She wasn’t sure how long it was before Louis went back into the front room to watch TV, but after some time she could hear the unfamiliar TV voices turned up louder, the false, cooing women, the desperate laugh tracks, the snapping open of beer cans, and she knew then that he was there. Outside on 31st Avenue there were sirens all night.
In the morning she called the cab and it came in ten minutes. Her clothes were wrinkled and clammy, but she didn’t care. Louis stumbled out of the front room, seemed tired and irritable, perhaps achey from having slept on the couch, but he helped bring her bag out to the cab anyway. The air was cold and quiet. The cabbie got out and opened up the back trunk.
“Good-bye, little sister,” Louis said, aiming for some weird jocularity, inappropriate as flowers. “Have fun.”
“Thanks,” said Benna. “I’ll send you a postcard.” They quickly kissed good-bye, their mouths breakfastless and clouded with the potatoey, dishwater-breath of sleep.
“Goinda Kennedy?” asked the cabbie.
“Yeah.” Benna heaved her handbag into the backseat and got in after it. On the other side of the street, to her right, some teenaged boy, up early or out late, walking by with a leather jacket and a dangling, bent cigarette, called “Hey, jiggle-butt” and waved. He looked, for a minute, like Gerard, like some teenaged ghost of Gerard.
On her left Louis was closing the door. He waved, then scuffed back toward the tiny collapsing stoop that was his. He had no socks on, and his heels were on top of his shoes, mashing the backs. He was wearing the same pants and shirt as the night before, she noticed, rumpled and misbuttoned, his coat thrown on over them. His breath floated out into the wintry morning in puffs. She watched him disappear. She knew he hadn’t a friend in the world. The two of them: How had they come to this?
The cab moved forward. She suddenly realized she’d forgotten to give Louis his Christmas present, but she said nothing, and the cab turned right and kept going.
The sun was only just coming up, and the driver was still high on his first coffee of the day. He wanted to talk. “You look glum,” he said. “Tough to say good-bye to that guy with the shoes?”
Benna closed her eyes, leaned back into the seat. It was Christmas. Santa Claus is a spirit that lives in your heart, her mother had told her, not believing it right to hoodwink children. But perhaps her mother had been wrong. Perhaps sitting in a taxicab like this on Christmas there was no spirit in your heart. Perhaps there was only an old man, ridiculous and fat, who came into your house through your chimney, too moronic even to use the door.
The sky’s striated blush began to look like a parfait behind the apartments and stores of Astoria. The roads were empty and clear as days and days. “My brother and I,” Benna said. “It’s just that we never get a chance to see each other very much.” Perhaps, she was thinking, there was nothing in which anyone might intelligently place their faith. Perhaps there was only rubble and sleep. It’s all hopeless, said Fred Astaire in a movie once. But it’s not serious. That was the only line she remembered.
“Ah, brothers,” smiled the cab driver. “Do I know that. Hey, my brother and me?” He took a sharp left and double-checked the rearview mirror to catch Benna’s eye. “We’re like this.” And he held up two crossed fingers.
V
When the train stops, the lights stop flickering, and the doors bang open, George is the first to set official foot on Grand Central soot. She stops to sniff and exclaim, “Pooey-mcphooey,” in a tone that makes me wonder whether I’ve taught her to be polite, and, even if I have, what that means, how it really helps.
We have to grunt and lug bags out the door, over the metal ridge, onto the dank cement of the platform. We have ball bearings on the bottoms of our suitcases and from here on in it looks to be a sweatless trundle out to the hivey cathedral of the main concourse. We are off to be Beruba girls. People pour out from behind us, bumping, pushing, greeting friends and relatives with hugs and handclasps and sweaty cheek-to-cheeks. There are shouts of “Happy New Year,” although it’s still a week away. “It’s like Grand Central Station in here,” I say to George. I cap my hand over her head and steer her in front of me like a basketball or a mail cart.
“It stinks like trains, Mom,” she says over the hiss of engines. It’s a harsh, queasy, burn smell, with its suggestions of hell and carcinogenesis. I think, This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just sit there like a bunch of schoolkids with their hands raised and uncalled on — each knowing, really knowing, the answer.
Life is sad. Here is someone.
“Knock, knock,” whispers Georgianne. She takes two steps to my one. “Knock, knock,” she repeats.
“Who’s there?”
“Me.”
“Me who?”
“Just me!” she says and giggles wildly.
I shake my head. “You made that up, didn’t you.”
“Yup.” She tugs at her bag. Passing the diesel at the front, we are suddenly hit with a steamy, acrid smoke billowing out from underneath it. People around us cough. George leans her head on my arm, mock-weary, Pre-Raphaelite. She is a gift I have given myself, a lozenge of pretend. Pretend there’s a child dozed between us, wrote Darrel once, and the city’s parch and chill is not the world, and the world’s not hurtful as a fist holding us sternly, always here and down.
George fiddles with my coat cuff. “Sometimes,” she sighs into the steam, “I feel like I’m right in the mist of things.”
I swear, she is a genius.