Love on the Road 2015 (2 page)

‘You could sell a fridge to an Eskimo.’

‘Or maybe to a Shona,’ she laughed.

He noticed her pearly white teeth and the flawless caramel skin that glistened with a sprinkling of sweat on her brow. Her eyes were hazel and twinkled when she smiled.

Tinotenda was lost, hypnotised in them, until he realised he was being rude, staring. He abruptly turned away, feeling embarrassed. He could feel his heartbeat. One, two, one, two. They inched forward, making progress. Time slowed down in the queue as the burning sun arced through the sky. His thoughts drifted from his landlord to Star and back to his landlord. The rent was going up again; his salary was not. Star, Star, Star, twinkling behind him.
Teachers and students – oil and water,
he thought.

There were so many voices in the queue, talking at once. People who had been strangers just hours earlier now discovered some bond. Some spoke about the rains, which had failed to fall again. A voice, right at the back, was loudly revealing how it had noticed a pattern and come up with a foolproof strategy for winning the lotto. Someone asked for the method, but the voice refused, choosing instead to talk about how it was going to spend the money.

‘Jesus has done miracles for me this year. He can do miracles for you too,’ a woman at the front with a shrill voice was saying.

‘No, no, no … it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s called multi-level marketing. You pay five million, then you can go for meetings in Harare. When you get ten people to join, and they get another ten to join, you are given fifty million. My cousin who made me join has just harvested his fifty,’ the fat man said to his queue-jumping comrade.

Tinotenda listened to the voices, his mind tripping, returning to Star, oscillating between her and the world around them.
We are the fish and the people are the sea.
The queue kept moving forward. Tinotenda smiled to himself as if there were no one else about. He now stood at the threshold.

The guard emerged and held his baton to Tinotenda’s chest. It was a short, stout phallus with a rope that was tied around the guard’s wrist.

‘Right, there is no more money. It is finished,’ he said.

‘We’ve been here all day!’ the overalls man shouted.

‘We don’t print money here. Come back tomorrow. There’s nothing I can do. Don’t shoot the messenger.’

The guard bolted the door, locking them out.

Tinotenda saw how close he was. Had the fat man’s friend not jumped the queue, he’d have made it. The people in the queue hung about for a while, as though they expected the guard to come out and say it was a prank. A few voices of dissent grumbled for form’s sake and then fizzled out. Tinotenda felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘I guess we’ll meet here tomorrow, same time?’ Star said.

‘A little earlier may be better.’

He watched her walk away until she was swallowed up by
the crowd. She was autumn orange, appearing and disappearing, twinkling, twinkling as she went. Tinotenda walked away a happy man; he had a date tomorrow with the queue.

Monroe Rosenberg figured that a nursing home was like a hotel. He had checked himself into the South Beach Senior Center. By God he could check himself out.

His downward slide began the day he hit eighty. He ate lunch at the Van Dyke, bought himself a
New York Times,
and was taking his usual three-mile stroll up and down the Lincoln Road Mall. Suddenly, a crack in the pavement appeared out of nowhere. He lurched forward and landed like a tumbled bag of groceries. His eyeglasses flew in one direction, his cane another. A tropical breeze blew his newspapers like tumbleweeds along the street.

Monroe had prided himself on both his independence and his good health. When his wife Goldie died ten years earlier, he didn’t cry in his soup like other widowers. He learned which buttons to push on the microwave and how to wash his clothes. Monroe had served four years in the Navy unscathed. Now a simple flaw in the cement redirected his life. His hip cracked like an egg.

The visions started the first week in the rehab centre. Monroe was wide awake. He tackled Sudoku puzzles and kept track of his investments. There was nothing wrong
with his mind. And keeping your thoughts intact was no easy task in an institution. Half of the patients spoke Spanish while the other half spoke to Elvis. So when the visions flashed on his TV screen, right there in Technicolor like a commercial, he didn’t flinch.

