Elegies for the Brokenhearted (15 page)

In some strange way the news of your death saved me. I started to wonder what I wanted to do. I had only the vaguest idea of my future. I was scheduled to start graduate school in the fall, in French language and literature, after which I imagined teaching high school, living a quiet life in a tiny apartment, probably with several cats. But now I saw very clearly what was missing—the things I would regret if I never did them.

First on the list was reconciling with my sister, and so I set about the business of finding her. I looked in the classifieds for a car and found a Buick Centurion for two hundred dollars. The car's owner was a man in a cowboy hat, and he seemed reluctant to sell. As we took the car on a test drive he listed all of its flaws: the heat and radio didn't work; the wipers dragged; the tires were bald and the brakes iffy; there was a bit of trouble with the transmission, the engine overheated and so it was best to drive at night if I was planning on going farther than ten miles. “She might break down on you tomorrow,” he said. “I'd hate to see you stuck on the side of the road. You better look around some more.”

But I bought the car and packed it up with everything I owned in the world, with clothes and books, a sleeping bag and pillow, my old clarinet (long dead in its coffin), a fifty-year-old manual typewriter I'd bought at a pawnshop along with a spare ribbon. I imagined that this was the last ribbon on earth suited to the machine, and sometimes grew preoccupied with the problem of the ribbon, and the notion that within so many feet of black fabric I would have to say all that I had to say because when it ran out there would be no replacing it. Though this was ridiculous—one could write by hand, for instance, one could always find another typewriter—it filled me with anxiety.

As I was leaving campus it occurred to me that I might first drive down to that town of yours, that awful place that had held you captive. At the exit to your town I pulled off the highway and drove for miles and miles through yellow fields. The town itself was small and it wasn't hard to find city hall, where I stopped for your address, and from there it was just a short walk to your house, a small white block of a house with a red door and red shutters. To the mailbox by the road, your father had affixed the Washington name with reflective foil stickers. A small bicycle lay on its side on the front lawn. Regis had been a baby when I'd known you but now of course he was old enough to ride a bike. This troubled me. The windows were open and I could see your mother's curtains, white lace, lifting and falling with the breeze. In back of the house was an aluminum swing set, blue, with two white plastic swings dangling from it. A sprinkler was running, though it couldn't have been for the grass—the grass was long dead—it must have been running for a child, for Regis, but there was no one out.

I walked around some more. There wasn't a building in town taller than a single story—all of the houses and shops and municipal buildings were squat and flat-roofed. Even the church—the First Assembly of the Fire Baptized—was this way. It had been converted from a house and still had a screened-in porch at the front. There weren't many people out, but now and then I passed someone and they'd nod to me, seeming to wonder what I was doing there, who I was, what I wanted.

At the center of town there was a small grocery store and I walked through it. Everything had been priced with a gun, little flags of white paper with numbers printed in purple, the way things used to be years ago. I picked up a loaf of bread, squeezed it. I picked up a variety of cans—half pears in lite syrup, fruit cocktail, sliced pineapple—and examined them, placed them back on the shelf. I thought of you shopping there, going through the aisles. I found the pastries, the donuts. I found the cereal. Though I knew it was ridiculous I was compelled to touch everything. On my way out of the store I waved to the cashier—a fat woman in a flowered dress—who remained expressionless, as if she couldn't see me.

I walked to your house again, knocked on the door, even looked through the living room window, but all was quiet. Which I told myself was for the best. I didn't know what I'd say if someone had answered.

By the time I left town the sun had gone down. On the southbound road away from that place I drove past the county nursing home where your mother and sister worked, a single-story building made of red brick that had obviously once been a motel. It had a large central lobby and a long wing extending out on either side, each room with a door opening right out into the parking lot. All the rooms were dark and only the lobby was lit, by light of the television. When I drove past I saw that all of the home's residents had been wheeled to the lobby in their wheelchairs and arranged around the television in a horseshoe. They sat with their backs bent, their heads bent, and they seemed like spineless creatures languishing under the sea. I pulled to the side of the road and looked for a long moment at that place. Black women in pink scrubs walked about, going in and out of the lobby, and I thought perhaps one of them was your mother. Around that nursing home wasn't a stick of life. It sat in the middle of a giant paved lot. Rising above it was a tall sign that had once said something but now no longer did, now it was only a giant white sign that said nothing. A chill went through me. To live in that town one's whole life, to die there—one of those long, suffering deaths, day after day after day in bed looking out the window into an empty parking lot—it was unimaginable. I sped off as though fleeing the scene of a crime. But the picture of this nursing home stayed with me for many years, dogged me, it raised the hairs on my neck every time I thought of it. In dreams I saw the home glowing green, saw myself in it, and woke in a sweat.

