Walls of Troy
ryan r. schoon
Copyright 2006 by Ryan Robert Schoon.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval system, without the express, written permission of the author.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of this work should be sent to week15@yahoo.com with the subject line “Request: Walls of Troy.”
ISBN 9781456448875
Written and printed in the United States.
This is purely a work of fiction. No characters, situations, or events represented here are intended to represent the actions, ideas, or characteristics of any person, living or dead. Any likeness to such persons is entirely coincidental.
For Lisa
“It won't rain all the time.”
Chapter One
Tucked in a cheap, particleboard desk drawer sits an overused flash drive. Unlabeled, the object sits atop a pile of rubber bands, pay-stubs, and paper clips. Inside its virtual space, translated into a series of ones and zeros, lives a file titled “wallsoftroy.” The document is ephemeral at present-- unread, unprinted, unexamined, even by the singular mind that created it. A singular, overactive mind traipsing through equally overactive use of the thesaurus, exclamation point, and italicized font. The unanalyzed attitudes and inexperience that created it are as fleeting as the document, itself.
“A confused season. A snoring winter. Not the winter season of childhood. The winter of youth was coldness, clearness, and cleanliness... uncomplicated and unstained. The winter of childhood was a season in and of itself.
No lines partition this high winter from the waning autumn or the waxing spring. This is a yawning winter, but merely half a winter. This early January is of half-melted snowmen crying gray charcoal tears. This early January is dripping-ice-sickle wind chimes hastily strung transverse lines of carefully draped, rusted barbed wire. This is the early January of Troy.
“A week ago it snowed the packing snow born only off the Great Lakes. After the snow, a firm thermometer—just above freezing in daylight and just below freezing at night—sets the week’s lumbering pace. During daytime, the snow slowly, laboriously melts. At night the wet mass refreezes in chunky clumps of snow and ice mixed with street gravel, tan clay, and black soil. Sediments and slush! Everything is unsightly and stained beneath the sickly, gray, overcast sky. This same gray sky will shroud Troy all week.
“Troy is a border of two worlds. Troy is technically a small town, but really it is just the convenient idea of a small town. That convenient idea—a contrivance, really—binds two begrudgingly disparate communities: the campus of a venerated Lutheran university and the ragged descendants of the town’s original settlers. The campus’s faculty and staff live in gated, cul-de-sac residential communities, fenced in with barbed wire and manicured hedges. The settler descendants live in claptrap deathtraps, hedged by unpainted, decayed picket fences and that same rusted barbed wire that protects the campus and residential communities from the rest of Troy. The barbed wire of the campus and gated communities are the physical manifestation of a whispered, terror-struck worldview. The sincere attitude of the campus is that the university sits far and away from Troy. The sincere attitude of the campus is that the townies are a manifestation of all that is wrong in the country as a whole—slimy, fetid wormholes emerging from the apple’s core. The campus holds itself separate and aloof.
“Troy is really a propaganda! Troy is the not-so-innocent fiction that the university sits in a small-town setting! Troy is the idea of wholesomeness that sells the school to potential students and their parents. Troy – an extended advertising pitch!
“Troy, in fact, was not even the town’s original name. The town was originally called Schneiderville, after one of the settling families. Thirty years or so ago, a group of history professors, supported by the campus administration, petitioned for the town to be renamed Troy. The professors brought forward the petition as a motion during a mid-day community meeting. Aside from the oldest Schneider boy and his wife, the two of whom ran the only locally owned bar, the townies were presumably too busy working to attend. When the floor was opened to comments, the Schneider boy slouched to the podium and with exasperated dignity asked a very simple, one word question: “Why?”
“From the back of the assembly hall, subdued in a shirt sleeve, an anonymous chuckle was the first answer. The second answer came from the head of the history department. He gave the ridiculous explanation that the change of names from the tri-syllabic “Schneiderville” to the mono-syllabic “Troy” would help attract new business to the town. The explanation was echoed all over the room with affirmative nods. [This is what I imagine happened, of course. My boss has only mentioned some details. Anyhow, who knows what actually happened anyways?].
The resolution passed [and this could be verified] fifty-seven votes supporting to three votes declining. Three votes! Schneider, his wife, and a middle-aged professor of philosophy were the only three to raise their hands in opposition. Schneider and his wife wanted to keep the town named after their family; the professor knew the real motivation behind the name change and was sickened by it. The town was to be named Troy, after the ancient city of the Iliad. The god-favored, intellectually superior Greeks had conquered that ancient city.
“Troy isn’t a town; Troy is a sick joke!”
“Schneider invited the dissenting professor back to his bar, East Street Tavern. Even after the Schneider boy died of cancer in his mid-forties, the professor still frequents East Street, to this day. Even thirty years later, he is the only faculty member that has ever patronized the locally owned businesses around the campus. Some form of respect, foreign to the rest of the campus community, grew between those two that day. It spanned the picket fences, the hedges, and the barbed wire. Schneider’s wife, still unmarried, and that professor are the only two left who have any sense of community in Troy, and they continue to call it Schneiderville.
“Troy is a town of two worlds: DaBloch University and The Block.
“Looking from the upper-story, southern windows of the Ellison Street fraternity and sorority houses you can just see the Block through the old growth oak and elms. [There was a party there once and a troglodyte pointed it out.] The frat boys and sorority sisters never look that way; they look north towards the DaBloch Cathedral. You can just make out the cathedral’s upper spires through the winter wood line.
