Elegies for the Brokenhearted (8 page)

“What instrument do you play?” I said.

“Don't,” one said. “Neither does Rod.”

“Who's Rod?”

“The guy your sister's with. That's his name.”

“Oh. I thought he was the drummer.”

“Naw,” he said. “We're just with the band. We do the equipment and sound and all that.”

“Oh,” I said.

“What year are you in school?”

“Sophomore. Next year I'll be a junior.”

“Sixteen, then?” He narrowed his eyes, as if concentrating on something important, as if wrestling with a momentous decision.

“That's too young,” his brother said. “Sixteen. Man.” He shook his head. “Too young.”

“But girls are more mature,” said the one.

The other shook his head. “Not that much.”

“Sixteen isn't so young. Not all that young, when you think about it. When you think about it we're sending eighteen-year-olds off to war all the time.”

“I never thought of it that way,” said the other, sarcastic. He gave his brother a pitying look. “I'm outta here.” He walked off, out of the room. When he was gone I turned to the one left and said, “Who are you again?”

“Mike,” he said. He had settled on
The Three Stooges
, who were working as tailors and had found a suit full of money, and its pending loss, which was certain, set off an anxiety in me so powerful the skit's comedy was lost in it.

When a commercial broke in Mike said, “I'm gonna get myself a drink. You want a drink?” He opened the little refrigerator and bent over to inspect its contents. “We got Coke.”

I was expecting a can but when he handed me a drink it was in one of the hotel's short glasses, amber-colored and dimpled. It tasted like Coke but there was something else to it, something bitter and warm. Rum, or whiskey, I didn't know the difference. I drank it down and in a minute Mike was up mixing drinks again, and then again. It wasn't long before I felt loose all over and started laughing at the least little thing. My laughter was loud and low and came out stuttering, without my adding any shape to it. It rang through the room and sounded to me the laugh of a retarded person.

I was lying on my stomach on the floor. Mike was sitting beside me with his legs crossed, but went so far as to stand up when something was funny and bend over laughing. “Fuck me, that's funny,” he said. Sometimes when he laughed he grabbed his head like people did in aspirin commercials. I rolled over and watched the television upside down. “Hey,” I said, “you should try this.” Mike stretched out beside me on his back, then started voicing over the characters. “Hey, guys,” he said in Curly's falsetto, “everything's all upside down!” And Mo answered, “You're upside down, you moron.” With an almost scientific detachment I noticed I was having trouble doing more than one thing at a time, for instance watching the television and listening to Mike, for instance laughing and keeping my eyes open, for instance hearing Malinda cry out in something like pain from the next room and pretending I hadn't. And then everything was reduced to breathing. I was breathing through my mouth as though a person who had been trapped underwater up to the brink of death.

Sometime later Malinda and Flash, or Rod, came out of their room, and distantly I heard Malinda saying, “Shit! Oh shit!” Then she was pulling my hand, pulling me up and then onto my feet. I was still so far gone it was all as in a dream, wobbly and chimerical, the room looked like a place I'd never seen, Flash and Mike like people I'd never seen, and I was up on my feet being pulled along by Malinda out the door and down the hall—we were running, now, with a swiftness that seemed untenable—and when we got to the elevator Malinda pressed the down button but then couldn't wait. She kept on running to the end of the hall and banged through the door to the stairwell, which was lit by a single orange bulb. We ran down the stairs and out into the back parking lot, then around the building, and up to the boardwalk, which was empty, its lights out, its stores shut away behind grates, our footsteps like those of criminals, and Malinda saying all the while, “Shit. We're dead. It's like one in the morning. Shit.” I thought of my mother and Bill pacing the motel room, calling the police. I thought of cruisers parked in the motel's lot, their spinning lights keeping everyone awake, massive resentment on the part of the other tenants.

But when we got back to the motel the lights were on and our mother was passed out in bed fully clothed, facedown and snoring. Bill was nowhere to be found. The room was so thick with the smell of sour tequila my mouth watered.