A bit farther down the road (would I never get out of this place?) there was a train coming and I had to stop for it. The clanging of the signal, the traffic arms coming down, the blinking lights, the bright light shining out in front of the train, and then it came into view. The ground shook. The train was slow-moving, car after car after car, some piled up and overflowing with coal, some piled with crushed automobiles, some of the boxcars with their doors flung open, empty. It occurred to me then as it always did when I saw an open boxcar to run after it and jump inside it and ride on to wherever it was going, to make a new life there. As I sat watching it—slow, slower—I saw something twisting in the air, it went in and out of the path of the car's headlights, one of those white wisps of cotton you'd mentioned. The cotton seemed propelled by some inner force. It turned and lifted and curled and fell, turned and lifted again, twisting. Just when it seemed about to disappear, sinking down, it lifted again; it would never come to rest, it would never settle anywhere, which was a problem I knew something about, the problem of being weightless. I watched that cotton for I don't know how long, hypnotized, and then the train was past and the cotton, the last trace of you, swept along with it, and I crossed the tracks and headed north.

Back home I stayed with Walter Adams, and went about the city tracking down Malinda's old friends. “God, Malinda,” people said, shaking their heads, “we were wicked tight for a while but then one day she just dropped me.” Somehow the fact that I was looking for Malinda escaped these people and they wound up asking me how she'd been, what she'd been up to all these years. “I don't know,” I told them. “I haven't seen her in five years.”

“You mean,” they said, “you haven't talked to her in all this time, your own sister?”

One person sent me to the next, then the next, and I spent two weeks hunting people down at their jobs, I walked the long hallways of hospitals and hotels, I went up and down the aisles of grocery and discount stores, in and out of restaurants, until eventually a story came together—that Malinda and a group of her friends spent their summers in the resort town of Ogunquit, Maine, working in the restaurants, where they made enough money in three months to support themselves for the rest of the year.

When I got to Ogunquit I went to all of its restaurants, showing Malinda's picture around until late in the night, but no one had ever heard of her. After all of the restaurants had closed I took a long, despairing walk on the beach. It seemed I had reached a dead end, it seemed I would never find her. I put my feet in the water and felt the pull of the tide. I decided to swim for a while. Without thinking too much about it I swam out farther than it was reasonable to swim. I could see the shoreline, curved and winking, but it was vague and out of reach, like some dream I'd once had. Then I was suddenly tired, out of breath, and it seemed I would never fight my way to land. I lay on my back trying to gather my strength and I started to wonder what the point of swimming back might be. It occurred to me that I might as well just float away. Though moments later, propelled by some primal instinct, I would start back to shore, and make it—at the time the sky was black and the water too was black, at the time I was floating on my back with my ears sunk underwater and it was quiet, quiet, at the time I felt utterly, hopelessly, infinitely alone, at the time I was going slack and I knew then, just for a moment, what it was like, I knew what you meant, I knew what you said was true, I knew I was drowning.

(1952–1996)

N
orthern Arkansas, 1952. Oh that you had been born somewhere, anywhere else. A swamp of a town, as you told it, its inhabitants like the creatures of a swamp, primitive and slow-moving, with the stupid smiles and heavy-lidded stares of frogs. No place for you.
A person with a bit of taste,
as you called yourself.
A person with a bit of class.
Throughout your childhood you waited like a customer in line at a complaint window. Somber, patient, holding a numbered ticket in your hand, you believed there would come a day, one day your turn would come at the head of the line and you would be given the chance to explain to someone, a surly employee in blue coveralls, your predicament.
I believe some mistake has been made. I do not belong here.
And there would be no doubt. One look at you would tell the story. You were a short, slender boy with an oversized head; you were pale, with hair so thin it was colorless; you had a soft, sibilant voice, a lilting cadence; you were nearsighted, with thick glasses in tortoiseshell frames, your eyes strangely magnified behind them; you were weak, pigeon-toed, with a funny, shuffling walk, and no, no, you did not belong here, you were not the right kind of boy for this place, anyone could see.

To be a boy in your town, a proper boy, was to be outdoors, running barefoot and shirtless through the woods, to shoot down squirrels and birds with slingshots, to wrestle and fight with other boys—those writhing, muscular, brainless organisms—to flick open and closed, open and closed, the blade of one's pocketknife, to move through the world mudcovered, dirt thick under one's nails, to spit on the ground, to piss against trees. Meanwhile there you sat on your grandparents' front porch, in a cane rocking chair, reading from your encyclopedia set, listening to classical records on the Victrola. Every afternoon you sat there in your linen shirts and trousers—preened and polished, your nails clipped, your hair oiled and parted to the side—you sat sipping tea from your grandmother's rose-trimmed china cups, and when the other boys passed you by on their way to and from the woods, they called out to you the worst name they knew—Fairy!—and the word and its name became one, the word floated in the air, glimmering and alive, the word settled like dust around you. Though it would be many years before the troubles of sex introduced themselves to boys your age, they knew already the difference between you—Fairy, Fairy, Quite Contrary—they knew already, you were not a proper boy.

