Esther Stories (3 page)

T
HEY BLAME
each other silently, and they've lived like this for years. Nearly a decade of silent eyeing. Here they sit at Papa Gino's on a Friday night in December, across from each other at a tiny plastic table, so close their knees touch. Neither laughs as the other wrestles drooping cheese.

Barry and Diane Swanson lost a child nine years ago. The story is simple. Barry, Diane, and Gene, who was then seven years old, were window-shopping along High Street in Dedham, Massachusetts. Gene kept bouncing a small orange rubber Superball he'd bought from a machine at Cookie's Table for a quarter. He was walking behind his parents. The ball ricocheted off a crack in the sidewalk and bounced into the street. Gene chased it. It's happened before. A blue Plymouth going too fast for High Street on a Saturday. Screech and a dull thud. Diane shrieking. Barry's already bloody hands holding Gene, and his pleading, God, please, no, no. And when eternity was over, and Barry was hovering over Gene in the back of an ambulance, Diane ran across the street and found the ball near the rim of a sewer grate. She stooped and picked it up. The slippery little ball, now worn down from years of rubbing, has remained in her purse ever since.

Barry tossed Gene the quarter to buy the ball.

Diane told him twice to stop bouncing. He was a spunky kid who'd liked to test his parents. He kept doing it. Diane did not take the ball away.

Barry was looking at a suede jacket in the window of Slaxon's, and in mid-comment about the hideousness of its color when Gene's ball sprang into the street.

The ball bounced just to the right of Diane's shoulder. Couldn't she have grabbed Gene as he bumped past her in pursuit?

Couldn't Barry have put his foot down, said enough's enough? Give me the goddamn ball, Gene.

Around and around and around. Four days after the funeral Barry went to work. It took Diane a full week, but then she too was back, back behind her desk at State Farm, taking calls, making referrals, seeing clients, listening to the void in her voice as she answered question after question.

Here they sit. Friday nights they eat out. They can afford better, but they feel more at ease in places like this. More anonymous. Less exposed. Silence is not wrong here. No one waits on them. Nobody chats them up. They place their orders at the counter and stand with a slip of paper that tells them their pickup number in red ink. You can see the lights of the highway from the window. I-95. The plastic tabletop has been made to look like a red-and-white-checked table-cloth. There are few sounds. The fuzzled ping-pang of a video arcade game playing itself in the corner. Muzak so low it sounds like somebody humming. Quick shout of a cook behind a red fake-brick wall—“Line on!” Soft yellow blankety light. Harsh if you look at the bulbs above straight on, but as a whole they combine to form a buttery glaze that drifts about the room. It is after nine and only two other tables are occupied, one by a counter girl on break. She is resting her chin on an outstretched arm and rattling her nails on the tabletop. A boy is mopping a closed section in a dark corner of the restaurant. Smell of tomato sauce and bleach. Barry and Diane eat a pepperoni with half mushrooms. Almost ten years ago, and that Saturday could just as well have been last week. Friday nights have always been tough.

They made love for a year after Gene's funeral. They made love for a year and nothing happened, nothing. They saw two doctors who told them nothing was wrong, that Diane was getting on but that all the parts were certainly in working order. “Go home and do it” is what the second doctor advised. “What else can I say?” That night they slept at the Comfort Inn, but it didn't make any difference. Then one morning, a few weeks later, Diane watched Barry come out of the shower with a towel loosely slunched around his waist, and she started to despise his body, his flubby folds, his thinning hair, his clumsy fatty hands, his sweaty naked squirming over her in the dark, like the wet glob of a seal. She could think of nothing but the man Gene would have grown into.

Barry didn't fight her. He simply watched her recoil and endured the silence. He had lost his mother when he was thirteen, and there were afternoons in the weeks following her death when he would come home from school and creep around his parents' room and steal things, a locket, an earring, even a bra once, which he kept hidden under his mattress. He was used to making do. So for years now Barry has been rubbing his big forehead, sighing, wandering the house, masturbating quietly in the bathroom, and reading.

Diane takes a sip of Diet Coke and clears her throat, but doesn't say anything. She looks at her reflection in the big window. Barry wipes his mouth with the corner of a paper napkin and slides his left hand across the table, palm up. Some nights she covers it with her own.

