Journey, p.14
Journey, page 14
I had been thinking about the bomb for a while, but when I found the hole in the stereo case, I figured it must be a sign.
The thing about the stereo is that Glenn worked in radio forty years ago and feels he still has his finger on the pulse of what’s hip and hot with the kids. He programs the music for the evening in the restaurant, then locks up the stereo in the cupboard and takes home the key. Even though he knows we can’t get at the stereo and have to languish for the entire shift, listening to instrumental covers of the Beach Boys, he still calls in the middle of the night and demands that we hold the phone up to the speakers so he can hear for sure that the rotation hasn’t been tampered with. Everybody hates the music there. Everybody has complained to him about it and he smiles his insipid smile, nods calmly, and says, “Well, I’ll look into that.”
He’ll never look into that.
* * *
The next week on my way to work, I saw the man again. This time he wasn’t reading anything; he was just sitting with his hands folded in his lap.
I was standing facing the doors, and since he was sitting sideways in his seat, he was staring right at my back. As I looked at my own reflection in the darkened window of the train, I noticed him behind me, also looking at my reflection.
He saw me see him.
I unintentionally raised my eyebrows.
He intentionally raised his eyebrows back.
I averted my gaze because the last thing I wanted to do was play the mirror game with a psycho on the subway, only to have him follow me to work and be sitting outside at the end of the night, ready to follow me home. This would invariably be the thing that would happen.
I unfocused my eyes to avoid his gaze and as I did, in my peripheral vision, I saw his hand slowly move up toward his face and touch the edge of his rug at me like a cowboy tipping his hat.
I couldn’t think of how to respond. He saw me see him again, so I nodded, just barely, in return. Then he shook his head sternly at me and smiled almost paternally, as though I had done something that wasn’t really bad, and he kind of approved in a way, but he trusted that I would take care of it because I knew right from wrong. Then he nodded to himself, folding his arms and resting his chin on his chest.
He didn’t look up for the rest of the ride.
* * *
—
When I got to work I took the bomb out of its hiding place and had a good look at it. It seemed to be working. There was an active white foam bubbling all around the chicken gizzards and guts. The meat was fermenting in milk. The pressure would overpower the glass of the jar and it would blow within a couple of weeks. The smell would be unbearable. Glenn would have to replace that wall and possibly the entire floor. He might have to abandon the restaurant, or it might have to be torn down. More than anything though, he would run around just furious, screaming like a preschooler, veins bulging through the papery, translucent skin on his temples. He might even have a heart attack. I held onto the jar for a minute, transported. Glenn would be wearing shorts, beige shorts with black socks and black shoes, as he did in the summer. I could hear the pitch of his squeal when he demanded to know who could possibly have done such a thing.
I put the bomb back in its hiding place.
Glenn has a trick he does that he thinks is really good. He finds a cigarette butt outside and picks it up, presumably with a stick with a nail through it or a really long pair of tweezers, and he puts it on the steps out front and waits to see how long it takes one of the staff members to see it and pick it up. Then he comes into the kitchen and announces how many days it’s been there with no one noticing. Glenn believes in the kind of employee loyalty that would make someone stop and pick up a cigarette butt on the stairs because it was marring the beauty of their place of work.
“You’d pick it up if this was your own house, wouldn’t you?” he whines. “Why can’t you keep my restaurant clean? Is it disdain? You can tell me.”
He keeps up the cigarette trick and we all play along now, which isn’t hard because the cigarette butt is always in the same place. We try to pick it up the second he puts it there, which makes it like a game. The whole point of his trick, Glenn doesn’t realize, is defeated now, because our picking up the cigarette butt doesn’t mean anyone cares any more about the well-being of the restaurant, but it certainly does make him feel as though his stupid crybaby will is being obeyed, which is more important to him than even employee loyalty.
I had started dreaming about the bomb every night, and was getting downright giddy every time I looked at Glenn, which I had to try to conceal because smiling at him would have been so out of character as to give me away.