There was nothing for you to do but wait. Wait and perform those duties necessary to your survival and eventual escape. Through one decade and into the next, through grade school and junior high, through the long, yawning stretch of high school you waited, practicing your piano in the mornings and evenings, the metronome knocking out time as you ran your scales and arpeggios, ascending and descending and ascending again; you waited in the front row of every classroom with your hand raised; you waited with your hands folded through Baptist services every Sunday, you waited while you waded into the town's cold lake to be baptized, fell back into the arms of your preacher, even with your head submerged underwater you were waiting, waiting, waiting for the day you would leave for college and renounce that place and everyone in it, everything you had said and done and pretended to believe within its borders. And when finally the day came (like Ulysses you escaped from your cave under the aegis of an animal), when you left to study music in New York, you watched from the window of the Greyhound bus as the porter loaded your suitcases into the luggage compartment, you watched as your grandmother stood waving a kerchief, you looked back and told yourself:
I am never coming back, I will never see this place, these people, ever again
.

 

O
f course I knew none of this at first—at first you were nothing to me but another in a long line of strange characters I met the summer I went off in search of my sister. This was in Ogunquit, Maine, a quaint beach town whose streets were lined with historic houses, with little shops and restaurants. It was the type of place I'd only seen before on postcards, and in fact everything there looked not quite real, as if it had been staged by a photographer, an adman. Tourists strolled around in perfect ease, their hands in their pockets. They wore white pants, bright polo shirts, tasseled loafers. They were fat and pink and exuberant, smacking of health and abundance. In a place like Ogunquit it was easy to believe that life was effortless, beautiful, that there was nothing to it but riches. It was exactly the kind of place, I thought, Malinda would run off to.

I had spent two days walking around town, sneaking behind all of its restaurants, to their back entrances, where the dumpsters were kept, where employees sat smoking on overturned buckets, for it was in these shadowy, stinking corners that life's drudgery was hiding. I'd shown Malinda's picture around, and almost everyone had the same reaction, which was to look at her and whistle: “A girl like that,” they said, and paused, “a girl like that I'd remember.”

This is how we met, on my second evening in town, when I had started to give up hope. When I first saw you, you were leaning by the side entrance of a fancy seafood place that overlooked the water. You were so remarkably small, so short and slender, that for an instant I had the impression you had stepped out of another dimension. As a child I had always suspected that a race of small people was working behind the scenes of what I took for ordinary life—behind a scrim they pushed buttons and pulled levers, controlling the traffic, the weather, the moods of my mother—and now, it seemed, here you were, an elf out on a cigarette break. You had an elf's pinkish skin, and an elf's delicate upturned nose. Your hair was parted elf-like on the side, slicked down with pomade. Though you were formally dressed—in a dark blue suit with a yellow bow tie—your small size gave the suit the look of a costume.

I caught your eye and we stared at each other for a second. I wonder, now, what I looked like to you—some wastrel, some crumpled vagrant.

May I help you?
you said. Your voice was high, snide.

“I'm looking for this girl.” I held out Malinda's picture and you fairly snatched it out of my hand. When you saw Malinda a corner of your mouth turned up.

What is it you want with Malinda?
you said.
If I might be so bold as to ask?

“You know her?”

I might,
you said.
I might not.
Your voice seemed to me like the recording of a voice—it was too loud, and there was something plastic about it.
She doesn't have any money, if that's what you want. If that's what you're after, you can just forget it.

I wondered how bad off Malinda was. If there were people coming by her workplace looking for the money she owed them. I didn't doubt it. The last time I'd seen her she was so drunk her eyes were swirling in the manner of a cartoon character hypnotized by a mad scientist. She'd come home in the middle of the night and woken me up. “Can I have some money?” she'd said, and I'd gone to my bureau drawer, where I kept a roll of soft, dirty bills rolled up inside a tube sock. I'd pulled out a twenty, thinking how it represented five hours of standing in front of a register at the grocery store, five hours of my life I'd never get back. She'd grabbed it and stuffed it in her pocket and said, “See ya.” Which was little enough of a parting sentiment, and she'd delivered not even that kindness. The next night I'd come home from work to find the rest of my money gone.

Hello?
you said. You stepped toward me and snapped your fingers in front of my face.

“Could you just tell me where Malinda is?” I said.

I don't think so
.
If I were you I'd turn around and go back wherever it was you came from.
You made a shooing motion with your hand.
I have half a mind to call the authorities
.
We don't allow loitering on the premises.

