Ecstatic

1

They drove a green rented car into central New York State to find me living wild in my apartment. Wearing shattered glasses and my hair a giant cauliflower-shaped afro on my head. I was three hundred and fifteen pounds. I was a mess, but the house was clean. They knocked and when I opened the front door there were three archangels on my stoop. My sister rubbed my ear when I cried. She whispered, — Why don’t you go put on clothes?

My family took me home to Queens and kept me in the basement. When I tried to go outside alone, they discouraged it. My sister led me by the hand when walking to the supermarket. Mom cut my meat at the dinner table. They treated me like what some still refer to as a Mongoloid. A few days of this is tenderness, but two weeks seems more like punishment. The spirit of blame stooped in a corner.

Their concern was wonderful, but the condescension was deadly. And surprising. Before opening the front door to them I really thought my life was full of pepper.

Three weeks after coming back to Rosedale I cooked a big, red breakfast for my family just to prove that I could. Not only to them, but to myself. It was September 25th, 1995. I remember certain dates to organize and understand my disaster. Without them my mind is a mass grave.

It was a red breakfast because I added ketchup to the eggs when scrambling them. And to the bacon as it curled in the pan. Call me tasteless, but ketchup is the only seasoning I need.

I was so nervous that I even dressed up that morning. This bright purple suit that was loose on me and hid my tits. Made me look like a two-hundred-fifty-pound man.

Our oven was so hot I had to watch I didn’t sweat into the food. Wiped my forehead with my tie. I pulled butter from the fridge to set next to a plate of toast and if this didn’t make them happy then I was out of ideas.

But they didn’t appear. I waited a long time.

Even though I heard their beds creak then footsteps on the floor, they never came around the corner. It was like they turned to dust. I prodded the bacon, but without enthusiasm. There was no sizzle yet. With my left hand in my pants pocket I hoped to look cool. I counted numbers to keep from fidgeting.

I turned the gas flames lower. I washed dishes left in the sink overnight and put them in high cabinets. Sunlight addressed the windows.

Worst of all fears is abandonment. Eventually I had to know where they’d gone. The white linoleum tiles ticked against the undersides of my dress shoes.

I was silent in the hallway. There weren’t any windows here so the place was dark and the ceiling seemed far. My hands tapping the walls was the echo inside a hollow bomb.

They’d hid in the bathroom. Mom leaned against the sink while Grandma rested on the toilet and my sister, Nabisase, sat on the rim of the tub. Three versions of the same woman— past, present and future— huddled in one room. With the door partway shut I was unseen and apart from them.

Mom whispered, — We should go to him.

— Yes. Grandma agreed, but they stayed there.

My family was afraid of me.

I expected more sympathy, actually, because I sure wasn’t the first one in my bloodline to go zipper-lidded. You should’ve seen when my mother tobogganed naked through Flushing Meadow Park in 1983. Four police carried her to the hospital wrapped in their jackets. Parents on the hill thought Mom was a hump-starved fiend out to abduct their children. Her illness often made her frenzied sexually. Whenever she relapsed the woman was an open womb, but Haldol had stabilized Mom’s mind for years.

There was my Uncle Isaac, too, who walked from New York to the Canadian border in 1986, and emptied out his brain pan with a rifle. So when they discovered me in that Ithaca apartment Mom and Grandma recognized the situation. Their boy had become a narwhal.

I pushed in the bathroom door to surprise them, but instead of shuddering they only sighed.

— Good morning, Grandma murmured.

— I made eggs.

Nabisase smiled. — That’s very good of you!

She was confused and angry. She was thirteen and thus only partially human when it came to compassion. Call me her older brother, by ten years, but Nabisase practically had to tie me down to cut my hair that first week back. I kept saying that I looked fine. No kid is going to enjoy that. Sarcasm was her mild revenge.

Mom and Grandma were earnestly complimentary; anything I did earned praise. If I’d taken an especially heavy boweling they would have bought me a squeeze toy.

Nabisase asked, — Is the fire oven still on?

— Fire oven?

— The place where you cook, Nabisase explained slowly.

— It might be, I admitted.

They ran past me. Forget that. Right over me. Even Grandma, a ninety-three year old, vaulted my doughy shoulders and sped into the kitchen. Where Mom was turning the burners’ dials straight off, to six o’clock.

— I wouldn’t have started a fire, I told them.

— How do you know? Nabisase asked.

Neville Chamberlain believed Hitler would be satisfied to taste only a jigger of Czechoslovakia. My family knew I wasn’t retarded, but the idea of one more paranoid schizophrenic in our fold fucked with their common sense so much that they never mentioned medication, hospitalization, examination. For what? They wished that I was fragile instead of berserk, so that’s what I became. They handled me with cushy mitts.

Grandma’s English was slightly twisted. She was from East Africa. Uganda, specifically. My mother had also been born there, but Nabisase and I were from Queens. Grandma said, — Well we should have nice dresses then.

— For breakfast?

Grandma said, — You are wearing a suit. We should put on long pants.

While they changed I finished with the food. I got the frying pans going again; the smell of pig meat warmed my heart. The eggs were solid; not dry, just firm. So much grease on the skillet that they floated pretty as kids in a wading pool. I wasn’t fat because of any thyroid condition.

We lived in Rosedale, at the southeastern end of Queens. A suburb of New York complete with the growls of cars leaving driveways. The sound of engines was pleasant to me.

Grandma came back first wearing a yellow housedress and black flat shoes. She walked down the hallway, into the living room, then sat on the sectional couch waiting to be served. Across the street a husband backed his RV into the yard of a home he shared with his wife. My family was middle class and I liked that.

Then, loud as the Devil in his best pink shoes, my sister attacked my mother. A blitzkrieg; bomb blasts and shouting. Lightning behind Mom’s bedroom door.

My mother came down the hallway chased by her daughter, who was swinging a hair dryer and yelling Mom’s name. Nabisase hammer-slammed Mom across the back of the skull and the dryer’s nozzle shattered into plastic chips around the room. Nabisase took two handfuls of Mom’s hair and used them as handles for pulling our mother, face first, to the ground.

Grandma tried to stand, but the couch was shaking too much because Mom had pushed Nabisase backward across it. My mother might even have strangled Nabisase if my sister weren’t scratching the skin from Mom’s hands.

Nabisase pulled the television from our gray entertainment unit. It would have made a louder crash but my mother’s foot stopped the fall. Maybe a toe was broken. I bet my sister wished that was true.