“On the Block, across from the barbwire fences surrounding the settler’s cemetery, you can’t see the cathedral’s spires. You see a loosely distorted world through a rundown apartment’s old, substandard glass panes, and that world is of paint flaking off the rotten siding of low-roofed houses, trumped by the immaculately kept fraternities behind them. Through the windows you see the salt stained and rusted luxury and economy cars of twenty years ago, bought second, third, or forth hand-- all of them cheap relics now. Cracked windshields and bald tires accompany smashed fenders and mangled grills, mended with duct-tape on late-night off-ramps. You see unploughed streets covered in snow sludge, track-marked and dirty, melting of only nature’s accord. You see sidewalks running along that street and under that same snow sludge. In that gray sludge are the pockmarked impressions of unsteady footfalls leading from car to stoop and back out again. You see all this under the gray sky, but you did not see the Cathedral’s spires.
“The Greek Alphabet students only look towards The Block when the black and tan police cruisers, yellow fire trucks, and white ambulances roar down Ellison and into the old neighborhood. The frat boys and, yes, even the sorority sisters look towards the Block only then, because, secretly, they want to watch the Block burn! Year after year, winter after winter, tipped kerosene stoves and wiring overloaded with space heaters and hot plates, gives them a sudden taste of their dreams. Apartments are gutted, houses burn to their foundations, and the pack of townie “human debris” that live there lose that much more of their number. When children die the sorority sisters set out change buckets at the nearby interstate’s gas stations. They write public letters of condolence in the campus newspaper. They thrill at the chance to prove themselves humanitarians once again!
“The frat boys cannot interrupt their riotous beer-party schedules. The sorority sisters faithfully attend.
“The Block is the remnant of the town that preceded the college: both in architecture and population. The buildings on The Block are the town before the college. Save a few exceptions, only townies live in them. The names on the door buzzers and mailboxes are the names of the town’s founders. The property titles are now owned by absentee landlords. Every home more than a story tall has been converted into a bundle of tightly cramped, roughly portioned apartments. The denizens of The Block are townies, but their lack of urbanity is not the only reason that they are looked down upon by DaBloch’s faculty, administration, and Greek Alphabet folk. The children of The Block are townie children, but that isn’t why the Troy police hound them everyday.
“Heroin has been found in several recent police raids. Overdoses are up at the hospital (though most are likely alcohol overdoses from the frat parties). The college “children” must be protected! The Block is suddenly a threat. The Block has become The Heroin Block. Though they hush their fears in front of the student body, to hear it from the administration, alumni, and trustees you would think that Troy and, yes, the wider world are rotting to the core. Take them too seriously and you will listen for Gabriel’s horn!”
Down on the street level, down on the Block, across from the settler’s cemetery, Griffith Sellicha peers through the substandard glass panes of his apartment’s street-side window, into the distorted world outside. The streetlights’ poorly adjusted sensors make the lamps blink on and off in the predawn light. He sees nothing new. He turns from the window to change from his work cloths into fresh, school cloths. The diskette sits in his desk drawer, waiting for his next satire. This has been Griffith’s life for three years now. He muses over that life in his writings. Griffith works graveyard shifts scrubbing the floors at the East Street Tavern then dresses for school and goes to campus. Nothing new. Some people, like his Greek Alphabet kids, have their ends meet for them; Griffith meets all his ends.
Though he works at East Street and lives on The Block, Griffith isn’t a townie. He came to Troy on an academic scholarship sponsored by DaBloch’s alumni association. It wasn’t a full ride, and he wasn’t expected to finish his education there. The alumni committee awarded him the scholarship never expecting that he might last this long. The committee tempted him and a small group of other minority students to the university because they were minority students, a rarity at DaBloch.
DaBloch University was always fishing for government aide, as many private universities do, and this is one of their longest running schemes. They tempt working-class minority students to the school with academic scholarships that pay their tuition, room, and board for about four semesters. The scholarships ensure that they have enough minority students to compete for federal aid; the limits ensure they seldom award minority students degrees.
The only reason Griffith has made it through to this, his junior year, is because he tricked the system. He saw that his scholarship would not fund him through to graduation, so he saved money by electing off-campus housing. He was only allowed to live off-campus because he neither looked nor spoke like the Housing Secretary’s idea of a minority student. Griffith Sellicha’s father was Hispanic. His mother, a De Young, was Dutch. Aside from what she took to be well-tanned skin, subconsciously Griffith looked perfectly “European” to the housing secretary. She signed the paper entitling him to seek alternative housing and inadvertently ensured that he could make the scholarship last through to his senior year.
Griffith goes to his computer desk and selects the textbooks he’ll need for the day. He takes his diskette from his desk-drawer, for he has an appointment to write in it today between noon and one-thirty. He shoves his laptop into his satchel. He is so accustomed to this routine, he does not even need to turn on the overhead light. Having gathered his things, he carefully closes the door behind him.
Four houses down, at one of the only well-kept houses on this end of the Block, he sees a familiar sight: the repo man. Griffith stretches on the porch, spying on the scene for a moment. He doesn’t know her, but he has dreamed of the pretty redhead who lives there with her daughter, father, and mother. The repo man stands next to her car, a newer car than any of the others in the neighborhood. She is emptying it out. Griffith haughtily sympathizes, but musters nothing else but that patronizing emotion. He moves to his car, gets in, and takes a side street to avoid the scene. Unconsciously condescending, he thinks, “Plight of the poor.” No heroes.
She unfastens the car seat as quickly as she can. John stands a ways off and stares into the black dirt.
He thinks: Least I was decent about it. At least I warned her. Most never say nothing. Most never warn nobody. Should when they got the car seat. Should, but those fuckers couldn’t give a shit. At least I wouldn’t be shitting around with this mess.
Pretty though. Fucking mother, but pretty. Married by the paper work. No fucking ring though. What’d he do, missy?
Nice ass.
Ah, shit! Don’t fucking turn around!
He stares into a tire track in the lawn where somebody cut a turn too tight. The dirt is rich, black, and fertile. A rough, imperfect cover of thin, half-shattered frost glass bridges the deep furrows of the anonymous tire’s track.
He thinks: Looks like cookies and cream ice cream. Mom loved that shit. Brought it home twice a week. Ice-cream? What in the fuck does any of this got to do with ice cream?
