Make Me Work (12 page)

“I have to go somewhere with him,” Ricky said.

“Then go.”

“I gotta talk to you, Mom.”

“Then talk.”

Ricky turned on the steps to face Alfie. “Just wait for me, O.K., idiot?”

Josephine wished she hadn't left her Chianti bottle on the kitchen counter, but she had, and now Ricky made a point of smirking at it while she took off her parka. In his simplemindedness, her having a drink leveled the moral playing field between them. If she now tried to pretend she hadn't been drinking, the field would tilt in his favor. So she uncorked the bottle and poured herself another glass, even though she didn't want one. She threw Saint Joseph on the counter and lit a cigarette, too. Never apologize, never explain. It worked for Ricky. It seemed to be working for her. He had nothing to say. He took off his cap but not his leather jacket. His hair was cut in the goofy homeboy mode, the temples shaved away.

“I guess I don't get offered a drink,” he said.

“You're gonna mix booze and those goofballs you're on?” Josephine said. “You're not bad enough as it is? You want to be a vegetable now?”

“I ain't on any goofballs,” Ricky said.

“Who do you think's gonna take care of you when you're a giant slug? Me? Don't count on it, pal.”

“I didn't even want a drink,” Ricky said. He opened the fridge. “Is there anything from the restaurant around? I'm pretty hungry.”

“I ate what there was. Today's my day off. That's why I'm here, right? You didn't expect me to be here. You came ‘cause you thought I wasn't around.”

“I told you. I came to talk to you.”

“You can have peanut butter and jelly and a glass of milk.”

“That's O.K. with me. I'll take that.”

“Take it. You know where it is.”

She took the wine bottle to the dining-room table while he rattled around in the kitchen. She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another one. She was going to quit smoking when she got to Florida. People would see her jogging by the ocean in fluorescent shorts. In time, her lungs would turn pink, as though she'd never lived this dirty life. Time would go backward. She'd be young again. She'd pass Ricky on her way back, looking like Methuselah under his wicked dope.

He came out with a white-bread sandwich and a glass of milk. He'd had countless identical meals at this very table as a boy, and it was mockery—the props remaining exactly the same though the plot had changed so utterly. There should be a different kind of bread to make sandwiches from when your heart was broken, Josephine thought. Milk should come in different colors, so you could tell at a glance which part of your life you were in. “What's on your mind?” she said.

Ricky was flipping through An
Half-Hour with God's Heroes
with one hand, eating his sandwich with the other, looking at the book and then at his mother, and shaking his head. He closed it and pushed it away. “Well,” he said, and clacked the table with his long, dirty nails. “I guess I'm gonna be a father.”

Josephine had been taking a drag on her cigarette, and she choked on the smoke. “What! Don't be ridiculous. You're not becoming any father.”

“It's not ridiculous. She just told me today.”

Josephine stood up so fast her chair fell down. She pointed at Ricky with her cigarette. “Then she's not very pregnant. She can get an abortion right now.”

“She says she's not. She says she's having it.”

Josephine righted her chair. A finger of wine remained in her glass, which she took to the kitchen and threw down the drain. “I'm having a cup of tea,” she said. “You want one?”

“No.”

“You want anything else?”

“I gotta go in a minute.”

She put water on to boil. “Where do you have to go?”

“To Charlene's.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“Nothing, Mom. I told her everything already.”

“Like what?”

“Like she shouldn't have the kid.”

“That's right! It's a sin for her to have this kid! A sin!” She heard what she was saying, and stopped. She hadn't realized she believed in sin anymore. Ricky sat there stupefied, staring at her. Not only was she born again, she had the whole thing backward. She barreled on. “You're a drug addict! She works in a lousy diner! This kid is gonna have no life! Zero!”

“I'm not a drug addict,” Ricky said.

“You're stoned right now!”

“I'm not a drug addict.”

“When did you stop?”

“A while ago.”

“You're lying. You know who you sound like? Your father. You lie exactly like your father.”

“If you hate my father so much, how come you married him? You weren't knocked up with me. You didn't have to marry him.”

