Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (10 page)

~

I decided to go over and see this woman. I wanted to see how she lived. I wanted to see what she ate for breakfast.

I decided to go over right away. I walked.

On the way over I saw signs. I looked in the trees and in the bushes, in the clouds, in my shoelaces. I saw a sign in a section of sidewalk on Walnut Grove Boulevard.

~

In the morning, he comes down the stairs and he wants me to play with him. He says, “Can we play, Daddy?”

I tell him I have to go to work.

He tries to think of ways to make me stay and play with him. He says, “Just a tiny bit.”

I tell him I have to have my breakfast and then I have to go to work.

But I shouldn’t have my breakfast, should I? Why should I have my breakfast? On the day I die, when I look back on this, and I remember choosing breakfast over playing with Sammy, how is this going to make me feel?

~

God was sitting in a movie theater. It was the early show. The guy sitting next to God was eating popcorn.

~

My theory was it was the O-ring which had gone, so I took apart the cartridge. The O-ring looked fine. But you can never tell with an O-ring. Sometimes they will look fine, but then there is a tiny fissure in them which will render them useless. O-rings cost ninety-nine cents for a package of two.

That night I dreamed I was ninety-three years old and the woman at the desk next to mine at work was calling the paramedics.

P
ETRA,
WHO
works with me supervising the part-timers, likes to tell me stories about how she and her husband bought this old house in the country and fixed it up. I like to sit and listen to these stories, because Petra really knows how to tell them. Petra calls them decorating stories, because they are all about how she and her husband are decorating their house.

One day Petra has this idea where the part-timers will sign out their elevator keys in pencil. You have to have an elevator key to get on the elevator here. If the part-timers sign out their elevator keys in pencil, we can erase the slips of paper they sign them out on and then use them again. Petra wants to help the environment.

At the part-timers’ meeting we tell all the part-timers we want them using pencil to sign the little slips of paper they sign to get their keys out, and when they turn their keys back in, they should give the slips of paper back to us and we will erase them. We tell them we are doing this for the environment.

I think this is an idea you could only get from Petra. This is what I like about this idea. I have no desire to erase the little slips of paper.

But then one of the managers says she doesn’t like the idea. She says she wants the kids to sign their keys out in pen because she thinks pen will foster a sense of responsibility in the kids. At the next part-timers’ meeting, we tell the kids to go back to signing the little slips of paper in pen.

~

Tutti gives me a piece of paper which lists all the food groups on it. We are sitting up in bed. Tutti writes down all the food groups and then draws a bunch of little squares beside each of the food groups. She draws the squares fast, and then hands the piece of paper to me.

“Each time you eat something from one of the food groups,” she says, “you check off one of the squares.” She reaches over and puts her finger on some of the squares. “When you run out of squares,” she says, “you can’t eat anything from that food group anymore.”

I look at the piece of paper. I put it on the bedside table, on top of the clock radio.

~

The day my mom came to live with us was the same day they came to cut the grass. The guy with the gray hair rode around on the little tractor. The younger guy went around with the weed-eater. It was cool and windy, like autumn, only it was only the first day of August. They drove the tractor up the retractable ramp onto the pickup truck. The weed-eater went off. Everything was quiet. All you could hear was the wind in the trees. Mom was downstairs, unpacking boxes.

~

Don’t lay this trip on me. Like it’s all my doing. Okay? As if you have nothing to do with it.

What I’m talking about is anything like a vase, in the sense that a vase is the last thing you would want to see.

O
NE
DAY
we drive out to the country to see Petra’s house. Tutti and Sammy and me. Petra lives in a town about an hour away from where we live. She has a boy the same age as Sammy, so we figure they can play together. We figure we can take them to the park. Petra says there’s a wading pool at the park, and a train ride.

We get to the town where Petra lives, and we get on the street it says to go on in the directions Petra gave me. We pass the gas station Petra said we would pass.

What I am picturing as we go along is this big house with big corners jutting out where the roof comes down, and a big front porch and a screen door that slams. This is the picture I get from all the stories Petra has told me about the house they live in. Instead, what it is is this small house with a hole in the ceiling in the kitchen and people next door who work on their car all day Sunday with the radio going.

~

I go in the bathroom and try to get Sammy to pee, but Sammy just cries and hangs there over the toilet with his little eyes still shut and his blanket clutched up around his nose.

~

We have this secret society at work, the Black Rod Club. We’re a bunch of guys working in a predominantly female workplace. I think this Black Rod thing involves subconscious desires.

The founder of the club sits at the desk next to mine. In this place where I work, some of the women have their own offices, but most of us sit at desks that are all pushed together in a couple of rooms. Jeff’s desk is perpendicular to mine and is always covered with stacks of books and papers. I don’t know what Jeff’s job actually is, but apparently it involves all the papers that are on his desk. Sometimes he puts all the papers and books into boxes and carries the boxes around for a day or two, as though he intends to do something with all that stuff.

When I ask Jeff about the history of the Black Rod Club, he rubs his beard. His glasses make his eyes look larger than they are. He says the Black Rod Club was founded by a bunch of guys with black rods. He laughs. He tells me that in the late 1600s a Scotsman named Roderick, nicknamed Black Rod, came to Canada and founded the Black Rod Club. He laughs again. He says he has work to do.

