Why Did I Ever Read online

  “I’m to blame for that,” I say. “It’s because you’re your mother’s daughter.”

  “Wow,” she says and sits down with me on the concrete bench.

  I say, “Everybody else gets red.”

  30

  The thing about Mev is she has twice failed the bar exam.

  “You can fail it a third time, though, can’t you?” Hollis asks her.

  Mev says, “No, see, at this point, even to do that, I’d have to brush up and study.”

  31

  In Appletree, she says, “There’s my friend Margaret, over at the orange juice.”

  “Who?”

  “My friend Margaret that lives near me on Southy. I got that angora sweater from her? The one who does the bookmobile. I waved but I guess she doesn’t see me.”

  I’m looking. I say, “The only person anywhere near the orange juice is ninety-two years old.”

  “What about it, Mother?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “Nothing about it at all.”

  Mev always finds friends and they’re always older. They’re people who were born at home.

  32

  She makes herself a part of things—over in the smoke niche fetching Lucky Strikes for that man, now dragging somebody’s Moderow baby crib up to the cashier. Her brother’s the same way. I boarded a subway with him once and he went along the car like a porter, seating people and catching parcels before they spilled.

  And It’s Just My Size

  Hollis reads to me from a dictionary: “‘Oscillate . . . A vibrating motion as things move backward and forward, vary or vacillate between differing conditions and become stronger and weaker.’”

  “Huh,” I say. “Well, but that describes me.”

  34

  “Can I just say something?” he asks, and he starts to. So I remind him that permission to say something is not permission to say anything.

  Therefore, he decides to write down for me in longhand what it is that he has to say. Or, he would like to. He attempts to. First he must test his pen for ink.

  I vacate the room without ever learning if his letter-writing effort is successful.

  All We Do Is Argue

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I say to myself.

  “O.K.,” I say, “What?”

  “It’s that thing in your hand. You’re thinking that it goes someplace.”

  “Then where does it go?” I ask.

  “Well, not up there . . . ,” I say as I’m climbing the stairs.

  “So important to you to be right,” I say, climbing back down.

  36

  Martin, some person I know, has compiled a list of the five hundred best rock singles ever recorded. Number 11 on the list is “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks. Or if it’s not number 11, it should be.

  You Decide

  Things break. I head for the hardware.

  I have to walk past my neighbor who’s forever out on the bench here in our yard. The Deaf Lady. She isn’t deaf; a little bit, not very. She won’t tell me why she’s called that. She’ll say, “I’d rather not go into it,” or, “I’d prefer you weren’t involved.”

  The light out here is weird, the day already fading. The Deaf Lady looks as if she can’t locate her doll. “What’s the matter?” I ask her.

  “Just mistakes I make,” she says. “Like I left the kitchen thing burning again. On the what’s-it-called? Not the dashboard.”

  “The oven top. Coil stove. The burners,” I say. “But everybody does that. How long did you leave it on?”

  “Since the other night, I guess, when I was making fudge.”

  I scoot her over so I can sit down. “Well, it’s happened to me,” I say. “Never for days on end, that I recall.”

  “You want to go somewhere and eat?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  “O.K., good,” she says. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Oh, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Anyplace is fine.”

  She says, “Then let’s just go to the city dump and eat rats! All we have to do is catch them.”

  38

  We end up at the River Cafe on Science Street. Who works here according to their name tags are Toadstool and Paranoid Phil.

  My Asparagus Tips Casserole has no asparagus.

  “How’re you doing?” the two servers ask me.

  They must mean with this food.

  “You guys are spoiling me,” I say.

  39

  Across from us is the cashier’s counter. There, a girl in a black T-shirt stenciled with the word “Jezebel” is wagging her head at a woman in a muumuu who’s sadly, slowly, reluctantly writing a check.

  Now a squat fellow appears outside the place and squints at the door menu. He wanders off, comes back, reads the menu some more, wanders off.

  Lollipops Are Only for the Kids Who Had Shots

  Most of the movie studios have fired me. The William Morris Agency just fired me. Two of their agents on a conference line regretted that maybe they’ve been holding me back. They’ve fired me so they won’t hold me back anymore.

  Now I couldn’t be happier because here’s what I get to do: Run the bathroom tap water until it’s really cold, plug the tub up and fill it to the brim, and then into the chilly water plunge the Umani Fax Machine, the Sukosonic modem, the 1309 Phone Mail System, the beeper.

  “Good-bye. Go to hell,” I say to them.

  Mercury Brothers is about the only studio I have left. Mercury Brothers and their producer witch, Belinda.

  There Is No They

  “It’ll never change,” Hollis says, beside me in the car. “No matter how long we sit here, it’ll still be a stop sign.”

  Hollis is a Driver’s Ed. instructor. I say, “So this is what it must be like to study under you.”

  He sips noisily to the end of his lime drink, now sends the jumbo paper cup flying from the car window.

  He is just coming up with shit. He says, “At least I made you stop dyeing your hair. That purple shoeshine color or what was it? Remember?”

  “No,” I say. “And I believe I would.”

