The Middleman and Other Stories (8 page)

I wish I had something breakfasty in my kitchen cupboard to offer him. He wants to stay and talk about Mom, which is the
way old married people have. Let's talk about me means: What do you think of Mom? I'll take the turkey over means: When will Rindy settle down? I wish this morning I had bought the Goodwill sofa for ten dollars instead of letting Vic haul off the fancy deck chairs from Fortunoff's. Vic had flash. He'd left Jersey a long time before he actually took off.

“I can make you tea.”

“None of that herbal stuff.”

We don't talk about Mom, but I know what he's going through. She's just started to find herself. He's not burned out, he's merely stuck. I remember when Mom refused to learn to drive, wouldn't leave the house even to mail a letter. Her litany those days was: when you've spent the first fifteen years of your life in a mountain village, when you remember candles and gaslight and carrying water from a well, not to mention holding in your water at night because of wolves and the unlit outdoor privy, you
like
being housebound. She used those wolves for all they were worth, as though imaginary wolves still nipped her heels in the Clifton Mall.

Before Mom began to find herself and signed up for a class at Paterson, she used to nag Cindi and me about finding the right men. “Men,” she said; she wasn't coy, never. Unembarrassed, she'd tell me about her wedding night, about her first sighting of Dad's “thing” (“Land ho!” Cindi giggled. “Thar she blows!” I chipped in.) and she'd giggle at our word for it, the common word, and she'd use it around us, never around Dad. Mom's peasant, she's earthy but never coarse. If I could get that across to Dad, how I admire it in men or in women, I would feel somehow redeemed of all my little mistakes with them, with men, with myself. Cindi and Brent were married on a cruise ship by the ship's captain. Tony, Vic's older brother, made a play for me my senior year. Tony's solid now. He manages a funeral home but he's invested in crayfish ponds on the side.

“You don't even own a dining table.” Dad sounds petulant. He uses “even” a lot around me. Not just a judgment, but a comparative judgment. Other people have dining tables.
Lots
of
dining tables. He softens it a bit, not wanting to hurt me, wanting more for me to judge him a failure. “We've always had a sit-down dinner, hon.”

Okay, so traditions change. This year dinner's potluck. So I don't have real furniture. I eat off stack-up plastic tables as I watch the evening news. I drink red wine and heat a pita bread on the gas burner and wrap it around alfalfa sprouts or green linguine. The Swedish knockdown dresser keeps popping its sides because Vic didn't glue it properly. Swedish engineering, he said, doesn't need glue. Think of Volvos, he said, and Ingmar Bergman. He isn't good with directions that come in four languages. At least he wasn't.

“Trust me, Dad.” This isn't the time to spring new lovers on him. “A friend made me a table. It's in the basement.”

“How about chairs?” Ah, my good father. He could have said, friend? What friend?

Marge, my landlady, has all kinds of junky stuff in the basement. “Jorge and I'll bring up what we need. You'd strain your back, Dad.” Shot knees, bad back: daily pain but nothing fatal. Not like Carmine.

“Jorge? Is that the new boyfriend?”

Shocking him makes me feel good. It would serve him right if Jorge were my new boyfriend. But Jorge is Marge's other roomer. He gives Marge Spanish lessons, and does the heavy cleaning and the yard work. Jorge has family in El Salvador he's hoping to bring up. I haven't met Marge's husband yet. He works on an offshore oil rig in some emirate with a funny name.

“No, Dad.” I explain about Jorge.

“El Salvador!” he repeats. “That means ‘the Savior.'” He passes on the information with a kind of awe. It makes Jorge's homeland, which he's shown me pretty pictures of, seem messy and exotic, at the very rim of human comprehension.

After Dad leaves, I call Cindi, who lives fifteen minutes away on Upper Mountainside Road. She's eleven months younger and almost a natural blonde, but we're close. Brent wasn't easy for me to take, not at first. He owns a discount camera and
electronics store on Fifty-fourth in Manhattan. Cindi met him through Club Med. They sat on a gorgeous Caribbean beach and talked of hogs. His father is an Amish farmer in Kalona, Iowa. Brent, in spite of the obvious hairpiece and the gold chain, is a rebel. He was born Schwartzendruber, but changed his name to Schwartz. Now no one believes the Brent, either. They call him Bernie on the street and it makes everyone more comfortable. His father's never taken their buggy out of the county.

