Ms. Taken Identity (3 page)

Thursday afternoon, I go to Hannah’s to pick up my stuff. She isn’t around, which is good, and I don’t have much to pack (which
is even better, since I’m riding the bus), and in no time at all, the place looks like I was never there. My presence here,
it would seem, as Keats said of himself in his epitaph, was “writ in water.”

My brother Scott calls after dinner. Dad’s birthday is this weekend, and Leah—my
stepmother
of fourteen years—is having her usual get-together. She let Scott know she’d like me to swing by.

“Have I ever?” I grunt.

“There’s always a first. I thought it’d be a nice gesture if you went shopping with Kyle and me and helped him pick out a
birthday gift for his grandpa. And I’ll spring for lunch, since I know money’s tight for you.”

Son of a bitch
. “I’ve got a gesture for you right here, Scott.”

He sighs. “That’s real mature.”

This is how it’s been for Scott and me the last few years when it comes to my father. Now that Scott’s a dad, he wants Kyle
to know his grandfather and have a relationship with him. So he’s made his peace with the old man, forgiven him for that whole
dumping us, buying a golf course, getting remarried, and having more kids thing. Bravo. Wonderful. My hero. But don’t expect
me to show up for your lovefest.

“So I’ll take that as a no,” he says.

“Wrong. It’s a fuck no.”

“It must be tough holding all that anger inside. How long do you plan to keep it?”

“You tell me, lawyer man. What’s the sentence for what he did?”

“I seem to have gotten over it.”

I’d hit him if I could. “Don’t compare us. It’s different and you know it.”

Another heavy sigh on his part. What kind of lawyer does that, sighs all the time? An annoying one, I’ll tell you.

“All right, brother, if you change your mind, give me a call,” he says.

“Don’t hold your breath.”

Here’s the thing about my brother: he’s a good guy, I like him, and on most days—any other day—we get along fine. But what
he always seems to forget is that when he was fourteen, he couldn’t stand our dad and was glad to see him go. Not me, not
by a long shot. When I was a kid, he played baseball with me, took me to games, even drove me up to church to serve Mass (my
Jewish father waiting an hour for his Catholic son out in the parking lot, in winter, at six am—imagine that). In fact, not
that I’d ever tell Scott or my mom or anyone else, but the first person who broke my heart wasn’t the first girl I kissed,
or slept with, or Sharon Manus, or any type of female at all. It was him. My old man. So go ahead, take a moment, think about
the first person who broke your heart. Get a good image of that person, remember the happy days. Now, be honest: are you over
it yet?
Completely?
I didn’t think so.

I
finish grading the essays Friday morning (topic: critique some aspect of American culture that you find absurd). Later, in
class, I read excerpts from the best ones aloud, then start handing all of them back, calling out the various names: Napoleon
Dynamite, Beyoncé, Joe the Plumber… (No, really, those
are
the names on them: I make everyone use an alias so I won’t let my impression of a student color my reading of an essay, especially
if said student has, oh, I don’t know, a habit of wearing obnoxious T-shirts; plus, when they have a mask to hide behind,
they’re not so inhibited and self-conscious.) As each Borat and Kelly Kapowski comes forward to claim a paper, I finally get
to see who wrote what and write the grade in my book, next to the student’s real name.

When I call out Dr. Ruth, there’s snickering—everyone got a kick out of that one, the best of the bunch by far, a wicked,
sly, edgy piece about sex, the rules of attraction, and the American diet. But when Dr. Ruth steps forth to claim her paper,
there’s no snickering from me, not even a chuckle or cracked smile or grin, because what to my wondering eyes should appear
but a girl in a tight black T-shirt that says Remove in Case of Party. Molly. She stands there with her hand out, waiting,
staring at me, almost daring me to say something, and I don’t want to give it to her because I don’t want it to be hers, but
in the end I do, because I have to, hopefully without creating too much of a scene. But it already is. She takes it with a
smirk and saunters back to her seat, and I’m in danger of squeezing all the ink from my pen as I mark her grade in my book:
A.

