You Are Not A Stranger Here (5 page)

He thought now how it had always been for him, ever since he was a boy sitting on the edge of a chair in the living room listening to his parents' friends--a divorced woman whose hands shook slightly in her lap as she told him with great excitement about the vacation she was to take, or the man whose son Frank saw teased relentlessly at school, talking of how happy his boy was--the unsaid visible in their gestures, filling the air around them, pressing on Frank. And later in college, at a party, drink in hand, standing by a bookcase, chatting with a slightly heavy girl hanging back from the crowd, tracked into every shift of her eyes, every tense little smile, as if the nerves in her body were the nerves in his, her every attempt to disguise her awkwardness raising its pitch in him.

Sitting in front of this oddly compelling woman, he real43 ized more clearly than ever before this was why he'd become a doctor: to organize his involuntary proximity to human pain. He could use his excuse of debt to leave his position at the clinic; he could even leave his profession, move away, anywhere, but still there would be this opening in him. Mrs. Buckholdt rose from the couch and stood by the window. As she raised the shade, more of the waning sun flooded the room. Her shoulders tensed at the sound of a knock on the other side of the kitchen door. Frank watched her take a breath.

"What is it, darling?" she called out.

"Can I come in?" a quiet voice asked.

She crossed to unlock the door. The boy edged his way into the room. Biting her lower lip, holding herself rigid, Mrs. Buckholdt managed to run her hand through her son's hair.

"What is it, dear?"

"When are we leaving?"

"In a few minutes," she said. "Go ahead and get ready."

The boy stared for a moment at Frank, his expression as mysterious as before. He turned back into the kitchen and they listened to his steps as he climbed the back stairs.

"Mrs. Buckholdt," Frank began, knowing that by saying what he was about to say he was committing himself to remaining here, to finding some way to scrape by. People like this woman needed him, needed a person to listen. "In situations like yours, it can help a great deal if you have someone to talk with. I couldn't see you every week, but I could do it once a month, and if you were able perhaps to get down to 44

my office, we might meet once every two weeks. We could sign you up for free care. The drugs can only do so much."

She had remained standing by the door, her arms crossed over her chest. "That's generous of you," she said, taking a step into the center of the room.

After a moment's pause, she looked again at the picture on the wall. "That print there," she said, "it was his favorite. He picked it out at the museum in Chicago. He loved all the different characters, the bits of activity."

Frank turned to look. In the left foreground, a tavern overflowed with townspeople, drinkers spilling into the street, following in the wake of a large-bellied mandolin player wearing a floppy hat. In front of him, the obese leader of the carnival sat, as if on horseback, astride a massive wine barrel pushed forward by the revelers, his lance a spit of meat. Opposite him and his train, somberly dressed people stood praying in some rough formation behind a gaunt, pale man propped up in a chair--Lent holding out before him a baker's pole. He faced the leader of the carnival band, the two posed in mock battle. Behind these contending forces, the square bustled. Fishwives gutting their fish on a wooden block, boys playing at a stick and tethered ball, dancers dancing, merchants selling, children peering from windows, a woman on a ladder scrubbing the walls of a house. There were cripples missing limbs, almsmen begging by the well. A man and woman made love. Another couple, dressed in Puritan costume, their backs to the viewer, were led by a fool through the middle of it all.

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"Certainly no Arcadia," she said. "Nothing lush about it, not the kind of painting I fell in love with. I've looked at it a lot since he's been gone. My professors taught me Brueghel was a moralizer, his paintings full of parables. But that's not what I see anymore. I just see how
much
there is, how much life."

She looked at Frank. "The woman over in Tilden, she teaches Michael the violin now, and she won't let me pay her. He's not as good as his brother was, but he's good."

She bowed her head. "You seem like a kind man, and you're kind to offer what you did. But I don't want you to come back here. And I don't want to come to your office. A few days a week I use those pills to get by, but there are days when I manage without them. Those are the better days. When I don't look back, when I'm not afraid--better for my kids too. If you feel like you can't write me a prescription, I understand. I'll survive without it."