“Jesus,” Malinda said. She turned out the lights and went to bed, fell on top of it, and I fell too. We curled toward each other like parentheses. When my eyes adjusted I saw the glow of Malinda's, wet and mournful. She had always been like that at night, unable to sleep, a sense of regret and sadness about her, a softness. This was the thing about her I knew that no one else did. We had a long history of lying quietly side by side, the troubles of our days—the fights we'd had, the wild swings we'd witnessed our mother go through, the drunken exaltations and rages—drifting around us, unspoken but felt, deeply felt. In the morning she would be back to her usual self. By that time we would just be two girls who'd gone back to a hotel room with a couple of older men, it happened all the time, every day, it wouldn't even be worth mentioning.

My mother woke early the next morning and went out for the paper. One of her quirks was that she liked to read the obituaries first thing every day; often she read them aloud to us either for entertainment value (“He was a man fond of playing the flugelhorn!”) or for instructional purposes (“She entered the convent at fourteen, where she lived the remaining years of her life.” Jesus! She must have died of boredom!). When she returned she told Malinda and me to get up and get our things together. “Move it,” she said, “or lose it.”

“Where are we going?” Malinda said, groggy, her words running together.

“Get up,” said our mother, who was stuffing all of our things into a red duffel bag. It said Schlitz on the side and had belonged, at one time, to one or another of her boyfriends, though I couldn't remember which one.

“Where's Bud?” Malinda said.

“I don't know,” said my mother. “Just get your shit and let's go.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just come on.” My mother was dressed for the beach, in a red bikini and sunglasses. I assumed we were going there but when we got to the beach we just kept walking. Once we'd cleared the strip my mother turned and started walking backwards, facing the line of cars headed out of town, and Malinda, her voice high with disbelief, said, “What are you doing?”

“Watch,” our mother said, “and learn.” She took her hair out of its ponytail and shook it, arranging it around her shoulders. Then she stuck her thumb out. She was thirty-five and looked, still, like a teenager—it didn't seem unreasonable to me that someone would stop to pick her up. She had always gotten what she wanted rather easily.

“What the hell?” said Malinda. “Where's Bud? What are we doing?”

“Bud's gone,” said my mother. “Probably for good.”

“What'd you do?” said Malinda, and my mother said she didn't know for sure, that she couldn't exactly remember, but that she was pretty sure it had something to do with another man.

“Oh my God,” Malinda said, “this is so embarrassing.” Her voice high, squealing, all the composure of the day before gone, gone. In that moment she was a child.

I turned backwards then and regarded the beach, as if some explanation might be found there for what had happened. From that angle the stretch of oceanfront property looked thin and flimsy as a Hollywood set, as if it might fall on its face. Also from that angle I could see my mother's cheek, the slice of flesh hidden behind her sunglasses. I could see that it was bruised to hell. A sharp pain went through me, followed by the pulsing sort of panic that I was prone to in those days. Instinctively I reached for my money, the stash I'd been saving in my pocket. Only then did I realize it was gone.

We walked for a few minutes, the cars passing us by so slowly that we could not only see all the people inside but determine the mood in the cars, most filled with the exhaustion and annoyance common to the end of family weekends, each curled in his seat and angled away from the rest, though in some of the cars people were still going at it, joking, fighting. Malinda hung her head, angled her body away from the road, the shame of being seen by someone we knew so hot within her it was coming off in waves. A few times there were cars full of men that slowed down and whistled, honked, asked my mother where she was going. But when she named our city, an hour south, the men didn't want to go that far out of their way and said, “Good luck, baby.” And she said, “I wouldn't take a ride with you anyways.”

We kept walking. The road opened up into two lanes, the traffic moved faster. Malinda started to complain. “Just call someone,” she said, and listed all of our relatives. “Just go back and call Auntie Lily or Auntie Ellen. Or call Pop or something. God, this is so fucking humiliating!” But my mother wouldn't give in, she just kept walking backwards, saying every now and then, “What's this, what's this? This looks like it could be good,” though the cars kept going by. Then, in one of those rare moments when the world's fools are vindicated, you and Bill drove past in your red Camaro, radio blasting as always. Bill leaned out his window and shouted at us, “Hey, Malinda, you need a ride?” and Malinda looked up. Her eyes went wide with relief. She raised her arm up and waved, started jogging toward you. But there was some disagreement between you and Bill—you kept driving forward and I could see you reaching for him, trying to pull him back inside the car by his shirt. He turned toward you and said something, you said something in return. The car slowed, and swerved toward the side of the road for a moment, and Bill leaned out the window again, waved us toward the car, but then, in some impulsive defense of yourself and your kind, some protest against the way people like Malinda had always treated you, you steered the car back onto the road and sped away. You left us there in the dust.

