to demand that Ms. Strom give him a different set of partners.
“You,” Mandi said, stopping Morris before he left. She grabbed him by the wrist. “Follow me,” she said, and directed him to her bedroom, which had a sterile feel. The walls were bare, the bed tightly made. Nothing was out of order, no shoes or bra or Seventeen magazines lying about. The entire room was in muted, earth colors, like a hotel room off an abandoned highway.
Closing the door behind her, she stepped up to Morris and said, “I want a good grade on this project, and to get a good grade, we need to present a single front here. We need to all be together.”
“I’m not playing Riding Hood,” Morris said again, unable to look her in the face. “I’m not playing a girl.”
Mandi’s breath, smelling of Basel and anise, warmly brushed Morris face. “I need you on my team,” she said, still holding his wrist. Gently, she placed his hand to her small breast. “You will play Red Riding Hood. Do we have an understanding?” she asked. She pressed her lips to his.
They had an understanding.
For two weeks, they practiced the play, Morris taking the lead of Red Riding Hood. Mandi held sway over the group, commanding and ordering them about, telling them how the lines should be executed, how the scenes should be blocked.
After each practice, after the other girls had left, Mandi lead Morris by his wrist to her room and went through roles not described in the script.
“I’ve got a great idea,” Mandi said on their final night of practice. They were to perform the play the next day, a Friday, in class. “When we go to cut you open with a knife,” she said, pointing to Tammy the wolf, “Odile should be under the table and squirt ketchup like it’s blood. Spray it all over the place.” No one voiced their thoughts, not knowing what to think. No one wanted to contradict her. “And I’ll bring a liver, take it out of you, like I’m operating.”
“Should we make a knife out of cardboard?” Tammy asked, looking to Morris, then to Odile. “I mean, to be safe.”
“Cardboard?” Mandi asked. “Nein, mein kinder. I’m not about to trade a grade for ‘safety.’ We want realism. We want a good grade.”
Morris wanted to object to the knife, the ketchup, the liver, but the look on the other two girls’ faces, a look of resignation and exhaustion, told him he’d get the same wilted non-support he gotten when objecting to having to play the role of Riding Hood. What do I care? he thought, not being the wolf, the one under the blade. All he cared about was getting practice over with and going to Mandi’s room.
The next morning, Mandi arrived at school dressed in her father’s camouflage fatigues. In a large, brown duffle bag she had a cow’s liver, a squeezable bottle of ketchup, and an eight-inch butcher’s knife. Over her shoulder was slung a .22 rifle.
Stopping Mandi in the hall, Mr. Stanley, the assistant principal, asked, “Is that a real rifle?”
“Props, sir,” she answered. “In acting, they’re called props.” She unzipped her bag and showed Mr. Stanley the contents. “All of this is for Ms. Strom’s German class, sir. We’re doing a play, ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ in German.”
“It’s awful realistic,” Mr. Stanley said, warily eyeing Mandi.
“Thank you, sir. That is my intention,” she answered, then excused herself. “I don’t want to be late for class.”
Everyone had their costumes: Morris wore a red blanket tied around his neck like a cape and a red stocking cap; Odile wore a frayed, brown crocheted shawl her mother had made and put flour in her hair to turn it white; Tammy wore black and frantically smiled her wolfish smile. The play went flawlessly, the lines spoken in stilted, basic German.
The rifle was aimed, the wolf killed. The knife was flashed and the blood was sprayed. The liver was extracted then Grandma and Red Riding Hood were rescued from the wolf’s stomach.
Ms. Strom was terrified. The rifle, the knife, and the liver were real.
By the time the principal arrived, the play was complete. The class was clapping and hooting as Mandi and her props where escorted from the class, from the school. Morris, Tammy, and Odile spent the rest of the day in the principal’s office. But their two weeks of acting, their practicing at pretending, paid off: They convinced him that they had no idea Mandi would bring real weapons to school.
All three received a stern warning. Mandi received a transfer to a school for violent and troubled children. And for the rest of the semester, Morris received malicious taunts for having played Red Riding Hood.
