The Convalescent (11 page)

“Who is the most able among you?” he asked.

Kinga pushed Aranka’s child, Szeretlek, forward. The boy was only five years old, but was already the size of your average medieval Hungarian adult. He was neither handsome nor bright, not even by lowly Pfliegman standards. His face was dull and lifeless. A face like a loaf of bread. The large child was deeply distrustful of his own brain, and clung to Kinga for direction. She put him to good use. At five years old, he could dig pits and haul logs for the Gyepü. Trees fell with one swing of his axe. So when the time came to choose among us Pfliegmans, there was no doubt that Szeretlek was strongest and most able. The blunter was quickly passed to him.

The boy stared at the long piece of heavy wood.

“Make yourself
useful
,” Kinga whispered. “A useful man is never lonely.”

Szeretlek looked at everyone for permission. “If I can be of use,” he said. He lifted his massive arm and clocked the cow over the head.

“
Wunh
,” the cow said, and then fell over.

We Pfliegmans threw ourselves upon it. Like vampires, like piranhas, in a few flimsy seconds we held up heavy, dripping cuts of meat. Round, Loin, Flank, Rib, Plate, Chuck, Shank. All of it. The heart of the cow still pulsed in one of our hands.

“You can see the white bone,” the Hungarians breathed.

It appeared there was a use for us after all.

Szeretlek, however, had not participated in the cutting. His big fingers were too thick, too clumsy. But as he watched his family carve and eviscerate the animal to the approval of the good and decent Hungarians, the boy felt, from a deep place in his large body, that things were about to change for the Fekete-Szem.

An unpleasant odor is filling the air of the Waiting Area. It smells infested. Gluttonous. There’s a dead rodent somewhere, I think. Oily hair, rotting flesh. A pungent, omnivorous mold—I look up.

Mrs. Himmel is eating a cheeseburger.

The Sick or Diseased children hold their stomachs in agony. I admit, even my own stomach is turning unhappily. For someone who knows everything there is to know about the meat business, for someone who sells meat of a bus in a field for a meager but adequate living—for all of this, I don’t go near the stuff. Not long after Ján and Janka Pfliegman died, I took a bite of a ham sandwich and the meat tasted wrong. Heavy. For a while I only ate tomatoes and crackers, but then the crackers also started getting heavy. I couldn’t work them down my throat.

In fact, for the last month, all I’ve been able to swallow with any modicum of appeal are Evermores. Mister Bis sells them by the box at the G&P, but Dr. Monica wants me to be working more with the rest of the food groups. “Listen to your body,” she says, and so I listen, but I swear that Evermores are the only thing my body wants.

I reach into the pocket of my trousers and remove one. The Sick or
Diseased child sitting next to me watches as I unwrap it. He thinks it’s candy. He looks at me. “Is that a lemon?” he asks.

I nod.

The boy slides off his chair. He walks over to the pile of coloring books on the sidetable, books colored over so many times the pages have torn, and picks up a blue crayon. With one eye, he watches as I bite into the Evermore and swallow the honey. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says
BANG THE DRUM
! on it, and there’s a picture of a snare drum with two drumsticks hovering in the air above. It looks like the drum’s being played by an invisible man. He pretends to be importantly occupied coloring over a dumptruck that’s already been colored.

I pick up my writing tablet. I draw him a quick sketch of a bumblebee and hold it up.

He ignores me.

His mother turns the pages of her women’s magazine. She’s reading a recipe for a banana-nut loaf with Tips for Decorative Icing:

1. Squeeze the tube from behind.
2. Use different nozzles for a varied effect.
3. Have fun
.

She takes out a notepad from her purse and pointedly jots it all down. She is a Good Mother. I can tell the difference between the Good Mothers and the Bad Mothers. The Good Mothers make their children wash their hands in the bathroom before they see Dr. Monica. They wear clean slacks or skirts with pleats in the front, and raincoats on rainy days. They carry tissues and mints in their pockets. They are the ones with the water jugs. The Bad Mothers come into the office wearing T-shirts, with the straps of their brassieres showing. They smell like onions and cigarettes and tell their children to
shut up and go play with the toys
. They slouch in the chairs and don’t even bother with magazines. They disconsolately watch the television in the corner.