M
ORE THAN HALF
a lifetime away, and even now his mind wanders back to a weekday morning on a bridge in 1948. He was unemployed then, the only time in his working life that he wasn’t at a job on a weekday morning, and walking along Postal Route 31 with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, alone. Twenty-six years old and a veteran, still humbled by the things he saw in Germany and Poland at the end of the Hitler half of the war. He hadn’t seen much combat himself, but he knew then, as he knows now, that what he saw as part of the 222nd Infantry, “The Mop-up Crew,” as he called it, could never be compared to shooting at people or getting shot at. Human beings who didn’t look like people, shriveled hands grasping and fisting, like the tiny fingers of dolls, and sometimes, but not always, ditches of bodies. A place called Nordhausen, where he and another soldier found the corpse of a pregnant woman in a bloody latrine. An army interpreter told them that an SS had tried to force the birth by stomping on her with his boots. He and the other soldier, whose name he never knew, buried her. The other soldier said a prayer, which he repeated.

A year and a half later, there he was—amazed that such a thing as quiet could exist again in the world—rambling down Route 33 in Sibley, Mississippi, ten or so miles from his mother’s place at St. Catherine Creek, in the middle of the morning. He took long walks that year, mostly to think about the things he’d seen and to get out of the house, away from his mother’s hasty breathing and droning.
Someone who’s done for country as you’ve done deserves to rest, and don’t for twelve seconds believe you’re lazy, or not worthy, or that you haven’t done your share.
Fists jammed into pockets, surrounded by the desolation of home, the woods, the gurgle of the Homochitto River. He turns off the road and begins to cross a bridge. A simple, twin I-beam girder, wood-planked, unscuffed, about the width of a truck. Back then it was still some optimistic architect’s fancy. A little bridge to nowhere really, no houses up the hill that way, just a dirt road that ended a hundred feet from the end of the bridge on the other side of the river. Beyond the end of the road, woods and a steep grade upward, what his father used to call Steve Glower’s Hill. Maybe they’d planned to do some building up there, but that never came to pass.

Nothing is left now but the crumbled ruins of the two arches of a bridge that has fallen into a river.

But that morning long ago he’d stood at the railing of the little bridge, his chin resting on the backs of his hands, and looked down at the water and dreamed of a girl, not a particular girl, not one he could describe or name, but a formless one, hair and smile, quick-tongued and laughing. He saw her and didn’t see her, and it was safer that way. But then, as if nudged out of the woods by the finger of God, she came out of the trees upriver, naked and white as vanilla pudding, followed closely by a man, dark-skinned, but not black, Indian maybe, naked too. For a moment the girl looked familiar, a little like his cousin Jackie, the one with all the curly sticking-up hair everybody teased her about, but this one was older than Jackie, maybe a lot older. This girl could have been thirty. It was hard to tell from up there. He watched her step fast across the rocks by the water’s edge and plunge in with a wordless shout. With much more hesitation, the man followed her across the rocks and stepped off, without a peep, into the water. Neither of them looked up at the bridge. Maybe for the same reason he didn’t look away. Who’d have expected the other? Who’d be standing on a bridge that didn’t lead anywhere? Who’d be swimming, naked, in March? He watched her breasts float above the water; he watched the man watch her, not smiling, as though he was already counting the seconds he had left with her, with this woman who was so obviously—even from up there on the bridge—someone else’s wife. (Her flailing joy in the water too free to be everyday.) Which is why both men, the man in the water and the man on the bridge, stared with such useless desire. The couple didn’t speak. This he remembers—cherishes, really. That neither of them succumbed to the temptation of lying about what they didn’t have. Just the heavy pant and flap of swimming in the wrong season. He remembers the pressure of his erection and the awkwardness of walking away with it down the road. He remembers the man’s hands as they reached out over the water and how for a single moment he wanted nothing more than to murder him so those could be his hands.