“Oh, by the way. I e-mailed it to
Cosmo
. They want to publish it.” She tilts her head, gives me a smile. “Guess I’m in the club now, too.”

Jesus. Is it too late to cancel my membership?

I’m writing about
The Canterbury Tales
for my dissertation—or more precisely, “The semantics of ecclesiastical iconography as it relates to Chaucer’s portrait of
medieval England’s moral landscape”—and most days when I’m researching it, there’s something about monks or merchants or madames,
or a recently discovered letter by Chaucer, or maybe just the poetry itself, that jumps off the page and grabs me by the scruff
of the neck and gives me a lift. Not today. It’s all an effort and chore, every inch of slogging a cartload of bricks, up
a hill, in the mud, and by six o’clock, I’m pedaling my way home from the library. It hasn’t been a banner week: I’ve been
dumped by Hannah, guilt-tripped by Scott, and Molly and I now share the same number of publishing credits. What I need is
a hot shower, a Cardinals win on the tube, maybe some QT with a pretty young lady at the pub who’ll let me buy her a drink.
Three out of three would be great, but I’ll settle for one, which should be a lock, since how hard can it be to turn a knob
in the shower?

Then I open the vestibule door.

When Scott and I were kids, every Christmas morning we tore out to the tree before dawn and pawed and shook everything, to
guess what was what. (Emily never got the chance; she died when she was two.) But one package I never had to poke or prod
or lay a finger on, no matter the wrapping paper or size of the bow, was the length of a shoebox and half as wide, but not
so tall: the entire set of Topps baseball cards, pristine, glossy, mine.

There’s another package whose size and shape and heft I’ve come to know with as much certainty, but for all the wrong reasons.
Because each time I see it—the 10 x 13 tear-/-water-proof manila envelope, stuffed with seven hundred double-spaced manuscript
pages, weighing fifty-seven ounces—it means I’ve been rejected. I’ve seen it a lot these past few months lying on the vestibule
steps, along with the other mail too big for our slots. That’s why I mailed it to Brandon in Minnesota and his independent
press, so I’d never have to see it on those fucking steps again.

It’s on those fucking steps again.

I lean my bike against the wall and my ears start to ring. Maybe there’s been a mistake; maybe it’s not from Minnesota at
all; maybe there’s another of my manuscripts out there, one I lost track of, and it’s just now coming back. I check the postmark:
Minnesota. Now the ring is a buzz. But maybe it’s not
my
manuscript. Maybe the wrong one got stuffed in an envelope addressed to me, and won’t we all have a good laugh when it turns
out I got the rejected pages of a romance novel meant for someone in Des Moines. But it’s mine,
Henley Farm
, all seven hundred pages. The buzz becomes a throb. But Brandon must have a different system: he sends the manuscript back,
even when it
has
been accepted. I race through the cover letter: “Dear writer: Thank you for the chance to read your work. Unfortunately,
we are not enthusiastic enough about it to publish it at this time....” A fucking form letter. Now I can’t hear at all.

I’ve been rejected. By Brandon. I’ve. Been. Rejected. By. Brandon.
I’ve been rejected by fucking Brandon!

I breathe.

I breathe.

I breathe.

Then I rip and tear and shred and twist and throw and stomp and kick, and I do it not only to the pages of my manuscript but
also to the cover letter and envelope it came in, and not only to those items belonging to me but to the other mail lying
on the stoop—a
People
, a
Vogue
—which are certainly not mine, but have the misfortune of being in my reach, so their pages, too, are ripped and torn and
shredded and twisted and thrown and stomped and kicked, with venom and gusto and rage, so that by the time I’m finished, the
entire floor is wall-papered, after a fashion, and I’m panting and wheezing and hoarse (was I cursing? grunting?
screaming?
). And that’s where I find myself, standing atop the tickertape remnants of my tantrum, when the front door opens.