One minute he was watching CNN and the next minute he was watching his funeral. A rabbi he didn’t recognise stood at a podium. As old and stooped as Monroe, his liver-spotted hands grew shakier from one vision to the next. For the next seventeen minutes, the rabbi would tell a story so distorted and distanced from the truth that it was only at the end that Monroe realised it was about him.

‘And now will you please bow your heads and say a prayer for our friend and neighbour, not to mention beloved uncle, Monroe Rosenberg.’

Then the crowd – the men straight from the golf course in their pastel-coloured shirts, a handful of Goldie’s friends in pearls and going-to-synagogue suits – chanted Kaddish. In the front row sat Goldie’s nephew Carter. Curling his fingers into a fist and thwacking his chest, he out-cried them all.

For years, Carter had been like a son. He had been directionless, bouncing from one job to the next. Then one night Goldie sat Monroe down at their kitchen table. She had baked
mandlebreit
and made him tea. Monroe dunked the cookie into the cup, counted the seconds, extracted the cookie and, just as he was taking that first satisfying bite, Goldie launched a surprise attack.

‘My nephew Carter, I know he’s been a
schlimazel,
a constant source of worry to my poor sister, but he tries hard. What he needs is a break. An opportunity. I was thinking maybe at the Woodmere store, you could show him the ropes.’

Monroe had a gift for business. First one clothing store than another had sprung up like mushrooms, all over Long Island. Monroe admitted he could use the help. Soon, he and Carter were visiting the factories in China, hefting bolts of fabric, checking dye lots, inspecting samples for defects and pulls. Then, a year before Goldie’s death, just when they figured out the chemo wasn’t working, Carter stole Monroe’s list of contacts. By the time they called in the hospice people, Carter had opened his own chain.

Monroe had never known such betrayal. And now Carter sat in the first row like the heir apparent, commandeering the high-profile seats with his third or fourth wife – who could keep track? – and blowing his nose like a bugle.

‘Did you see that?’ Monroe pointed to the TV. It wasn’t one of those fancy models that hung on the wall. This one was a behemoth, an antique, a box thirty-six inches wide, plopped on a black plastic cart.

‘Wardell, I’m talking to you. Are you deaf?’

The black orderly looked around, hoping there was someone else in the room. He stared at his reflection in the mirror. Green scrubs, latex gloves, his bald head in need of a fresh shave.

‘You want me to change the channel?’

Monroe felt like a prisoner in his own body, caged by bed rails one minute, tethered to his wheelchair the next.

‘Look. Look at that for Christ’s sake! The man with the hat is the rabbi. That idiot in the first row is my nephew Carter. Don’t you see them? Don’t you see them?’

The orderly walked over to Monroe’s hospital bed, plumped the pillows, sighed.

‘Mr R, you seem a bit agitated.’

‘A washing machine gets agitated. This is not agitated.’ His cheeks blotched purplish red, Monroe began to shout. ‘Do I look agitated?’

Up and down the rows, Monroe searched for faces from his past. He had been an only child. His father had been a haberdasher in Brooklyn, his mother a seamstress. They worked with their hands while the radio blared, their lives in rhythm with their machines.

They called him a change-of-life baby – a baby that comes after you’ve converted the empty nursery into a sewing room. They were going to move out West, they always told Monroe, but his birth changed everything. His mother, a blond, blue-eyed beauty, had dreamt of travelling the world. She framed magazine pictures of California and hung them up on walls of their home. The Golden Gate Bridge. Yosemite. Lake Tahoe. Whenever she’d walk by them, she’d touch them with her fingertips as if each were a
mezuzah
containing a hidden prayer. ‘Life,’ she would tell her son, ‘sends you detours.’

Wardell shook his head. ‘You should consider some of them pills, Mr R.’

‘You can take my pills and shove them up your ass, Wardell. I hate pills! And they can’t force me to take them either!’