After high school, he had a brief relationship with a girl named Cheryl he met at a City College information open house. A junior in the mathematics department, Cheryl wanted to eventually work for the government or for the WTO. Morris was contemplating pursuing a degree in French or Spanish or Russian, a degree that would help him in all his travels, all the places he planned to go. Cheryl showed him around the campus, talked about her trip to Mexico the spring break prior. She worked her way through college, bartended at Loopy Larry’s, a sticky bar near Columbia University that had all-you-can-eat nacho night and Jell-O shots, a bar that catered to the college crowd. She was friendly, open, liked to talk and laugh. After the tour, Morris asked if she’d be interested in getting a coffee. She said yes. They got along. He asked her out for the next night. They started dating, being boyfriend and girlfriend, but after a few months, she developed a tongue lesion. Open sores sprung out on her hands and arms. Her body was sensitive; it hurt when Morris touched her. Morris was worried, told her she should go to the doctor. She was strange and evasive about the whole thing, like it didn’t exist. “What are you talking about?” she kept saying, her arms folded to hide her hands.
Morris decided against college, worried that class responsibilities would keep him from his travels. He didn’t date Cheryl anymore, worried he might catch what she had.
It wasn’t until he was twenty-five that Morris found his next girlfriend. He was riding with the Department of Transportation pothole crew, his first real job, a job his father secur
ed for him through his union connections, drinking buddies, and low-level blackmail. It paid well. Morris hated it. Day after day, he rode out with a crew to fill potholes, repair damaged streets, smooth pavements all over the city, in all the boroughs. The smell of heating asphalt, the smell of the other men, sweaty and ripe, the violent rattle of the jackhammer, and the exhausting labor made him light-headed, ill. He dropped tools, couldn’t properly operate machinery. He wasn’t built for such work, didn’t thrive in grueling conditions like his father did.
On the team was Lilly, a sturdy, twenty-year old Haitian woman whose job it was to wave an orange flag, stop traffic, direct it around the work crew, making certain none of the men got run over. All the guys on the crew playfully hit on, harangued, and harassed her. It was part of the game, what one had to endure when working on the team. She took it in stride, ignoring what she wanted to ignore, firing back a vicious verbal assault when provoked.
Morris greeted her as he greeted everyone on the crew each morning, told her to take care at the end of the shift, but said little else to her during the workday. And at the end of each day, she’d decline the men’s offers to go for a beer and headed home to her apartment on West 122nd Street.
Into his fourth month on the job, Morris had an exceptionally arduous day. Seven calls for problem potholes, all of which they fielded.
He didn’t want to go home after work, didn’t want to spend the evening alone. He wanted company, someone to talk with aside from his father or N.J., someone with something more interesting to say than what the guys on the crew talked about.
Clocking out, he said goodnight to Lilly, then, with the bolstered courage of a bank robber, asked Lilly if she wanted to see a movie or maybe grab some dinner.
To his surprise, she said yes.
“Great,” Morris said. “How about—” He broke off, drawing no ideas as what to do. Lilly suggested they go to Hooters on Fifty-Fifth Street. “They have a buffalo wing special until seven,” she said, her English so heavily accented it was nearly indiscernible. While Hooters wasn’t Morris’s ideal, he agreed. He wanted company.
Working on their third plate of wings and their second pitcher of beer, Lilly said, “I always wanted to be a Hooters girl, to work here and wear the orange T-shirt.” Celery, sauce, and wadded, sauce-smeared napkins littered the table. “Just think of the money, the tips.”
“Why don’t you?” Morris asked, his fingers stained a bright, spicy red. Lilly was pretty, but not in a Hooters-pretty way. She had rugged, healthy features, like a well-handled carving, the patina smooth, shiny, radiant.
“My English isn’t good enough, and because,” she said, taking a sip of beer, “my family would kill me if they knew I worked at such a place.”
“They’d rather you do dangerous manual labor?” Morris said, somewhat joking. The flag job was the easiest of jobs. Women and the working injured were given that task. It was like being a majorette for a marching band, whipping the plastic flag about all day. Even the crew’s foreman, a lazy, religious man who held work as a sin, did more on the job than Lilly.
