Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (4 page)

“My god,” the teacher said.

She walked quickly over to Barton’s desk, her hand sill over her mouth. “Barton,” she said. She touched him on the shoulder. Barton opened one eye. He opened the other eye. He moved his eyes from one side to the other. He lifted his head.

“Barton,” the teacher said. “My god, Barton.” Barton smiled.

The teacher walked back up the aisle, past the desks, back up to the front of the class. She went around behind her desk and stood for a long moment with her back to the classroom, touching her hair with her hands and smoothing her skirt.

T
HERE’S
NEVER
any jelly in these donuts,” she said, crossing her eyes, trying to see the donut as it entered her mouth.

“All the jelly is on your chin,” he said.

She turned her eyes down and tried to look at her chin. Then she put her hand up and started feeling around on her chin for the glob of jelly. When she found the glob of jelly, she wiped it off with her index finger.

He tried not to look at her big, bare legs, which looked especially big against the black vinyl seats of the car. When one or the other of them spoke, their voice fell out and joined the hum of the wind on the other side of the window.

Driving down a long gradual hill in a small town where neither of them knew the actual name of the town, he opened the window and put his arm out into the cool rush of air.

“I could live in this town,” he said. Some dogs were standing in a group of trees in a park farther down the road. The car drove past an old man pushing a wheelbarrow with some groceries in it.

“Could you close the window?” she said.

He pulled his arm in and closed the window. He put his hand on the gear shift knob and told her to quit using her toe to pop the cassettes in and out of the tape deck.

It was Sunday and the air smelled of rivers.

~

Tutti says, if your Achilles tendon snaps, your foot just hangs there. We are out running and Tutti keeps stopping to stretch her Achilles tendon. “It’s stiff,” she says.

“Maybe we should go back,” I say.

“No,” she says.

“Don’t snap your Achilles tendon,” I say.

“Don’t be an asshole,” she says.

M
OTHER
IS
trying to bake loaves of bread, but they come out hard, like rocks. She tells me to get the hell out to the parking lot and bring in the car battery.

I go into bars with windows. In between loud songs you can hear the sound of dogs.

Some trees have poked themselves up at the sky where the snow has stopped a moment before.

No one gets away from whatever it is that is holding them back.

The black-haired girl goes out to the road and looks up as far as she can see. “Come here,” she says.

My mother and I used to have long conversations where I wanted to run out of the house and scream. She would look up at me, her eyes all baggy and red because of how late it was. The kitchen light hung above us.

~

We were in Quebec one time before we got married. We were walking along the street in whatever city we were in and we were getting ready to go to the bank to get some money, because we were running low on money, and Tutti was practicing what she was going to say to the bank teller.

“Parlez-vous ling-long?” Tutti said.

I laughed.

“Isn’t that right?” she said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“No it isn’t,” she said.

~

Okay, here is a list of the guys who have died this week. Write it down, okay, because I’m not going to say it twice. Bob Simpson’s father died three weeks ago, but I didn’t hear about it until yesterday. Just shut up and write it down. I don’t know what his occupation was, but I do know they cremated him and Bob has the ashes in an urn in his living room. Bob’s in-laws will not come into the house anymore because they believe cremation is evil.

There is only one other one who died this week and she is not actually dead yet. She is only dying. Normally this doesn’t count, but don’t question my judgment, okay? Just write it down. She could be dead anytime now. Anytime. Okay? So don’t question my judgment.

~

I was blowing on the campfire, trying to get some flames to come out of it so Tutti would quit telling me how fucking cold she was. It was almost time to go to bed.

~

She drank coffee and stayed up late, watching TV. She watched old sitcoms. He watched documentaries. He watched them during the day. He watched National Geographic films about whales, or Australia, and these films rose up between him and certain consequences of the way he lived that he felt blowing toward him inevitably.

“I’d like to go to Australia sometime,” he told her. “I’d like to see whales.” They would drink coffee and talk about the films he had seen that day. But she said almost nothing.

The day after he went to get the cream, he could not believe how quiet it was. There were gulls spiraling in the air above the parking lot. There were red and blue and gray cars with no one in them. Inside the grocery store the cashiers stood idle, twirling their hair with their fingers, or tying and untying their aprons.

He was a large lumbering man who moved slowly. Once inside a store, he liked to stop and pick up a piece of merchandise and turn it over and over in his hands, considering the possible uses he might put it to.

She would grab a cart and hurry up and down the aisles, now and then coming back to collect him, to bring him along, to show him something.

~

“What do you want?” I said. It was Tutti. She was calling from work. “Did you call just to bug me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “There’s no one here.”

“You want me to come down?”

“No,” she said. “I have appointments at three and four.”

“Did you think I was coming down earlier to get those papers you copied?”

“No,” she said. “I just called to tell you they were ready. You sounded like you wanted them so bad.”

“I did. But now I don’t care.”

“You going to go now?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “See you.”

“See you,” I said. I hung up.

The phone rang.

“Hello,” I said. No one answered. “Hello.” I stayed on the line for a moment. I was thinking Tutti was playing a joke on me. I stayed on the line until I heard the dial tone and then I hung up.

The phone rang again.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi.” It was Tutti.

“Did you just phone and hang up?”

“Yes,” she said. “I thought I had the wrong number. I called to tell you you hung up too fast.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, you shouldn’t have hung up so fast after we said goodbye. You should have waited a minute.”

Tutti and I used to do that when we were dating. I would say goodbye and she would say goodbye and then neither of us would hang up.

“I’m going now,” Tutti said.

“Okay,” I said.