There are a lot of crazy white people in here, but not this old man,
thought Wardell.
This old man has all his pistons firing.
He smiled, unzipping his mouth slowly from one side to the other so that the old man could count his teeth.

‘I imagine it’s a gift, Mr R. Being a guest at your own funeral. It’s a gift.’

Monroe raised his eyebrows. ‘A gift?’ The old man pointed a gnarled and crooked finger at the TV. ‘This isn’t a
dream. It’s more like a nightmare. And it’s real, I tell you. As real as you are, standing in this room.’

Monroe lay back in his bed and rested his head. The orderly gently placed two fingers on his wrist and checked his pulse.

‘I used to dream about my college graduation,’ said the orderly. ‘The dream seemed so real I could touch it. Like it was in fucking 3D. I was wearing that hat with the tassels, the long black gown, walking down the aisle. And there was my mama in the first row, crying and yelling my name. “Wardell! Wardell!” Sometimes the mind gets night and day confused. Hope and reality can get confused, too.’

The orderly had an accent, a Caribbean lilt to his voice. Up and down like ocean waves, the sounds began to lull Monroe to sleep. His eyelids fluttered. A shiver jolted his hand.

‘Did you graduate?’

‘Had to drop out the first semester. My father died. Never had a chance to go back.’

Whenever Monroe tried to remember his father, he couldn’t visualise his face or hear his voice. Only a heavy brown coat came to mind. Monroe would be in his pyjamas, listening with his mother to Molly Goldberg, when his father would open the front door and let the wind rush in. Then he’d throw his tan fedora on their hall tree, take off his coat, and hang it in the closet. Monroe remembered a cuff, a sleeve. His father would be dead by the time he was five. Cancer. The chemicals in the hat factory, his mother would say. To this day, whenever a draft chilled the room, Monroe would picture that sleeve.

His uncle Hymie filled the gaps. If his mother was short with a mortgage payment, her brother would send a
cheque. When Monroe got a girl in trouble, Uncle Hymie made those arrangements, too. All those years he and Goldie tried to get pregnant and nothing happened. But when he had been only sixteen, his chest still as hairless as a child’s, he had knocked someone up. His uncle’s receptionist no less.

For a short six months, he had been in love. Monroe was always a sturdy kid, built like a tree stump. Short, wide, grounded. When his uncle offered him a job at his furniture store, he couldn’t turn down the extra cash. Bureaus, beds, tables. There was nothing Monroe couldn’t lift. Soon he developed muscles he never knew existed. Bulges grew under his shirts.

Gretchen noticed. She was in her twenties. Her face and neck were talcum-powdered, her nails and her lips painted a bright fire-engine red. No girl, let alone a full-bodied woman, had ever taken an interest in Monroe before. Soon she was lurking in the supply closet and bumping into him in the halls. For a few short seconds the world spun.

When she told him she was pregnant, he couldn’t believe a momentary blip – her hand on his zipper, his hand on her breast – was all it took. Monroe was sure he’d lose his job. He dreamt at night about the Bowery, living in a one-room tenement with Gretchen, the baby screaming all day and all night. But his uncle surprised him. Another detour, thought Monroe. Another path in a whole new direction.

‘You know you’re not the only fella in this woman’s purview,’ said Hymie. ‘By God she has a black book! A black book with names!’

Monroe had been wondering why his uncle had hired a receptionist who couldn’t type. Gretchen had a voice that
squeaked like a rusty hinge. Customers hung up the phone when she answered.

‘And every other month she threatens to show the goddamned book to your Aunt Myra!’

Maybe Hymie didn’t want competition in the bedroom. Weeks later, he farmed Monroe out to another businessman. Carl ‘Fits Like a Glove’ Yankowitz. He sold women’s shoes and accessories, whatever overstocks he could find. Monroe learned the retail-clothing business, and Hymie and Myra stayed happily married for almost fifty years. Friday nights, Monroe’s mother would cook them dinner, her small way of saying thanks. Hymie, his breath soured from cigarettes, his big belly tugging at the buttons on his shirt, would sidle up to Monroe at the kitchen table.