The first time Vic asked me out, he talked of feminism and holism and macrobiotics. Then he opened up on cinema and literature, and I was very impressed, as who wouldn't be? Ro, my current lover, is very different. He picked me up in an uptown singles bar that I and sometimes Cindi go to. He bought me a Cinzano and touched my breast in the dark. He was direct, and at the same time weirdly courtly. I took him home though usually I don't, at first. I learned in bed that night that the tall brown drink with the lemon twist he'd been drinking was Tab.

I went back on the singles circuit even though the break with Vic should have made me cautious. Cindi thinks Vic's a romantic. I've told her how it ended. One Sunday morning in March he kissed me awake as usual. He'd brought in the
Times
from the porch and was reading it. I made us some cinnamon rose tea. We had a ritual, starting with the real estate pages, passing remarks on the latest tacky towers. Not for us, we'd say, the view is terrible! No room for the servants, things like that. And our imaginary children's imaginary nanny. “Hi, gorgeous,” I said. He is gorgeous, not strong, but showy. He said, “I'm leaving, babe. New Jersey doesn't do it for me anymore.” I said, “Okay, so where're we going?” I had an awful job at the time, taking orders for MCI. Vic said, “I didn't say we, babe.” So I asked, “You mean it's over? Just like that?” And he said, “Isn't that the best way? No fuss, no hang-ups.” Then I got a little whiny. “But
why?
” I wanted to know. But he was macrobiotic in lots of things, including relationships. Yin and yang,
hot and sour, green and yellow. “You know, Rindy, there are
places.
You don't fall off the earth when you leave Jersey, you know. Places you see pictures of and read about. Different weathers, different trees, different everything. Places that get the Cubs on cable instead of the Mets.” He was into that. For all the sophisticated things he liked to talk about, he was a very local boy. “Vic,” I pleaded, “you're crazy. You need help.” “I need help because I want to get out of Jersey? You gotta be kidding!” He stood up and for a moment I thought he would do something crazy, like destroy something, or hurt me. “Don't ever call me crazy, got that? And give me the keys to the van.”

He took the van. Danny had sold it to me when the Marines sent him overseas. I'd have given it to him anyway, even if he hadn't asked.

“Cindi, I need a turkey roaster,” I tell my sister on the phone.

“I'll be right over,” she says. “The brat's driving me crazy.”

“Isn't Franny's visit working out?”

“I could kill her. I think up ways. How does that sound?”

“Why not send her home?” I'm joking. Franny is Brent's twelve-year-old and he's shelled out a lot of dough to lawyers in New Jersey and Florida to work out visitation rights.

“Poor Brent. He feels so
divided
,” Cindi says. “He shouldn't have to take sides.”

I want her to ask who my date is for this afternoon, but she doesn't. It's important to me that she like Ro, that Mom and Dad more than tolerate him.

All over the country, I tell myself, women are towing new lovers home to meet their families. Vic is simmering cranberries in somebody's kitchen and explaining yin and yang. I check out the stuffing recipe. The gravy calls for cream and freshly grated nutmeg. Ro brought me six whole nutmegs in a Ziplock bag from his friend, a Pakistani, who runs a spice store in SoHo. The nuts look hard and ugly. I take one out of the bag
and sniff it. The aroma's so exotic my head swims. On an impulse I call Ro.

The phone rings and rings. He doesn't have his own place yet. He has to crash with friends. He's been in the States three months, maybe less. I let it ring fifteen, sixteen, seventeen times.

Finally someone answers. “Yes?” The voice is guarded, the accent obviously foreign even though all I'm hearing is a one-syllable word. Ro has fled here from Kabul. He wants to take classes at NJIT and become an electrical engineer. He says he's lucky his father got him out. A friend of Ro's father, a man called Mumtaz, runs a fried chicken restaurant in Brooklyn in a neighborhood Ro calls “Little Kabul,” though probably no one else has ever noticed. Mr. Mumtaz puts the legal immigrants to work as waiters out front. The illegals hide in a backroom as pluckers and gutters.

“Ro? I miss you. We're eating at three, remember?”