It’s our neighbor from across the hall—Rhonda or Rhoda or Randi. She sees me and the mess, and probably the sweat on my face,
and utters an embarrassed, “Oh, pardon me,” like she’s intruding and shouldn’t be here, and starts to back away. But then
you see her mind catch: Hey, I live here. But then you see her mind catch again: But this guy’s crazy. You can tell she’s
weighing this against that, and she decides to take her chances. She drops her gaze and steps inside, moving briskly.

“I got some bad news,” I try to explain.

“Sorry to hear it.”

She keeps her gaze low and far from mine and scoots over the mess in her heels and prim little business suit and laptop carry
case, and almost makes it to the steps free and clear. But her eyes flick at something on the pile and register surprise,
displeasure, then she flashes a look at me to see if I saw her, which I did, which makes her gasp, as if now that she’s seen
what’s there, I’ll be forced to do the same to her.

“Are they yours?” I say.

“Are what mine?” she says too quickly, her back to me.

“Those magazines.”

“What magazines?”

“
People
,
Vogue
.”

“Oh, were they there?”

Her little act is starting to tick me off. “Don’t play games. I know you saw them. Just admit it.”

“Hmm, well, if that’s what they were, don’t worry about them.”

“Who said I was worried about them?” I snap. “I’m not worried about them. You shouldn’t be reading them anyway. They’re garbage.
I did you a favor.”

It’s clear now all she really wants to do is put space between us. Her shoes make a clickety-click as she goes up the steps,
and there’s something about the way it sounds so grown-up, so professional, so…
successful
that lights my skin on fire.

“Then again,” I yell up to her, “maybe you
should
be reading that
Vogue
.”

The clickety-click stops; I’ve got her attention.

“Goodwill called. They want their outfit back.”

She exhales a loud, disgusted breath.

“Asshole!” she screams, and with quite the echo. Then she stomps to her door and slams it.

I do that little head-bob, chin-thrust, pigeon-looking thing you tend to do when you feel cool and cocky and confident, because
that’s how I feel right now: Yo, check it out, my novel might be confetti, but my trash talkin’ ain’t lost a beat. And this
feeling of bad-boy bravado lasts for approximately eighteen seconds, till I realize what I’ve managed to do. I took a situation
in which I was the wronged party, the victim, the neighbor guy worthy of “Sorry to hear it” condolences, and I’ve thrown it
all away by being a smart-mouthed, ignorant prick. And now what Brandon did to me, and all the self-righteous indignation
I’m entitled to, it’s all swallowed up—every flippin’ ounce of it—by guilt and regret over what I said to Rhonda. Rhoda. Randi.
Fuck
. Which means I know what I have to do.

First, I scoop up the mess, stuff all the manuscript and magazine pages into my backpack. Second, I go upstairs and call coward-ass
Brandon and give his answering machine a profane and pissed-off piece of my mind. And finally, I set out for the bookstore
to replace the magazines I destroyed, since I won’t have the proper peace of mind to wallow in my rejection until I’ve eased
my conscience about being a jerk. And, since the bookstore I go to doesn’t carry that type of magazine, my penance is even
stiffer: a trip into the bowels of Bookzilla.

Here’s how ridiculous the parking lot is at Bookzilla: drivers are actually following departing shoppers to their cars, to
get their spots. And it’s not Christmas Eve. It’s the bloody Friday night after Labor Day. But what do you expect when you
squeeze a bookstore in with a Linens-N-Things and Petco and Home Depot and Target?

The inside of Bookzilla is just as bloated as the parking lot. It’s women, mostly, and hordes of them, all ages and sizes
and hair colors, squealing and heading upstairs. Oprah must’ve had a writer on her show today, someone who wrote a book about
shopping or dieting or sex, or maybe she was talking about something like
Love in the Time of Cholera
, which everyone skipped twenty years ago when it was required reading in high school, but now that Oprah loves it, “Girl,
I just gotta have it!” My goal is to get in and out of this place without being trampled or lobotomized.