My mother had dabbled with art— dress making and sculpture to name two. The only proof of this was a horrendous statuette on top of our entertainment unit. A tiny bust meant to resemble Sidney Poitier except that both ears were on the same side of the poor man’s head. With the television crashing the small bust wobbled about to fall so my mother set it safely on the floor.

Then there was a broom against the wall, so Mom took it and gave Nabisase two baton shots in the ribs. This put my sister on the floor.

And I was the one with a problem?

Grandma yelled, — Anthony! Come. Anthony! Please.

When I stood between my sister and mother they went around me. My sister threw couch cushions over my head hoping they’d hit Mom. Not to hurt, but to annoy, which was a fine alternative.

Mom whipped a small picture frame under one of my outstretched arms and it plunked against a wall, chipping the paint. — I’m getting a lock for my bedroom, Mom promised. I’m getting it today.

At which point Grandma raised her voice. The old lady climbed on the couch. — You crazy three bitches! she yelled. You stake my heart!

She fell backward, but caught herself. The yellow housedress hung down between her thighs. With her spindly old arms and legs visible she became a giant wiry spider. Gnashing and screaming and the yellow fabric gathered below her like a dangling silk line. Loom of the dead. She scared us away.

There really were worse situations than mine. Mothers and daughters are war.

Not to seem monomaniacal, but there was still the matter of nine eggs, eight slices of toast, six pats of butter, four glasses of orange juice, two cups of tea, six sausage links and thirteen strips of bacon awaiting an eating. How could they forget that?

My mother and Nabisase went to dress; passed the kitchen like there was no food inside. This is something I couldn’t do. I didn’t understand how my mother could. She used to be weak like me, but now I was the only one who felt the pantry calling. There are people who love to eat and those who don’t. My mother might have changed, but I was still a man who found any complication less daunting after a full plate.

I took our largest salad bowl from one of the cupboards above the kitchen sink and threw in those nine eggs. I added another half-cup of ketchup and a teaspoon of salt.

I mixed the ketchup, eggs, sausages, salt and some syrup with a wooden spoon. Until there was a red-and-yellow soup four inches deep and thicker than sap. The idea was to sour mash this concoction then sink into the basement where I could eat it at leisure on my bed. When anyone decides to tell me I have a problem with food I gesture to the long line of helpful advisors forming a kissing line to the right of my ass.

And I would have made it down if I hadn’t gone back for the bacon.

Right at the top of the basement steps I realized the thirteen strips were in a bowl next to the pepper shaker. If I didn’t get them now Mom would toss them to thwart her own gluttonous tendencies. I darted into the kitchen, grabbed the bacon, dropped it into my big bowl and was set to sashay merrily away, but before I turned around Mom and my sister were at my sides.

— Oh that’s too much food for one, my mother said.

My sister put her arm on my shoulder. — You should put that in the garbage place.

— Garbage place?

Mom didn’t dignify Nabisase’s goading, but her own tone wasn’t much better. The difference was that my mother didn’t even know how to spell patronizing, so forget realizing that she was doing it.

She asked, — You don’t want to get a stomachache, do you?

I said, — Do you people realize I was the first one in this family to even get to college?

— We’ve all gone to university, Mom said. Myself, your Uncle. Even Grandma. And we got our degrees.

— But that was in Uganda. I was in the Ivy League for two years.

My sister touched my arm. — The only place you’ll graduate from now is McDonald’s University.

Mom said, — I’ll throw it out for you.

I looked at the brew mournfully. I could have fought with my mother, but why? I unloaded the slop into our garbage bin. This made my mom glad.

She was fifty-three years old with gray stubble on her chin. It was while I was away at college that Mom became beautiful by losing ninety pounds. She was sane and slim now. When I’d been walking around downtown Ithaca with cookie crumbs in my hair, Mom was jogging across Brookville Park. Seeing her again had been the hardest. Before I went to Cornell we were misfits, a pair. We’d finish an entire Louisiana Crunch Cake in twenty minutes; hiding from Nabisase and Grandma in the bathroom.

But do you believe our world is an alchemical comedy? Because I do.

Inside the house I was a twenty-three-year-old college dropout, a girthy goon suffering bouts of dementia, but when I opened the front door I was That Right Young Man Living In An Otherwise Hysterical Home.

New York City Police had been called to our address four different times in the month before I returned. Sister against Mother. Mother against Sister. Once Grandma called cops on both. No one was ever arrested, but there was a quartet of pink police reports on the fridge under a magnet shaped like bananas.

Outside, the ladies were crazy and I was brand new.

I walked down the front steps and pulled our green garbage bin from one side of the house onto the sidewalk. I auditioned for the role of conscientious new director. After putting out the trash I coiled the lawn hose by the driveway.

The man across the street, with the RV, said, — Taking care of a house is never done, is it?

His wife was next to him; we spoke from their yard to mine. — But we’re glad to see someone’s over there doing it, she said.

Meanwhile Nabisase and my mother were inside yelling again.

My sister left through the kitchen’s black security gate. When she went out she slammed that metal door and a gong sound woke Rosedale’s sleeping dogs. It was just seven in the morning and now they barked like it was noon.

When other neighbors peeked they saw me throwing away supermarket circulars as Mom opened the same kitchen door, slammed it even louder, then made the Oldsmobile Firenza’s engine bleat by twisting the ignition key too hard.

— You keep it up, both husband and wife told me.

Rosedale really was a lovely place. Trees grew beside great lampposts. The sycamores caught starlings on their bare branches. This neighborhood was for teachers and tax preparers. One supermarket manager. A family who owned their own meat store; the specialty was goat.

Two branch supervisors for Bell Atlantic phones.

Two bus drivers.

Nurses.

I spent the next hour in the front yard holding a trowel while theatrically grunting through light field work. I did that because neighborhoods expect cooperation from every family. I know it’s dumb to care about other people’s opinions, but I wanted everyone to think highly of me.

At the top of the front steps I checked for mail, but it was too early. My sister had cut my hair to the raw scalp. The cold wind hurt, but I didn’t put on a hat.

Even after I opened the front door my left and right foot refused to enter. Who would give up manhood, honestly? With so many benefits. The world defers to me.

— Pull the door closed! Grandma yelled from the couch. She watched the television news and read a copy of The Globe, too.

I shut the door then slapped down on the standing ironing board.

When Grandma grumbled I apologized.

I remember when she turned around in the green rented car. That whole trip from Ithaca my grandmother only spoke once. She was in the front seat, taking tissues from her bra and handing them to my mother. It was September 3, 1995. Grandma turned to me and said, — We will be fixing you.