And he remembers remembering this. In 1977, driving through a snowstorm in St. Louis at 2:00 in the morning, and he’s standing on the bridge. No trigger, no reason for her to come to him. Nothing in that blinding whirl to take him so far back. But there she was, amid the battering plunk of the flakes on the windshield: the way her wet hair twisted around her neck like a scarf. The sweep of her thin arms. The way she ignored men and the cold. Another time, eating with Manda and her father in some hoity-toity place in Atlanta, putting a forkful of steak in his mouth, and again, for no reason except maybe the happiness of that food, the river. Again her emergence out of the trees. His wish granted and ripped away the next moment; the dark man’s head and shoulders appear. What you wish for and what you can never have—both come out of the woods at the same time. You didn’t fight a war. You cleaned up after one. Still, you’re your mother’s hero. You don’t want to work right now. You want to wander the old roads. You want to stand on the bridge and watch.

S
HE HAD TROUBLE
getting dates, so some nights she'd march into Cousin Tuck's and wait for the one-eyed man to finish playing pool. His name was Tito, and he wore a black patch over his left eye. He was a small-time hustler who could clear tables at will, using a combination of ball-smacking power and quiet, surgical, intricacy. He was also a teacher. Really more of a teacher than a hustler, because those of us who were regulars didn't dare play him for more than a few quarters a game. But some of us would play him to learn. He'd set up your angles, a little left, a little right, pick out spots on the ball, call pockets on shots you would never have dreamed of making had he not whispered that if you hit the 13 into the right edge of the 7 with just enough oomph to bank it off the left side—
fuckdawango
—you could make that shot. Tito made you feel that you could be consistently good at the game, that you really were capable of mastering the geometry. The click of the balls as beautiful as your own heartbeat. On those nights, after four, five beers, you'd be soaring and people in the booths would start to murmur about you, point the necks of their bottles your way. You standing against the wall, chalking your cue and kissing your knuckles as if all of a sudden Cousin Tuck's was Bally's in Atlantic City and you were the guy. Everybody's guy. But on those nights Tito wasn't around, you'd be back to hitting slop, back to whacking the ball all over the table, because it was Tito who made you and without him you went back to being nobody.

Her name was Nadine. She was very short and had a flat, almost squashed face, with a little chubbiness all over and eyes that, as Marty Patowski put it, were too big for a single head. But her heart was as wide and as long as the English High School football field across from the bar. She was our, Jamaica Plain's, locally famous community activist. This was 1987. In our humble edge of Boston, she was like a pioneer. People said that she worked as a paralegal in a legal services office, but she was known for her attendance at any and all J.P. community-based events. She'd be at the Voting Rights for Legal Aliens rally (VRLA), a featured speaker at the bimonthly meeting of Latina Women Against AIDS Project (LWAAP), hustling money for the Youth Build summer employment program for at-risk teens in Roslindale (YBEP). You'd see her on Centre Street stapling flyers to telephone poles with that big carpenter-sized stapler she lugged around in a filthy-bottomed canvas tote bag. You'd overhear her in Woolworth's quietly grilling the cashiers—Maureen and Donna—about working conditions and insurance plans. Every time you saw her riding her bike in a wobbling rush to a meeting, you'd be reminded of all the contributions you weren't making to the betterment of society, you gluttonous hog. But Nadine never chastised. She simply tried to infect you with her enthusiasm.
Hey, I'm glad I ran into you.
Oliver or Cynthia or Fernanda or Carmen or Frankie T.
There's an interactive poetry reading tonight at St. Mary's to raise money for the Art Council's day-care center, and all you have to give is three dollars and come up with one line about what day care means to you. No kids? That doesn't mean Reagan's evil doesn't affect you! I'll have some ideas on notecards that I'll pass around. So just show up and you can read
…

Tito wouldn't make love to her. That was his rule, because he was honest about the fact that he wasn't in love with her. Admitted that even with his one eye he was a sucker for beauty and couldn't get around it, so why lie. But he'd take her home with him after the bar and hold her and kiss the scratchy backs of her arms. His bed always had clean white sheets, hotel sheets, and Nadine would feel a little guilty and decadent in that bed, the sheets slick against her bare thighs. She couldn't help thinking of all the people who would never know a bed so clean, the men and women wrapped in garbage bags sleeping in the park on Vermeer. But she usually got over it, thinking that a lot of people actually got laid once in a while, damnit, so she should be entitled to her little nibble.