“Who is speaking, please?”

So I fell for the accent, but it isn't a malicious error. I
can
tell one Afghan tribe from another now, even by looking at them or by their names. I can make out some Pashto words. “Tell Ro it's Rindy. Please? I'm a friend. He wanted me to call this number.”

“Not knowing any Ro.”

“Hey, wait. Tell him it's Rindy deMarco.”

The guy hangs up on me.

I'm crumbling cornbread into a bowl for the stuffing when Cindi honks half of “King Cotton” from the parking apron in the back. Brent bought her the BMW on the gray market and saved a bundle—once discount, always discount—then spent three hundred dollars to put in a horn that beeps a Sousa march. I wave a potato masher at her from the back window. She doesn't get out of the car. Instead she points to the pan in the back seat. I come down, wiping my hands on a dish towel.

“I should stay and help.” Cindi sounds ready to cry. But I don't want her with me when Ro calls back.

“You're doing too much already, kiddo.” My voice at least sounds comforting. “You promised one veg and the salad.”

“I ought to come up and help. That or get drunk.” She shifts the stick. When Brent bought her the car, the dealer threw in driving gloves to match the upholstery.

“Get Franny to shred the greens,” I call as Cindi backs up the car. “Get her involved.”

The phone is ringing in my apartment. I can hear it ring from the second-floor landing.

“Ro?”

“You're taking a chance, my treasure. It could have been any other admirer, then where would you be?”

“I don't have any other admirers.” Ro is not a conventionally jealous man, not like the types I have known. He's totally unlike any man I have ever known. He wants men to come on to me. Lately when we go to a bar he makes me sit far enough from him so some poor lonely guy thinks I'm looking for action. Ro likes to swagger out of a dark booth as soon as someone buys me a drink. I go along. He comes from a macho culture.

“How else will I know you are as beautiful as I think you are? I would not want an unprized woman,” he says. He is asking me for time, I know. In a few more months he'll know I'm something of a catch in my culture, or at least I've never had trouble finding boys. Even Brent Schwartzendruber has begged me to see him alone.

“I'm going to be a little late,” Ro says. “I told you about my cousin Abdul, no?”

Ro has three or four cousins that I know of in Manhattan. They're all named Abdul something. When I think of Abdul, I think of a giant black man with goggles on, running down a court. Abdul is the teenage cousin whom immigration officials nabbed as he was gutting chickens in Mumtaz's backroom.
Abdul doesn't have the right papers to live and work in this country, and now he's been locked up in a detention center on Varick Street. Ro's afraid Abdul will be deported back to Afghanistan. If that happens, he'll be tortured.

“I have to visit him before I take the DeCamp bus. He's talking nonsense. He's talking of starting a hunger fast.”

“A hunger strike! God!” When I'm with Ro I feel I am looking at America through the wrong end of a telescope. He makes it sound like a police state, with sudden raids, papers, detention centers, deportations, and torture and death waiting in the wings. I'm not a political person. Last fall I wore the Ferraro button because she's a woman and Italian.

“Rindy, all night I've been up and awake. All night I think of your splendid breasts. Like clusters of grapes, I think. I am stroking and fondling your grapes this very minute. My talk gets you excited?”

I tell him to test me, please get here before three. I remind him he can't buy his ticket on the bus.

“We got here too early, didn't we?” Dad stands just outside the door to my apartment, looking embarrassed. He's in his best dark suit, the one he wears every Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year he can't do up the top button of his jacket.

“Don't be so formal, Dad.” I give him a showy hug and pull him indoors so Mom can come in.

“As if your papa ever listens to me!” Mom laughs. But she sits primly on the sofa bed in her velvet cloak, with her tote bag and evening purse on her lap. Before Dad started courting her, she worked as a seamstress. Dad rescued her from a sweatshop. He married down, she married well. That's the family story.

“She told me to rush.”

Mom isn't in a mood to squabble. I think she's reached the point of knowing she won't have him forever. There was Carmine, at death's door just a month ago. Anything could happen to Dad. She says, “Renata, look what I made! Crostolis.” She lifts a cake tin out of her tote bag. The pan still feels warm. And
for dessert, I know, there'll be a jar of super-thick, super-rich Death by Chocolate.