2

They were surprised when I turned down a family cookout. They wanted to celebrate my return, but by cookout they only meant four of us in the backyard turning franks on a tiny grill. In that scenario Mom would be pre-chewing my rice the whole afternoon. No thanks. I demanded guests.

— Who? Nabisase asked.

— These other buildings have people in them, you know.

— Bring neighbors!? Grandma yelled.

Mom walked to the front window just to pull down the shade. — Why would we tell people you were back?

I said, — They won’t ask.

Other folks must have it easier when they’re throwing parties. Invite people and watch them come. But I tried to be objective about my family; we’d have to offer a bribe. I printed flyers and put them on car windows, in mailboxes. I taped them to trees. The two biggest words were the ones that worked: ‘Free’ and ‘Food.’

Even with charcoal blackening the beef and unthreatening soul music on a portable radio, guests wouldn’t enter our yard. I was in the basement waiting to make an entrance when my sister came down the stairs. She said, — They’re on the sidewalk.

— Then open the gate.

— They just keep asking to see you.

Nabisase was Old-Testament-beautiful; wrathful, privileged loveliness. A short girl with long legs and big thighs. Her face was mostly lips and chin. She’d been to forty beauty pageants in thirteen years, but never won or placed. My sister didn’t take them seriously enough to try, just to attend. There were plenty of participation sashes in a suitcase under her bed. She was one of those good-looking women who can be so carefree about their natural splendor that you only want to kick them in the forehead.

Next to her I would have felt insignificant if I wasn’t wearing my purple suit. I’d bought it with my savings. I didn’t have much, but the suit wasn’t worth much. The material was wrinkle-proof. There were washing-machine instructions inside the jacket.

But still I wore the slacks, tie, shoes, everything, because a suit explains a man to his world. It organizes him in a respectable compartment. This formal outfit wasn’t camouflage, it was an announcement.

On the drive back, from Ithaca, Nabisase showed me card tricks. She was practicing for a pageant in November. Even long after getting bored Nabisase flicked face cards around the car just to keep me from becoming maudlin.

More maudlin.

— They want to greet the man of the house formally, I said.

Nabisase nodded. — I’ll send Mom.

Neighbors were on the sidewalk honking at each other informally.

I pulled our gate open, they walked in.

This was on a Saturday, October 7th. A clear day, but chilly because it was winter. People wore coats, scarves, dickeys.

One woman passed me, then two. Like that. Women. Women. All these women and me.

Nabisase tapped my shoulder. — You couldn’t invite shorties? she asked.

— I don’t think there are any other men in this neighborhood.

— What about those two? I can go tell them right now.

Before she could talk I put my hand on her mouth. — They look busy, I said.

The pair of guys were about my age and only twenty feet away, relaxing on a stoop next door. One was muscular and the other was thin, so you can guess why I ignored them. I believed in market dominance, not competition. They waved, but I didn’t. I pulled my sister to the backyard; I had the only ‘y’ chromosome around.

It had been three parched years for me. I don’t mean three years since I had sex; I mean thirty-six months since a friendly handshake. I’d been reduced to brushing past women on crowded elevators; I was that man in the subway car who enjoys overcrowding way too much. When I made it to the back the crowd called my name.

— Anthony! they hailed instinctively.

They didn’t question what I’d done in the world. College, work, armed forces, whatever.

My hands uplifted, they encircled me; the planets continuing their heliocentricity.

I knew what I needed and that was a woman, but my mother had her ideas. After the great greeting I had an appetite, so I went to the tables. We had plastic plates, knives, forks and spoons.

There was a bowl of off-white sweet potatoes, a flat pan of fried chapati which are these flat bread disks originally from India that my mother loved since childhood. A pot of oxtail soup. A pot of chicken in salty brown gravy. A pot of meatballs hand-rolled by Grandma, then fried before being simmered in tomato sauce. A dish of brown rice and another of white. When I list these things it’s to say which items I sampled first. There were nine others that I’d touch on the second round.

When I sat on one of the cheap chairs we’d rented for the party Mom propped herself next to me. — That’s quite a calorie base you’ve made.

It was a diet tip. Mom was full of them, but because I was feeling so special and wearing my purple suit I had thought she was complimenting me on choosing foods well.

— But do you know what’s just as filling as those meatballs?

— The crawfish?

— Broccoli.

What a stupid person. What a colossal wingnut. — No plant tastes as good as meat.

— You’ve never had a shiitake mushroom, then.

I couldn’t lift the first forkful to my lips, though I tried. This seemed odd until I realized my mother was holding my left hand down.

— Eating healthy doesn’t just help you lose weight. It can change your complexion. Your blood pressure improves. So many of your problems could be solved.

She was referring to my mind of course; as if lentils were a natural antipsychotic. Though she’d been on a number of medications she wasn’t pushing them on me. I’m sure Mom gave more credit for her wellness to leeks and various tubers.

— I’m not asking you to become a vegetarian.

I looked at her strangely; I hadn’t realized I was talking out loud. That happened to me occasionally; the blinds between thoughts and words drawn up.

— Then what are you telling me to do?

— You remember when I was 270 pounds? Mom asked.

— 1981–1990.

— You don’t have to be that specific. Was it really for so long? Now I can’t remember.

— We used to sneak whole bags of cookies.

— It was never that much, she said.

One of us was lying.

I thought: If my mother doesn’t let me swallow some ox I’m going to fall into a coma right in the grass. I’m telling you this even though I’m not proud of it.

— I’ll start tomorrow, I promised, though I didn’t mean it.

— You don’t mean it, she said.

I covered my forehead so she wouldn’t also see the sexual frustration I had gathered inside.

— Start today, she said. I’m talking about a whole change. You won’t believe how much of a difference it makes.

Imagine that everywhere you went some sprightly guy follows you; a train, an elevator, in the shower. Now this guy isn’t so bad; he doesn’t hit you. He just plays an accordion loudly and right into your ear. This goes on so long that it’s no longer exactly noticeable, but the sound is wearing you down. You become irritated and try to make him stop, but when you try to grab his throat he takes a tiny step just out of reach. And keeps playing. It’s no longer music or even separate chords, but a constant buzzing just behind you. It keeps you awake for days until exhaustion makes the stupid acts seem sensible. I’d been walking around my apartment naked on the day my family found me only because wearing clothes in the house felt too confining, I’m sure that lots of people do it. The problem is that when I opened the door I was just too haggard to get dressed. Though they must have thought I went outside like that all the time.

I gave my mother the plate of food then she took it to the trash. While Mom felt sure that this would save me, I had my own idea.

Walked up to a seventy-year-old woman with a face like warm pie crust, soft and dimpled. I took her hand and kissed it.