‘My friend Yankowitz, is he treating you right?’

Monroe knew Carl was cooking the books. He underpaid his help and
schtupped
the secretaries. ‘He’s treating me okay.’

‘He’s a
goniff.
A thief and a scoundrel. You couldn’t pay for a better education!’

Hymie saw Monroe off when he boarded his first ship out to sea and stood alongside his mother at his wedding. Hymie lived long enough to meet Goldie. He liked Goldie. He always wanted them to have children right off the bat.

Carter wasn’t the only fixture in his dreams. There was Abe Bernstein, who cheated at golf, moving the ball when he thought no one was looking. The stockbroker, he forgot his name, who always advised him to buy high and sell low. And Goldie’s friends. Yetta or Etta. Marlene or Eileen. He wasn’t sure. There they sat with their dyed black hair, dabbing their orange cheeks with their tissues, looking in their
compacts every five minutes to make sure their mascara hadn’t run. God, how he hated those women. They surrounded Goldie like a tidal pool, circling her, feeding off of her good nature –
My, my we’d love an invitation to your country club!
– then abandoned her when she got sick. A get-well card, a potted plant, the detritus of friendship. Of all the villains who inhabited his visions, they were the worst.

Two months later, they moved Monroe from rehab into the nursing-home wing. Wardell got himself transferred, too. The two of them found a connection, a symbiotic relationship. They read the
New York Times
together, ogled
Baywatch
reruns on TV, and figured out ways to undermine the system. Monroe would fake symptoms and Wardell would pocket the drugs.

‘
Symbiotic.
Write that down, Wardell.’ Monroe had lifted another writing pad (‘Lipitor: Don’t Kid Yourself’) from the nurses’ station.

It was clear to him that the orderly was one of the more intelligent employees of the nursing home. Wardell was kind to the
alter kockers
reduced to bibs and diapers. He followed sports. He was reasonably well-informed about current events. Yet he had the vocabulary of an eight-year-old.

‘We have a remunerative kinship, my friend. Write that down.
Remunerative.
I keep my head clear of medication and you keep yourself stocked in crack or meth or whatever else strikes your fancy.’

‘I’m not an addict, Mr R. I told you. I ain’t making money off your pills. They’re more like barter. I’m using them to barter for things I need.’

But the orderly couldn’t be by Monroe’s side every
minute of the day. And one night all the forces in the universe colluded against Monroe.

He had dreamt again of his funeral. A green tarp. Four poles. Carter was shovelling dirt on his casket while his cell phone rang.

‘Here,’ he said to the rabbi. ‘I’ve got to take this.’

Then he handed the shovel to the rabbi like a baton in a relay race. Turning his back, he flipped open his phone. Goldie’s friends cocked their ears in Carter’s direction. What else could they do? He was speaking so loud. He always spoke so goddamned loud, making wide swooping gestures with his arms. And such a suit! Silver pinstripes on black worsted wool, double-breasted with a nice narrow lapel. Monroe felt upstaged at his own funeral.

He woke up with a start. His heart was beating so violently that he looked down at his chest to see if the sheets were moving. And in those few moments while his head wasn’t clear, when he wasn’t quite sure if he was asleep or awake, he decided to take a leak. He forgot he was eighty years old. He forgot he was in the nursing home. Like he had done for decades, he swung his legs to the side of the bed, somehow vaulted over the side rails, and started walking to the bathroom. Five steps later, his hip gave out.

The call button around his neck landed between his shoulder blades. His arm was sandwiched between his bad hip and the floor. No matter how much he turned and twisted, Monroe couldn’t find the leverage to get up. For eight hours he lay on the floor. Wardell found him the next morning.

‘Anything feel broke? What were you thinking, man? What were you thinking?’