The room where our desks are has a window at the end, and we look out onto a courtyard with a picnic table sitting in the center of it, and benches under trees. We look at the people eating their lunches out there. We talk about these people. Some of them come every day, and we talk as if we know them. There is one blonde girl who has been coming a lot lately. She eats her lunch and we stare out the window at her. Sometimes a man in a suit comes to meet her. We believe they are having an affair. Sometimes they sit close to one another and look down at their laps. Sometimes the girl laughs and tosses her long, straight hair, and then leans close and brushes the man’s lips with her own. It drives us Black Rod members crazy to see this. We think the man should make his move. We want to see him really kiss her.

Mostly we notice the girls. These girls, whom none of us ever approaches or speaks to, are part of the Black Rod Club. Somehow they have become part of the club.

Today there is a guy sleeping on one of the benches out there. He keeps rolling around, and once in a while he rolls right off. Sometimes he undoes his shirt and talks to himself. Eventually he undoes his fly and, without getting up off the bench, he lies on his side and pees onto the interlocking stones beneath the bench. One of the managers finds out and calls the police. The police come and take the guy away.

I think the men in the Black Rod Club are afraid of something. They all laugh when the police come and take this guy away. They all make comments. There is talk of never having lunch in the courtyard again. Someone asks if any of the guy’s pee splashed on the picnic table. Beneath all this talk and laughter I think there is a kind of terror.

~

Anytime Sammy wants me to carry him, I carry him. Sometimes I carry him from the living room to the front steps. I carry him so he can get his shoes on and go outside and play. Sometimes I carry him all the way to the mall.

Today Sammy wanted to go to the mall to buy Tutti some blocks. “We could give Mommy some blocks,” he says. “Let’s get Mommy some blocks.”

“She doesn’t want blocks,” I say.

“Mommy wants blocks,” he says.

“We are not getting Mommy any blocks,” I say.

“Mommy needs blocks,” he says.

I carry him over to the mall on my shoulders. The air is cold and we go into Kmart.

~

Are you the kind of guy who, when it says,
Take One
, you always take one? I don’t know. Maybe you don’t get that kind of thing where you are. We get it on the buses.

~

There are things you can think about, where if you follow your thoughts in, no one will ever be able to get you out.

~

Hypnotize me or something, would you?

O
NE
DAY
Tutti takes all the bank books and the bank cards and the bank statements and she says to me, “When your check comes in, give it to me.”

~

We just got back from visiting Mom. Yesterday, when we had to leave, Sammy stood outside the donut shop where my sister works and cried. He cried because he wanted a lemon donut. Tutti said he couldn’t have a lemon donut because he already had a chocolate donut and he couldn’t have both. We took him back to Mom’s house and put him in the car. I had all the suitcases on the roof of the car. Tutti was in the passenger seat with her seat belt on. Sammy was in the back seat, crying. He kept crying. He said he wanted to go back to the donut shop.

The thing is, I wanted to go back. I wanted to go back to the donut shop and get Sammy that donut. I didn’t want to hear Sammy cry anymore. He was crying so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. He said, “Daddy, you’ve never done this to me before.” Only, you could hardly tell what he was saying because of the way he was crying so hard.

~

It takes
x
number of years to figure out what you are trying to say, and then another number of years to find out that what you are trying to say cannot be said. What I want to know now is, what the fuck are you supposed to do with the rest of your life?

~

I took Sammy to the beach today. Tutti is out with Coco, shopping. I don’t know when they will be back.

It was cold and windy at the beach, and I didn’t bring any sweatshirts, because of the way the weather has been around here for the last week or so, and because I always think, once it is July, and it gets hot, it is just going to stay hot. I made egg salad sandwiches with cheese on them, but we never wound up eating them. We couldn’t even swim, because the waves were knocking Sammy down and it was scaring him. We ended up eating chips on the way home in the car. It was the jumbo size of rippled chips, and there weren’t many left, so Sammy would reach down into the bag and his whole arm would disappear. Then his hand would come out with some chips in it. He fell asleep on the way home, and I had to hold his head up with my elbow while I drove.

~

You know those things that look like various breeds of dogs, and you get them in the backs of guys’ cars, where it sits on the back dash and the head bobs up and down? What the hell are those things called?

~

Things would get quiet. Then, after a while, things would get quiet.

I
GET
that letter they send every year from the hospital, asking me to send them money.

~

She kept holding up the little cards with buttons on them. “What do you think of these ones?” she would say. She would hold the little card with the buttons in front of my face and wait for me to say something.

~

It is my belief that you can never have too much playground equipment. At the community center, near where we live, there is a playground for the kids who go to the day care over there. It says,
Day Care Only
, on a sign on the fence that surrounds the playground. I like taking Sammy over to that playground after dinner, when there are no kids left over there from the day care. I lift Sammy up over the fence and set him down in the playground. We watch the sun go down behind the community center. Then we hurry home. When the dark starts overtaking the sky, we feel a kind of fear. This is in the autumn. The air is cold. From the driveway, we can see Tutti in the kitchen, washing the dishes.

~

I got all my money out of the bank. I rode the bus. I called some of my friends, but they said, no, give it to me loose.

~

Coco once bought a little electric thing that was supposed to shave off those fabric balls you get on your clothes after you have washed them a lot of times. She lent it to me one time, and I brought it home, thinking about all the clothes I was going to save with this thing.

I
THOUGHT
I was alone. But then I hear this banging out in the hall and I say to myself, “I wonder who that is.” I open the door and look out. Gerome is out there. I turn on some lights. I go into the kitchen to make some coffee.

The light is on in the managers’ office, but I figure it’s Gerome who has turned it on, for whatever reason. Then I see Lina, one of the managers, working at her desk.

“You’re in early,” I say.

“I think I set my watch wrong.”

I think Lina is probably lying. I don’t think her watch is wrong. I think Lina is probably the same as my mother.