While pouring a dumpling-shaped teenager some fruit punch I told her: — Cornell’s architecture program is one of the best. You should let me see if I can get you in.

She shrugged then went back to her chair, somberly chewing potato chips. She was expressionless, her face amorphous, but I was so horny that she charmed me.

None of my lines worked, but then neither did straight conversation.

There was a lady leaning against one side of our house with her hair pulled back under a bright scarf, face in some book. I tip-toed closer because if I’d had any luck in the world it was with literate women. But this one was only checking the horoscopes in the back of her TV Guide.

Though she did smell like cocoa butter, which was nice.

Mom came around again checking if I’d loaded a new plate, but I hadn’t. The backyard was only about twenty feet by twenty, so where could I go to nibble mashed potatoes undetected? Since I couldn’t fulfill one hunger I tried the other; applying my smile to more women regardless of age or infirmity. One old woman had no voice box thanks to cigarettes, so she used that electric wand against her throat. As a girl she said she’d loved to sing, but no one listened since her operation. She wasn’t bad looking or at least I tried to be objective about myself here; I had no room to discriminate. She told me she’d sing two Jim Reeves songs, but if that was English I didn’t understand. Every word she sang was just a long or short variation on a sound, — zzz- or — zzzzzz- and occasionally, — zuh-. I held her hand gently, but it was clear that sex was long past her. So when Mom went inside to get napkins I ran to the meal tables and stole a chicken leg.

I crept to the side of the house then waited next to our Oldsmobile Firenza; even bent over like I was checking the hub-caps. Until I heard Mom out back again.

— You’re Anthony.

A man behind me spoke before I could eat so I turned with more than a soupçon of agitation asking, — What? What?!

— Nothing to worry about, my man. Your mother told me about the party. She told me about you.

He was taller than me. His suit was tailored tight to make him seem even longer. From a block away he’d look six foot three, but closer it was an even six.

— What did she say? I may have sounded agitated. All I needed was for Mom to ruin me with the neighbors, by telling them I was touched in the head.

This guy smiled, saying, — Hey now. No problems.

He said, — Ishkabibble.

— S’l’m aleikoum, I answered, unsure if this was right.

He asked, — You a Muslim?

— No, I thought you were. What did you say?

— My name. Ishkabibble. I helped your grandmother get the paper she needed for this house.

— She couldn’t do it on her own?

— I’m better than the banks, he said. I am the U.S. Treasury to half this neighborhood.

Ishkabibble had a doofy tooth. One of his front teeth was doofy. White and fully grown, but twisted about twenty degrees abnormal. He could sip a straw without opening his mouth. Would it be rude, I wondered, to suck the marrow out of a chicken bone right now.

He said, — I understand that you’re ready to enter the world.

— I bought brand new clothes and everything.

He nodded, then smiled. — Of course. I’m not trying to down you. Your mother just told me you were gone.

— That’s what it was.

— So now you come back to help them out?

— That’s what it is.

What I didn’t want to do was act greedy. — She’s in the back if you’re looking for her, I said.

Go ahead out back and let me feed, that’s what I actually meant.

— Your mother? I’ll speak with her later, Ishkabibble said. Right now I want to talk with you. Young man comes home and starts to work, he needs a way to get around.

— I’ll get a bus pass.

He slapped my shoulder lightly. — Are women putting out for bus transfers these days? Let me tell you, a nice car gives any man a polishing.

— You think I need one?

— Who doesn’t?

This guy was good. If he’d had a contract I’d have signed it without reading.

We were at my open front gate. — There’s five cars on this block that I helped with. Come see what we can do.

I had the chicken leg palmed so that the meaty top was hidden in my hand while the bone was up against my wrist, obscured by the sleeve of my suit jacket.

My neighbor’s garbage bin had been tackled in his yard. A big mess, there was a splash of yellow rice, egg shells and diapers across their front steps. A spoiled wave lapping at the shore. Before I could figure what made the mess a tiny dog ran out from behind the garbage can, leapt the neighbor’s low fence and attacked Ishkabibble’s skinny leg.

Rosedale was used to this. I hate to admit. Yes it was a middle-class outfit, from the mid-price cars to the Catholic schools nearby. A neighborhood of well-kept homes. But it was still common to find feral dogs hopping from yard to yard; so starved that their ribs showed through. Where had they come from? Children. Stupid, stupid kids. Who lost their dogs or set them free. Or even some who let their dogs hump in the park just to laugh at the sticking motion. This is how five loose dogs becomes fifteen. Then forty. Besides the domesticated house pets and yard guards, some frenzied crossbreeds terrorized the neighborhood. Daily there was shit on many stoops, torn garbage bags in driveways. At night they bayed from Brookville Park or street corners or under our windows.

But now there was the mutt trying to eviscerate Ishkabibble. It was a mix of Pug and Pekingnese; with a face so flat it might have been concave. A short-haired body, but a fluffy tail.

The man looked to me for help, but what did he expect? That I would drive my hands into the maw to pry his pant leg free? I turned to get my sister, the tough one.

Ishkabibble said, — Throw him the chicken leg.

— Why should I?

— What?!

The skin was reddish and greasy. Now he wanted me to give it away?

He kicked stiffly at me, but moved off-balance like a marionette.

— Okay, I said to Ishkabibble. I’ll help.

But not right away. I picked at the chicken tenderly.

To his credit Ishkabibble checked the dog in the jaw with his heel.

When it barked Ishkabibble got free and tried to shut the gate, but soon as he pushed it the dog stuffed its charged face in between and there wasn’t enough room to throw down the little metal clasp.

— What the fuck are you doing? he yelled.

— I’m just taking the skin, I said. Let me get the skin at least.

The man actually spat on me.

On the lapel of my jacket.

I stopped tearing at the meat then threw it to the road.

As the food went over its head the dog disengaged from Ishkabibble. It caught the morsel in the air then made a choking noise as it swallowed the bone then broke it under the teeth. And chewed. I watched the Peking-pug do that for a whole five minutes.

Until Ishkabibble asked me, — Are you crying?

There was a fight in the backyard, but I was in the basement so it had no effect on me. After four hours with the guests I felt I’d made the strongest impression I could. Strategically speaking, retreat was victory.

In the basement, beside my bed, were the ten boxes of books I’d brought home. Each one smelled like vanilla because Grandma sprayed them with air freshener that morning.

My mother was outside, saying, — Just come out and tell me what he said.

A woman answered. — You told him I was old!

— I just told him you looked older than me!