Job sucks on days like this—she’s looking at me again—damned ice everywhere. But her eyes are green. Green’s a good color for eyes. Greenish at least. Ice in the air too. Better than blue. Blue eyes are cooler. Damned morning jobs. Ice jobs. Hell to drive.
Maybe a hundred cars by now. Most are more exciting. This is just inventory, but I’m righting a wrong—sometimes. Even the racy stuff’s better than fucking inventory bullshit. Hopping fences—barbed wire’s everywhere in this bullshit town. Can’t even slow me down now. Lying to cops. That’s funnier than this shit. ‘Just making things right, Officer. They didn’t make their payments, so they didn’t keep their car. Balancing the scales, man. Balancing the fucking scales.’ Stories to tell the grand kids. Hell, maybe I should impress some barfly and get kids first.
Impress. Why shouldn’t it? This damn dirt looks like ice-cream, that’s why it fucking shouldn’t. Damn mothers.
She checks under the driver and passengers’ seats. She takes the tape out of the cassette deck. She opens the trunk and removes a pink ballerina’s costume. He looks at the dirt. He feels like the dirt.
He thinks: Better if she’d cuss me. Be better yet if the bitch’d fucking hit me. ‘Stop fucking hitting me! I’m just doing my goddamn job!’ Come on. At least spit or something. Bitch.
No, you ain’t a cussing bitch. Not a hitting bitch either. You’re not even a spitting bitch. (Scum). That’s your fucking problem. Somebody give you something to spit and you fucking swallowed it. (Scum). You’re the type don’t even feel it in your stomach, ain’t you? (Scum). Had plenty of this before, ain’t you? (Scum! Scum! Scum!).
Just let me say it’s my fucking job, already! It is my fucking job, ain’t it?
She scans the pile of stuff she’s put in the gravel: car seat, coloring book, tutu, paper work, tire jack, cassette tape, library books on astronomy, everything. Still looking at the pile, she quietly, calmly says to him, “I think that’s it.”
“Check again to make sure.”
“No, that’s it.”
“You’re sure?”
She nods. She doesn’t look at the car mournfully. She doesn’t look at him, angrily.
(Scum).
“I’m just doing--”
“I know,” she says cutting him off. He may need to hear it to make his ears stop ringing “Scum,” but she doesn’t need to hear him say it.
“Do you need help getting everything inside?”
Without emotion, without speaking she shakes her head “No.”
“I’m just--”
Again, she closes her eyes and shakes her head. There is a tear in her eye.
He starts thinking again: She’s beautiful when she-- When she what’s? She’s fucking married and you’re taking her goddamn car. You won’t ever fucking see her again. She’d be beautiful if she spread her goddamn, fucking legs for you-- that’s when she’d be beautiful. Jumping her bones’d beautiful. That’s all you got to think about. Get that long, devil red hair jumping up and down across your lap. Probably got the same freckles on her ass she does on her face. Connect all those freckles. That’s when she’d be fucking beautiful.
He doesn’t know her, but the black bile and venom helps him get into the car, turn the engine over, and press the accelerator. At the end of the block he rolls the stop sign. He looks in the rear-view. She’s carrying the car-seat into the house.
“Bitch deserves it,” he says aloud without conviction or malice, just to hear something said. “I’m just doing my job” he adds. When he’s around the corner and she’s out of sight, he adds, “I’ll give you fucking kids.”
She startles her mother. “Oh, I thought I heard you leave.”
“No. Listen,” she breathes, “I need a ride to work.”
“What about your car. Why do you have the car seat?”
“He hasn’t made any payments.”
“What do you mean? Who was that?”
“It was the repo man.”
“The what?” Her mother’s anxiety is rising.
“The repo man. Scott didn’t make any payments on the car lately.” She’s doing her best not to scream.
Her mother rushes to the window. “Wait, what happened to your car?”
“The repo man.”
“He just took your car?”
“Scott didn’t make the payments.”
“You let him take your car?” The anxiety is at a pitch.
“It isn’t about letting him, Mom. You’re not listening. Scott didn’t make the payments, so they took the car back.” She is calm.
Her mother lets it sink in a moment. She asks, “But how are you going to take the baby to the--”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But how are you going to get to work?”
She starts laughing, “Mom, I just asked you for a ride.” The laugh is genuine, if frayed at the edges. Her mother starts to laugh too, even if she doesn’t know how any of this might be amusing.
John is driving her car. He’s put a tape in the deck, he’s put the heat on full blast, and he’s just beginning to doze. The red head is bobbing on his lap. She smiles and her hair turns fire bright.
Red brake lights veer left. The suggestion does not inspire mimicry. She’s blocking the view. The red hair is dancing in his eyes. She won’t let him see. She keeps smiling.
The pole comes out of nowhere. He hears the brakes squealing before he’s awake enough to feel his foot on the pedal. He knows the route. Why didn’t he see it?
He grabs at her hair. “Honey, put your fucking head down.” A clump of hair comes off in his hand, but more and more grows to replace it.
It’s dead in front of his bumper. The bumper is traveling at seventy miles an hour.
He stares at the clump of hair in his hand. He wonders why he’s shoving his right foot into the bed.
Brakes lock. Tires lose grip. The radio vomits euro-punk obscenities: forth word, second verse- “Bullocks.”
“Bu…” The bumper folds like it’s made of wax. Dead center-- as if he’d aimed for it. The back wheels jump off the pavement; the front wheels dig into soft clay and salted ice chunks. A copper bar fails to descend and grip tight a three inch strip of cloth resting across his lap.
“Bitch, get off me!” He tries to push her off, but his sweat and hers are like pitch, melding them together. She keeps smiling, but she cocks her arm back. Her knuckles crack as her hand flexes into a tight fist; her crimson hair splays in every direction. There’s the untanned, water bleached impression of where a wedding ring should be on the fourth finger of her cocked fist.
