When I got home, I’d go through the trash, looking for evidence. I wanted to know how smart Jimmy was: smart enough to stay sober or smart enough to put his empties in the neighbor’s trash? I opened the bureau drawer in the kitchen, and asked him where the extra set of keys had gone. He pretended he didn’t know or he really didn’t. One time I came home to find him sprawled out in my nightgown — the long flowy one with the careful embroidery. He didn’t fluster when I walked in the door. I widened my eyes, running them up and down his body. “This?” he said. “I wanted to get all my laundry into one load.” If I hadn’t just worked a twelve-hour shift, I’d have argued that I had sweatpants he could have worn just as easy. Jimmy said, “Sammy, tell your mother our new nickname for me.” Sammy looked away from the cartoon cats and mice, and smiled huge. “Uncle Jimmy is Second Mommy!” I shook my head and turned back to the recliner. “That’s healthy, Jim. The boy doesn’t need an uncle. He needs a second mommy?’” Jimmy cracked up and leaned over to high-five Sammy.
A few days later I found a baggie in the trash, a different size than what we bought. “What was in this?” I asked my brother. “Jeez, Kim, Sammy had a snack,” he said, turning to the sink. “Where did such a snack come from, Jimmy? Not this house.” “Bake sale at the park. Am I gonna get in trouble for sharing a brownie with the kid?”
If I took Sammy somewhere, Jimmy wanted to come with. I shared with Jimmy every bit of my relationship with my child now. Every opportunity I saw to nourish some small internal light I saw in Sammy was undercut by Jimmy’s nudges and jokes. I wanted to pose impossible questions to Sammy to see how his youth would reason. I wanted to present him with antinomies, to see whether he would gravitate toward this thesis or that antithesis. I knew Sammy had some answers in him. Jimmy’d roll his eyes at me and tickle Sammy and tell me to lighten up — he was just a kid. At that point, I expected Jimmy to be with us a long time. Sammy was starting school at the end of summer, but I imagined the three of us carrying on. I couldn’t tell if I hated it or if I was just looking for something to end, like I’d gotten used to the finite and had trouble believing in anything more.
I brought men home. I’d tell you about a single one of them if I could remember. Every night shaped itself into a fanatical bustle. Looks in the grocery store, a kind word in the hospital parking lot. I didn’t spend minutes in a bar or dollars on drinks. The men always turned up over shoulders, in the bellies of shadows, at PTA meetings. Clint told me to call him. Randy told me I knew his number. Darren told me about problems he thought trumped mine, and I let them. Every time it happened I thought I was getting closer to a target and then it’d turn out I was throwing my dart in the wrong direction.
Jimmy didn’t mouth off about it. He knew better. His own past sounded constant, gnarly jingles and we’d try to keep the peace as best we could. Sometimes when they were giving me a bad vibe, I told them to leave before the morning. Sometimes when their phones buzzed, I told them to go find their wives. They’d scowl at me and think better of it while I held their fate in my hands. Jimmy’d say, “No breakfast buddy today?” I’d shoot him my most dastardly glare and say, “We’re allowed to do things we think better of after the fact. Am I right, brother?”
Some nights Jimmy would pace in a flurry of spells and fits — then set himself down and bite his lips, jitter his feet. Jimmy’s face furrowed and dug deep at the slightest emotion. My knees sagged, soft and liquid, just like the old ladies at the public pool. Our hard lives showed up all over our bodies, but when I said something to that effect, Jimmy’d say, “Who are we comparing to?” I’d find him some aspirin, give myself a few too. We’d sip warm soda out of thin straws I stole from the coffee station at work. We’d handle each other softly for a little while. After I’d put myself to bed, I’d wake late in the night to Jim’s dark whistling over the muted TV hum. The light comforted him even when the voices did not.