On the mornings after, they'd wake up before seven, and Nadine would make a huge buttery breakfast of heaped eggs, toast, and four flavors of jam. Tito would take a run through Arnold Arb and pick up a
Globe
and a
Herald
on his way home. Then they'd sip coffee and read the news silently in Tito's immaculate kitchen. He was a printer and spent his days covered in ink, but outside of work, because of his work, Tito was fastidious, constantly scrubbing.

He taught her pool. Unlike the rest of us, no more than one-night wonders, Nadine actually had some talent. She wasn't Tito, but after a couple of weeks of lessons she was quietly clearing tables and disposing of some of the better guys in the bar like Angel Cruz and Blake McClusky, Russell McClusky's little nothing brother.

“She empties her eyes,” Tito said. “Like Willie Mosconi said, ‘Friends, there is nothing in this world but the balls and the pockets.' What the master meant was that you have to be like some fool drowning. It's all blue from there. See? The table's your ocean. Once the other stuff gets in there, once you start noticing your opponent's fancy shoes…Once you start hearing the music—even Miles's battaboop—it's over. You're through. And Naddy's got it. Intuitively, she empties. You don't teach that.”

Nadine and Tito's story would circulate among those in the know around the bar. How Tito taught Nadine how to kick some ass—and that some nights he'd take her home. Most guys gave him no grief—hell, a warm body's a warm body. In Boston in February, there's guys who sleep with frozen squirrel corpses. Once, when Marty Patowski said that Tito probably put a patch over his good eye when he was delivering the Bob Evans home to Nadine, Sal Burkus shot him a look so deadly that Marty coughed and took it back. “Jesus, I joke. Can't anyone tell a joke in this friggin' place?”

Burkus pointed the rim of his beer in Marty's direction and said, “Not you. You can't tell any jokes.”

On the summer night he showed her his left eye, Tito was standing in the doorway of the bathroom in his designer underwear. Nadine was sitting on the edge of his bed unbuttoning her blouse. He'd pulled a clean T-shirt out for her, and it lay neatly folded on the bed beside her thigh.

“I want to see your eye,” Nadine said. She'd asked before, but she always backed off when he refused. “It's a part of you and I want to see it.”

Maybe Nadine caught Tito off guard barefoot in those silk briefs he got on sale at Filene's. It also could have been that he just figured, finally, it's only Nadine, what difference does it make if she sees? She of all people should be able to handle this. Right? Doesn't she volunteer at that nursing home on Childs Street, the place tucked back in the trees where all the inmates are old and deformed, on the edge of death, hollering into the night, a bunch of elderly lunatics clinging to their lives by yelling themselves hoarse? Doesn't she sit and read to those people and put her hand on their raving arms to calm them? Tito shrugged and lifted the patch. He smiled. “You asked.”

She couldn't conceal her revulsion. She looked down, at the clean shirt, then back at the eye. It was wreckage. A flap of skin and a gash, half an eyelid only partly covering a blurry mass of tissue, a gobble of iris and blue-white cornea.

Her reaction didn't surprise him. Tito slid the patch back down. Renee had done the same thing when he finally showed her. Had acted as if she were seeing it over and over again after he put the patch back down. Here was the same gagging look. And like Renee, Nadine was now saying something about blind people, about how much he had to be thankful for with his one good eye. It was as if someone had recorded the same bullshit Renee said and was now playing it from hidden speakers in this very room, as if Renee were under the bed.
Baby, of course you aren't any different to me now. How could I love you less?
But Renee was three years ago. She didn't leave right after. No. That would have been unseemly. But soon enough after. For a clown with two perfect shiny eyes, a greasebag assistant restaurant manager from Quincy. Tito took consolation in knowing that Renee carries the memory of his eye with her. That sometimes in bed with her tomato-sauced boyfriend, his eye floats across her night-mares like a wound.

“I'm sorry,” Nadine said.

“No need.”

“I bugged you.” She stood up and moved closer to him, but Tito backed away. “I should have known.”

“Known what?”

“That it would hurt you to show it.”

“I'm not one of your causes.”

“Did I say that? That you were a cause?”

“Save your bleedy heart for your social work.”

Nadine stepped back to the bed, fisted the shirt, and threw it across the room. She'd promised herself when they first started leaving the bar together that this was only about being with someone, someone to help chew up the meaningless hours when she couldn't work. That was all this was ever going to be. She turned and faced him. Stood there in her unbuttoned blouse and plum-colored bra. “And I'm some princess, Tito? You taking Princess Fergie home with you?”