The boy could be heard at the top of the front stairs. Frank rose from his chair and took a step toward Mrs. Buckholdt. She turned to watch her son enter the room, carrying his violin case. Quietly, he took a seat in the wicker chair by the door.

"Go and get your father," she said. "Tell him it's time to leave." He ran along the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door.

Frank's stomach tightened, the panic beginning before his mind could form the thought: he didn't want to lose her, he didn't want the telling to end.

Mrs. Buckholdt took her handbag from the front table. 46

"It really is recommended in almost all cases such as this that a patient undergo some kind of therapy, and given the extremity--"

"Dr. Briggs," she interrupted, opening the front door to the view out over the yard and beyond to the empty road,

"didn't you hear what I said?"

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T H E B E G I N N I N G S

O F G R I E F

2

A Y E A R A F T E R my mother's suicide I broke a promise to myself not to burden my father with worries of my own. I told him how unhappy I was at school, how lonely I felt. From the wing chair where he crouched in the evenings he asked,

"What can I do?" The following afternoon, coming home from work the back way, he missed a stop sign. A van full of sheet glass going forty miles an hour hit the driver's side of the 48

Taurus. According to the policeman who knocked on the front door in tears, my father died with the first shattering impact. An aunt from Little Rock stayed for a week, cooking stews and Danish pastry. She said I could come and live with her in Arkansas. I told her I didn't want to. As I had only a year and a half left of high school, we decided I could finish up where I was, and she arranged for me to live with a neighbor. Mrs. Polk was sixty, her mother eighty-five. They had between them a closet of fourteen blue flowered dresses, which the maid laundered on Tuesdays. They watched a considerable amount of public television and spoke in hushed tones of relatives in Pittsburgh. I was given dead Mr. Polk's study with a cot in the corner. The ladies paid no attention to my coming and going and I spent as little time at their house as I could.

In industrial arts that fall, Mr. Raffello gave us a choice of projects: bookcase, spice rack, or a chest about the size of a child's coffin. I picked the last of these, and because we had to pay for our own wood, I used pine. I took exact measurements and sanded each board with three grades of paper. All the equipment was there in the shop: hammers and vises, finishing nails and glue, planers and table saws. The machines had shiny metal casings and made a deafening roar. If I had been allowed to, I would've stayed all day.

I found the class entrancing for another reason: the chance to be with Gramm Slater, an angry, cherub-faced boy who wore steel-tip boots and a baseball cap pulled over his brow. He stood a head above the other kids, already as large framed as my father, his forearms covered in a layer of golden 49

hair. His lips curled easily into a sneer and his eyes were full of mockery. When he caught me gazing at him, he'd smirk knowingly, like an angel. Twice our shoulders had touched in the cafeteria line.

On a Friday afternoon a few weeks after my father died, Mr. Raffello began explaining the use of clamps. The thermos of gin I'd washed my sloppy joe down with at lunch made concentration a challenge but like a good student, I held on to my bench and remained upright. It struck me our teacher might be an inhabitant of some kingdom of middle earth, with his rickety frame and nose jutting over his mouth like a cliff above the entrance of a cave. His voice sounded like the bass notes of an organ.

"The instrument is here in your hand. You've sanded your wood. You've applied your glue. The time for the clamp has arrived."

Eyes in the class fluttered shut as his bony hands began turning the rod. Steel squeaked in the thread. I imagined the sound as the creaking of a ferry's oar in its lock as we pulled away from the shore.

Leaning into the noise, I watched Gramm on the stool beside me. He sat hunched forward. Through his worn cotton T-shirt, I traced the perfect arch of his spine. I wanted him to look at me. I wanted him to touch me. I didn't care how. My foot reached out and tapped him on the shin.

"What the fuck?" he whispered, his sneer coming to life. I suppose the incident could have ended there, but the expression on his face, the way his eyes narrowed and his upper lip flared off his front teeth, appeared to me so beauti50 ful I couldn't stand to see it fade. I swung my foot back and hammered him on the calf. This brought a wonderful color to his cheeks.

