Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (6 page)

I said, “Two coffees please. Small. Just cream.”

Here was a coordinated effort. Nothing separate here. Mind, body, mouth – everything getting in on the act and the world beginning to take on an aura of chaos.

My mind was thinking,
Good-looking, heavyset girl
.

My mouth was saying the thing about
coffee please
.

The girl was smiling, saying something in a heavy accent. “Cream?” she was saying.

“Just cream,” I said. “Two.” I held up two fingers. “Small.” I pinched the air with my thumb and forefinger to show her small.

The girl turned her beautiful back to me and poured two coffees. I gave her $1.20.

“You want bag?” she asked.

“No bag,” I said, shaking my head, holding up the coffee.

On my way back to the car my heart was beating. My brain kept repeating,
You want bag? You want bag?

~

There was this guy who used to take us down into the ravine across from the apartment where we moved after Mom and Dad split up. He used to take us down to walk along the railroad tracks. He must have liked Mom. I think he used to drink wine with Mom. I don’t know what ever happened to him. It was a terrible place to live. Mom used to say the ravine was the only good thing about living there.

Now we live in the town house, and I’ve got this cold I can’t get rid of, and I’ve been sleeping all day. Sammy is off at some birthday party. He’s been gone all day. When he’s here and I’m sick, I just lie there and try to get the energy to do something with him. Now, when he’s gone, I wish I would never have to wake up again.

~

Sometimes the guy across the street burns his leaves in his backyard just to get the neighbors angry. They stare out their windows, watch the smoke curl up from behind the guy’s house. Somebody always calls the fire department.

~

I kept saying: “You cannot have more ketchup, Sammy.” The tree outside the front window was blowing in the breeze.

Sammy wanted more ketchup for his potato puffs.

Tutti phoned. After I finished talking to Tutti I hung up the phone and put more ketchup on Sammy’s plate.

~

Travis and I are the caretakers of this place. What a life we have. We drive into the parking lot early in the morning in our brown cars. It’s so quiet, you can hear the gravel squeak under our tires.

No matter how fast I pick up the garbage, there is always more.

Travis says: “The whole of civilization lies out there in the parking lot. It’s all right there.”

My insides will not support my needs anymore. I am trying to structure the silence under my eyes. Sometimes you are lucky enough to have your hopes dashed in the moment of their conception.

~

When he would get the boot was long beyond him. Out there in a space he pictured out by the clouds somewhere. Partially, it was him that put it there, after he mulled it over, temporarily allowing it space in his thinking.

~

I get messages taped to my mail tray. They are written on pink slips of paper.
Phone home right away
, these messages say.

I go to the nearest phone, whichever phone is nearest when I read the message, I go over to that phone and I phone home from there.

“Hi, Tutti, it’s me,” I say.

“Dad found a train ride,” Tutti says. “We were over at the mall and Dad found a train ride for Sammy.”

My grandmother died on the weekend. She was blind and senile and then she got pneumonia. So Mom and I went to the funeral in Chicago. We drove to Chicago. It’s a ten-hour drive. When we got to Chicago, I phoned Tutti.

“We’re in Chicago,” I told her. “We’re at the motel.”

Tutti told me the story of how her dad took Sammy to Perry’s Pony Farm. Perry’s Pony Farm is this place in the country run by a midget named Perry. There are some mud fields, some half-dead ponies, and some chickens. I used to go to Perry’s Pony Farm when I was a kid. Perry always had this awful smile on his face.

“You should take Sammy to Perry’s Pony Farm sometime,” Tutti tells me. “He had a great time there with Dad.”

She tells me this while I’m sitting there on the bed, in the motel room in Chicago, with my suit on, waiting to go to Grandma’s funeral.

~

She used to say it,
uk-you-lay-lee
. We were in bars and she would say, “Is that the
uk-you-lay-lee
that guy is playing? I love the
uk-you-lay-lee.”