  42

  I would say to this or that ex: “Maybe I didn’t understand you or pay enough attention. There was a little bridge or something I failed to cross over. It was on the day you helped me wax the hallway and the little stairs, when you said to me, ‘The floor will be dry in a minute.’ Between the time you said that and when you asked me, ‘Do you think my pubic hair’s such an unusual color?’”

  And Another Thing

  I have now done Blockbuster. Little Dorrit, Parts One and Two.

  44

  I’m pressed up against a telephone pole, nailing it with a poster of my missing cat.

  Now I’m bustling off, for I’ve noticed the Ichabod landlord working in the bushes. He strictly does not allow pets.

  Now I’m at the next pole making a loud production of nailing Flower Girl’s poster because I know right from wrong and my dealings with the landlord are less important than the swift return of my cat.

  45

  Through the window is a lavender sky and a red orb of sun and the Deaf Lady out there with a half-filled air balloon. She’s staring ahead, her cheeks flushed, her eyes intense, readying herself to pump up the rest of it.

  Inside here is Hollis, and the clock, and the “wick-wick” of the ceiling fan, and the television left going out on the sun porch, transmitting the voice of Paul Newman in Hud.

  “Hollis,” I say. “On that thing we were discussing. What are my other choices?”

  He blows a smoke ring into the reach of the fan. “No others,” he says. “You don’t get any more.”

  I gaze at the fireplace, at its yellow-tiled face, at the mantel, with its huddle of red votive candles.

&
nbsp; He can never just answer me. If I ask, “How’re you doing?” he asks, “Compared to whom?” I ask, “May I tell you something?” and he says, “Still America.” That is what I have to put up with, day, after day, after day.

  Chapter Two

  Life in the Car

  I drive all over the American South, all night long, and nobody gives me trouble.

  Maybe this farmer would but I buzz down my window and scream at him, “Remember Goat’s Head Soup? What an album! To my mind, it is worth hearing again!”

  47

  Couples, in the cars on this interstate, I think, “Ugh. They are stuck.” I think the women must envy me, driving a hundred and five with nobody saying not to, barefoot and chain smoking and squawking along to a song.

  And Yet

  Overconfidence is a mistake for me. Not a big one, but it kicks open the door for several others.

  49

  Now I don’t care about sitting up straight and I’m going to break speed records in Alabama.

  Or no I am not, because the U.S. Army is in front of me. You would think that the Army would drive very fast. Not so, at least not in peace time. Good, one more reason to hate the Army. They’re holding me up.

  50

  Here’s a sign that reads: “pork!” Some signs aren’t there to make you happy.

  51

  In sleepiness, I see a rabble of dogs in a steamy heath, their hard-featured faces mottled with light from the yellow moon. I wonder if my cat’s sleeping somewhere, if she’s dreaming.

  There could be nothing worse than wondering about my son Paulie’s dreams.

  52

  “work for us” reads the purple neon writing over a trucker’s garage.

  I say, “Thanks, but I just want to drive right now.”

  53

  Paulie’s hands. They’re large to begin with, and make him bashful and can sometimes seem in his way. Now he has, in reaction to some goop he’s taking, a rash and must wear white gloves. Big ridiculous gloves. So it’s even more like he’s in a cartoon.

  Turn Off the Radio

  There are alcoholics all over the South. Many of them are inside the cars on this same highway. The alcoholics left over are minding the store.

  55

  My wheel explodes as I’m ripping past Mobile. The drunk road workers left a concrete chunk of debris out for me, smack-dab in the center of the interstate.

  But I shouldn’t talk. I’m just one more thingamabob.

  Waiting around.

  And there are two capital letters on my gearshift panel that I can’t identify. I’ve never had to go down there.

  56

  Maybe I should be dead sixteen ways, but they can sledgehammer my rim back into shape and plug on any old tire; I’ll pay. Because these folks are fine at the wheel replacement facility. They’re no different. They’re practically the same as the same people I meet over and over in the middle of the night in Mobile when something very frightening is happening to me.

  We’re congregated in a stifling hut—the stucco mechanics’ garage.

  I lean on a tiled wall. There are fizzing snapping light tubes overhead. The room seems hollowed out to me, a green cavity.

  I try to talk to them. I say, “Did you ever read Pierre; or, The Ambiguities? It’s the most disturbing Melville.”

  I am crying but I try to stop. “White Jacket is more accessible,” I say.

  57

  Here’s a resting place for me—an all-night laundromat. It has a padlocked washroom, a line of shrimp-colored scoop chairs bolted to a wall.

  My doctor did not prescribe enough drugs for me. If that ever was, in fact, his intention.

  A tumble dryer is spinning my bandanna and the raggedy shop towels I carry in my trunk.

  A berserk ringing noise issues from a game machine all the while.

  Now a length of red hose untwists itself on the floor between me and the washers, snakes over and squirts water on my sandals and toes.

  My car keys are where? They’re my only keys. I know I had them. I got here, didn’t I? Mightn’t those be they, clangoring around in the clothes dryer?

