Hieroglyphics Page 19

  “Sorry to tell you, kid,” her brother said, the pupils of his eyes like pinpricks, “but we live in shit, and the only way out is what I’m fixing to do.” She didn’t think much of it until late that night when he hadn’t returned home and, while their mother slept, she filled those bags with all the trash and all the shit, all the detritus—a word that makes her think of the word viscera more than it should.

  Surely, the judge will forgive her; surely, the judge won’t judge. She is hoping that the story she wrote comes true. She wrote:

  The judge, angry as hell but looking very sophisticated in expensive shoes, slammed her gavel and shouted, “He’s the white Bill Cosby, only worse, because he has never said anything funny,” while the ugly murderer stood in his ugly orange jumpsuit, wet where he had pissed himself, and cursed everyone who had made this decision, but the people laughed and sang and danced and said they would have a huge party and everyone would pee on his grave like dogs to cover up his scent. “Don’t you agree?” the judge asked the young stenographer, whose shoes weren’t so bad, given her salary. The judge told the court that she relied heavily on the opinion of this young woman, who could take notes faster than anyone on the East Coast. “She’s brilliant,” the judge said. The stenographer gave the judge a high five and was applauded by everyone, and then the judge went on to explain how all the women who had fucked the ugly guy would have to go home and work out their own marriages. They’d be doing favors and chores forevermore, and happily so, and the old people would go back and pull out bottles of champagne for those not on heavy meds and raise a toast to “their girl,” her murder finally vindicated. They would laugh and say, “Good riddance, asshole,” but then, when alone in their beds, would cry for the young woman and the life that was stolen from her, and they would think up something new to distract them from what is just up and around the corner—game over.

  It made Shelley cry to write that, though now she imagines the judge reading it and looking at her and thinking, You have the audacity to call others ugly? You? Who do you think you are? Meeting men in bars and growing up in racist squalor? You? The mother of a young man born with a birth defect that could render him the butt of teasing and cruelty, and yet you have spent your words talking about how physically ugly the man is?

  Not long ago, she read how people have to learn how to reject others. That in fact learning to be rejected and learning how to reject is as important as any other skill you might have. But she didn’t learn it. Secure people have that skill, and she never learned it. She was intimidated by waitresses and salesclerks; beauticians, especially beauticians. She got to the place she was afraid to make friends, in case she couldn’t stand them and then wouldn’t know how to politely get rid of them.

  And now, Harvey’s teacher says he wants to meet with her again to continue the conversation, and she isn’t sure if he is asking her out or feeling sorry for her and thinking Harvey’s situation needs some really serious one-on-one face-to-face time. But she has been afraid to go, because what if he has something else on his mind, and she knows that she can’t reject him even if she decides she wants to.

  That time with the giant Hefty trash bags, she found abandoned nests of all kinds on their porch with the appliances—squirrel and mouse and bird. And she found empty toilet-paper rolls and hot-water bottles and loads of nail clippers and old rolls of duct tape, which together made a horrible story if that’s all you had to go on. She was afraid to reach her hand in drawers without shining a flashlight to make sure there wasn’t a snake or a rat or a black widow or a brown recluse spider, something that would multiply and you would never get rid of, like in that movie Gremlins that Jason loved to watch, and they looked so cute, like those Furbies that everybody had to have that one Christmas, but they weren’t cute at all. They were really, really scary! And destructive.

  Jason sent a text last week that was indecipherable. Butt-dialed. An accident. Rushing to class. She wrote back: I love you. Come see us soon.

  OK, Mom. Soon.

  Any nice girls?

  He didn’t answer, and she knows she shouldn’t have done that; he needs his space. He had told her he didn’t have a lot of spare time, that he has a heavy schedule, all kinds of projects and research going on.