I liked to hear her say that, so I never corrected her.

~

Some days I felt like I wanted war.

Or at least a little rain.

H
E
WOULD
go home and sit in the big green corduroy chair and hold his hands out in front of him. He would turn his hands back and forth and look at them. He would laugh.

“I’m forgetting something,” he would say. He would say things to himself and laugh.

He would turn on the TV but then forget he had turned it on. He would go into the kitchen and look in the fridge, forgetting he had turned the TV on and that it was still on.

There was a woman living with him.

“You’re beautiful,” he said to her one day.

She laughed. “You know you left the TV on in there again,” she said.

He looked at his hands. He looked at the woman. She was beautiful.

“Is there anyone as beautiful as you?” he said.

She was fat around the middle, and her blouse hung out of her pants. Her face was swollen and her hair stuck out.

“Is there anyone as beautiful as you?” he said.

One day she took him to the beach. He found his penis growing stiff at the sight of her lying on the sand.

Later, he drank milk and went to sleep.

When he woke up, the fat woman was there, on the side of the bed, with no clothes on.

“I have to go out now,” he said. He whispered it. “I have to get a newspaper. When I get back, will you be gone?”

~

If the weather was lousy, we would go buy groceries. Me, Tutti, and Sammy. We would get Sammy a cookie, sit him down in the cart, his legs hanging out the holes, and then we would go around the store filling up the cart. We would fill the cart with things we didn’t need. We would go to the front of the store, pay for the stuff, and then go and load the stuff into the car. Then we would get in the car and sit in the car for a while with the engine running, gazing straight ahead.

~

I own five pairs of shorts, two of which no longer fit. I keep hoping for cooler weather. I watch the Weather Network.

Tutti comes and sits down beside me on the couch. She has coffee in her hand. We both sit on the couch and look at the TV screen.

Tutti has dark hair, cut short, and dark eyes I hardly ever look at anymore. The room is long, like two arms joined in a handshake. Light ribbons through the vertical blinds. The air is wide open.

~

Last night Sammy said he had to poo. So we sat him down on the toilet, and he sat there on the toilet for a long time, trying to poo, but the poo would not come out. If you lifted him up off the toilet and set him down on the floor, you could see the tip of the poo sticking out of his bum, but then, when you put him back on the toilet, the poo would not come out. I ran around the house trying to find something that would help. Then I ran out of the house and got in the car and went to the grocery store. I bought a box of bran and some prune juice. When I got home, Sammy and Tutti were sitting on the couch, smiling and watching TV.

~

I think after a certain point in your life things are never the same. For years you try to figure out what went wrong. You try to come up with reasons. Any reasons.

~

First of all, there is this great clamor about getting some of those posts with ropes, or chains strung between them, the kind you see in banks all the time. Everyone on staff wants to get a bunch of these posts with chains and start stringing them up all around the library.

“Let’s get as many as we can,” someone says.

This all sounds perfectly rational. Like having staplers on all the desks, or getting better office chairs for everyone.

But then, at the staff meeting, when, once again, the matter of the posts arises, something occurs. People want to put the posts in every conceivable location in the library. “We can put them up,” someone says, “and if we find they aren’t working in certain locations, we can take them down again.”

Around the time the talk about the posts is reaching its climax, the microwave in the staff kitchen stops working. We must now keep constant vigil over our coffees, lest they grow cold and there be no way to heat them up again.

Cups of cold coffee begin to appear on every flat surface in the workroom, abandoned, forgotten. The most disturbing occurrence, however, involves the Ping-Pong table on the fourth floor. Some people who don’t work at the library, people who merely rent space on the fourth floor, have begun playing Ping-Pong on their lunch hour. So a couple of the boys on staff here head upstairs, vigilante-style, and try to put locks on the doors to the room where the Ping-Pong table is. Only problem is, none of these guys really knows what the hell they are doing. They start moving locks from one door to another, and, before you know it, they’ve locked themselves out of the cleaner’s closet. They can’t get in. They’ve closed and locked the door, and now they can’t get back in. So they spend the entire afternoon up there on the fourth floor, desperately trying to break into the cleaner’s closet. They try paper clips, kitchen knives, screwdrivers.