Any book would do. I wanted to read quietly for an hour. Growing up with lunacy means learning to allow the skirmishes. Other people don’t understand and think: look how badly your mother was acting. But one fight was nothing. You can’t imagine how much worse it used to be.

My learning wasn’t remarkable. When I was enrolled at Cornell I read enough to pass, but couldn’t remember much of it now. Only after the expulsion did learning start to seem important.

— I don’t want you coming onto my block now, I heard the woman tell my mother.

— Well then get your husband to stop driving down mine!

Through the basement windows I saw partygoer legs, but not bodies. The shins had gathered into a circle around Mom and the married woman. Maybe it was true that Mom had slept with the lady’s husband. Though she was on Haldol there were other explanations for that kind of behavior. After losing weight Mom became bitter. It must have been the fat times, decades of being treated like a burlap sack by men and women. Now that she was dazzling Mom used her beauty as a shiv.

— Please, Mom! My sister yelled out there. Mrs. Hattamurdy, please!

That’s when I should have gone upstairs, but I’d already chosen the collected stories of Algernon Blackwood. The book was in my hand. They were supernatural tales which, like Edgar Allan Poe’s, were ripping good until the last few pages.

I might still have helped my sister. She was yelling my name. She was forced to be referee at her own mother’s cockfight. I stayed below. Soon, Grandma came with me.

Down the basement stairs as I was reading Blackwood’s “The Man Who Was Milligan,” a dumb story that I still wanted to finish.

— Your mother has trouble, Grandma said.

— I don’t really want to go up.

— No?

I made room for her. — Sit down here, Grandma.

— I will, she whispered.

She was wearing yellow rubber gloves. — You’ve been doing the dishes? I asked.

— Who else?

— I would.

The ceiling in the basement was lower than on the first floor. Eight feet instead of eleven. The room felt crowded amid Grandma, our cowardice, and I.

— A woman says your mother has had friendship with her husband.

— Did she call it friendship?

— No she did not.

I shut the book then put it in my lap. My breath smelled bad even though I’d brushed my teeth this morning, so I tried not to breathe on her but then remembered that this was my grandmother; not every woman was a potential partner.

— I’m always glad to see how much you like books, she said.

— How do you stay so thin, Grandma?

She sighed. — You know I have always wanted more weight. They called me skinny names when I was young.

— I would give you some of mine if I could.

— I have always been trapped between small and smallest. She put up two threadlike hands to show the parameters.

— People expect me to stay somewhere between bigger and bigger forever.

— Maybe your sister will stop the fight, Grandma said.

— She’ll learn how. I did.

— Your mother has been doing so well for a long time.

— Yes?

— I just don’t want her to now make new problems. My sadness comes from your pain.

— I like the way my boxes smell. Thank-you.

Grandma nodded. — I will spray them every day.

She took the book from my lap then set it facedown on my pillow. The cover showed a hazy painting of children wearing grotesque masks. She didn’t think much of the subject matter, I guess, but then all she read was tabloids. — Will you get a job? Grandma asked.

— I’ll apply for some tomorrow.

— A safe one.

— I want to move furniture.

— Oh, you will break your back.

— I worked even after I stopped going to school, Grandma. I cleaned houses in Ithaca.

— Why don’t you do that here? That’s no danger.

— Moving is like cleaning. I like to see things get organized.

— How long did you work like that. Houses in Cornell?

— The last two years.

— Two years! Such time. Why didn’t we know?

— Because I didn’t tell you.

— We believed in your letters. You wrote us about classes.

— But you never asked to see my grades. I touched my knees. What made you come up in September? I asked.

— Your sister begged us to take the time.

Of the noises outside Grandma and I ignored most of them. I was an expert at it and she was the grandmaster.

— Being a moving man is hard, she said.

— I could get an easier job, but it won’t pay any better.

— Not easy, she said. You should labor. So much of your problem would be solved. Your grandfather toiled harder when he was sick and it always healed him.

I nodded. There were many suggestions. Everyone wanted to make me better, but we couldn’t even name the problem.

3

I met Lorraine on the 6 train when it was between 14th Street and 23rd. We were in a tunnel, but I choose to remember this as meeting when it was dark.

Sunday, October 8th, my mother woke with bruises on her cheeks because the married Haitian woman was a better fighter.

That morning we sat nearly together in the living room, with Mom, Grandma and I on the sectional couch. Nabisase on the floor eating cereal from a yellow bowl in her lap.

My mother and sister talked, but I was quiet just like Grandma. When anyone’s tea was finished I made more. Grandma convinced Nabisase to let her comb and braid her hair. In this way we hoped to apologize to Nabisase and even Mom.

My mother and grandmother were foreigners, essentially, so they had an alien’s attitude about forgiveness. Mom apologized and expected that all bad feeling was soothed. But, being Americans, my sister and I expected contrition. Saying sorry was fine, but tears were better. This is a country of moral failures, not simple mistakes.

But Mom only said, — I didn’t mean to fight. Forgive me.

That’s it.

Then she and Grandma left to clean the bathroom, mow the yard, keep living.

Leaving my sister and I as mystified as a Baptist with a Buddhist groom.

Our living room was painted red, but in the low register. Nearly crimson. It was a serious little chamber; only more so with my sister in it.

— This family needs church, my sister said.

— Awww. I groaned, ground my teeth, gripped the couch cushion then collapsed.

— Let’s get dressed, Nabisase commanded.

— You should at least ask me.

— Wear a suit, she said.

— I’ve only got one and it’s dirty.

Mom and Grandma weren’t going. — We did our time in that institution, Mom insisted.

When I hid in the boiler room I hoped my dithering would make us miss the preacher’s call, but Nabisase appeared carrying my shoes and black socks. I ducked into Grandma’s closet and my sister brought me a tie. A thirteen-year-old girl haunted me.

This had nothing to do with religion; if this had been Saturday she’d insist we go join a synagogue. On Monday it would be to attend a school board meeting for Community School District 29. A teenager’s natural talent is for blending tedium with enmity.

Unfortunately in Queens it was possible to indulge this impulse for Holy Ghosts or Holy Rollers at any time. I couldn’t delay us out of a sermon. There were seven churches in a one-mile radius from our home; even one that operated from midnight to six A.M.

Storefronts, trailers on the side of the road, established brick venues with gabled rooftops and parking lots. Christ was here. I later discovered that Queens was much like the South. Places where there is one God and he tolls for thee.

There was a church three blocks away. Close enough that Nabisase and I walked even though I didn’t want to.

On the corner of 229th Street and 147th Avenue there was a small brick building that might have been mistaken for a speakeasy rather than a church. It had no windows and only one gray metal door in front. The sign on the gate that surrounded the church read: Apostolic Church of Christ. A Church with Old Time Powers.