The grill shatters like plastic-- the grill is plastic, so that makes sense. The radiator cracks, pops. Steam jumps. Nature abhors a vacuum. The tip of the hood kisses the pole. The car grinds up the pole, sexually. The pole shifts back to support her weight.
He feels weightless, everywhere except inside her.
A hubcap comes lose and follows Newtonian Physics into the woods. Shattered windshield glass and enameled grill plastic leap into and hide in the snow sludge and unmown, unsown roadside weeds.
The red head punches him, full force, in the mouth. His teeth crack and splinter.
Six o’clock on the steering wheel tastes like sweaty palms.
She’s still smiling.
He passes out.
At forty-five degrees relative to the earth’s surface the ascent begins to slow down. It doesn’t rush to stop. This dance has to be danced, even if John has decided to sit it out. “An object in motion will remain in motion until brought to rest by an equal and opposite force.” The car goes fast, the car hits hard.
At sixty degrees, the front axle snaps. The wheels lift from the ground, effortlessly. The cracked, boiling radiator sighs as it dips deep into the soft, cool earth. The battery takes its corroded bolts and compartment with it as it tries to jump through the windshield wiper fluid reservoir and passenger side head lamp. The cables hold it back. The radio spews on: “...ll…”
At eighty degrees it is apparent that either the impact was one inch leeward of dead on or the ground has a vague grade to it. The effect is that the car tips ever so slightly to the passenger’s side. A crushed cigarette pack, an empty Styrofoam coffee cup, and a waded, yellow sandwich wrapper respond to their new place in gravity. They scurry from under the seats like frightened mice to mingle with the overturned floor mats.
Just before ninety degrees, the pole caresses the seam where the splintered windshield meets the roof. A yellowed poster, announcing last year’s 4-H fair, flutters to the ground from the opposite side. Pebbles of shatter-resistant glass leap into the early morning chill. Glass shatters. Particulates of gasoline waft into the air. Metal bends but, eventually, metal resists.
The car spins with the pole as its axis. John’s head, limp upon his neck, lazily droops to rest between the steering wheel and the window: a bad position for impact. A car’s weight on a window—when the window shatters, the weight of car will rest on his skull. Two of his incisors rolled across the instrument panel like dice.
The rear fender lumbers into the earth. Forty degrees… thirty degrees… Momentum and gravity equals increased velocity. Twenty-five, twenty, eighteen, fourteen degrees. The ground yawns toward him. The radio says, “…ock….” Tennineeightsevensix—John’s head rocks back, just slightly enough. Fourtwozero.
The driver-side window pops like a soap bubble. A jagged shard of glass rockets through John’s left check. Glass splinters grind into his eyelashes, nose, chin, and hairline. The steering wheel rests imbedded three inches into the damp, welcoming clay. “…s…”
On the way to work, she calls Scott.
“Hello?” He sounds hung over.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Wait.” There is a shuffle as he sits up in bed. “What?”
“They just repossessed the fucking car!”
“What did they do?”
“They just repoed, r-e-p-o-e-d, repoed the fucking car!”
“Wait--” a spring squeaks on the bed, “How could they do that?”
“You stopped making the payments, you fucking shit.”
“No. Wait. I’ve been making the payments.”
“Scott, the guy showed me the paper work. They’ve been sending you notices. You knew this was going to happen.”
“Now wait.” Papers shuffle. “I talked to a lady two weeks ago, and she said I had until the end of the month.”
“Scott, it’s the sixth.”
“They don’t repose cars over a few days.”
“It’s been six months since you made a fricking payment!”
“Yeah, but I talked to her and she said I had until the end of the month!”
“Ask him how his daughters going to get to the--”
“I will Mom.” Into the phone, “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah.”
“Well are you going to take her?”
“Take her where?”
“You don’t even fucking know? Do you even care about your daughter? I know you couldn’t give two shits about me, but could you at least consider your fricking daughter, for once? You think that car was for me—it was for her, you asshole. How the hell am I supposed to get her to--”
He screams, “You crazy bitch, where the fuck does she need to go?”
She hangs up on him.
“Renee again?” the blonde says sweetly as he cusses at the receiver and hangs up.
“Of course it was. It’s always her.”
She sits up in bed, takes a cigarette from the package on her nightstand, and lights it. She absently observes, “She’s your ex-wife and you have a daughter together—of course she’s going to call.”
“Yeah, wife and kid.”
Under the silk sheets, she strokes her bare legs against his. “What’s wrong this time?”
“Damn car.”
She pinches his thigh with her toes making him yelp. She scorns, “Scott, I told you to make the damn payment!”
He screams back, “I can’t help it if the bank fucking overreacted!”
She looks wilted. The sheet relaxes over her breasts and she abandons her cigarette in the ashtray. She lets the sheet fall further, exposing herself. She makes puppy dog eyes at him, “Won’t you at least--” The puppy dog eyes turn to seduction, “Won’t you at least try for me?” She presses her naked form against his. She breathes on the back of his neck, “Please.” Smoke trails her voice.
He wraps his arms around her. He cups her breast. He asks in a husky voice, “Why the fuck do you care?”
He kisses her. He pushes her down. He doesn’t want an answer. She thinks, “Because I want you to be a father, someday.” She thinks he is someone else as she presses her tongue against him. She begs someone else for more.
When it’s over, she takes her birth control pill, thinks of the daughter she already has, and prays that the infection from her C-section made her infertile.
Blip.
One pre-packaged celery stalk, one pound: ninety-nine cents.
Blip. Enter key.
Two canned tomato sauces, eight ounces each: three for a dollar-- difference in the grocery’s favor.
Blip. Number key three. Enter.
Three, off-brand, raspberry yogurts: Sixty-five cents each, one ninety-five total.