I like the Bad Mothers. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because of the snooty way the Good Mothers are always clearing their throats and shooting them glances, or maybe it’s because the Bad Mothers sometimes talk to each other and try to make each other feel better about their Sick or Diseased child, and the Good Mothers never talk to anyone. Or maybe it’s
because of the familiar way the Bad Mothers troll around the Waiting Area like it’s their own living room. When prompted, they laugh a startling, bellicose laughter.

Or maybe it’s just because I have a slightly different perspective on the issue of Good and Bad. I imagine Janka sitting here in Dr. Monica’s office. She’d sit next to the Good Mothers. She’d scratch her hairy legs and then reach into her bag and bring out a pack of cigarettes and, ignoring the sign hanging right above her head, light one. When a Good Mother would politely ask her to extinguish it, she would sneer and call her a
tight bitch
. Then she’d borrow one of the Good Mothers’ tissues and blow her nose and then clean the bottom of her clogs with it. She would complain about the hard chairs on her
goddamn coccyx
. She would start ribbing one of the Good Mothers for showing off such a
fancy fucken purse
, and she would get a few snickers from the Bad Mothers. She would feel fed by them. Most of all, she would completely ignore her own Sick or Diseased child, passed out on the floor underneath the withering ficus.

Adrian reappears in the doorway with her clipboard. She motions for the
BANG THE DRUM
! boy to follow her. His mother gets up quickly, dropping her women’s magazine on the side table. They linger, for a moment, in the Waiting Area, as Adrian explains what’s going on.

“Dr. Monica would like to do an X-ray,” she says, quietly.

The boy hears the word X-ray and bursts into tears. Whimpering, he takes his mother’s hand. As he walks by me, I hold up my writing tablet and show the boy what I’ve drawn. Instead of a crappy bumblebee, it’s a cowboy whirling a lasso above his head surrounded by a dying sunset and prickly cacti. From the cowboy’s mouth is a speaking bubble that says “
Giddyup!
”

He smiles as his mother pulls him out of the Waiting Area. I’m pleased that I’ve made the boy smile. I even laugh a little. My laugh is dry and quiet, but unfortunately it’s enough to command Mrs. Himmel’s attention. She puts down the cheeseburger and glares at the man in the filthy pink sweatshirt cackling in the corner of her Waiting Area. Her eyes go narrow, thin as dimes—

Slowly, I stick out my tongue.

“That’s it!” she shouts. She bounds from her chair and moves right in front of me. She leans down, so close I can smell her wet, acrimonious pores:

“I want
you
outside
now
.”

I look around quickly, but Adrian and Dr. Monica are nowhere in sight. I look to the mothers, but their faces are buried in women’s magazines. The Sick or Diseased children are the only ones who notice. They watch me gather my writing tablet. They lift their pale faces.

“Get your coat,” Himmel says.

I remove my coat from the rack and follow Mrs. Himmel’s finger outside Dr. Monica’s office. She points me to a circular picnic table parked on the front lawn.

“Wait here,” she says. “Adrian will come and get you if there’s a cancellation. If no one comes to get you by five o’clock, you can assume you can just go home.”

The door closes behind her with a deliberate
click
.

I climb up on top of the picnic table and stare across the street. Directly across the street from Dr. Monica’s office is the Big M supermarket. The place used to be a mini-mall, but now the supermarket takes up the entire complex. Inside, there’s the Big M hair salon, the Big M coffeeshop, the Big M car mechanic. At the entrance to the parking lot, a three-dimensional box laconically spins:
ENTER, EXIT, ENTER, EXIT, ENTER
—

Above it all is a glowing red M.

Sitting here, evicted to a picnic table outside a pediatrician’s office on this wet and frigid April afternoon, clouds splayed across the sky like spilt milk, I imagine climbing off the picnic table and crossing the intersection and walking into the coffeeshop and sitting down to have a cup of coffee like any normal, civilized person. But civilized people have something to offer each other, and all I have to offer is my unsightly visage. My swinging cheeks. My dirt, my peeling skin, my sickness. My beard hanging from my chin like a squirrel. And the civilized people would sit tightly, politely, away from me. Because they are Virginians. They’re doing everything right in the world, and I’m mucking it up royally.