He always did this when they got to this point. Maybe she should have been grateful he still followed the old script. Maybe that meant he had human feelings left, and wasn't just a lab animal sucking a nozzle. Maybe he was sorry his life had gone this way. “I've told you why. I fell in love with him. I didn't know who he really was.”

“He probably didn't, either,” Ricky said.

This stunned Josephine. It was the most thoughtful thing she'd ever heard Ricky say. “Are you gonna live up to your responsibilities and support this kid?” she said.

“Yup.”

“How?”

“I'm gonna work.”

“You've never worked in your life! And what about Charlene?”

“She's gonna work, too.”

“You're both gonna work. So who's gonna take care of the baby? Me? Is that what you think? Is that why you're in such a hurry to tell me?”

“Well, a lot of mothers would do their share,” Ricky said.

“Their share! Are you kidding me?” She was screaming above the screeching teakettle. She went out to the kitchen to turn it off.

Ricky hiked up in his chair to look through the gauzy curtains on the living room's picture window. “I gotta go. He's freezing out there.”

Josephine came into the dining room and suddenly she started to laugh. “I could pour boiling water on him for you,” she said. “Want to?” she added conspiratorially, widening her eyes. “Let's pour boiling water on him!”

Ricky snorted at the idea. Then he stood up and led her through the dining room and living room and out to the front door.

“Did you really stop?” Josephine asked. “Tell me the truth.”

“I stopped.”

“Come back here tomorrow morning and tell me that. Come for breakfast.”

“O.K., fine. I will.”

He stepped into the crackling air, and she closed the door. Through the small windowpane she watched him get into Alfie's van and drive away, and then she walked down the front hall to the kitchen. She was about to make her tea when she noticed her purse on the counter with its flap unlatched. Inside, the snap was undone on her red leather wallet. She walked her fingertips through its worn compartments. He'd taken thirty of her forty bucks, and her extra pack of cigarettes, too. He wasn't going to Charlene's. He was going to gangland to buy some dope and nod out somewhere. Once, back when Josephine was legally charged with his life, she'd gone to the bad part of Boston to find her son. Half the stores were boarded up and the big theater's marquee was blank. She found Ricky and his friends in a dive called Vaughn's Rib Room, where a rack of baby backs was only $6.99, and that included the slaw, the beans, the slice of white bread, and the realistic sound of pistol fire out in the darkness nearby—no extra charge for the gunplay unless you got hit through the window while minding your business and gnawing on a bone, in which case your luck was so bad that it was now or later for you anyway, and it might as well be now.

CAN YOU DANCE TO IT?

We three kings of Collegetown crossed Main Street in the dazzling light and flung open the black door of Rafferty's Bar. It was that brief moment in clear autumn afternoons when the sun ignited our beautiful lake, suffusing downtown with gleams and flashes like a five-minute occupation by the forces of good. Rafferty's door swung shut and cut us off from all that. We blinked in the cool darkness, surrounded by the spectral forms of pinball machines and the Ms. Pac-Man on which I'd recently damaged my right arm in a tournament with some of my students. This was back in my days of teaching at the college, before that part of my life came to an end. The doctor had my arm in one of those modern slings, all Teflon and Velero as befit the high-tech nature of my wound.

Rafferty's was a vast old place. A voice called to us from deep inside it, where the names of beer shimmered in the void like approaching spacecraft. “Hey, the gang's all here,” the voice said. “And it's not even Friday.”

It was Russell, the man we were after. We couldn't see him yet, but he could see us—white-haired widower Sam, middle-aged divorcé Max, and youngest, never-married me, like three Russian dolls that fit inside each other. We were only one-third of the gang he had in mind—the Alienated Professors Club, which met every Friday at this hour in Rafferty's Bar. Judith herself, seven months pregnant with Russell's child, was a founding member. But, true, it wasn't Friday, and we weren't in Rafferty's for our weekly kvetchfest.

“That's right,” Max called back. “It's Tuesday.”

“Then this must be Bora Bora,” Russell replied.

“Only for the lucky people on the cruise,” said Sam.

“Luck!” Russell laughed into the darkness. “My mistress!”

