I didn’t say anything. But I wanted to tell her this story I remembered, from back in Italy: this guy worked the land for this baroness and lived a long way from her. One day she sent for him, said she wanted to see him. So he walks this whole way to see her, and when he gets to the gates of the villa, there she is, way off by the house. And she makes a sign for him to stop where he is. And she looks at him through this telescope she has, just looks at him, him standing there at the gate holding his hat. Then she waves her hand, bye-bye, bye-bye, and sends him away.
TODD
My dog’s name is Audrey. She’s half Irish setter, half beagle. When we tell people that, they always look at us like, half what and half what? But she is. She’s a little bigger than a beagle, and her coat’s red like an Irish setter’s. My dad got her for us, upstate. He named her after Audrey Meadows from “The Honeymooners.” She was free. She’s nine years old. She had growths on her side, but the vet said they didn’t mean anything. He cut one off. She has white hairs on her muzzle, from stress.
I want to go to lacrosse camp this year, but I probably won’t. My mom doesn’t even know I want to go. I don’t have a stick or anything, but I borrowed a friend’s and really liked it. I watched the NCAA championships on TV. Princeton won. I was rooting for Syracuse.
School’s been over for two weeks. In gym we did crab ball, which was good but hurt your hands. We finished gymnastics. I was good on the rope climb, once I got used to the way it swayed near the top. I was a star on the springboard. I was best on the pommel horse. I sucked on the uneven parallel bars. Which is a girl’s thing.
I live alone with my mother.
We see a lot of my mother’s parents — Nina and Sandro, I call them. My friends say, God, you call your grandparents that? I go, Yeah. That’s their names. My father’s parents we hardly ever see. I guess they’re ashamed.
When my dad left, he left a note on the phone. That was it. He mighta snuck into my room and said good-bye or something, but I don’t know. I’m a light sleeper. He sent me a letter that was two pages long once he got out to Colorado, but it was not real informative. I sent him back this card I made of Audrey flying an F-16 and hanging a paw out the canopy. Audrey was saying, “WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK?” He wrote and thanked me like that wasn’t a serious question.
The day I got his letter I watched cable twenty-three straight hours, nine in the morning to eight in the morning, still my record. My mom was a wreck. I saw the strangest ending to any movie ever. The movie was called Half Angel. There’s a good gangster and a bad gangster. At the end the good gangster goes to kiss the girl, and right in the middle of it his friend starts this gross story about this other gangster who kills everybody. His friend goes, “Yeah, Bugs himself was drooling with the lust of slaughter.” That’s exactly what he said, and the movie ends like that. I watched it twice, at 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M., because I couldn’t believe it.
A few weeks after my father left, my mother and I had a fight. We had more fights than that, but this was a big one. I broke about seven things in my room, and my mother kicked open the door. She broke the lock. It was like martial arts or something. Later she said, “When did you ever have it so bad? What did we ever do to you?” So I said, “Okay,” and told her about the time we went to Moodus Lake to look at the property they bought and never did anything with. We went there like once every three years to prove to ourselves we still had it. We never used it. Where our part was, the water was all weedy and gross, like a swamp, and there was no driveway in — you had to walk through the woods — and not even a good place to camp. We all went up there, and they went off to talk to the owner of the land association or somebody and told me to lock the doors and not let anybody in and wait where I was. Where was I going? We were pulled off this dirt road in the middle of the woods. One side of the car had like smashed branches up against the windows. I just sat there. They couldn’t find him. It was like they were gone forever. Then they couldn’t find the car. They took the wrong trail or something. It got dark. I was in the backseat. I had the radio on. I thought it’d be good for them if I ran the battery down, and then I thought that was stupid, because we’d all be stuck here when they got back. Even so, I left it on. And the disc jockey or whoever must’ve put a stack of records on the turntable and gone away, because something stuck, and the station played “Down in the Boondocks” like fifty times in a row. The guy announced it once, and then it just kept coming on. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t change the station or turn it off. I kept thinking the next time the guy would come in and stop it. I wanted to see if he’d apologize, or what. I don’t know what happened. Finally I got too scared for the battery and turned it off. I could still hear the song in my head. It was pitch-black, and there were all these cricket sounds and rustlings. I spent some time closing my eyes and checking out those circles and gray things that float around behind your eyelids. I thought, They don’t even have a flashlight. The song coming back was worse than the sound of the woods: Down in the Boondocks. I sang it, though that was the last thing I wanted to do: “‘People put me down ’cause that’s the side of town I was born in. I love her, she loves me, but I don’t fit in her society.’” Then I heard them calling, and I turned on the headlights, and they found me.
BRUNO
Three guys walk into a bar. Roof collapses, kills ’em all. Turns out they had cancer.
Hard Luck stories. Poor Me stories. Isn’t It Sad stories. Isn’t it sad I had to do what I had to do? I looked the other way during kickbacks, I put less in the Sunday envelope, I hit my kid and now he’s got this stutter, my husband left me and I had to raise my three blind girls alone. Bruno, Bruno, poor Elena, poor Lucia, poor whoever, poor me, no one should have this much trouble. Bruno, Bruno, you’re so hardhearted. Isn’t it sad? I say, You got trouble? Too bad, my condolences, deal with it. There’s no trick to this. I’m not here as a therapist. This guy Darwin on TV had it right: you got too many legs, a fin out to here, teeth smaller than Harvey across the rock, you’re not gonna make it. And what is that? What? Bad luck? You pray all your life you don’t get luck like some people get. Guys with no eyes, guys whose whole families go down on some boat, guys who’re vegetables, get fed off a tray. People say, Bruno you wouldn’t be so hard it happened to you — I say, My father came over here, he was fourteen years old, knew four words of English — four — worked on the highways going in upstate for three days and a back-loader dumped a load of shale where he was standing, crushed his legs. Guy called, “All clear?” and my dad waved and stood there. My mother died of this simple thing because some Mick doctor couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a diagram. I’m forty-two years old, never got married, I’ve gone broke twice. Started up from nothing twice. Now I sell cars. You think I like selling cars? My life is a bowl of roses selling cars?
I came here, started working in the off-season. Everything was down. Sales were down. The economy was down. Inventory was down. Spirits were down, morale was down, the shade in my office was down. The desk they gave me, the drawers didn’t open. They probably figured, Guinea, he’s not gonna write anything, anyway. They told me I couldn’t use the coffee machine. I hadda go across the street. You imagine this? Bruno, it’s only an eight-cupper. Oh, I didn’t realize. You know what it’s like, you’re humping to sell the car, Gee, Mr. Dickhead, would you like a cuppa coffee? Okay, well, we’ll have to go across the street, see, because I got this disease and they don’t let me touch their fucking coffeepot. Gas shortage, oil shortage, money shortage, no beans for the soup: just the time to be selling ocean-liner Buicks in Bridgeport. I’m brand new at this, standing there in my — I got one suit, I change the shirt and ties day to day — and guys’re coming in without a pot to piss in, just looking for transportation, and I’m pushing station wagons with power sunroofs. Four doors you can land planes on. The whole world’s selling little Nip cars to Yupsters at eighty-percent markups and I’m selling V-8s to cane-dragging Sanka-sucking cottontops. But I sold. I sold to everybody. I sold to morons. I sold to kids. I sold to widows with bad eyesight. I sold to sharpies. I sold to Puerto Ricans. I sold to mulignons. I sold to family. I got my coffeepot. I drink their coffee now.