"Cut the shit!" he said in a louder whisper, turning the heads of our neighboring carpenters. The sound had traveled up to the front of the industrial arts studio, where Mr. Raffello cast his ancient eye to us and said, "If you never learn to clamp, you never learn to build."

I swung again, nailing Gramm in the ankle. He jumped off his stool and I thought he'd punch me right then, but instead he paused. The scraping of the other students' chairs filled the room. If there was a fight we both knew he'd win. I sensed the amazement in him at what he was about to do, the sheer pleasure of an excuse for rage. At last it came, his fist planted just under my heart like a battering ram against the gates of a castle. The air rushed from my lungs and I fell backward onto a low bench. Looking up, I saw him closing on me. My muscles went limp. I waited for his tackle.

But Mr. Raffello had reached Gramm by then and he stepped between us.

G R A M M S TA RT E D C A L L I N G me faggot and dissed me in front of my classmates, who were appalled he could do such a thing to someone who everyone knew had lost both his parents in a year. Most people thought silence was kindest. But whenever he and I saw each other on our street or at the supermarket where I bagged groceries, he showed a sullen kind of interest in me.

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On a Saturday in the beginning of March, he came in the store to buy orange juice and asked me what I was doing that night. I told him nothing, and he laughed. He said if I didn't want to be a loser my whole life I should come to his house, where he planned to get drunk.

I arrived at about ten o'clock, expecting a party. As it turned out, Gramm was alone. His eyes were bloodshot and he smelled of dope. He offered me a vodka and orange as soon as we got into the kitchen.

"Where's your mom?" I asked.

"She went shopping somewhere for the weekend."

Mrs. Slater had been divorced three times and was very rich as a result of it. The house had six bedrooms and was built in the style of an old Southern mansion. Small computer screens embedded in the walls controlled every appliance and light.

"Nice place," I said.

"It's all right."

On the counter, a tabby cat picked at a mound of smoked salmon. Gramm spooned a blue-black paste of tiny eggs onto another plate and pushed it under the animal's nose. The cat sniffed the new offering and returned to the fish.

"I had a snake," Gramm said. "It died from some skin disease. The vet told us to put it in a garbage can full of rocks and cold water but it still died. I think the vet was wrong. I think the vet's a fucking idiot."

"Sounds like it."

"You want to get high?"

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"Sure," I nodded, savoring the damp touch of his fingertips as he passed the joint.

"Why did you come over here?" he asked.

"You invited me."

He laughed, as though that were no reason at all. I swallowed my drink whole and poured another vodka.

"How come you kicked me in Raffello's class?"

"I was just kidding around."

"Bullshit."

"Is anybody else coming over?"

"Why? Are you afraid?"

I knew I should fire back something like "Afraid of what?"--that this would be the proper, male thing to do. Yet we both seemed to know the futility of such a gesture and I couldn't bring myself to pretend.

Gramm slouched in a chair between me and the sink. As I passed by him to put my glass on the counter, he stuck his foot out and tripped me. I hit the tile floor with my shoulder; the glass fell from my hand and shattered by the door of the fridge. I rolled onto my back and saw the same giddy expression on Gramm's face he'd flashed the day I first got his attention. My heart thumped against my rib cage like a ball dribbled close to the pavement.

"Aren't you going to get up?" he asked sarcastically, understanding already that I wouldn't, that he'd have to lift me from the floor. The knowledge seemed to anger him. He drew his leg back and kicked me in the thigh. I let out a moan of relief as the pain shot up my spine.

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"There you go, cocksucker. How was that?"

He lifted his glass to his mouth, the bottom of his T-shirt rose from the waist of his jeans, and I could see the smattering of light brown hair around his belly button. I wanted to run my tongue over it. More than anything in the world. He took a step forward and pressed the sole of his shoe lightly against my cheek. "I could squash you like a bug," he said. He wasn't the most articulate boy I ever met. Only the one whose pain seemed to me most beautiful. I reached out and grabbed his ankle but he tore his leg away at once and kicked me hard in the stomach, jamming me against the cabinet door. Air rushed from my lungs and I slumped facedown on the linoleum. All of a sudden, I felt very tired. He kicked me several times more, but the blows seemed to come from farther away.