* * *
I’ve lived in this house my whole life. My folks died here. They both got cancer, my mother first and then my father, and I took care of them both and now they’re gone. So the house is mine. I have a brother who wants nothing to do with it. He’s a lawyer for the EPA up in Alaska. We were never close. Lately he’s been calling me once a month or so, out of the blue, to say hello. He doesn’t have to. I tell him that, but he still calls. He says he wants to come down for a visit sometime, to bring his family. He says he wants his kids to meet their uncle. I tell him: “Fine, come down whenever.”
I’ve taken good care of this house. Whatever it’s needed, I’ve done. I sanded and planed and lacquered the floors a few years ago, and I did a pretty good job. I keep the lawn and the bushes trimmed and neat, and the neighbors appreciate that. They tell me so. These are things I care about. I don’t own a TV; I don’t watch that crap. I listen to the radio and I read the newspapers every day, so I know what’s going on in the world. And I don’t need anybody telling me how a life is supposed to be. I’m alone, but I’m not lonely; there’s loneliness and then there’s solitude, which is a positive thing. It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult. Rilke said that. I’ve read him. I read books. I know who I am.
* * *
The new girl’s name was April. She was hired to replace Dot, and on her first day Mack brought her out to meet us. The guys were very polite. They told her about the rooftop bowling alley and tried to sell her tickets to the underground swimming pool. It was the same routine they did on my first day, and when Ruben was hired. But when she and Mack left, they started in on how fat she was. Phil said you’d have to roll her in flour first to fuck her, just to find the wet spot.
She started coming out onto the stock floor regularly, to chat and to hang out during breaks. This was a new thing for us. The women in Receiving rarely came out onto the floor, and then only to ask where Mack was and then go looking for him. None of them ever came out otherwise. There was no policy against it. It just didn’t happen. The guys muttered to each other when they saw April heading our way. “Here comes our mascot,” they said. “Here comes the pooch.” They were nice to her when she came around. They told their jokes and their stories, and she laughed and told a few of her own, and they laughed. But when she was gone, they leered and made fun of her. They were always talking about screwing her, but not in a good way. And they wouldn’t let up on the fat jokes. I didn’t get it, because she wasn’t that fat, no fatter than any of them. I thought at first that if she dropped a few pounds, maybe they would’ve let up on her. Maybe things would’ve been different. But they just find something else about you to make fun of. It’s what they do. They’re good at it.
April went out for lunch. She always went alone. If she got back early, she’d spend the rest of her hour with the guys on the stock floor. She didn’t socialize much with the women in Receiving. She was the youngest one in there.
A few weeks after she started, she came up on the dock on her way back from lunch. “So,” she said to me, “you’re the New Guy.” She lit a cigarette and asked me why I ate alone. I told her it was because of the cigarette smoke inside. She looked at the cigarette she’d just lit, and laughed. And she put it out. From then on, just about every day, she swung by and talked to me, fiddling with an unlit cigarette. I had nothing to say, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was a talker. She told me that. “So that makes you the listener,” she said. So she talked, and I listened, sitting on the dock while she stood leaning against a stack of pallets. When I got tired of squinting up at her, I looked at my food. Sometimes I looked out over the lot, where you could see the heat wiggle up from the blacktop. It was hot that summer. April had just moved here, and I remember her saying how she was discovering the place, getting to know the bus system, finding the neighborhood pubs and the secondhand shops, doing all the tourist things. She rode the dinner train up to the capital once and did the tour of the abandoned prison over in Old Town. She went to the zoo. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid. They charged admission now. And they were getting rid of the cages. There was an Otter Island, and a Gorilla Haven. The cats where getting their own places, too, a savanna for the lions and grottoes with pools for the panthers and tigers. I was born here, and April already knew more about the city than I ever would.
Sure enough, the guys started in on me. Eugene wanted to know if she was a moaner or a screamer. Dave asked if we had set a wedding date, and if we were registered at any of the doughnut shops. Ruben laughed with the rest of them. But whenever we were alone, he said I should ask April out. He said that she wanted me and that it would be a waste to not go for it. I told him I didn’t even like her. “Fuck like,” he said. “What’s like got to do with anything?” He wouldn’t leave it alone. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I’d be working the floor and he’d be running up and down the aisles looking for me, whispering at me through the shelving that pussy was a gift from God, or cornering me with his cart to tell me that I had a duty as a man. We hadn’t said ten words to each other in years, and here he was getting all worked up about my duty as a man. I never liked Ruben. Who was he to tell me about being a man? Who was he to tell me anything?
* * *
She asked me about my running. I told her. I kept it simple, sticking to my regimen, telling her what I do and not getting near why I do it. She was playing with her unlit cigarette while I talked, flipping and catching it in her hand. But she was listening. So I told her she could do it, too, if she wanted. She was about my age, maybe younger, so it wouldn’t take long to get a routine going, and to see results. She just smiled and shook her head. She put the cigarette she was playing with in her mouth and lit it. “I lack discipline,” she said. “Which is something you’ve got a lot of.” She blew a thin stream of smoke above her head and swatted at it to keep it away from me. She was right. It was something I had a lot of.
Another time she brought it up again. She asked about my regimen, and it turned into this interrogation. She wanted to know what time I got up every morning and how long I stretched for. She wanted to know how long I spent on my calves, on my thighs, on my neck. She asked what direction I headed in when I ran and what streets I turned on and whether I took the same streets back. She stood above me with the sun at her back and fired her questions at me. I answered every one of them. It was kind of a game, like a lawyer and a witness, and I let myself get caught up in it because I thought she really wanted to know about what I did, that the details of my regimen, and my absolute knowledge of them, were bringing her around somehow. I was wrong. She bent down all of a sudden, real quick, and leaned in close. I could smell her hair. I could’ve looked down her blouse if I wanted to. And she said, “Well, maybe discipline is something a person can have too much of. Don’t you think?” And the way she was looking at me, I realized she wasn’t interested in running at all. I didn’t say anything. She straightened up and checked her watch and walked back inside. Lunch was over.
She was looking at me like she knew something about me, as if you could know a person just by looking in his face. She thinks she knows me. She doesn’t know anything about me. I’ve looked at my face. You can’t see anything in it.
* * *
Here’s something about me. I was running around the lake one afternoon when this woman fell into step alongside me. She ran well, with her legs in full extension. She clipped along in smooth, even strides, her shoulders slack and her arms relaxed, swinging in little arcs along her rib cage. There wasn’t a single wasted motion about her. She ran with me. We didn’t say a word. After four laps around she tapped me on the shoulder. She smiled and said thanks. I watched her pull off and head down a path toward the streets. I went to the lake regularly for a few months after that. I never saw her again.