Blip.
“Those yogurts were sixty cents each.”
“Oh, um--” she picks up the phone and presses the page key, “Price check lane three. Price check lane three, please.”
“Why’d you need to call a price check? I know how much the sign said.”
She tells the same lie, the company’s lie, that she’s been telling since her first day, “Oh, it’s just so we can have the scanning department update the system.” Never mention errors on anyone’s part.
The stocker comes up beside her. She didn’t want it to be him. She’s talked to him in the smoker’s break room. He’s working his way through school. He hasn’t shaved in four days, but he knows his job and isn’t afraid of the customers. He’s just old enough to bitterly, bitingly know he doesn’t really belong here. That can make these moments volatile. He nods at her, “What’s up?”
She wonders how old he is. She never really asked. She holds up a yogurt and asks, “What’s the price for three of these?”
“Sixty-five each.”
The customer grimaces and starts up her attack. She’s playing the whole field. She’s telling them that they’ve been raising their prices every time she’s been in over the past twenty years. She’s telling him that the old manager, the one that just retired, the one she can’t recall the name of right now, he’d never have let someone change the price on her. She’ll call the owner. She’ll call the Better Business Bureau and the Board of Trade. She’ll get the whole store shut down. When she’s just short of calling the governor’s mansion, he says, “Sixty-five cents each.”
He is three years younger than Renee.
This goes on for six minutes, until he doesn’t care enough to fight her. He tells Renee to take the damn fifteen cents off. The customer promises to complain to the manager about both of them, Renee included. He laughs. No hero.
Blip. Minus fifteen cents. Plus one customer complaint form. Minus one immortal soul.
A calm voice over the intercom says, “Renee, please dial extension 4-3-5. Renee, dial extension 4-3-5.” She’s to go to the managers’ office on her way to break.
By five, she’s waiting outside, smoking a cigarette. Her mom wasn’t going to be able to pick her up, but she had promised that someone would. They had no clue who that someone would be, but her mother had never let her down. If anyone could get her a ride home, it would be her mother. Renee just hoped her mom hadn’t gotten desperate. She knew who would pull up if she had.
She has barely finished half of her cigarette before he pulls up. Her mom had gotten desperate. When Renee sees him, she immediately feels torn between abject misery and complete gratitude. Her father smiles when he sees her.
As she gets into the old, well-preserved sedan, he asks her how her day was. She doesn’t mention being written up. She doesn’t mention the unending line of customers. She doesn’t say that her feet, back, and eyes hurt from standing, hunched over a register, for the past eight hours. She goes immediately to the heart of it and kisses the top of his bald, tanned head. Although she already knows the answer, she asks, “How did you get away from work?” He downplays it, but he’ll be working a double tomorrow and the day after. He’s fifty-nine years old and feels even closer to retirement than he is, but he’ll be working doubles for the next two days. He doesn’t have to say he’d work doubles his whole life if it meant his daughter wouldn’t be left without a ride home.
He talks about the song on the radio and the way the weather has been as he carefully pulls from the lot and onto the highway. He talks about the football game her mother taped for him and he watched last night before bed. He never mentions how the game ended. She sees the bags under his eyes. She knows he fell asleep before the game was over. She sees the bags under his eyes and winces realizing how much worse they’ll be at the end of the week when he’s made up for getting out early today. She says thank you, again and again, although she knows he hates to hear it and would just as soon she didn’t say it. She’s silent most of the way. She’s silent and crying. He cracks little, predictable jokes she’s heard at least a thousand times. He has her laughing by the time they reach the driveway. Before he can get out of the car, she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses the top of his head again and again. He tells her that she’ll make him go bald, again.
She stops kissing him, but leaves her arms wrapped around his neck. He looks in her eyes and still sees his little girl. She frowns and asks, “Daddy, why aren’t there any men like you anymore?”
He ponders a moment, doesn’t come up with an answer, and changes the subject, saying, “Your aunt told me she’s been in her ballerina costume all day. You can use my car to take her over. It’s a beater, but she’ll get you there and back.”
Renee wipes her eyes. She lets him go, looks away, and says, “I know, Dad. I know I can take your car.”
He helps her put the car seat in. While he does, he mentions that a friend at work has an old junker he might be able to get working for her. She knows it will be in the driveway, with him under the hood, before she gets back tonight. She thinks of the bags under his eyes as she drives away. He watches her leave and goes to make a phone call.
Her aunt is pestering her before she even gets all the way into the door. She says, “I don’t know why you’re going to let her wear that.”
Renee has her shoes on, so she is standing on the linoleum foyer, just like she was forced to when she was five. She hates leaving her daughter here, but with everyone else working and her daughter on winter break, she doesn’t have much choice. She stays on the linoleum and replies, “Aunt Claire, they’re all wearing them. That’s how they knew her.”
Claire scoffs, “Well it just doesn’t seem respectable. It isn’t a party, it’s—”
She snaps, “Damn it, I know what it is, but they’re all wearing them.” She doesn’t mean to be so angry, but her Aunt Claire has a way of making hard situations harder. She continues, “They decided it was what they wanted to do, and they’re the ones that have to deal with this. Now I’m going to be late--” she steps onto the carpet.
As if the whole affair was a hostage situation gone rotten, Claire screams, “Don’t step on the carpet! I’ll get her. Just stay there!”
Renee is left alone in the foyer. Canned, lilac air-freshener lingers in the air. Claire has babysat ten children at a time since before Renee was born. It had been her only source of income since her husband, Jim, left her nearly twenty years ago. Renee thought she knew why, considering what a hag her aunt turned out to be. Renee didn’t know anything.
Renee idealized Jim. He was her father’s brother, so in her mind, he couldn’t be all that bad. So she thought. The one time she had met him was as a child, when Jim and Claire had tried one last time to work things out. Renee had wondered how such an extremely happy person could have ever married her aunt. She was too young to identify the whisky on his breath. Claire had only ever wanted a house full of children. Renee was too young to know what a black eye was. No hero.
Claire reenters the room with her grandniece in tow. When Renee had to have her wedding gown altered to fit her swelling belly, Claire had alienated herself from all the spinsters at church by telling them to mind their own “goddamn business.” Renee didn’t know about that. She was too busy noticing her daughter to notice how tenderly Claire held the girl’s tiny hand. There was a moment’s pause. The little girl was in perfect order: pink tights, glittered blouse, and crape tutu. Her face was the only betrayal of her grief. Her mouth was closed to a scowl. Her eyelids and cheeks were red from a day's worth of crying. Claire broke the silence, saying sternly, “Amber, go to your mother.” Renee did not see the tender squeeze of her aunt’s hand that counterbalanced the remake’s force.
Amber started asking questions a few minutes after she learned to talk. They had bombarded Renee for the last five years straight. Most of the questions were the type that Renee could find answers to at the library. She spent a lot of time in the library. She didn’t want to set back her daughter’s intelligence. She never thought about the fact that her own father and mother hadn’t spent hours at the library trying to answer her questions when she was little. Both of her parents had never been much for books, yet Renee had never felt her intelligence stifled. Renee wanted her daughter to have every opportunity she could provide. She will never realize children need to question more than they ever need to be answered.
Most of Amber’s questions could be answered at the library, but not her questions tonight.
“Mom, why are we in grandpa’s car?”
Renee can’t think of an easy way to answer this. Amber has had a good relationship with her father, even if he doesn’t show up half the time. Renee never tried to make Scott look bad in front of her. Sometimes it was impossible to save him. At those moments, she thought of how much she loved her father and lied.
“Your daddy decided to get us a better car. He wants it to be special though, so he promised that he’d bring it right over once you asked him a hundred times.”
“Why a hundred times?”
“Because he wants to make sure you really, really want it.”
“Oh.” She adds, “Dad’s fun.”
She doesn’t like lying to her, but she uses it to her advantage when she has to.
There is a moment of silence. Renee wanted Amber to ask how old the stars are again. She hadn’t known last week when Amber first asked, but Renee was full of information about stars this week. Amber didn’t ask though. She asked something harder.
“Mom—” she stops, wondering if it was an okay question to ask.
“Go ahead, honey,” Renee bid her, still thinking she’d ask about stars.
“Mom, why do people die?”
Renee is quite. She knew this might come up, but she had hoped it would come up after the funeral, when she had had time to consult with the other mothers. She starts as best she can, “Mrs. Evelyn did because she got sick—”
“A.I.D.S. I know.”
Renee looks back at Amber. She is shrouded in darkness until they pass a streetlight and her face lights up for a moment. Her strawberry curls mask her eyes for a moment, but she isn’t crying. Renee asks, “How did you know that, sweetheart?”
“Auntie Claire told me.”
Renee winces. She looks back to the street in front of her. She is angry. Her knuckles turning white, she asks the steering wheel, more than Amber, “And what did Auntie Claire tell you A.I.D.S. was?”
Amber responds, “She said it was a bad disease that married people only get when they’re in love, but the person they love is in love with somebody else. She said Mrs. Evelyn’s husband got it from somebody he loved more than Mrs. Evelyn, but he gave it to Mrs. Evelyn and that’s why she got sick-- because Mr. Evelyn loved somebody else. She said it was kind of like a broken heart.”
Renee doesn’t notice it, but she is actually relieved that someone has taken the task out of her hands. Half-consciously, she realizes that although it isn’t much of an explanation, it is good enough for a little girl.
“A broken heart,” she mouths. She remembers Evelyn crying in the backroom of the ballet studio as she told the mothers about her husband, Ron’s, infidelity. She remembers how Evelyn had nearly choked telling them that she was infected. “A broken heart-- that about says it,” she whispers to herself.
A quite moment passes before Amber pipes up again. She says “Mommy—” and is quite again.
Renee pushes back a tear and says “Yes, honey?”
“Mommy, that wasn’t what I asked.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. What did you ask?”
“I asked why people die, not just Ms. Evelyn.”
Renee is taken aback. Her daughter is barely six. Naively, she hadn’t expected her to universalize Evelyn’s death. The doctor had only noticed the infection in its later stages. It was a vicious strand. It swept through her quickly, perhaps helped along by the fact that Evelyn wasn’t putting up a fight. Renee had heard Jim was resisting, but it was that broken heart of hers that killed Evelyn so quickly. Renee had known about it for some time, almost a year, but the girls were only told after Evelyn went into the hospital and the studio had to close. She had underestimated how much time her daughter needed to universalize the results of Jim’s infidelity.
Renee thinks about what the pastor of her church says whenever there is a funeral. She thinks of that and then the sideways looks the reverend gave her when she gave birth after only four months of marriage. He gave her the same look when he found out she was planning to divorce Scott. Renee tries to think of a person at the church, one damn person other than her parents and aunt, who stuck by her. She tries to say that God needs more angels in Heaven. She tries to, but she thinks of a broken-hearted Evelyn and a leering minister. She thinks of Evelyn and a leering God.
If the type of people who go to heaven are the type of people who go to church, Renee hopes Evelyn found a place with better company, or no place at all. This is not a new thought for her.
She looks into the rear-view mirror. Amber’s eyes hold hers for a moment, then the little girl looks out the window, into the night sky. Renee has no idea what to say. Thankfully Amber’s curiosity moves towards the night sky as quickly as her gaze does. “How old are the stars, Mom?” she asks.
Renee settles into the long explanation of how stars form and pass away that she has gleaned from an astronomy book at the library. Amber isn’t listening, but she nods at the appropriate times to give the illusion that she is. Renee thinks the matter is settled, but, from this day forward, Amber will remember that her mother couldn’t tell her why people die.