“You're being stupid here now.”

“You can't look at me. Easier with the light off?”

“Why don't you put the T-shirt on?”

“What if I love you?”

“Nadine. Don't—”

“For the sake of argument. Me with my big ass and this face. What if I do?”

“I told you.”

“Right. That you're waiting for some Brahmin with a ponytail to stray into the bar, a lost lamb in search of directions. Excuse me, I'm looking for the Green Street metro. Oh my!” She put her hand over her heart and swooned. “A hunky to beat all hunkies!”

“Naddy—”

“And he's Mexican! Or something like Mexican. Oh, they will be absolutely floored on Beacon Hill, floored!”

Tito retrieved the shirt from the floor and tried to hand it to her, but she refused, kept right on talking at him in that screeching voice, what the little lost girl would look like, her curls, her sneery lip, her little yellow shorts, her peek-a-boo thighs…

Tito watched her and listened. Her half-naked rave in the middle of his room. The rain pelted the window like a phantom tap dancer. When he tried to take her in his arms, she whapped him. “Like you're the bastard that invented loneliness.”

For the first time he didn't ask her for help scratching his back, and she didn't offer. That night they slept on opposite edges of the bed. Even the bottoms of their feet didn't touch. When Tito woke up to news radio at 6:17, Nadine was long gone.

Some say they fled away together. To a cabin in backwoods Maine where they still speak French. Or maybe it was Newfoundland. San Bernardino. Others say they went separate, and not far, that she stuck to her guns and never spoke to him again, that she went to Waltham and he went to Medford. There's even one guy who swears he saw Tito doing some strange ritual dance outside her apartment, three days after she'd packed up a U-Haul and left J.P. to stew in its own juice. This guy said Tito's dance was something like half hopping and half praying, and that he kept going around and around in a circle. It all depends on how big a liar the guy who's telling it is. Because the fact is, there isn't anybody around here who knows anything more than I do. And what's it matter, really? Neither of them ever set foot back in Cousin Tuck's. What else is there?

Before they vanished, Nadine rode her bike into the bar. Pedaled right through the door. It was a hot night, and Moca Joe had propped the door open with a brick. That tote bag dangled from her handlebars. Not stopping the bike, in mid-speech about the uselessness of pool, she pedaled by our row of stools to the table, still going on about pool, how it was a disgusting waste of time and resources. Billiards! The world rides on a highway of shit while we hit glass balls into pockets like oblivious ducklings. And she called Tito all sorts of names. I won't go into all the particulars, but she let him have it as bad as she could give it, in front of all of us, in the place where he was king. She went right for his throat and said Tito's rule over Cousin Tuck's was like Reagan's, slack-jawed and drooling at the wheel while the crew cuts run the country from the basement. The pool shark racks 'em up again. Another round of opium for the masses. Then she got off the bike, let it drop, and turned to us at the bar. She said something that sounded rehearsed: “Listen up, louts, I LOVE his eye. Not his pool eye, ignorants. Do you hear me?
The eye he hides.
” She turned around and approached Tito. She placed both hands on the green felt and pulled till it ripped. Then, with one angry finger pointed at him, she said, low and vicious, as if this worst truth had only just occurred to her, “Forty-two years on earth and still dumb enough to be vain. And by the way, we didn't fuck. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.”

She got back on her bike and rode slowly toward the door. A couple of guys at the front tables moved their chairs out of the way to give her clear passage. And through the whole thing Tito just stood there holding his cue and looking at the chalk blue tip as if it were the thing exposing him, calling him out.

After Nadine coasted out of the bar (Angel stood by the door, kicked his heels together, and saluted), Tito yanked the triangle off the hook by the Bud Light girl and started to rack. He moved in the slow methodical way a shamed man does when he knows everybody's watching. His hands wandered around as though they were detached. Nobody—not even any of the newcomers, who could not have understood the significance of what had happened—stepped up to challenge. Tito broke, and the crack of the balls in the silence of the bar was enough to make even Sal Burkus wince. We listened to him knock around. He avoided the tear she'd made in the felt. Nobody made any comments. He waited a decent half hour before leaving, so we wouldn't think he was chasing her heels, her rattling back fender.