Twilight hung behind the curtained windows. I carried a sack of groceries that would sit on the coffee table long enough for the ice cream to melt. “Where’s your uncle?” I asked him. “Jimmy?” I called into every corner of that tiny house. “He can’t have gone,” Sammy said. “He was just here.” My stomach turned with disgust and frustration and relief. “What do you mean just here?” I asked my son. “Minutes or hours?” Sammy shrugged and turned back to the TV. The laundry basket with the broken handle where he sniffed out the clean from the dirty each morning lay abandoned beside the couch. He didn’t have anything else. The bread bag sat open on the kitchen counter, half as empty as when I’d used it to make myself toast that morning. A dirty knife lay next to it, looking like it meant to make it to the sink. I’d expected worse of this moment. I looked in the trash can. “You didn’t see him leave, huh?” I sat next to Sammy and stroked his baby bird hair, waiting for him to answer. At the commercial, Sammy turned to me. “How could I have seen him if he didn’t go?”
Twins, or Ambivalence
The giant twins, Bittern and Barn Swallow, cannot handle the uncertain gazes that fall upon them when seen apart from each other. Their secrets exist in the negative space between them. Bittern and Barn Swallow have ears like hands reaching, mouths that curl indication into their emotions. Bittern and Barn Swallow have shirts stained with distorting drool and don’t feel one bit bad about it. That’s just the way their lips spill. Deep in thought, they sink slowly through mindlessness. They haul sacks of wrist-watches to the Laundromat, shake the bags loose into the washers, and listen to the rattling machines drink up the mechanics of those portable clocks. Bittern and Barn Swallow don’t care. They keep reaching inside for some feeling and pulling out more of their blank white stuffing. They try to believe something is possible. They keep shaking their heads and nodding, hoping one of the gestures will feel right. Every minute they feel like nervous soldiers with nothing to do. They collect useless items from garage sales, slap their dollars down, and carry away whatever is handed to them. A plastic flower, a peg doll, the sneaky thorned stem of a useless length of barbed wire. When they get home Bittern hula hoops till he’s tired out and Barn Swallow fans him absently with a silk palm frond. Their eyes droop uneven and careless. Bittern and Barn Swallow look at their junk and feel nothing. They watch a space exploration special on an old black-and-white TV. Seconds into the program the spacemen arrive in space and exchange knowing smiles. Bittern and Barn Swallow look at each other, not understanding the meaning of a shared experience. In a bright and oversized world, Bittern and Barn Swallow look out of their brains, like one thing keeps fading into the next. They do not look up information in books or read magazines or have a clue what is going on anywhere. They prop themselves up on their front stoop like gargoyles and look down instead of out. So much time on those godforsaken concrete stairs, all sorts of people and things moving by, and Bittern and Barn Swallow stare at the cracks in the sidewalk. Bittern and Barn Swallow are grown but still afraid of haircuts. They pay a brave girl to come to the house and urge them to sit still and stop shrieking: it will grow back; it always does. Bittern and Barn Swallow will walk this girl home with some hope in their minds they cannot quite get around. Bittern and Barn Swallow will pick blossoms that do not belong to them. They will give the girl fingers she does not want. They will hide cherry stems, threaded needles and their tongues low inside their mouths. Bittern and Barn Swallow will share their friendliness like it’s something else. The girl will get herself home. Bittern and Barn Swallow will smoke and put distance between themselves to test their limits and then hurtle back together, like losing the grip on a strip of elastic. Bittern and Barn Swallow will chew off moles that look suspicious and spit them into the gutter. They will fail to understand why it is still just the two of them leaking beside each other. They will peer into the hairdresser’s window and she will try not to notice them. She will arrive at other people’s homes, one hand tight around mace and the other fist clutching a horror story. Those men will live simply and long-haired a while longer and then they will attest to each other a mixture of joy and sorrow that seems to convince them they have lived long enough. They will clarify after the fact. They will decide and then forget their decision. They will remember too late that the ground has gone and fall from the sky.