I looked at you murderously. I had an image of gripping your throat, strangling your neck. I wondered who would win in a fight between us. Since my junior year of college I'd suffered bouts of insomnia, and I'd spent long nights on the couch in the dormitory lobby watching nature documentaries on public television. One animal was always fighting another, and I could never tell which one would survive. Sometimes the smaller animals were faster and got away, other times their size worked against them and they were devoured. You were, I thought, smaller and more delicate than I was, and I had an advantage there. But then again you were angry, and sometimes anger was enough. It was a toss-up.

Have you had a stroke or something?
you said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot what we were talking about.”

Then you burst out laughing, a high, stuttering kind of laugh I'd heard before only in cartoons. “Oh God,” you said. “You're the sister, aren't you?”

I nodded.

“Oh, this is rich,” you said. You laughed again, threw your head back and cackled. “You're exactly like she said.”

“What'd she say?” I asked.

Oh,
you said,
nothing much. She said she had a sister but that you were polar opposites, you were like a deaf mute, all you did was sit around reading books.
You swirled your cigarette around in the air, as if conducting yourself.
She said you froze up during conversations and sometimes started crying for no reason, you couldn't help it, you should be pitied.

“That's not true!” I said. “I don't cry!”

She said you were probably on the street somewhere, sitting on the sidewalk shaking a paper cup full of change. You know, a charity case. One of those people walking around with a sandwich board. Some kind of crazy message painted on it. The apocalypse or whatnot. Don't worry,
you said,
she didn't say much.

“I have a college degree,” I told you.

You looked me up and down.
I'm sure you went to a fine institution,
you said, your sarcasm so sly I almost missed it.

Then you started reminiscing about Arkansas, something I'd soon realize was a compulsive habit of yours.
Of course we had our own lunatic back home—every town has one, that's what I told Malinda, the world wouldn't be the same without crazy people walking around asking for change. The funny thing about Arkansas, though, is that everyone does everything backwards. Our lunatic was a fat man who went around carrying a sign with something or other drawn on it, every day something different, a flower, a rocket ship, a dog wearing roller skates. Things of that nature. No one knew who he was or where he came from, but he stood at the town center, holding up his sign, and whenever you passed by he'd try to give you a quarter.
You stopped to drag on your cigarette. You looked up at the sky, squinting, as if a scene from your childhood was playing out there.
I took a quarter from time to time, bought myself a soda, but it never tasted right. There was always something funny about it.

“I'm not a lunatic!” I cried. Though the sound of my voice, high and pleading, wasn't exactly convincing.

Of course not.
You gave me another cutting look.
I never said you were.

“I just want to find Malinda.”

She's not in town yet,
you said.
But we're expecting her hourly, my dear. Hourly.

With that you flicked your cigarette butt into the air, and it soared into the dumpster. I imagined a fire breaking out.
At the present moment, however,
you said,
I have a show to put on.
And you turned on your heel and disappeared through the door.

I wondered what to do—whether to stay in town and wait, and if so, how to pay for it. I would have to get a job. I imagined working at that very restaurant, side by side with Malinda. We'd reconcile, and she'd realize how unfair she'd been to turn away from me, she'd sob with regret…My head was swirling with plans when suddenly you appeared in the doorway again.
Well, are you coming to the show,
you said,
or what?

I followed you through the kitchen, bright and hot and clattering, and then through the dining room, dark and cool, where tourists sat dismantling lobsters. They had little plastic bibs around their necks, and they were working at the lobster claws with nutcrackers and tiny forks. In their concentration they stuck the tips of their tongues out the sides of their mouths, like children in an art class.

Adjacent to the dining room was a bar, and in its far corner sat a baby grand. Small tables were clustered around the piano, and several couples sat waiting for you. They applauded when you settled yourself on the bench.

Thank you so much,
you said,
Thank you, I love you all
. When your voice came through the microphone it was entirely different than it had been just moments before. It was low and mellifluous, and laced with such a false humility that it made me wince.

I sat at the bar, and a man who looked very much like Humphrey Bogart asked me what I was having. I looked in my pocket to see how much money I had. “Can I get anything for three dollars?” I said.

The bartender stared at me with Bogart's wearied indifference. “I suppose you could get a Shirley Temple,” he said.

“Then I guess I'll have a Shirley Temple.”

He made an elaborate display of serving my drink, setting down a little napkin, then resting the drink just so on top of it. He waited until I took a sip. “Everything satisfactory?” he said.

“Quite.”

Printed on the napkin was a cartoon drawing of you—a tiny man with a large head. In the drawing you were smiling, and your teeth nearly overtook your face, like the Cheshire Cat.
THE OASIS BAR,
the napkin read.
FEATURING THE PIANO STYLINGS OF JAMES BUTLER.