There’s no question about it.

Wind blows mercilessly through the Disneyland sweatshirt, making my flesh pimple. I pull my coat over my arms. The coat is one of Grandfather Ákos’s coats. There are ten in all, each made from heavy gray Hungarian wool. Each cinched with a row of gold buttons. Inside, the coats are layered with thinner, more refined wools, but behind what appears to be the final layer, behind a zipper, are a dozen or so wide pockets. Pockets made
from soft, but extraordinarily durable, Hungarian cloth; pockets evenly distributed throughout the hidden lining, designed so that once filled, a person on the outside could never guess the nature of the ballast; pockets just large enough to fit assorted, prewrapped, loaf-sized cuts of meat.

A small light-blue silk label is sewn into each collar of the coats:
KABáT TOLVAJOK
.

Coat of Thieves.

Grandfather Ákos never told me about the original function for the pockets, but once mumbled something about how being a Hungarian meant wanting nothing and being prepared for anything. “Or was it the other way around,” he said.

Three Security Guards appear briefly in front of the glass doors. Herman lumbers fatly around the other two, moving in a winding figure-eight, observing the Virginians who walk past him with wariness and suspicion. He rests one hand on the walkie-talkie attached to his belt like a pistol; with the other, he fiddles with his baseball cap. The guards take one look through the glass doors and then spread out, abandoning their posts.

I stand up and stretch, then pull on the wooly sleeves. There has always been something about the Big M supermarket that makes me feel hidden. Invisible. It’s something in the high ceilings, the gleaming white walls, the glass refrigerator units filled with colorful, prepackaged foods. It’s in the sweet smells unfurling from the bakery ovens. It’s in the rows of shiny green peppers, shipped all the way from Taiwan. Here, there are so many more interesting, more charming things to look at other than a hairy little man lingering in front of the meat display in a large wool coat, slipping cold, prewrapped packages into the pockets of the lining.

I lower my stylish woolen cap to cover my face, and then climb off the picnic table and cross the intersection. I hustle quickly through the parking lot, all the way up to the entrance of the supermarket, to where those shiny glass doors swing open.

It’s Saturday. People buy roasts on Saturdays. By late afternoon, the line of meat customers nearly reaches the road. Marjorie likes busy days. Her blade sways happily in the April wind by the bus, listening to the gurgle of the Queeconococheecook, feeling good about today. About life in general. The sky is clear for once, and inside, the tape-radio’s playing some upbeat German pop tunes:

Hier ist ein übermäßiger Klassiker von den sechziger Jahren!

Even Mrs. Kipner’s in a good mood. I perch the tin can on an arm of my lawnchair and drop in a fat slice of tomato, all brown and glistening with sugars. It lands on the shiny part of his back. Tomato juice runs luxuriously over his face, like water from a warm bath. He whirrs contentedly.

The Virginians all chat comfortably while waiting to buy their meat. Mister Bis is here today, in line with the others. A woman tells a funny story about losing her keys and a baked ham and everyone laughs. A man is buying meat for a church barbecue. He invites everyone in line to the barbecue, and walks along the line of people and gives them his flyer. He does not give me a flyer. Which is fine. I have no interest in flyers.

Dr. Monica says I need to put myself in social situations, but is selling meat out of a bus not social? This moment, my customers all in a row, is
my main social engagement with the outside world. My convivial soirée. The whole world is busy and alive and I, if just for this fleeting moment, am alive in it—

I hand a lamb roast to a Virginian in a pressed suit.

“Well!” he says, laughing, marveling at the girth. He pays for the meat, then reaches into a bag and produces a loaf of dark, thick bread. “You look
hungry
,” the man says.

Even if I could possibly consume it, the bread is old, and has already hardened.

“How magnanimous of you,” I want to say.

Then the sport utility vehicle turns the corner onto Back Lick Road. It’s the same one as before. Black. Shiny. It moves toward the field like a tank. An arrow of sunlight hits the window, illuminating the three of them inside: the dark suits. The curve of their massive chins. Another large square sign fills the backseat: