City of Boys Page 9

  —No, she says. —I was just commenting on the scenery.

  —Oh, he says. —I see. He lays the newspaper down on his lap. —I think it’s time for dinner.

  Alice’s mother nods, but does not rise from her chair. —It’s just, she says. —It’s just that this is an awfully long trip for Alice.

  Alice’s father looks at Alice. —Don’t you worry about Alice, he says. —Alice can take care of herself.

  —I know that, her mother says. —But you know, it’s just that there are lots of other things we might have done on this vacation besides go to the wedding of someone we don’t know.

  He looks down at the paper a moment, as if he might be reading.

  —Okay, he says. —Next year you can decide what we do. And the year after that. And the year after that, too, and every year after that until we die. His voice is even and contained, but Alice can see that his hands are trembling a bit as he presses his palms into his knees.

  —I’m just saying, says Alice’s mother, —that this is a long trip.

  He folds the paper and runs his fingers carefully along each sharp crease, then stands. —Jesus Christ, he says. —Jesus Christ Almighty.

  Alice looks down at her sneakers. They are new, bought just for this trip. She tries to think of someplace on the train she might go, someplace she hasn’t been yet, but she knows already that it’s just car after car of the same. Her mother sighs heavily and stands.

  —I’m going to smoke, she says. —If anyone wants me.

  After she is gone, Alice’s father lays his newspaper down gently and goes to the window. —I could get out right here, he says. —I could just get out right here in Arkansas.

  —It’s Oklahoma, Alice says. —We’re in Oklahoma now. I saw a sign.

  He does not turn from the window. —Arkansas, he says. —Oklahoma. What’s the difference? It’s all the same. And it goes on forever and ever.

  Outside, evening is creeping across the fields. Already, behind them in the east, night has fallen, but ahead it is still light, and it seems to Alice that if they continue to follow the sun west they will keep riding into day, and night will never come, but even as they rush ahead, the cabin grows dim and they travel in the chilly half-glow of evening until the train comes into a station.

  —Well, Alice’s father says, —I guess I’ll stretch my legs. He closes the cabin door softly behind him, and Alice picks up his map. Little blue circles are drawn around all the cities in Oklahoma that fall along the blue line her father has drawn to trace the train’s route south. She looks at each city and tries to remember which is the capital of Oklahoma as she waits for the train to pull out. When they have built back up to speed and her father has not returned, she goes to her bed and opens her book, willing herself not to look out the window until they are completely out of the town, but she looks too soon, and in one quick glance she sees a bank, a hotel, a grocery store; out of each building walk tall, gray, unhappy-looking men who look just like her father.

  My father now lives in Oklahoma, she thinks, and she practices saying it out loud. —My father lives in Oklahoma, she will say to her friends at school, to her teachers, to the boyfriends she will have before too long. —He does very well for himself there.

  When they have left the town behind, she puts her book down and leaves the cabin, closing the door quietly. As she walks up the aisle, she lets her hands drift across the tops of seats, hardly touching them at all. At this moment, her father is sitting down to coffee in a restaurant, being served by a middle-aged waitress with frosted hair, and when she smiles at him, he will explain to her that he is not a happy man, that he has never been a happy man, despite his many opportunities. It’s his wife, he will tell the waitress, and his daughter, and she will nod; she has an unhappy man at home just like Alice’s father. Alice imagines him taking bites of his sandwich and smiling, wondering which hotel to stay in, what kind of car to buy, if he will have dessert. In her mind he is just about to pay the bill when she sees him, swaying in the breezeway just ahead of her. She is close enough to see the muscles in his jaw work as he looks out and watches his new life pass before him, and she turns and walks the other way. In the next car, or the car after that, her mother sits and smokes, waiting for someone to talk to, but before Alice can reach her, she feels a hand on her shoulder and turns to face Mr. Gregg.

  —Well, he says, —imagine finding you here. I was just on my way to meet your mother.

  He waits politely for a response, but Alice says nothing. Behind her is the door to a bathroom and she leans against it.

  —You know, Mr. Gregg says, —your mother is a very remarkable woman. He smiles in a way that has nothing to do with Alice.

  —She’s not my mother, Alice says, and turns to enter the tiny bathroom, smaller even than the one in their cabin. It has a stainless-steel sink and toilet, both clogged with soggy lumps of paper, and a thin stream of water leaks from the faucet.

  Alice looks at herself in the mirror. It is too soon, really, to tell what she will look like as an adult, whom she will most resemble, and if she will be beautiful, and although she knows she will care about that later, right now it does not matter. Right now she longs only to be done with all of it, to be old at last, and to creep about with a cane and sit in the sun, caring for nothing, all that she once loved tucked safely away from the sorrows of life. It is before her like a dream–to be an old woman, her skin gone dry and spotted, her hair a fragile cloud about her skull, just a frail relic in the middle of a field with nothing to do but let her eyes fill with sand. Right now it is all she wants to be, that old woman, but between them crouches the enormous responsibility of her own life. The train shudders over a warp in the track and Alice steadies herself against the sink and looks into the mirror, but there is no one there; she is already gone, disappeared into the bright frozen world that waits ahead.

  ANOTHER COUNTRY

  —Honey, my mother calls, and her voice echoes over the wooden floor into the kitchen, where I am spreading peanut butter on my toast. I lift my head and wait for her to call again.

  —Honey, she says, louder. —Come in and meet your Uncle, and she pauses a moment, then says, —Carl.

  I come into the room, where she is standing next to a tall, bored-looking man who fingers the change in his pockets and glances at me without interest.

  —Hi, I say.

  —Hi, he says in my general direction. —Are you ready? he asks my mother. —The show starts soon.

  —We’re going to the movies, my mother says to me as she wraps a long blue scarf around her neck. —You’ll be okay alone?

  She turns to the man with a radiant smile. —Let’s go, baby, she says.

  When she bends to pick up her purse, his eyes travel slowly down her body; then he glances quickly at me, then at the floor and around the room, but he does not look at my mother again. As he turns away, jingling, my mother holds her coat out to him, but he is already at the door and she puts it on herself.

  —Don’t wait up, baby, she says, blowing me a kiss, her eyes already on the man’s back as he walks out of our apartment. I lock the door behind them and listen to my mother’s heels tap down the hallway.

  —Cute kid, the man says, his voice slightly muffled as they walk away.

  —She’s not a kid, my mother says. —She’s sixteen. She pauses a moment. —Seventeen, she says.

  The heavy glass outer door bites off the rest of their conversation, and I go to the window to watch them pass. Our apartment is at street level, and I can see them only from the knees down–my mother’s long thin legs and ankles, and behind them the man’s beige slacks and flat brown shoes. They kick up leaves as they go by, and I can tell by the tilt of my mother’s heels that she is leaning against the man. Above me I hear Mr. Rosenberg wheel to his window. Because he is higher up, he has a better view—he can see if they talk or kiss as they walk. I can only imagine them at the street corner, my mother’s arm draped loosely around the man’s shoulder as he loo
ks up and down the street, lights a cigarette, pulls his coat tightly about him. Mr. Rosenberg can watch them for two or three blocks, but all I can see is the street, the wheels of cars, and the featureless walls of the buildings across from me. There is really nothing else to see from this window, but my mother spends most of her time here, looking out through the iron bars. —You can tell a lot from people’s shoes, she tells me, —and the way they walk, but when I ask her to tell me then what a pair of red sneakers says to her, or some penny loafers, she looks off through the dusty glass. —Well, she says, —they’re really going by too fast to tell much.

  Even though we have lived here for years, I still find myself expecting the view to change, but as every season passes, it is always the same: in the winter, feet kick dirty snow against our window, and the rest of the time they scuffle through stiff leaves or trash. Sometimes a scrap of paper catches in the window bars and flaps in the wind until someone pulls it out or it blows away.