“As long as I keep sending money home, they don’t care about the danger. But something like this,” she said, lifting her eyes to a waitress. She shook her head. “Working here would really be dangerous. If word got back to my family that I was doing this, waiting table dressed like that, my mother would personally swim from Haiti to murder me.”
Morris laughed, then saw she was serious.
“Sometimes love is too much,” Lilly said, finishing the last wing.
It was after seven when they left. Morris didn’t want the evening to end. Neither did Lilly. She enjoyed having someone to talk to, someone who wasn’t making crude jokes or being vulgar. Someone who wasn’t a fellow countryman. “You’d think being in a different country, we’d all watch out for each other,” she said of Haitians, of the community. “Help each other. But it’s the fellow countryman who’s the first to rob you, the first to kick you to the pavement, the first to kill you for nothing.”
After an awkward moment of silence, Morris took her hand to say good-bye. It was rough, callused, the hand of someone used to work. “I had a good time,” he said.
“Why’s it ending?” she asked.
Morris had no answer.
She invited him back to her place, where she played her favorite albums and showed him pictures of her youth, growing up on the island.
They began spending time together after work and on the weekends, though they kept a cordial distance during work, not wanting the others to know. Not wanting to endure the hazing.
“Lilly’s such a pretty name,” Morris said one morning as they lay in bed together. He wore cargo pants, a tank top, and a pair of sneakers. “Why do you sleep with your shoes on?” she asked the first night he stayed over. After they’d had sex, Morris had showered, dressed. Lilly thought he was leaving, but he crawled into bed with her.
“Just in case,” he told her.
“Just in case?” she asked, wrapping her arm around him.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Emergencies,” he said.
“Emergencies?”
“Yeah.”
She laid her face to his. There’d been many things she’d experienced; this was another. She didn’t press the issue. Sleeping fully dressed was just something he did.
“My birth name is Anchorage,” Lilly told him.
“Anchorage?”
“It was my father idea,” she said. “He’d been there once, when he worked on a cargo ship, and thought Alaska the most beautiful place in the world, the whiteness, the cold.” Pausing a moment, she said, “My father always said that Haiti would be beautiful if it weren’t for the Haitians. It has everything, he’d tell us,” she said, resting a dark arm against Morris’s slim chest. “But they’re things you don’t want.
“My name, Lilly,” she continued, “the name I go by now, is the name I picked when I first came here. I was fifteen when I first got here, and was very sick, to the point of dying. Some infection. I couldn’t hold food. Even water made me ill. Someone brought Mrs. Rethco to me. She was a nurse, worked at a clinic. She knew what was wrong with me, was able to get me drugs that helped. I would sleep for nearly the whole day, wake only for the medicine. Slowly, slowly, I got better.” She paused. “I never liked the name Anchorage,” she said. “So I took my new name from the red pills that saved me. On each one was written ‘Eli Lilly.’ ”
“Did you think of taking the nurse’s name? She saved you as much as the medicine did,” Morris said.
“Her name was Bertha,” Lilly said, making a face. “Anchorage is bad, but Bertha?”
It wasn’t a raging love, but Morris’s heart was with Lilly. She’d endured so much. He felt tethered to her. She made him happy, content. He could see a life together.
As they lay there, a long, pleasant silence building between them, Morris listened to the gaining morning, to the day turning. It was a security, a peace he hadn’t felt in some time, in years. It was a security he hadn’t felt since he was a child, since his mother’s death. He didn’t want to leave the bed, didn’t want to get up and shower and pull on stiff clothing and go to work. He wanted to remain where he was, with Lilly’s arm across his chest, barring him from leaving, barring the world from getting to him.
Then Lilly said, “My husband is coming back next week. He called from Florida and said he is coming back home.”
Morris laughed.
“It’s true,” she quietly said.
Morris laughter hardened in his throat. “You’re married?” he asked, a metallic taste coating his mouth.
She explained; she’d married for her citizenship, had to marry to stay in the country, and had lived with this man for six months before he left to Florida to work at a dog track. She hadn’t heard from him in over two years.
Now he’d called. He was coming home.