  Men Who Are Too Young

  “Clean as you go,” Hollis tells me. He says this is something he’s lived and learned.

  He says so during this phone call he’s made to me at four a.m. Clean-As-You-Go is his reason for calling.

  59

  After I broke up with somebody and there were no more men, I called an old friend of mine, Lillian, and asked if she might fix me up.

  “Oh certainly,” she said to me. “Plenty of people.”

  “Great, great,” I said. “So, who’re you thinking?”

  “Give me just a second.”

  “O.K.”

  “There’s somebody,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I told her and told her I was hanging up.

  “Wait,” she said. “Let me try a few things.”

  So Lillian called around and she came up with Hollis. Grief-stricken and fresh out of his many-year marriage to Midge.

  60

  Now he and I are watching as some charitable organization pleads away on the television. The spokesperson says that without our donations many Third World children will go blind.

  “Where the fuck is my government?” asks Hollis. “Why should this be left up to me?”

  He says, “Suppose I don’t have any money to contribute?”

  I don’t want to hurt his feelings or make things worse but I have to say, “That, is not too big a suppose.”

  61

  I should be ashamed, though. This is a man who buys, at a reduced price, milk and bags of bread that have expired.

  62

  We’ve moved over into my dining room. Hollis is backed up against the wall, measuring his height and marking over his head with a pencil. “You go next,” he says to me. “It’s fun to do!”

  “Can’t just now,” I tell him.

  He’s giving me a cool look and preparing a criticism. He carefully pockets his pencil, eases into the chair opposite, stirs the green tea in his steaming cup. “I don’t think—” he begins.

  I say, “Well, no you don’t, do you? You don’t think this! You don’t think that! Don’t relay any more thoughts to me if you do not have them.”

  63

  I don’t open the door very wide for the spiteful hunchbacked landlord. He’s snooping around to see if I have a pet.

  “No pet here,” I tell him, which is true, true, true.

  64

  I end up at the cat shelter. I step inside and announce that I am here for an animal who needs me.

  Which is not true if they think I mean any cat in an iron lung or this ET-lookalike with the plate-sized face; technically a cat, considered so by a stringent application of the rules.

  65

  I say to myself, “Stop it.”

  Or so I say. It doesn’t work.

  Ain’t Life a Brook

  Paulie says he’s crying because he’s tired and because his trousers are too long. He says they’re the only pants he brought to the hotel and they’re too long. He’s calling from somewhere in Manhattan. I know this from the 212 showing on my caller ID.

  There are two cops keeping Paulie company tonight, I hear them in the background. They are Mikey and Rob. “Where are the other channels?” one of them is asking. And the other says, “No! You mean it isn’t even cable?”

  Simple Machines

  I would remind the ex-husbands, “We’re still awaiting your well-wishes and cards of concern, your outpourings and bids of assistance. You, who had something or other to do with my son.”

  68

  Paulie’s caretakers from the Sexual Crimes Division escorted him to the medical facility where the doctors are giving him TB
tests and what all to learn something about his immune system. The Crap-Head Rodent Criminal, meantime, is in a cage at Rikers. That answers a few of my wants and desires. Not all.

  69

  Now I’m at a mall having indecision shopping and trying to buy something nice to send along to Paulie. A coat? No, no, he’s got plenty of coats. What’s that leave, then? I can’t think. A what? A what? A shower curtain?

  70

  And with bitterness sigh before their eyes.

  And it shall be when they ask you,

  “Wherefore sighest thou?” that you shall answer,

  “For the tidings, because it cometh.”

  And every heart shall melt.

  —ezekiel 21:6–7

  I’m at IHOP in a red booth seat, over a swiped tabletop and a Swedish stack.

  In the booth ahead, with her back to me, is a woman, her bushy hair under a moss-green scarf. “Just say you’re my brother,” she tells her companion. “They’ll believe it. If they ask you, say you’re my brother.” The companion is facing me. He peeks up as he pours salt. Should I wag my head at him, no? Is that the right thing to do or the wrong?

  I’m nobody’s judge. Not these days, certainly. On my blouse here, for instance, I missed the buttoning sequence by two.

  Straight across from me there’s a couple on a study date. The male has a loose-leaf binder opened. He says, “Now we’ll go through these notes and pick out similarities and differences. O.K.? Here we go: ‘Traditional beliefs, customs, laws. Social strife was commonplace.’” He stops and peers through his wire-rims. His girl’s Rollerball is wiggling furiously. “Sheila,” he says, “don’t write the verbs. You don’t have to write ‘was,’ just write ‘commonplace.’”

  Ah, but I hope they keep it up. I hope they don’t load their knapsacks and leave. I hope this stack of pancakes lasts so I don’t have to go home and try horribly to sleep again ever. The sky out there is like your head’s dunked down in the iodine water. And there are prickly white stars. The wind has tugged up the pine trees and is rocking and swaying them loose.

  71

  When I try to call Paulie back, there’s no answer, he’s gone and I guess the people from the Sexual Crimes Division have relocated him for safekeeping in some other hotel.