  When my mother is out of his sight, Mr. Rosenberg pounds on the floor, but I stay at the window. Across the street small children in tiny white uniforms enter the building that houses a karate studio upstairs. Mr. Rosenberg pounds again, and I walk into the kitchen and turn on the radio. Above, he follows me, a rubbery running squeak along the ceiling. He listens as I switch stations. I leave the radio on as I go out and I close our door as quietly as I can, turn the key in the lock slowly until I hear a faint click, and climb the stairs on tiptoe, but when I knock on his door, he is already waiting at the other side.

  —Who is it? he asks, and when I tell him, he begins undoing his locks, then pulls the door open against the chain and looks at me.

  —Oh, he says. —You.

  In the dreary sliver of world protected by the weak chain, a burglar would see nothing of value: an old television set, a splintery piano covered with photographs in cheap frames, Mr. Rosenberg’s thin dry face. He closes the door and unhooks the chain.

  —So, he says, wheeling toward the television. —Your mother’s gone out.

  The television is already on, humming quietly in the corner, throwing a shifting pattern of light out across the floor and walls. My mother never let us have a television. —It’s the one thing I ever did right with you kids, she sometimes says. And, as children, we sat through long evenings while televisions flicked on in the houses all around us, changing the shadows, changing the color of the night outside the windows; every day at recess, when the other children came together to talk about their favorite shows, we stood loosely by, feigning disinterest, but hungering for news of people we had never even seen. I don’t think Mr. Rosenberg ever turns his television off, just lowers the sound when there is nothing on that he wants to watch. Sometimes, early in the morning, before anyone is awake, I’m sure I can hear it hum through our ceiling, and I wonder what might be on, as Mr. Rosenberg sits dozing in front of it, waking occasionally to watch, then sliding back to sleep. He spends the rest of his time rolling restlessly around his apartment; if he ever really sleeps, it is in his chair, sitting up like a cat or a horse, and only for short periods of time.

  He turns the sound up now, and as a show comes on, he rolls back to the shadows in the corner, and I sit in the straight wooden chair he leaves for me in the middle of the floor, close to the television. He chooses what we watch, which is generally whatever channel the TV happens to be on, and we never speak, not even during the commercials. Occasionally he makes a noise, a sigh, a small exclamation, but I never turn around. The only other sound comes from the TV and the steady rhythm of his breath as he lights and smokes cigarettes. He has a large plastic ashtray taped to the arm of his wheelchair, but only rarely does he use it; usually when he has smoked a cigarette down to the filter, he drops it on the floor beside him and lights another. His floor is covered with the small dark scars of burnt-out cigarettes. In good weather, he rides the rickety elevator downstairs, then parks himself outside in front of the doorway to our building where he sits and smokes all day, all by himself, unless someone stops and talks to him. —Step on that, he’ll say, dropping a burning butt on the ground, and he’s got another one lit before you’ve lifted your foot.

  —One of these days, my mother says, —he’ll burn the place down. He’ll kill us all, she says with satisfaction, but she smokes the same way, constantly, and our apartment is gray and grimy with smoke.

  —Oh, your father hated it, she says. —That’s why our marriage broke up. He said I was trying to give him cancer.

  At other times, though, she says it was money, another man, another woman that broke up their marriage. Once, she turned sadly to me from the window and said, as if she’d been thinking about it for a long time, —You know, before you kids were born- and her voice trailed off. —I don’t know, she went on. —Things just seemed to be different then.

  She lit a cigarette and looked right through me, while outside on the street a woman walked by wheeling a broken grocery cart full of plastic bags.

  Mr. Rosenberg lights a cigarette behind me and I get comfortable in my hard chair. In front of us, flickering image gives way to flickering image, family succeeds family, plot follows plot, and Mr. Rosenberg lights and drops cigarettes, the sharp hiss of a match followed by the sharper inhalation of breath. When the news comes on at eleven, Mr. Rosenberg stirs.

  —So, he says. —So. Found your brother yet?

