And then we were all quiet. It was so sad and sweet to imagine Grandmother as a young girl looking for a baby down at the beach, with her stockings all wet and the sun going down. And then Grandmother beckoned us to her side, telling us our mother would be back in good time, and both my brother and I hugged her with all of our might. We hugged her just like we were little night babies too, reaching out for human arms from under the waves.
THE MAN WITHOUT A HEART
Andrea and her son lived in a big building on a busy street. There were loads of small doorbells in the lobby. There were fluorescent blue tiles that had been put in a long time ago when the building was fancy. Some of the tiles had come off the floor and had been replaced by different-coloured ones, and the floor looked like a Rubik’s Cube that was never going to be solved. And now the building was filled with all sorts of lower-class people who couldn’t afford to live anyplace else.
Michal was ten years old and was small for his age. He had a short afro and enormous brown eyes. There was supposed to be an e in his name. But Andrea didn’t know about it when she was filling out the birth certificate. She thought that happened to be the way that you wrote Michael.
Michal didn’t have any friends. He was so shy that other kids forgot that he existed. He would sometimes sit quietly near a bunch of kids, hoping they would notice him and invite him to play. He was terrified of them, but he longed for their company.
Andrea was a hard worker. She worked ten hours a day at the grocery store. She had big boobs and a pouty mouth and dark skin. She brushed her hair violently every morning and pulled it into a tiny little ponytail at the top of her head. But the elastic was always popping off and her hair would be sticking straight up by the time she got home. She was still pretty adorable.
She had the face of a little girl. It sure as hell didn’t stop men from being mean to her. She went out with just about anybody who asked her. And for some reason, it was only the low-lifes who asked.
She went out with a guy who made deliveries for the corner store on a bicycle with one of those huge baskets on the front of it. He wore a black leather vest without a shirt on underneath. He told her that he couldn’t ever be tied down to one woman. For a long time she put up with a guy who used to beat her. One guy only ever came over after ten o’clock at night.
She was always loaning her boyfriends money. They were always coming over and eating her and Michal’s dinner. They would never, ever take her out to a restaurant in exchange. One of her boyfriends would scoff at the food she prepared. When she served Hamburger Helper, he said that when he was growing up, his mother would never, ever prepare him something like this. And he kicked over a chair and walked out.
Michal always kept his distance from the men his mother dated. Most of them didn’t seem to mind. Some of them resented Michal. If she was going to have a kid, at least she could have had a really fun one. Michal just skulked around, looking at the floor. No siree, they thought. When they had their own sons, they were going to be much better than this kid. They would be tall and outgoing and good at sports.
And these guys all ended up leaving Andrea at the drop of a hat.
Then Andrea met Lionel. He was buying a package of Twizzlers at the store where she worked. Lionel was tall and had sharp features and was good-looking. He looked like those statues that the Romans were always making of gods, except he was black. And Lord, was he smart. For a while, Andrea finally thought she had struck gold.
She could talk to him about Michal too, and he was interested.
“He’s so shy,” Andrea told him. They were lying in bed after making love. “He’s been like that since he was really little. I worry about him. I mean, how are you supposed to get anywhere in the world if you can’t even bring yourself to ask for simple instructions on the subway ride?”
“Where’s his pops?”
“Nowhere. He left me when I was pregnant. I was nineteen years old and I had nothing.”
“You must have been foxy as all shit when you were nineteen and pregnant.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I would have gotten all romantic poet on you, if I had seen you pregnant. Seriously. I would have been resolute in my endearing affections.”
Andrea laughed.
Michal was sitting in his small room at the end of the hall when Lionel walked right in. He was wearing a pair of silky shorts that Michal noticed looked way too small for him. They had a print of roses on them and were the bottom half of a pair of pyjamas that belonged to his mother.
“Do you know how to play chess? I see you got a board.”
Michal looked at his hands and nodded. Lionel set out the chessboard between them on the single bed.
“The best way to play chess is in silence. You can’t say a word, brother. If you do, it’ll upset my equilibrium. I’m going to be playing seven moves ahead, okay?”
When Michal took Lionel’s knight, the man yelled out.
“What kind of move was that? Wow! Where’d you learn to play like that? Are you Russian?”
Michal put his finger over his mouth to indicate that Lionel had broken the Rule of Silence.
Lionel continued in a whisper. “Do you have like a little earphone on and that Vladimir Stanislavskovitch is whispering in your ear from St. Petersburg? Man!”
Michal laughed. Much to Andrea’s amazement, Lionel and Michal bonded.
Lionel would go into Michal’s room and she could hear the two of them chatting away incessantly. Michal would babble excitedly. She never heard him talk like that with anybody. They would walk together to the store to pick up some milk. She would see them out the window, waving their arms about in discussion.
But it turned out that Lionel was probably the worst of all her boyfriends. He had been addicted to heroin and he started using again. He sold their television set for drugs. He stole money from her wallet, her jewellery and some of her dresses. He even stole her bus pass and then sold it to the neighbour for five dollars. Andrea worked hard for the little she had. So Andrea threw him out forever.
Lionel went into rehab and they didn’t hear from him for a couple of months. When Lionel called up, wanting to see Michal, Andrea was sure that it was some sort of lame-ass excuse to keep her in his life. But she wasn’t going to turn Lionel’s offer down. She was so exhausted and overwhelmed that she would take whatever babysitter she could get, even if he was an ex-junkie.
But Lionel was only allowed as far as the lobby. Andrea wouldn’t let him in the apartment ever again. It wasn’t that she was doing it to be mean, she was only using common sense.
Lionel agreed to pick Michal up from school and walk him home in the afternoons and refused to take money for it. They passed by the homeless who were out rooting through the garbage to find parts for time machines.
“What are you wearing?” Michal asked.
He was wearing rubber boots, a pair of denim shorts that were pinstriped, a blazer that had seen better days, and a light blue undershirt.
“People look at me because I am a damn bona fide original, my little friend. I have an original style of dressing. I dress in the manner of a pimped-out Edwardian gentleman.”
Despite being on welfare, despite not having a high school diploma, despite living in the crappiest boarding house in town, Lionel generally thought that he was superior to everybody. He could not be bothered under any circumstances to care what people thought of him.