“All right,” Tutti said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you,” I said.

“See you,” she said.

“Goodbye,” I said.

Neither of us hung up.

“That’s better,” Tutti said. “You can go now. You’ve done your job.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodbye.” I still didn’t hang up.

“You can hang up now,” Tutti said.

“Why don’t you hang up first?” I said.

“I like to hold onto the phone a little longer,” Tutti said.

“You hang up first.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodbye,” I said. I went to hang up but then I stopped. I put the phone back to my ear. “Tutti?”

“Why didn’t you hang up?” she asked.

“I almost did. But then I pulled the phone back.”

“I’ve got to go,” Tutti said. She hung up.

~

He decides to go out for a bicycle ride. For a long while he rides along keeping his head down, not noticing anything. When he looks up, a strange thing has happened. He finds himself in a foreign country, possibly Italy. He thinks he recognizes the bridge he is crossing from a book his mother used to read to him as a child.

I
T
WAS
the beginning of spring and all the girls were going around with bare legs, and there was a girl with bare legs on the subway and she was reading a magazine and I said to her, “What are you reading?” and without looking up at me she crossed her legs.

~

The universe keeps striking the same note. I suddenly realize there has only ever been one note. The difference is, I used to wait to hear the other notes.
They’re coming
, I thought. There was this wonderful sense of possibility.

I am saying, it was always only the one note. The cosmos has no imagination. Look at this macaroni dinner I am trying to eat.

~

Once, I was camping in a trailer park and an old lady made me breakfast. She cooked it for me, but she couldn’t come out and give it to me. She was too old. There was something wrong with her legs.

She sent her husband out. He handed me a paper plate with breakfast on it. There was a napkin with a plastic fork and knife tucked inside.

“My wife made this for you,” the husband says. “She thinks you look lonely.”

He went back to the trailer. He walked through the forest as though it were a cathedral, and it was going to take him the rest of his life to get back to the trailer. I could see the old lady’s face in the trailer window.

~

Tutti and I were living in that apartment where you couldn’t put anything in the freezer because of all the ice forming on the freezer walls. I saw my whole life in that freezer. I saw a guy with hairy legs, living in a cave, eating frozen fish-sticks. I saw God in that freezer.

~

I went out the door, into the heat. I stopped. I went back into the building. I saw Lisa. “It’s a wall of heat out there,” I said. Lisa looked at me. I imagined she was saying to herself, There, but for the grace of God, go I.

I went back out into the heat.

I
S
THAT
something you can do?” was one thing someone in class had said. Plus this: “We learned in our other class that you can’t do that.” Another thing people said was: “How will you be grading us?”

I wanted to get at what was most important in my life. Cut to the quick, so to speak. Get to the point. Say what had to be said and be done with it. I didn’t want to fuck around too much anymore.

I had a story already written down. It was about beans. I decided my project would be to cut out all the nonessential crap in my story about beans. Then I would have it. I would have what I was looking for, what I had been looking for all my life, more or less. No doubt people would want to read what I had written this time, since it represented the culmination of a lifetime of searching.

But when I read it over, I saw that it represented nothing. It was just this story where a guy goes over to his uncle’s place and finds all these beans in the cupboard.

You see what I was trying to do, though, don’t you? The beans were supposed to represent something. Having all those beans. More beans than you could ever consume.

There was one moment where the uncle opens the cupboard and looks at all the beans and shakes his head in disbelief, as if he can’t understand how all those beans got in there, how this could be what his life had come to. You know the kind of moment I’m talking about. The epiphanic moment. The moment of revelation. The moment where some little, mundane thing shows us how little and mundane our lives have really been.

Only I guess the uncle already knew how little and mundane his life was, and the revelation was not all that revealing. I don’t think it could have been a revelation at all. More of a confirmation maybe. Like when you see a documentary on TV and you find out kangaroos have no backbones or something. That sort of thing.

~

When the kid came home for the first time, the grandparents said, “Is he warm enough? What are those spots on his face?” The grandfather put his face very close to the baby’s face and looked at the spots.

Pretty soon the mother and the father got in their car and took the baby home. The father mentioned that the baby had no eyebrows. The mother said she thought the baby was an elf, because he had soft fuzz all over his ears. At night, they put rubbing alcohol on the baby’s navel. All of this happened in June, and the summer was another hot one.

~

Tutti went downstairs and put some clothes in the dryer. I was in the kitchen. I could see a guy in a white shirt standing out in the road, looking at various units in the condominium complex. He walked up and down the street, looking at various units in the complex. He stopped in front of our unit and looked at our unit for a while. Someone, somewhere, had their stereo going and I could hear the bass and drums. I was thinking it would be nice, for once, to be able to buy the ten-pound bag of apples and not have half of them shrivel up and rot before we got a chance to eat them.

I
THINK
we have reached a turning point with Sammy. He is starting to hear the sadness in everything that happens. Last night he had a tantrum because I brought him a Kleenex. This was deep into the night. I was tired. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. It scared me.

~

Do you know what it’s like to sleep with another boy? With Rita, that’s what I thought. I thought,
This is my chance to sleep with a boy without actually having to sleep with a boy
, and all the kinds of things you have to listen to people say when you’re sleeping with boys.

What I am saying is, now that she’s gone, this is when I start thinking this thing about boys, about sleeping with boys.

I’ll tell you something, though. If you could have heard her talk. If you could have heard her talk through her cigarette that way. She would point her eyes down at the cigarette just long enough to get the thing lit. Then she would point her eyes up at me, and she would talk to me through her cigarette.