  “So, are you alone now?” She gets asked that question a lot these days, a question she was asked back when no one knew where her brother had gone. Just recently in the grocery store, Harvey was spinning a rack and she was thinking about how a head of cauliflower looks like a brain, like those growths you sometimes see on a tree; there was a tree in her hometown, not far from here, that looked like that, a giant cyst or tumor on its trunk, its limbs reaching upward to get away from it. And why did she even move back this close to where she started, anyway, except thinking her brother might be there, that she might suddenly find him. “It was an accident,” he’d told her. “I swear it was.”

  “What do you remember?” people asked, and all she could come up with was a number and the words do not remove.

  Jason has asked her to tell him all that she remembers about his father, and she plans to. Someday she will tell him all that he needs to know. But right now, she needs to get her job back so she can find out how it all ends, this trial that has distracted her for months now. Shelley feels so sorry for the wife and the children of this awful man, who have already moved away, and who can blame them? People often forget about the lives of those who are tied to such a person, and that their innocent lives are fucked up by it all when they are not responsible for any of it.

  At one point in the trial, the murderer had told how heavy his wife had gotten, as if people needed to feel sorry for him, and then on a break, Shelley overheard one of the old people there to watch the show saying how that monster killed our girl. They called her “our girl”—such a nice endearment for someone who must have felt so estranged and lonely most of her life. Our girl.

  “That’s a girl,” Shelley’s brother had said when he let go of the back of that small rusty bike, and thinking he was still right there beside her, she went pedaling down Cobb Road at full speed. That’s a girl, she sometimes tells herself. That’s a girl. And when that doesn’t work, she sings “I Have Confidence” and does her very best to channel Julie Andrews channeling Maria Von Trapp, though in her imagination she does not wear that really bad hat. She is going to get her job back, and she’ll get a letter from her brother and learn that he is just fine and has been all these years, that he’s right down the road, and everything is so much better now. Can’t wait to see you, Baby Sis. Please come see me! and Brent will come to see Harvey and realize what a mistake he made—What was I thinking? he’ll say—and Harvey and Jason will be happy and they will all settle in for a good supper and to watch a movie, and then they will all live happily ever after. Do you like my hat? No, no, I do not like your hat, but I really, really love you. And she is repeating that aloud—“I really, really love you”—when the phone rings and the person on the other end tells her to get to the courthouse as quickly as she can. They need her to come back to work, but the judge wants to speak to her first.

  She breathes a sigh and once again finds the promise of that voice from long ago: You will be fine. You will be fine. And since she is already there, across the street from the courthouse waiting, she has plenty of time. She goes and looks in the mirror over the produce to check her hair and then leaves her cart in the paper products aisle. It can’t be helped; she’s in a hurry. She will switch to Lowes Foods in the future, or she will tell the Food Lion people it was an emergency. And it is.

  Lil

  August 2016 (remembering)

  Southern Pines

  The wall phone rang once that long-ago day: a signal. “That is so annoying,” I said, and your father agreed; he was reading the paper and talking about how they feared rats might infest the city because of the Big Dig, or that they might once again uncover graves, as they had years before when building the subway, long-buried bones of undocumented
dead, and wondering how such a thing can even happen, and yet it has, and it does.

  Your father was wearing my favorite shirt of his, a soft pinwale corduroy in forest green that I’d given him one Christmas. He said sometimes the phone rings when the phone company is working on the lines. We talked about that a little. We talked about the mouse problem we had had years before in our tiny first apartment, and the way it was not uncommon for squirrels to get stuck in the walls and slam around for a couple of days. And then the phone rang again, a shrill ring there from the kitchen, and then we talked about you, Becca, and how you and Alan seemed very happy together, and we talked about you, Jeff, and how relieved we were that you had really found your strength there in those business courses. And then your father stood suddenly, and in a voice I had heard only when he was rounding you kids up for some outing years before, he said: “I know what!” He clapped his hands. “I am going to get us takeout Chinese.”

  It was out of character, but in the moment, I thought it was just a nice thing. I had everything I needed for a meatloaf, but that would keep. I could just sit and watch the news, read the paper. And I planned that the next time the phone rang, I would grab it fast and give whoever an earful. But it didn’t ring again, and it took longer than it should have for him to get the food. He said there was traffic, and a miscommunication about the order of the person in front of him, but I have never eaten an egg roll since when I don’t remember the overly cheerful, exuberant tone of your father’s voice, and the way he avoided eye contact, so focused he was on the food on his plate, saying how he really had to watch out for those hot red peppers, and then later carefully cracking the thin cookie to extract his fortune, something stupid and common (“There is a bend in the road” or “Seek and ye shall find,” something like that), but I pretended I saw great and deep meaning there. Then I said, “But of course, now I understand,” and I looked at him until he had to look away.

  How odd the way an obsession that has blinded and trapped you can suddenly lift like a heavy fog. It dissipates, dissolves. When in the thick of it, you can’t imagine that it could happen, that the helpless panic you feel will shift back into something safe and solid, but it can. It was an afternoon several years later when it hit me just that way (perhaps because I was seated there on that olive sofa and your father in his chair, just as we had been that day in October), and the phone rang, but we let it go to the machine and listened as we were told that the coat I had taken to the cleaners was ready for pickup. It was winter, and we couldn’t fill the bird feeders fast enough, a bright-red cardinal and a host of chickadees constantly outside the window. We resisted turning on the lights and instead built a fire and let the blue dusk fill the room. We could hear the popping of the wood and the cars passing as people made their way home.

  “It’s all good, isn’t it?” your father asked, and I knew exactly what he meant. I said, “Absolutely.” I said, “It’s all very good.” And fearing the phone would once again disrupt our silence, I went and unplugged it from the wall. I said that I would never want to go back. Though I do wonder if we aren’t tested from time to time, my vision now so much clearer than it might have been.

  And how complicated it must be for people these days, with all those devices and chatter—the way you can see where the call comes from, trace it, even tape it. And yet people still find ways to cheat and creep and bury their bones. I am glad I grew up with a rotary phone. I am glad I grew up with silence. I’m glad Frank and I found our way back.

  Sometimes lately, here in the blurry buzz of air-conditioning, the soft, cushioned peach-colored carpet under my feet, the Easter egg men and the stark ugly pine trees out the window in the glaring heat, I find my mind takes me home. My first home. I am in Waltham, with the drip, drip, drip of the bathroom sink. My father had tied a cloth around the pipe to muffle the sound until it could be fixed, and yet I could still hear it. And on another night, barely spring outside, he took a hammer to the faucet and then stood back, an arching spray of water covering him and all of the bathroom. He stood there, hammer in hand, and I couldn’t tell if the water on his face was coming from without or within.

  I worry about Frank. Every day, I feel him slipping from me; I imagine each day takes him a little bit closer to that place, pulling him like the Sirens calling him into the rocks. Hastening. I look for messages. I look for signs. Every day I think, “It could be today.” I look out and see the bright sunlight and think, “Yes, he would choose a day like today,” a happy, bright day, a day and time opposite from that long-ago accident that changed his whole life. Or I look out in the dark of winter and think: “No, this is it.” He will choose a day to match that of that December night so very long ago. They both make sense, both choices, and we as humans like to make sense. When it rains on a funeral, we say the universe is crying, and when the sun shines, we say the dearly departed is smiling from beyond. Rain on a wedding (like yours, Becca) they say is good luck, and yet on that sunny beautiful day, no one says, “Oh no, I was hoping for a little rain for good luck.”

  Today when I woke and snuggled in close to your father, I realized he smells different, the skin and dust of a much-older man, the pores no longer exuding whatever youth once gave off. It is not unlike the way a dog will know things. Remember when poor Margot was old and we got Rudolf to help see her through? I have never known if that was the right thing to do or not. I feared it hurt her feelings, because she stayed another two years, but there at the end, Rudolf often smelled her breath, and I think he was smelling death, that he knew it was coming. If we all opened our senses to it, we would see much more than we do in passing.