Judith had told us to expect a jolly fellow, and here he was, his body tending bar but his soul already counting its chips in Atlantic City. Russell didn't know that federal agents had just been on campus looking for Judith, but he perceived his blunder with the word “mistress,” the carelessness of giving up a card for no reason. His laughter stopped abruptly. In the dark, beneath an old Ray Charles tune on the jukebox, I sensed him cursing himself.

“Let me see if I have this straight,” said Max, using Jack Webb's voice from
Dragnet
. Max was chair of the Philosophy Department and thus my boss. He'd begun doing the
Dragnet
voice years before as a way of keeping himself amused in class, and now it was a professional deformation, like the carved-up hands of a sheet-metal worker. He could no longer discuss Nietzsche or Hegel or Heidegger except in Jack Webb's voice. “First he says the gang is ‘all here' when the gang is conspicuously
not
all here. Then he substitutes a metaphysical mistress for a physical one—both statements serving to erase, as it were, a particular individual.”

“Screw you, Max,” Russell said. “That's my third statement.”

Our irises finally opened to reveal a few old regulars at tables, a few more at the far end of the bar, Russell himself pouring the drinks. It was what he was supposed to be doing, what Rafferty paid him to do, but we didn't expect to find him actually doing it.

“One-armed bandit!” he called to me. “I'll be seeing a lot of you soon!”

“So we hear,” I said.

Judith had given us this news twenty minutes before, when we pulled her from a supplies closet in the Humanities building, wrapped her in a quilt, and smuggled her to Sam's warehouse loft in the trunk of Max's Toyota. Our pal Russell had finally bought his ticket for the Greyhound—one-way to Atlantic City, leaving tomorrow. For months he'd been studying the science of card counting, pumping his memory up, practicing by fleecing his professor friends in all-night blackjack marathons. Now he figured he could take the dealers of southern Jersey, and from there Reno, then Vegas, then early retirement in Honolulu. And never mind anything he might be leaving behind.

We sat down at the bar. “We'll have whatever you've been having,” I said, noting the freshly washed shot glasses he'd arrayed bottoms-up on the rubber nubs of a green drainage mat. He was stumbling some, but still lining up the glassware in his meticulous way. I was surprised to see him this gone at four in the afternoon, until I remembered that it probably wasn't four in the afternoon for Russell. It was probably midnight now; it might even be tomorrow. Russell had switched over to casino time, where the boundaries of a day can expand and contract and slide around.

“No, I have something special for you guys,” he said. “Something special and rare.” And from down around his knees he produced a tall, clear bottle and plunked it on the bar. The label depicted a woman in a red miniskirt on a green-and-white field, caught mid-step in some ecstatic dance, the word “Ouzo” printed across her waist. It reminded me of “The Peppermint Twist” by Joey Dee and the Starliters, and I began to hum that tune.

“The last remaining evidence of the Greek space program,” Russell said, as he started to break the seal.

Max grabbed it out of his hands and passed it to Sam, who put it in his canvas satchel along with the Chinese text on silk painting and the big book on Oskar Kokoschka he'd been showing me earlier in the day. Sam, the senior painter in the Art Department, had taken upon himself my visual education. Years before, Max had received similar tutelage.

“So, you've been talking to Judith,” Russell said.

“More than talking,” said Max. “We've been playing hide-the-pregnant-lady.”

“We thought you might like to play, too,” Sam said.

“Aw, I thought we were gonna have fun.”

“Girls aren't fun?” Sam asked.

“They are at first,” Russell said.

Judith was the Philosophy Department's aesthetician, our specialist in truth and beauty. Like me, she was coming up for tenure in a couple of months. Unlike me, she had a chance. In my six years at the college I'd done a number of questionable things, but my dissertation wasn't one of them. Judith was not only a bona fide Ph.D., she was a pal, and everyone wanted to see her stick around. She wore the hippest shoes and stretch pants on campus, and she organized our monthly Motown dance parties, some of the only wholesome fun we ever had anymore. It was at one of Judith's dances that I'd first met Russell—the same night she met him, in fact, back when he first hit town to work in the vineyards of a farmer he knew down the lake.