* * *
—
I hadn’t seen the man on the subway for a couple of weeks and had started to feel that I was in the clear.
Then this happened:
I was on my way to work, as usual, when I saw him. He was a few yards away, near the end of the car. He wasn’t sitting, even though there were seats available. He was standing next to the pole, but he wasn’t holding on to it. He looked bad. I had to really squint to make sure it was him, but his rug was unmistakable. Just as I was looking, not sure what to do, the front of his toupée stood up from his head, just lifted right up. He didn’t seem to notice. The rug stayed that way, looking at me for a second. Then it addressed me.
“He’s sick,” it said.
It didn’t have eyes or fangs or anything; it was just standing up, talking. It had a soft, deep voice.
“If you let this happen,” it told me, “it will kill him.” I was frozen on the spot, staring back at the rug, which, even though it didn’t have eyes, was giving me a very serious look. We stood like this for the rest of the ride. When the doors opened at my stop, I nodded slightly and then the rug nodded back, flopping up once and coming down to rest on the man’s head.
I would get rid of the bomb. I would throw it in the river. I walked as fast as I could to work and was almost running when I rounded the comer and the smell stopped me like a wall. It very nearly knocked me down. It was how you might imagine the smell of an open mass grave. Next to a latrine. I doubled over and gagged a few times with my hands on my knees. Then I looked down the street at the restaurant and saw Glenn on the steps.
He was sitting there with his head in his hands. He wasn’t screaming or scampering around like a gerbil; he was just sitting, looking at the ground.
With my nose buried in my arm, I made my way over. He looked up when he saw my feet in front of him, and I saw it in his eyes: the pain of a full grown child still getting his lunch money stolen every single day in the schoolyard. Glenn lied to himself a lot, but as much as he wanted to believe that as a successful restaurateur and former radio celebrity he was loved and respected by his clientele and staff, he knew that people simply didn’t like him. He knew that people made fun of him. He had heard them in the kitchen.
“What is it, Janine?” he asked. He really wanted to know.
“Is it—is it disdain? Is it…” He shook his head and trailed off as his voice filled with tears.
I sat down on the steps beside him and hesitated a second before putting my arm around his frail little shoulders. This made him start crying harder. I felt something let go inside of me, put my other arm around him, and pulled him close. I actually squeezed him. This made him start sobbing so hard he felt like he was breaking apart, so I squeezed him tighter, hoping my arms might hold the pieces of him together.
Heather O’Neill
The Difference Between Me and Goldstein
When I was little, we lived in West Virginia. A lot of people wouldn’t talk to us, because my family had a bad reputation. My mother had a tattoo of a butterfly on her wrist that fit under her watch when she was going to my uncle’s parole hearing. She put mascara on and her hair up, but you could always tell right off the bat that she was wild.
My mother met my father when she ran away from home to the city in 1969. He was a guru. He would just sit in the park philosophizing with young people sitting around him. My mother wrote down what he said in a notebook. She thought it was like being educated. My dad always scared women because he had a nail for a front tooth and was crazy about shot guns. My mother was nineteen and had long hair down to her butt and she was crazy about him. My mother used to wake us up in the middle of the night when she was drinking. She would drag us out into the yard to look at the full moon. My mother was the kind of woman who calls you in the middle of the night begging you for forty dollars so that she can leave town or else she’ll be murdered. There was always a pile of clothes and broken chairs in the yard in the front of our house. There was pot growing in the pigpen and the goats walked around the house. Now I live in the city.
“My friends are all afraid of you!” Goldstein says. “How come you didn’t make a single friend from college?”
Goldstein has lots of friends. He goes and meets them for coffee. Growing up, we were never allowed to use the term “best friend” in my house. My dad said a best friend is someone who will rat you out in the future. “Your family are your only friends.”