The little girls stand tiptoe on the kneeler, three at a time. When not standing on the kneeler, they smell the snow-white lilies and purple irises, stare into soft glow of the long, taper candles, and whisper back and forth in hushed voices of innocent reverence and awe. The youngest is three; the oldest, ten. They are fairies hovering at the head of the chapel. Evelyn is their queen.
Evelyn is dressed in a larger version of their costumes. It is a reproduction of the costume she wore when she danced as the Sugar Plum Faire in college. Their costumes are reproductions of her reproduction. She had only pursued a short stage career after she was awarded her degree in ballet. The world is full of would be ballerinas, and, although she was as graceful, competent, and beautiful as any of them, she was not cruel. While she was all the more beautiful for that, it was not a beauty she could translate into a stage career. While she was waitressing to make ends meet, she met a small-time businessman at a convention. She married him, moved to his small, hometown, Troy, and started her dance school and studio to fill the world with more ballerinas.
She asked to be buried in her Sugar Plum Faire costume because, she said, she had looked happier there, at that one moment on stage, than she could have ever been in real life. Buried beneath the cool ground of the Quite Glen cemetery, locked in that dark, moisture proof casket, she will be immortally awash in the flood lights and applause of one flawless performance: one instant, surrounded by thirty tiny ballerinas, which was worth more to her than the course of her life.
The girls’ mothers and two of their fathers sit at the back of the chapel. They watch the girls and chat quietly. The ten-year-old’s mother relays the discussion she and her daughter had earlier that day. The mother is liberal-minded, so her daughter already knows enough about sex to brooch sexual transmitted diseases. At the word STD, one of the fathers goes outside for a cigarette. The mother continues that her daughter’s real question wasn’t about how H.I.V. is transmitted, but why a married man would cheat on his wife. The other father goes to join the first one. No heroes.
The mother hadn’t known how to respond to her daughter’s question. Some nervous eyes level in Renee’s direction, everyone expecting her input. She might have otherwise been offended, but she and this handful of mothers had become close in the last few months. There is a bound between them; they were the only ones who continued to send their children to Evelyn’s lessons after she had made her announcement in the backroom. They had formed a sort of impromptu sorority, exchanging late-night phone calls and advice about how they would deal with this day when it came. The ten-year-old’s mother was not criticizing Renee; these were not the women of Renee’s church. They are like students exchanging notes before a big exam. They need an expert opinion on this question, so they consult the expert. They are too polite to ask, but they know that this is Renee’s area of expertise.
The women are relieved when Renee breaks the awkward pause without being awkward herself. Not really knowing where to begin, she starts, “From what I can figure out now, my husband started cheating on me before we were even married. We were together since junior high, but I guess he started earlier than I did. He was my first, but I know I wasn’t his. He didn’t mean to get me pregnant, but he at least had the decency to marry me once he had.
“I can’t be sure, but I think there was a at least a while there that he was faithful to me. I caught him with his pants around his ankles—literally—after we had been married seven months. I just had Amber, not two months before, and he was running around on me. We fought a lot about it that first time, but we stayed married—for all that’s wrong with him, he never hit me or anything and he seemed really sorry. He cried and told me he’d never do it again; but, well, he’s just an ass. I even bought sexier underwear and walked around the apartment in them to try to keep him at home, but he only lasted a year before he was out on me again. I’m really surprised he lasted that long.
“Here’s the stupid part—I actually caught him on what I think was the first time he cheated on me again, and I didn’t kill him.” The women laugh with her. She explains, “He went to a party one night, and I knew where it was, so I followed him, and I looked through the window, and he had this girl on his lap. I saw her, and I thought the weirdest thing. I thought, ‘I’m prettier than her.’ And I was too. She was all pimple faced and had really big teeth, and this fuzzy black hair with brown showing at the roots. But he seemed genuinely entranced by her, like she was some sort of amazing beauty or something.
“When I was on my way there, I was so angry I think I might have killed him, but I just left. I couldn’t shake the image of this ugly girl, sitting on his lap, chewing a big wad of gum, and it just killed the rage in me. I think—I don’t know—before that moment, I somehow thought it was my fault that he was messing around, like I wasn’t living up to my end or something. But I suddenly realized that it had nothing to do with me, he’s just fucked in the head.” Giggles sweep through them again, but she goes on without pausing.
“Once I realized that he was just built wrong for the marriage thing, I just kind of pitied him. That’s the weirdest thing. I kept seeing her on his lap, and I cried and cried, but I was just crying because I felt like an idiot. I wasn’t mad at him or anything. I just pitied him.
“I didn’t confront him when he came home the next morning. I just sort of went on like nothing had happened. He did too, but I really think he knew I knew. I made him eggs and hash-browns and toast. I burnt the toast, but I always burn toast,” they chuckle again, but it’s good-hearted. She’s never told any of this stuff to anyone before and doesn’t know why she’s telling it now, but they are so interested and supportive she takes a nearby hand and keeps going, even though it’s getting harder. “He ate his breakfast, feed Amber for me—“ she’s crying now, “—and he finishes and tells me, out of the blue, that he’ll stick around for the baby if I want, but he doesn’t really want to be married anymore. He just says it like that, puts it right out on the table,” the hand squeezes hers, tenderly. She feels stronger.
“I didn’t know what to say, so I just said ‘Your damn right you’re going to stick around for your daughter.’” The strength drains from her again as she remembers what she said next. A hand takes her other hand. She continues, “Damn me that I said it, but then I said ‘I’m stuck with her so you’re gonna fucking stick too.’” She looks over to Amber, peering into the casket across the room. Renee looks back at them and forces, “You know I don’t mean it—” they nod, “—but I said it and I think I meant it when I did. I don’t anymore.”