— These people actually believe in God, I told her. Do you understand that?

I didn’t want to attend a service just to hear my sister rant to the pastor afterwards. Screaming about how much she hated Mom’s corrupt behavior at the picnic.

Nabisase would do that because she believed the church was here to serve her, not the other way round. If she knew that selfcenteredness was a sin she’d never have gone inside. Airing family distress seemed like the wrong reason to attend anyway and, more to the point, embarrassing. I really wanted to avoid that kind of thing in Rosedale. I thought I came off pretty well at the cookout so I wanted to make more good impressions, not fewer.

As my sister opened the church door I ran away. Slowly. Two blocks to the bus stop.

I went to the subway via a gypsy van to Jamaica then an E train from Parsons Boulevard. Since it was Sunday and I couldn’t look for work, I’d decided to buy a second suit. They were only $100 for everything. Not including shoes and socks. I transferred at Lexington Avenue to the 6. Where I met Lorraine. A little shredded paperback in her hands.

I sat next to her so I could be sure she wasn’t reading a hair pamphlet or a cosmetics catalog or a douche brochure. I don’t know.

Where we sat the train car smelled pleasantly like cinnamon because of two small girls whose hands and cheeks were iced and sticky from pastries. That seemed like a good omen for a fat man. Even better when the cover of her book showed the words, Translated from the Russian by Andrew R. MacAndrew.

— How do you like the story? I asked her.

Lorraine turned her face to me, but not her body.

I don’t want to make too much of her; Lorraine was on her way to being as heavy as me. We had the same shape. Just she was six inches shorter. Her face was nearly lost in these frizzy hairs that dangled from the sides of her head. She lurched forward so much as she sat that her nipples nearly touched her belly button. Lorraine was a shlump and tremendously glamorous. I wanted to cry over her feet because I was so thankful that she’d turned around. More so when she kept listening to me.

She was reading a book of stories by Nikolai Gogol so I told her about his novel, Dead Souls.

That when he’d finished the first third his mind began to twist, instead of just being a good story he was convinced that his book was meant to save the Russian people. When he realized this was nonsense he burned the unpublished pages, most of the second third, then starved himself to death in a religious fervor. The year was 1852.

Lorraine didn’t find the tale very compelling, but she liked the fact that I knew it. Most of the guys she dealt with divided their time between PlayStation games and good weed. I couldn’t tell a woman with that kind of bias that I’d rather be discussing ghost stories. My freshman lit class had taught me enough to approximate erudition.

We spoke on the telephone most evenings. Lorraine was a college student and in class during the day. I was never allowed to ring her because she had a volatile roommate studying to be a veterinarian. A guy. She said she lived in the dorms, but I sure didn’t believe her. Because I didn’t have her phone number I felt powerless. Whenever she chose Lorraine could stop calling, then where would I be?

Every conversation I asked her to spend the night with me. For two weeks she waffled, but why else were we talking.

Two weeks to wear her down.

She suggested this motel with a view of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Snug between a furniture warehouse and an abandoned furniture warehouse Red Penny Motel looked positively high-toned. Seventy-five rooms, but only two lights were on. Twenty-six cars in the parking lot. The night was so cold that my nose had numbed and I didn’t get to smell this rich city.

I walked into the parking lot. Probably the first person over the age of sixteen who’d ever done such a thing. The bus stop was seven blocks away, and calling a gypsy cab would have been a waste.

The lobby entrance was cramped down by the giant penny slung above the doors. Eight feet across with a large Abe Lincoln whose nose was misshaped long and had a pointed beard, more Devil than the long-interred emancipator. Maybe the crazy black Hebrew Israelites had gone into the hospitality industry after realizing there was no profit in broadswords.

I went into the lobby to get keys for a room then waited on a bench across from a pair of old women. I had never seen such love as theirs. They held hands absently, but firm; one set of fingers like kudzu, the other like dirt. It was the kind of friendship earned after forty years. I doubted they were renting a room; the motel clerk was letting them rest some warmth back into their bodies. If they had shelter I wouldn’t know it; how they made money I can’t surmise.

After ten minutes our quartet had, involuntarily, synchronized our breathing. A tiny gasp around the room and then a silence deeper than the fields of space.

The first woman wore sandals even though it was October 21st. Her toes were exposed. Her heels were calloused into stiff yellowed skin that I wanted to caress between my thumbs.

I missed women very much.

I was wearing a dark green suit that was ugly, but I got good service at the store. It was fitting that I wore it to see Lorraine again since I’d been on my way to buy it when I met her. The Egyptian guy who owned the place in midtown Manhattan even recognized me when I visited. He came from behind the counter screaming, Big Man! I have the jacket for you! You know famous rapper Mr. Notorious B.I.G.? I make you look as good as that.

The suits were worn at home and at work. I’d started moving furniture a week ago.

I stood and smoothed my clothes the best that I could when an old Cadillac arrived; it had commercial license plates and darkened gypsy cab windows. My hands were shaking.

Out stepped Lorraine. She paid the driver a twenty.

As I led Lorraine to our room I felt the pulse of nature on the stairs. My arms and legs trembled so much I thought they were going to tear.

The room had a double bed and that’s it. Not even a night table. The telephone was on the floor. There was space for a dresser or chiffonier, but those starving animals had been sold off by the farmer. I would have made a joke about the decor, but was too afraid that Lorriane only needed one excuse to leave.

— I’m glad to know that, Lorraine said.

I had that feeling again, of my mind being read.

— Your smile, she clarified. I’m glad to know you can smile.

She was nervous. She was.

If I sound surprised that’s because I was surprised. To me women were like the perfect model of government: paving the roads and protecting the weak. Omnipotent.

Boys without fathers say that kind of thing a lot. About their mothers. About their wives. Comparing ladies to goddesses and gold. But still I think we hate women even more than the average guy.

My hands were on her shoulders. I reminded myself that we weren’t in love. Be fun, I told myself. Don’t get weird. She only wants to play.

A man walked across the second floor landing right outside our room. The curtains were drawn so I only heard his boots on the concrete in drowsy cadence. He stopped by our door.

Lorraine wasn’t listening, but I was.

She touched my neck to tell me that we could kiss, but I wanted to hear the man outside go mosey off. I tried to think of some excuse for checking the door, but didn’t want to look like the cheating husband afraid that he was being followed. Or worse, a nut.

Lorraine made my skin tin again. When she squeezed warm hands around my cheeks they curved and shaped easily. I wanted to enjoy it, but hardly could because the outline of a man was still visible through the window when our curtains shifted.