Goldstein was born in Brooklyn. He likes comic books, Chris Elliot, and National Lampoon. If someone leaves their hat on a seat on the subway, he feels terrible. He likes radio documentaries about transvestites and eccentric babysitters. He opens the window of the bus when we pass by the chocolate factory. You can imagine him reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a child.
He’s a vegetarian and he likes Thai food. He smokes cigarettes and doesn’t inhale. He blows out all the smoke with his lips pursed and smiles. He compliments an old woman on the flowers that she planted in her one-foot city garden. He is terrified of rats. He didn’t have any girlfriends in high school and he used to sit in peep shows between classes in university. He finds the girls from 1920s silent films pretty. He likes to write haikus in black notebooks at the doctor’s office. He likes to play MS PAC·MAN and drink Orangina.
He likes to sit for tea squeezed between old Chinese men on a bench in a cafeteria in Chinatown. He likes to stand on a bridge that goes over a polluted river and calls it our romantic spot. He gets us to both stand on the fortune-telling scale. He is delighted when the paper comes out saying 270 lbs; “Your future is bright.” He says he will keep it and tell people that he has come a long way.
He says he doesn’t like when I act tough. I pick flowers and stick them behind my car and give people the evil eye. I like horses that have got lost. I especially love crazy roosters. I like the idea of black sheep. I like people who think they’re lucky when they’re not. I like people with long long legs that look like they belong on a motorcycle. I like blue eyes you can see across the room. The lights of motels on the highway make me feel like I’m in love with everyone, even the people on death row. I like busted-up cars with stuffed animals all over the seats and stickers on the hood. I like scrap men with thick dirty arms in pickups filled with old stoves. I like bare feet sticking out of car windows. I like Hells Angels when fifty of them pass down the highway at once. I like when a train passes right next to me. I like people who come up to your door trying to sell you stolen quilts. I like the pickpockets at the bus depot who pretend to be in love with you. I like birds and tattoos of birds.
I doodle stars all over my notebook until the paper looks like a night sky when you are lying on a pillow in the grass. Goldstein and I are trying to figure out where to settle down together. I want to buy a farm. Not the kind where you necessarily grow anything. The kind where you can stand in the yard in your underwear, where you can talk to yourself and nobody knows any different. Where you can have chickens named Peeper and Frederick. Goldstein doodles rockets and mad scientists. He doodles an open window through which you can see an attractive fat woman watching television. He says if he could buy any car he says he’d buy a little Honda because it’s easy to park. Goldstein carries around a tape recorder and records people performing music on the street. He plays the tape back to me. It’s of two punks making up a song.
“This made me think of you,” he says.
He says he has a beautiful picture in his head of us sitting outside the New York Public Library eating peanut butter sandwiches.
Saleema Nawaz
My Three Girls
There is a photograph of me and Kathleen in the rec room with Maggie, our dead baby sister. She is slumped in a car seat, swaddled in a pink flannel blanket, eyes and mouth sutured shut, every crease downturned with the heaviness of death. Kathleen and I are posed to either side, legs outstretched, hips pressed into the orange carpet. We have our chins in our hands, and Kathleen has one bare foot kicked up in the air. A couple of half-dressed Barbie dolls are visible off in the corner. A picnic pose, like the one of us in Stanley Park, the checkered print of our two matching sundresses vivid against the striped grey blanket, our island in the sea of green grass.
In the Stanley Park photo, our faces bright, our smiles wide and eager. Kathleen is grinning, her eyes flirting with the camera as though she could bewitch it with a direct gaze. The same sly but alluring look I can trace through all the family photos, from her class pictures to her wedding scrapbook. Behind us is a patch of blue, Lost Lagoon winking in the sun. When I look at myself half-squinting, I can remember the breeze coming off the water and our father’s indulgence in buying us swirled candy sticks on the way to the bus stop. Jockeying with Kathleen for the window seat until the end of my tutti-frutti stick got tangled up in her blonde hair. A lingering, luminous day.