  Sometimes I wake early and just watch your father sleeping; I lean close and breathe in, this new smell I have come to treasure as I once did that smell of youth and virility. He talks too much about death these days. I don’t mind discussing the practical aspects; I think that’s important. But he is discussing the hows, musing about when, his invitation for us to simply leave together there in the room like the big elephant. I’m always surprised when people ask those awful questions: Would you rather die suddenly of a heart attack, or after a long battle with cancer? And who plays such parlor games but the young, who believe they will always be young. People talk about premature deaths, but do they ever talk of mature ones?

  Connie! That is the name of the woman from Filene’s, and isn’t it funny how pieces blow in that way and how I realize that sometimes when Gloria calls to tell me what is happening there at home, I picture Connie just as she looked walking past the Wilbur Theatre in 1950-something. Connie with her auburn bob and perpetual grin, selling hosiery while I sold cosmetics and perfume. Coty gift set? Prince Matchabelli?

  Oh, it is so mysterious when the pieces blow in, like a window cracking to give the tiniest bit of air and light. Cold winter air and I am in the carpool line, windshield wipers batting the fat snowflakes, heat on my face and feet, making me drowsy, or I am there on the platform, waiting for the train.

  Harvey

  Sometimes, Harvey crawls along and through the bushes so he can see where the ghosts come from. Maybe from the old manhole, like what the Ninja Turtles use. He told his mom how he found signs, like his dad taught him to do. He’s seen broken sticks and tracks, a screwdriver. There are a lot of rabbit turds in there and Peggy eats those like a snack. Jason said rabbit turds is like Peggy’s Raisinets but under the bushes is also where Peggy goes to the bathroom and that is what Harvey’s mom wanted to talk about most. “You didn’t wipe your feet!” she said, and pointed to the rug.

  “I saw where they stay,” he told her, but she was scrubbing with paper towels and saying his name the way she does sometimes—“Harvey, Harvey, Harvey”—so he didn’t tell her he found a big flat piece of gold and some more matches. She asked didn’t he smell what he stepped in? But, no, he didn’t, because he was watching the manhole. You have to watch or they might come out and grab you. His mom was mad or he would have said what made her laugh one time, how she sa
id dog doo-doo was white when she was a kid. She and Jason laughed and laughed and that’s what Harvey likes to think about if scary things come in his head instead, like the Munchkins flipping your car and calling you things like shitbutt and snothead, or Lizzie with her axe, or those rich boys that killed their mama and daddy while they were watching television.

  Super Monkey said, “Hey, you guys, c’mon, they’re your mom and dad and you got a big TV and cars and stuff,” and they said, “Well, sometimes a mom or dad needs to go away and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “But they shouldn’t go away,” Super Monkey said. “A mom and a dad shouldn’t go away ever and you need to just watch that big TV and you think about it.”

  And then they said, okay, they would think about it.

  “Honey,” his mama said, “I’ve got to go to work and you have got to go to camp. You can’t do this every morning, okay? I had no idea where you were. And wipe your feet next time, okay?”

  And he said, “Okay,” and she said, “Maybe stay closer to the house,” and he said, “Okay,” but he didn’t tell her he ran and put a note on top of the manhole. Whos HEAR? he wrote in red crayon and now he can’t wait to get home from camp to go and see if they wrote back.

  At camp, the teacher asked what kids like and when Harvey said turtles, they spent lots of time on turtles. The teacher told things that Jason already told Harvey, about how they lived with dinosaurs and how they could be huge, like two thousand pounds, like a car, and how they can get really old if nothing kills them. But what he didn’t know is how a cool nest makes a boy turtle instead of a girl, and a girl named Bailey said that wasn’t fair until somebody else said when the world heats up then there will only be girl turtles and then she laughed and said, “Well, okay then. See? See?”