We stood there stunned. The air of adventure—the cinematic flair that had so far been coloring the trip—was gone and we were truly defeated. We had behaved poorly—not just this weekend but always—and we were being taken to task, humiliated. I don't know how long we walked, each of us in our private misery. In my case I was so lost in it—wondering how we would get home and then afterward, where we would go—that when I saw a car pass us, then pull to the side of the road, it took me a moment to realize that the driver was stopping for us. It was a beautiful old car, an Oldsmobile '88, with a long body and gently rising fins. There were two men in the car and they were black, I could tell even from a distance.

The driver went so far as to get out of the car—usually people didn't do this, just waited for you to approach—and even put a hat on his head before walking toward us. He cut something of a figure. He was tall and slender and very well dressed, in a pair of gray slacks with a seam pressed down the center and a white dress shirt. A red feather sprang from the band of his fedora. The brim of the hat, and its shadow, concealed much of his face.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Good afternoon,” said my mother.

“You ladies,” said the black man, “look to be in need of a ride.” His voice was deep and his speech exact. He could have made a living as the voice of God in movies. “Where are you heading?”

My mother spoke the name of our city. She said it in the formal way, instead of the way everyone else said it, letting the word go soft and lazy in their mouths, and the way she said it now sounded like a place I'd never been, a place in which something like this would never happen.

“That happens to be,” said the black man, “where we live. My son and I.” He tilted his head toward the car and for a second I could see the man's face, long and thin. Two deep lines were carved around the sides of his mouth as though with a knife. His eyes were extraordinary. They were resinous in color, almond-shaped, and there was an intensity to them, a sharpness I had rarely seen before.

“We don't want to be any trouble,” my mother said in the modest voice she used whenever she was meeting someone for the first time.

“No trouble,” the man said. He looked at his watch, a heavy gold one of the sort that men are given after twenty-five years of service to their employers. My mother was fond of saying that you could tell a lot about a man by his watch. And what you could tell about this man was that he was steady, reliable.

“We've found ourselves,” my mother said, “in an unexpected predicament. I'm sorry to be so improperly clothed.”

“Not at all,” said the man, and motioned us toward the car.

“It's a relief to meet a real gentleman,” said my mother. “You've no idea how rare you've become.” And I turned my mother's phrasing over in my mind—so improperly clothed, how rare you've become—wondering who this person was, my mother, what disease she suffered from, to be able to change herself like this, again and again, to spend her life this way.

When we approached the car the man's son—also tall and thin, with the same eyes as his father—got out and regarded us. He wore an expression of barely contained hatred, and when his eyes met Malinda's I saw pass between them a look of understanding, a half-lidded disdain for the situation, their parents. In a flash I recognized it as a look I would see go between them again and again.

All my life I'd suffered from strange flashes in which I saw the future. Little scenes appeared in my mind, lightning-fast, that sooner or later played out in real time. Often these scenes were so ordinary and predictable that their eventual playing-out came as no surprise—my mother standing in the living room folding up a purple housecoat, packing her suitcase, calmly preparing to leave her second husband, Poor Michael Collins; Malinda, sick in bed with a high fever, pulling a yellow blanket tight around her, her teeth chattering. But sometimes the scenes were so unpredictable, so extraordinary, there seemed no way I could have seen them coming except that I had some kind of strange ability. Once I saw a dog with a missing ear sitting on a fire escape. And years later, when my mother moved us to a building with a fire escape, I knew he would appear, and he did. I'd told my mother about these visions and she'd advised me to do what I could about lottery numbers. But the things I saw never had to do with good fortune. They were always small, private moments of resignation and regret. Several times that year I had seen a grassy field filled with small puddles, a set of bare feet walking through them, and I'd been preoccupied with what this might mean. Someone was wandering somewhere, in sorry circumstances, but I couldn't say more than that.