“But this isn’t h
is home,” Morris said, glancing about the apartment. Everything had become so familiar, comforting. The home was his and Lilly’s. He’d left his mark on the place, he felt.
“No?” Lilly asked. “Then whose home is it?”
Ours, Morris wanted to answer. It’s ours.
But it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. It was hers, Lilly’s, and whoever she decided to share it with.
Lilly made coffee, made breakfast as she always had before work. Nothing seemed changed for her. Morris gathered his things. They’d leave for work at different times, ten minutes apart, so as to not show up together. “See you at work,” she called to him as he left. She wouldn’t.
Morris skipped work that day, and the next, and the following, spending his time in bed. Lilly called but Morris didn’t answer the phone. On the fourth day, his father came to his bedroom and said, “What are you doing? You sick or something?”
Morris told him the story. He concluded, “Lilly’s married, Daddy.”
“You talking about that black girl that waves the flag?” Seymour asked. “Hell yeah, she’s married. Everyone knows she’s married. I don’t even know her and I know she’s married.”
After a week of not showing for work, Morris was fired.
“What’s your plan now?” his father asked, angry that Morris gave up such a solid job. “What’re you going to do now?”
Morris had money saved. He had no responsibilities. “Travel,” he told his father. “I’m going to travel.”
The farthest he went was to Mr. Charlies, for provisions. He went nowhere.
After ten months, his money dwindled. He got the job at Saint Mark’s Used Books, the job that lasted him nine years until his allergies laid in.
Now, again unemployed, he asks Stefani, “What other plans do you have?” He can’t envision Stefani running a business.
“I’ve a lot of plans,” she says.
“But none that I fit in.”
“You just don’t seem...” She pauses, searching for the word.
“I don’t seem what?”
A fire truck heaves past, its lights and siren cold. “You know,” Stefani says, “you just don’t seem.”
“What’s that mean, I don’t seem?”
“Before I forget,” she says, ignoring him, “I got you a gift.” The purse opens. Out comes a twelve-inch wheel of Brie in Saran Wrap. She hands it to him.
“You got me Brie?” It’s soft, like warm clay, and has a tangy odor.
“No,” Stefani says. “It’s cheese. French, I think,” she says. “It’s expensive stuff.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Mr. Charlies.”
“You bought this at Mr. Charlies?” he asks, not surprised he’d carry Brie.
“I didn’t exactly buy it,” she says, smiling.
“You stole it?”
“That asshole owed me,” she says. “He robbed me of that twenty you gave me, didn’t give me any change. So I went back in there and, you know, did some shopping to make up for it. Those twins he has working there are all shout and no chase. They didn’t even try to stop me.”
“But he knows who you are, knows I know you,” he says, guilty. Few things he holds as wrong—stealing is wrong.
She shrugs. “So? He stole from me first. And anyway, it’s not like we’re ever going back there.”
A drunken couple mill by, the woman carping at the man. “You were staring at her breasts all night!” the woman keeps saying. The man says nothing, stumbles along. A taxi honks. Another follows suit.
Stefani pokes Morris in the stomach. “Okay,” she says, standing close.
“Okay what?” He feels held in a fatal gravitation, trapped in a collapsing orbit. He wants Stefani to stay and go, wants his old life and wants to be cured of it.
“Just, you know, okay,” she says, then, “Give me a kiss.”
“Does that fit into your plans? I don’t want to ruin your plans.”
“It won’t ruin them,” she says, smiling. “I’ll make it fit.” She kisses him once, then turns and heads off toward First Avenue.
“Where you going?” he asks.
“Guess what I’m thinking,” she calls to him, walking away backward.
A feral, orange cat hobbles down the street, a small piece of fried chicken in its jaws.
Morris’s fingers sink into the Brie.
“Guess. What. I’m. Thinking!” She pauses at the corner.
“What are you thinking?” he answers, though not loud enough for her to hear.
Still, she answers. “I’m thinking my plans might have changed,” she calls to him. “I’m thinking you might be in my plans.” She wiggles her fingers at Morris. “Remember Monday, after school. Ray’s Pizza.”
Chapter 11
The Trouble with Bliss Page 11