“If it’ll get your mind off it,” my aunt said.
She had disposed herself beneath me, her eyes already shut, her hair a leaden bulk, an infrequent twinkle in her fingernails.
I filled her body with some pulse of my trouble. From the window I could make out the low-roofed town, untrafficable in the haze. One of the housetops close by was handsomely slated and slick. I slid my mind onto it for a clammy duration.
This is what days were now like in the morning if I hoped to see my brother come afternoon.
My heyday was the week or so my brother and I were finally boyfriend and girlfriend. We would arrive together for lunch in whichever room my aunt was keeping the food heated. Handkerchiefs would swag from the waistband of my brother’s pants, to be plucked, besopped, then set free. I watched them sail toward the floor, each with a fresh fortune of phlegm.
“He always claimed his wife hated him for the wrong reasons,” my aunt said. (I am afraid I paraphrase.) “Her despisal, he felt, was wide of the mark. The marriage was far from finished, but there was less to make it stick. The bed they shared was amiss. The mattress was too big for the frame, for one thing. There was quite the overhang on his side of it. He got better at shifting his weight onto other people, or tacking somebody onto himself for purposes of symmetry alone. I was much the same way — younger. But did I run? We were too much alike in our bloodbeat. We’d gone out to eat, finally, and he told me what he had told her exactly as he had put it to her: ‘You, you, you.’ Everywhere you look — why didn’t I know it then? — people are repeating to other people what they had said to third parties, and the ones caught in the middle are afraid everyone within earshot will think that they, the middle people, are the ones being spoken to with such a tongue. So they keep interrupting. They say things like, ‘You actually said that to so-and-so?’ Emphasis on the so-and-so. But I hadn’t been around long enough to know.
“My heart back then was more of a catch basin than it is now.
“When he was a child, mind you, he slept so soundly, he had to be taught everything all over again in the mornings — how to sit up to the table, what forks were for. His sisters were Brenna, Linette, and Naomi. They jumped for joy over whatever a foul little mouth could reach. He never wanted me to know their names and their interests. ‘Disaggregate,’ he’d say if he were here. He’d be throwing up his arms all over again.
“He would doff his shoes the instant he entered the house. ‘You’ve no idea what I’ve been stepping in all day,’ he’d say. He’d say farewell before shutting the door for his bath. I once found the poor man trying to read his way around a business card some thoughtless cuss had left as a bookmark midway down the page in a library book. I could see the struggle in him. The thing was slotted right into the spine, like a tiny extra page. It stuck out an angle. It was obvious he did not want to have to touch it. From where I stood, I could see the parallelogrammatic shadow it was throwing onto the left-hand page. I reached over and snatched it away. I was always the one to turn on the lamp and make sure the light fell over his left shoulder. I’d say, ‘You’ll ruin your eyes.’ And he’d say, ‘The only way to ruin your eyes is to keep looking at people.’
“So don’t think I don’t know what you two think you have,” my aunt said. “Don’t pretend you’re the first.”
I had my foot around my brother’s ankle. One of his hands was in mine; the other grasped an undrabbled handkerchief.
“He knocked you up?” I said.
“It was during one of the later years upstairs,” my aunt said. “The doctors told us it was a termless pregnancy, that the child might not ever come out, that it wasn’t going anywhere, that you see these sorts of impactions every once in a very great while, that this wasn’t the end of the world, there were ways to get around things, arrangements could be made for its tutoring, its recreations, inside of me, and for a while we kept at it, the drills, the columns of words, the recommended rhymes. But we started hearing less and less in return. ‘Pipe up!’ I would shout. It got harder to tell its baby talk, as muffled as it was, from everything else that might have been going on in my hellhole of a body proper. I think sooner or later it must have just got drowned out. I know I started shedding pounds.”
“Do you ever talk to him?” I said.
“Your father?” my aunt said.
A couple of nights later, I heard heavy luggage landing on the linoleum below. We were all three of us on the floor. My head was in my brother’s lap. I thought I was the only one awake.
“Who got the decorations out?” my father shouted from downstairs. “Who gave anyone permission to hang crepe paper?”
We lay still. I could see my aunt’s eyes unclosing themselves.
“What did I miss?” my father shouted. “Something big? Somebody thinks they had another wedding behind my back? That’s what this is about?”
I heard drawers being opened heatedly.
“What else could have happened?” my father shouted. “Look at this place.”
I heard the oven door slam.
“Which one of you?” my father shouted.
I saw my aunt raise an arm from the elbow, then start to bring it down. I kicked out my leg and caught the arm before the fist could reach the wide, booming floor.
Six Stories
SIMPLE
This is the simplest story. Why am I always the one to tell it?
When I was nine, an older kid said, “Hold out your hand.” Then tossed a crumpled candy-bar wrapper into my obediently cupped palm.
Walked away, laughing.
I decided to let the wrapper stay put.
Out of spite, or what?
I grew up, rented a room, worked, rode escalators, figured out where and where not to insert myself.
People kept looking at the wrapper in my hand and saying, “Here, let me take care of that for you,” or “Are you looking for something?”
I kept waiting for somebody to say something in a language that wasn’t shot.
CONCENTRATION
There was eventually a little something wrong with the son, too, though nothing so bad as with the daughter. The parents ordered corrective shoes and sat up late one night, writing and recopying and then laminating a note to be passed among all of his teachers.
The teachers read the note and placed the son at a special desk, where they quizzed him about kings and invertebrates. He answered bodily, and correctly.
He came home having been taught how to answer the telephone in a telephone voice.
“Speaking,” he had been taught to say.
His one big break was being told he needed eyeglasses — an encumbering portable fenestration that made props of his nose and ears. It was not so much that the world was now filled in more tidily (things were less destitute of outline, less likely to drown within themselves before they arrived in the thick of his eye) as that he felt he had acquired a wicket about himself, a little cage up front through which business could get quickly and fittingly done.
I WAS SURER OF THINGS
Try it this way: there was a woman who betrayed me with a man who had opened a factory in which it was suggested that the workers make things out of glass. The man did not believe in pushing people. He never once looked over anyone’s shoulder.