In the photo with Maggie, we are smiling, too, but the effect is disturbing. Our charms are displayed to better advantage by the closer angle, and beautiful Kathleen, at seven, is radiant against the drab wood panelling of our finished basement. Her smile, so beguiling and intense, barely eclipses my own here, for in this photo I actually seem to be giggling, betraying my crooked teeth as my brown ponytail flails forward in a messy signal of movement. I can barely pick out the rims of the glasses I used to hate, and I seem at home in my eleven-year-old body, unselfconscious about the exposed roll of stomach bulging in a pale band from under my purple T-shirt. The girth of my hips already large enough, as I lie lengthwise, to dwarf the car seat that is set before us.
I cannot imagine what we could have been thinking, though it is likely that it was our mother who told us to smile. In her album, this photo is captioned “My Three Girls.”
* * *
—
When my husband tells me he doesn’t want us to get a midwife, he invokes Maggie as a reason for going to the hospital. He thinks he is at his most persuasive after dinner, when I am full and tired and tend to agree with anything.
“But your baby sister, though. I thought your mother—well, am I right in thinking that your mother had her at home?”
The hesitation in his question irks me, although I know it is only his attempt at tact, at not venturing to express more than I would presume him to feel. He knows the circumstances of Maggie’s death as well as anyone in the family. As well as almost anyone might, having met my mother even once.
“Maggie didn’t die because she was born at home,” I say. “She died because she had a birth defect that would have killed her no matter where she was born.”
I remember my father, dry-eyed and harried, explaining how what had happened to Maggie was not quite as sad as if she could have lived but had died anyway. “It is a tragedy, yes,” he said, the side of his mouth sagging open as Kathleen and I gawked. “A tragedy has befallen this family. But it is something closer to a disappointment than a devastation.” This, though our mother’s noisy weeping kept on unabated from behind their bedroom door.
“Oh.” Eric turns away for a moment, stooping under the sink for dish soap, before attempting, “But what does your mother think?”
Which is his way of saying that my mother won’t like it and that, by even considering a home birth, we’re signing ourselves up for weeks of her heartrending pleadings—speeches that will make me mourn my sister, and the woman my mother used to be, and the way I was once able to feel grief and pity and know that they were in no way mixed with apathy or contempt.
* * *
—
Until Kathleen was born, I had never liked dolls. Their puckered lips and grappling fingers were nothing to me compared to the soft snout of a teddy bear or the fluffy tail of a stuffed cat. Kathleen was squishy like a plush animal and warm besides. I was captivated by her multitude of tiny expressions, sometimes even poking her in the side with my index finger to see a ripple of unhappiness clench her amazing, volatile face. I wondered how we had ever lived without her, without someone who could take us away from ourselves and the petty tedium of whatever had consumed us before.
When they brought Maggie home for the wake, she reminded me of those old dolls, as light as if she were filled only with air instead of with tiny muscles and bones and her still, imperfect heart. She was hard, too, like the dolls, except for her feet, which were soft and movable. My mother told us it was because the veins there were too tiny to be embalmed, and Kathleen stroked the soles of them with one finger, crooning “Cootchie-cootchiecoo” until my mother slapped her hand away and took Maggie upstairs to be passed around among the guests.
* * *
—
Eric is incredulous that my mother still hasn’t seen our baby in anything besides the dozens of snapshots taken by Kathleen.
“Your daughter has a baby, you go,” he says. I smile at him because I find his indignation, when it is on my behalf, charming. His bottom lip juts outward as his head begins a concise quiver of disapproval, his hands rubbing up and down against the small of his back in a flap-wing posture of concern. My hand on his cheek stops him, and he leans into my touch before shrugging his shoulders. He collapses into the chair beside Ava’s crib, the one that provides the best vantage point for parental doting and gloating. “My mother has been practically living here for the past four weeks,” he says.