Don’t think I’m being too spectral here, I wasn’t afraid that the guy was a ghost; it was a push-in robbery that worried me.

— There’s some things I’ve got to take care of anyway, Lorraine said, then dropped her bookbag on the floor.

I was agitated by the guy standing outside then by the fact that my hesitation had curdled our mood. — Why don’t you forget about that? I suggested. What is that?

— My books, she said. I have to write a paper.

Insulted, I went to the bathroom. Who brings homework to a rendezvous?

Of course, geek that I am, outrage gave way to a fantasy of she and I doing naked research on the bed. How erotic it would be to write up the bibliography with her bare thighs pressed against my back. Then when I walked out again Lorraine was packing.

— We have to move, she said.

— What the hell are you talking about?

— There’s no working phone and I need one.

Lorraine had unscrewed the mouthpiece from the handset to find that inside it someone had lumped ten or twelve pieces of gum.

— What do you want the phone for? I can help you.

— Please, she scoffed.

I got angry that she didn’t want my sexy research assistance. — You know these rooms are usually hourly, I said.

— It took you almost an hour just get up those stairs.

I sat on the bed and stifled any cracks about her own fat back because Lorraine seemed an insult away from running home.

— It’s not so hard. You go down and tell them the room’s not how you want it.

I was so annoyed that I forgot about the spook by my door until I was out there with little of Lorraine to protect me. But I did still have the perfect clean smell of the woman, which seemed to be enough because the man out there had gone.

This new room was like the other one except that we had a nightstand which Lorraine used as a desk. While she chatted with class-mates on the working phone I sat on the floor, horseshit insane for pussy.

When another half hour passed I walked over to see that she was writing her essay in bubble letter handwriting, like a junior-high-school girl. Plus the book she used for reference was wrong, mostly because she used only one. Lorraine was writing, in part, about Lee Iacocca’s relationship with Henry Ford II and what caused Iacocca to finally leave Ford. But she used only Iacocca’s autobiography for the facts!

When I get bored my favorite pastime is to catalogue the stupidity of others.

— I thought you were supposed to hang up a jacket so it wouldn’t wrinkle, she said just then.

— Uh, this is wrinkle-proof.

— Nothing natural is wrinkle-proof.

She laughed, but I wondered why she had to be so shitty. Maybe she’d seen me sneering at her two-inch-wide margins. I felt my face warming and didn’t want the ridicule. If we’d been having sex already this wouldn’t come up.

My mother might think a diet was going to save me and Grandma feel the same about hard work, but what I truly needed was to release this hydroelectric dam — sized nut then the lesser problems like debilitating psychiatric disorders could be swiftly fixed.

But my outburst only made Lorraine less horny, imagine that. Instead of shredding off her underthings she asked me some questions that I didn’t understand.

— Do you think Ahmed Abdel deserves another trial? she repeated.

I shrugged, I stalled, I had no idea who this guy was but wanted to sound well informed. Maybe he was a singer who’d killed his wife while on drugs. William Burroughs never went to jail, so why should this guy?

— That’s not what happened at all, she yelled. What do you do with your time?

Lorraine drained a pamphlet from her bookbag. His name was Ahmed Abdel and he’d gone to jail for exploding a police car while two cops sat inside. He swore he hadn’t been involved. That he was a journalist, not a jingoist. This was on the first page of the pamphlet.

— My friends are making time for his campaign. What about you?

I didn’t like her tone; it sounded like a dare. — I’m afraid I’d get lost in the crowd.

— You are the crowd, she said.

I think my hesitation rubbed her rawest parts. She was in college, a time of optimistic fascism when it seems that all the world needs is one more rally.

— I’m not sure we’d ever be good friends, I told her.

— Is that why we’re here?

— Well.

— You keep that. Getting involved can change your entire life. Make you a better person.

She pointed to the pamphlet and wouldn’t relent until I’d put the ten-page document in my jacket pocket. I was on the bed and so was she, but we faced dissimilar walls.

Two hours past midnight Lorraine said, — You’ve been quiet.

— I’ve been looking at you.

She had a faint mustache over her upper lip. It didn’t make her ugly or masculine. Right then it was the most beautifully feminine thing that I could stand.

I crept toward her. Dim light was the best special effect; it made me appear graceful. My knees were in some of her papers; my palms ground down on the books. She put one hand out to push me back, but I was fawning over her and she liked that as much as everyone does.

She got into bed under the comforter. I dug in there to find one of her feet.

Lorraine squirmed, but I pulled her down toward me. I touched the back of my hand against the top of her wide foot.

I took her clothes off without getting to see her naked. Pulling the socks, jeans, shirt, panties even, while the covers stayed up to her neck. It was nice. Like she was stripping, but I only got to see the layers once they were removed. Her body, under there, became more real the harder I imagined.

In the bathroom I ran a washcloth under hot water and motel soap then sat near her again and pulled the covers away from her thighs. I massaged the cloth into her leg until one was slick with bubbles. Under the knees. On her shins. Until the cloth was dry.

Wet the hand towel again. Soap again.

Lifted her other short thick leg onto my shoulder, pressed the red cloth against the back of her thigh. Wrapped the cloth over my pointed finger and touched it to where leg greets pelvis, where her skin shifted from one shade to one darker.

Did this steadily until her hips matched the rhythm of the wet cloth and my hand. As she pushed against me lather wept down her leg.

I squeezed the little towel until the soapy water uttered into a puddle in my hand then I rested my palm against her pussy. When she rubbed against me the slight tickle of her hair played up my forearm into my elbow. Moved my hand until the foam spread across us then I touched my hand to my own neck, to my mouth.

The look on Lorraine’s face might have been mine. With her eyes shut she seemed far away. I wondered where. I doubt she was even focusing on Ahmed Abdel or that guy she lived with. She had reclined into that calm state people only find when alone.

I rubbed the top of my head on the lips of her pussy just to spread her scent on me.

I thumped her knees lightly with my fingertips.

What sounds? If the curtain hadn’t been so thin there would have been that kind of total quiet when there’s no light. We had a sackcloth warmth in the room.

I wanted to ask her everything.

If she genuinely cared about Ahmed Abdel’s cause. Why she had started college late. If she had children. If she’d ever been out of the country. If she was in love with me.

— Why won’t you give me your phone number?

She answered sluggishly. — A woman keeps power however she can.

— Why does that prisoner mean so much to you?

— Because his mind is such a powerful tool.

— Could you imagine feeling that way about me?