  I turn the sound on the television down low, but I keep my eyes on the screen. Mr. Rosenberg has been asking this question regularly since my brother left more than a year ago.

  —He’s not lost, I say. —He just moved out.

  In truth, though, we have not seen him for several months, and I don’t know where to find him, so I suppose he could be called lost, and I do spend part of most days looking for him.

  —Well, Mr. Rosenberg says, —he’s going to be lost if you don’t find him pretty soon.

  I say nothing and watch a young man being carried out of a burning building on the lower East Side.

  —I don’t know, Mr. Rosenberg says. —It’s a wonder you haven’t disappeared too, the way things go.

  —He hasn’t disappeared, I say. —He’s around.

  —Listen, he says. —You just listen. My Kathy. She was around, too, and then, all of a sudden, just like that, she wasn’t. She was lost. Just like that.

  He gestures at his array of photographs, all of them but one pictures of girls and women-his wife and five daughters. In the odd one, he is standing next to his wife, watching her smile as she brings a cigarette to her lips. All the girls look pretty much alike to me, thin and dark, with the routine false smiles and startled eyes of photographs. Mr. Rosenberg shakes his head.

  —I don’t know, he says. —I should have seen it then, in the picture. I don’t know, he says again. —Maybe not. There were so many of them.

  On the news a man is being pushed through a crowd, several grinning policemen at his back. Downstairs the front door opens and snaps closed, and footsteps follow in the hallway. I rise.

  —I guess I’d better go, I say. —That might be my mother.

  Mr. Rosenberg looks at his watch. —Hah, he says. —Too early. He nods, but I stay standing as someone clicks down the hall and climbs the stairs slowly past us and up to the floors above.

  —See? he says, but I say I’d better go anyways.

  —What are you in such a hurry for? he asks. —You got no TV. Your mother’s not home.

  On the news someone charts a pattern of snow from North Dakota through the Midwest, on its way to New York. I cannot imagine what North Dakota could be like.

  —What do you do down there anyways? Mr. Rosenberg asks.

  —I read, I say. —Or do crossword puzzles. I listen to the radio.

  I don’t tell him how sometimes when I am alone I follow the rubbery trail of his chair as the floor creaks above me, tracing his passage from room to room, imagining his face, the smoke in his lungs, the things he thinks about. Every now and then I can feel him poised direct
ly above me, listening, and we wait together, breathless, until one of us finally steals away, leaving the other hovering uncertainly. These are some of the things I do, but mostly what I do is wait, with my mother or without her, for something to happen. Mr. Rosenberg drops his cigarette on the floor and wheels over to me.

  —What else?

  Sometimes, I tell him, I feed the pigeons in the alley. The roofs here are covered with pigeons that flutter down to eat from the Dumpsters in the alley. Because we are on the first floor, our side windows are too thick to see through–the glass is greenish and dimpled–so I used to throw bread on the walk out front and watch the pigeons from our window, but my mother said it depressed her to watch all those birds scrabbling after a few crusts of bread, so now I feed them in the alley. No matter how regularly I come with food, they still scatter at my approach, then gently descend as I toss the bread, but they won’t come near me, and wait until I back out of the alley to eat any bread that’s dropped near my feet. They cover the ground efficiently, crowding so close together that when I watch them from the sidewalk, if I almost close my eyes, they look like one big bobbing gray and white shape, like something from a dream.

  Before my brother left, he sometimes came with me to feed the pigeons, but now that he is gone, I go out alone. Their feathers are getting thicker as winter approaches.

  Mr. Rosenberg wheels around and looks at the wall that faces the alley. His windows are clear glass, but he keeps his shades pulled most of the time, since the building next door is only a few feet away.

  —Pigeons, he says. —Rats with wings. He lights a cigarette and tosses the match on the floor. —Get a cat.

  —I want a cat, I say, —but my mother says it’s too expensive.

  —Expensive? he says. —What’s to buy? I had cats. Five of them. Beautiful. Pigeons. Hah.

  He stares at the television for a while. —What else?

  —What?

  —What else? What else do you do?