Someone hugs her. She cries into the shoulder for a few minutes. Some of them are crying too. An anonymous hand gives her a tissue, and she smiles and thanks all of them. She gives a short, crying chuckle into the tissue and says, “Here you’re just asking about what to tell your little girls about men, and I’m dragging you all into this.”
They all shake their heads rapidly to negate her apology. A young mother, someone Renee went to high school with but never knew, puts her hand against Renee’s face and kisses her forehead. She whispers in her ear, “It is okay. You can continue. You must let it out to let it go.” Those close enough to hear nod in agreement. Renee nods and takes a deep breath. As she composes herself, she realizes she doesn’t even remember the girl’s name. She recalls her face, something about her being really smart. She looks at the girl curiously. Wasn’t it something like she skipped a few grades or something, she thinks. But why didn’t she graduate with us? What’s her name? Renee realizes that she doesn’t know half these women’s names and that half of them don’t even know hers. She hardly knows a woman here, but she feels closer to them than she has to any in her life. She takes another deep breath and goes on:
“Well, after I said what I said, he swore, again, that he’d stick around for Amber. I didn’t say anything, and he went off to work. I brought the baby over to my mom’s house for the day. I don’t have to explain when I drop her off. My mom wants to spend every waking hour with her that she can.
“I went home and I cried for an hour or so. I knew he wasn’t going to come home after work, so I had the house all to myself. I knew that. I thought about a lot of stuff. I thought about doing a lot of stuff—doing stuff to myself and what have you. I don’t know why, but I took out this notebook I had written a lot of poems in when I was younger. It was all love-dove type stuff that I wrote about him in high school. For some reason, I took it out and I just started to write things down and get them out of me and onto paper. I got so wrapped up in it my mom called and asked if there was something wrong. I hadn’t even thought about the time, and it was past eleven. I asked her if Amber could spend the night and she said it was okay. Then I ate something-- the first thing I ate all day-- and I slept a while.
“He woke me up around three in the morning. He asked me, ‘Renee, can I sleep with you?” one of the women gasps. Renee assures, “No, not like that. He didn’t get anymore of that out of me,” she lied. “He was just wondering if he should sleep in the bed or on the couch. It was so strange. You’ve got to realize how funny it was. Here was my husband—the man I married. Not two days before, that bed was just as much his as it was mine. Things had changed that much, that quick. All of the sudden, he had to ask to sleep in bed with me, like he needed to know how deep I wanted the illusion to be.
“We went on like that for sometime—just over three years, in fact. To say it like that, just to say ‘three years,’ makes it sound like it was nothing. It makes it sound to manageable. It was actually one thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven days. I don’t know why, but I figured that out on a calculator once he left. I felt every one of those days. I also figured out how many hours, minutes, and seconds it was, but I’ve forgotten. I felt those too, though. That was the level I was living on. By the time he left, I was counting the seconds as they passed, but it was time.
“Our illusion tricked most everyone: our friends, our minister, his parents. I told my mom, but my father didn’t know. It would have hurt him too much. I guessed it was time because Amber wasn’t fooled. By the time she was four—no, she wasn’t even four—she somehow figured out that things weren’t right. The three of us bumped into an old friend of mine and her son once, and while we talked about high school I heard her tell the boy, ‘That’s my mommy and daddy, but they aren’t really married, they’re just playing.’ I still can’t figure out how she put that together, but I should have broken things off right then and there, but—I don’t know—I was just used to the game. I don’t know why, but even though I knew it was, I didn’t want my marriage to be over.
“He broke it off. That’s the thing that pisses me off. He broke it off. He said he fell in love with somebody. I pity that whore; Scott can’t love anything.” The young mother Renee remembered from high school stares off at the girls with tears in her eyes. She memorizes faces. Her breath is rough and irregular. At the word “Scott,” she stands, rushes to her daughter, grabs her, and leaves in a hurry with one hand over her mouth. Her little girl says, “Mommy? What’s wrong—” but the tiny voice is lost to the women as the door swings shut behind them. The women look at each other in blank astonishment until the ten-year-old’s mother says, “That’s Sophie. I’ve been talking to her on the phone since this all started. She’s a hairstylist and Evelyn was one of her clients, so I think she knew her pretty well. She said that she isn’t any good at funerals. She’s probably just had too much for one day. I’ll call her tomorrow and find out.”
“I shouldn’t be talking like this,” Renee apologizes. “We’re at a funeral for Christ’s sake.”
One of the women pats her hand, “No, no, honey. You don’t worry about that. You just go right on ahead.”
“No, I shouldn’t with Evelyn up there and all her problems.”
Another woman looks at her seriously, with her neck barely turned, and says, “Evelyn doesn’t have anymore problems. The way I see it, if we’d all been able to talk like this before, she might not be up there in the first place.” Several of the women nod. All of them agree. “You knew Evelyn as well as I did, and I confess that wasn’t much, but she struck me as somebody who’d want you to get this out. God knows, I need to hear it.” She looks at the door, a faint trace of suspicion passing through her eyes. Earlier, her husband had been second to leave.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what else there is to say.”
“Well, what did you say to Amber when he stepped out?” one of the women asks.
“Well, there really wasn’t much to say. She sort of knew what was going on. I was just kind of confirming things for her. She’s an angel, though. I sat her down. I told her that her daddy was going to be moving out. She just asked if he could still come and visit her, and I told her yes. Then I told her we’d probably have to move in with her grandma and grandpa, and she said that would be okay as long as she got to keep her clothes and toys. I told her she could, and then she said it would be more than okay because she’d get to play with her grandpa’s dog. I laughed at that and told her it was very true. She asked if I still loved her dad, and—I don’t know if it’s true or not—but I told her I did. Then she asked the big one—the one I guess I started this all to answer. She asked me why her daddy was leaving. I told her that he loved somebody else. She asked me if my heart felt broken, and I—”