That night I go into the house and show Tutti a bag of almonds I have just bought. “Almonds are good for you,” I tell her. I hold the bag of almonds in front of her face. I point to the spot on the bag where the regular price has been crossed off and $1.99 is written in black Magic Marker.

“They’re good roughage,” I say.

I hold the bag in front of Tutti’s face for a moment.

Tutti looks at the bag there in front of her face. She is sitting at the kitchen table with her sewing machine in front of her, with the little light on over the needle.

~

Sammy calls me up at work. He tells me the kids in the neighborhood were laughing at him. He says they were chasing him around the playground, laughing at him. He says he was crying and they thought it was funny to chase him around and laugh at him. He says he hates them and never wants to play with any of them again.

“I hate them, too,” I tell him.

~

They’ve drained all the swamps in Florida, just so you can sit by a pool and look at other people’s towels.

On the way home it rains. We have to drive through Ohio.

I hate Ohio.

~

Let us think about what brought him here, to where he is right now, as a product of everything that has gone before, as though everything that has gone before has been squeezed into a single moment, and from the pressure of all his life pressed together into a single moment he is popping out into the next moment, a moment destined to be so devoid of motion as to be the perfect replication of death.

~

One of the things I had to start doing was, I had to start wearing those rubber things on my feet.

I touched her back. There was some dirt on her back. “There was some dirt on your back,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

She said, “Thank you,” as though she had practiced saying it. Had stood in front of the mirror and watched her lips and said, “Thank you.” And then she had said it again, “Thank you,” only this time she was watching her eyes. Then she would maybe pat her hair. It was the kind of hair you could pat. She would look into the mirror, watch her lips and pat her hair. “Thank you,” she would say. She would say it over and over again.

What I hated about those rubber things was having anyone see that I had them on. I would take them off in the car and then run into the office, trying to dodge the puddles, landing on my toes, trying to make the least amount of shoe as possible touch the ground.

It stuck out, but it stuck out in such a way that it made you think it was not sticking out. She must have used a lot of hair spray, some kind of hair spray that makes it look as though you didn’t use any hair spray.

What I wanted to touch was the backs of her arms. The backs of her arms looked soft. It looked as though the skin on the backs of her arms was going to fall off. I wanted to touch those arms and say, “There,” and then wait to hear her say, “Thank you.”

I think they can make hair spray where it looks as though there is no hair spray. I think it’s just a matter of cost. I think it’s just a matter of the cost of the thing they want to do, and if they want to make hair spray where it looks as though there is no hair spray, it’s just a matter of cost.

I wanted to get the best deal I could on those rubber things.

You thought you could smell it, the smell of the stubble coming out, dark like that, when she lifted her arm. It made you want to taste it. You wanted to taste the smell. Just seeing the stubble, and the bra, the way the bra looked, dark where you could see it at the edge, just seeing the bra and the stubble when she lifted her arm, you got the feeling you wanted to taste the smell.

I wanted her to say it as though I had slipped her something, and what I had slipped her made her eyes grow wide. Only it would be as though her eyes had not grown wide at all. This is how practiced I think she was.

She said, “Thank you,” as if she was sorry for me. As if she wanted to give me something. Like opening her eyes wide. That was what she could have given me. Her eyes, wide open, and me seeing her eyes, wide open like that.

They try to make those rubber things look like real shoes, but if you ask me, it doesn’t work. I don’t know. Maybe if I spent more money. I tried to get the cheapest ones I could find. They raise the rubber on top to try to make it look like laces, but who are they trying to kid? I try to look at those rubber things with an open mind. I really do. But please, who are they trying to kid?