I asked, but she didn’t answer. Only breathed.

— What are you that I don’t know you are?

Without hesitation Lorraine replied, — The hero.

Two hours later Lorraine could sleep, but not me. I was pretty naked except for my T-shirt and boxers that I wore the whole evening because even in the dark I was self-conscious. I took them off since she was tuned out, then ran naked around the motel, three times.

Okay I felt like doing that, but if I really had it would have been an act of joy, not madness, though it might have appeared otherwise to the average person.

I did have trouble sleeping though, so I spent time in the bathroom wishing there was a television above the tub. I hadn’t even brought a book because I’d had this fantasy of Lorraine and I sexing each other for eleven hours, which is the kind of thing one comes to believe in when years pass between layovers. I forgot that people and parts get exhausted.

Eventually I was so bored that I tried to wake Lorraine again, but her eyes were soldered shut. This led me to that paper she wrote. Just to do something. The one on the nightstand, the one that I took. I shut myself inside the bathroom and corrected the work.

I didn’t mean to be snotty when I wrote questions in the margins like, Are you sure Ford was a ‘toad of a man’? and, Should you really describe Lee Iacocca as having ‘the business sense of a god’? and, Do gods really have business sense? Which one? Mammon? Ayizan?

My suggestions left a terrible smell. Instead of running off tonight I wanted to have sex with her in the morning. I wanted to wake her by gliding my tongue up the crack of her ass. I wanted to do that many times in the coming weeks, but that wouldn’t happen if she found this cutjob. So I rewrote the paper, making the corrections I could, but without rearranging her ideas entirely. It was so much fun. I would have made a good English teacher, except that I hate kids.

After I was done I wrote a note on another sheet of paper apologizing for having spilled water on her notebook, so that was why I had to do it over by hand. Then I tore her version, the one with my critiques, and flushed the scraps away.

Fingers of my left hand were cramped from writing awkwardly; sitting on the toilet using my crossed leg as a desktop. After I put the notebook back on the nightstand I ran warm water over my hand, but I heard Lorraine mutter around so I thought she was waking up and I turned off the light in the bathroom. This was the first moment in an hour when I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I wanted to feel good alone.

I shut the bathroom door then locked it. The water was running into the sink, but the faucet made another sound, too. Like a gas oven burner when the dial’s been turned halfway, but the flame hasn’t yet been lit. A — hisss— that was soothing not sinister. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror, only the outline of me since the light came faint through a small window near the ceiling. I couldn’t go outside and do it, but in here I took off my clothes to prance around the little room; I shook my naked ass celebrating an end to one long dry season.

4

Lorraine and I parted the next morning. Sunday, October 22nd. I never saw her again. She stopped calling. Her number had come up as ‘Unavailable’ on the caller i.d. box every time.

But I wasn’t sad then. We didn’t talk about getting together again, but yes I’d expected it. Now it’s like there are two versions of me. The one who knows that she left and the one who doesn’t. My longing clouds the portrait of him, but his delight remains with me.

I was overjoyed that day. So much I skipped in the parking lot then down the block to the bus stop. I just about popped.

If I’d wanted I could have taken an express train rush through the Bronx and upper Manhattan, but back in Rosedale, this being Sunday, my sister was undoubtedly strapping on her church shoes.

Nabisase’d been so angry two Sundays earlier when I first ran off and met Lorraine on the 6 that she made me promise to come the next weekend, but that was the first time the movers had work for me, overtime pay, so I swore to go this weekend, but then Lorraine again.

I made the two-hour commute home last three. Passed four magazine stalls on various subway platforms; bought a Watchamacallit at each one. When I opened the kitchen door Grandma nearly pounced on my shoulders. — Where were you! she demanded. He’s here, she called.

— Where did you go, Mom asked, coming up from the basement. Where did you get to?

— I met a friend.

— You must call, Grandma told me. She was using a bucket and mop on the kitchen floor. Though she was ninety-three, Grandma still sewed, did the laundry, walked to the supermarket and carried groceries on her own.

— Or else we wonder, Mom said. Tell us you won’t do this again.

— An oath, Grandma whispered.

— I promise, I swear, I pledge and I vow. Am I going to have to go to church, too?

— You missed Nabisase, Grandma said.

Am I crazy then, for expecting I’d avoided lecturing, hectoring? Mom even agreed.

— You don’t need church, she said from the kitchen table where she was preparing a breakfast of asparagus spears and weak tea.

Mom took my hand. — I know what can help you.

I said, — Great.

Every realm has its capitol and for Southern Queens that’s Jamaica. Sanctuary of discount shoppers. 99¢ stores and used cars sold along Hillside Avenue.

Mom drove up Merrick Boulevard. It wasn’t congested at noon, but by one o’clock all the churches freed the faithful. You wouldn’t imagine how many believers there are until you see them filling the roads.

I kept the car window down because I had the smell from between Lorraine’s legs still drying on my chin; no mother wants to smell pussy on her son’s face.

— You’re right about that! Mom laughed and slapped the dashboard.

I was embarrassed for what she might have heard. I put my hands around my forehead.

— Did I say something?

— Never mind that. You’re a grown man I guess.

An admission I’d appreciate on any other afternoon, but this time it made me feel oily.

— Reach in that dash, she said.

Gladly. I went into the glove compartment elbow deep pulling out every item asking Mom if that’s what she wanted. What about this? In one movie I liked, Little Tricks, a man hides his monstrous, deformed brother under the car’s dashboard; the creature eats unsuspecting prostitutes one digit at a time.

— One of the music tapes! Stop playing, Mom said. It has your name on it.

The tape with my name on it was so old that the plastic outer shells were held together with Krazy Glue that had gone gummy brown in the cracks. While the tape began reeling I took off my shoes. I wanted to sleep. I would have, but then my mother asked me a question.

— How old are you today?

Her voice sounded strange because it was playing through our two car speakers. Then my answer was funny, because I squeaked. — I’m ten years old.

— You keep these in the car? I asked over the recorded conversation.

— Not always. Just recently.

If I was ten on the tape then it was from 1982. She’d been taking photos, home movies and even these cassette tracks since I was five. Whenever she was institutionalized I sent her the tapes of Nabisase and I to comfort her.

— How do you like your new little sister? My mother asked a ten-year-old Anthony.

— She’s fine, he answered.

— Is that all you can say about her?

— My sister is always making BM’s!

That’s how the dialogue went; I was underwhelmed, but my mother was marooned. She was back there now, in 1982, without need of rescue.

She said, — Do you remember when you were that little boy?

— You taped us a thousand times.

The rest of the way she and I were quiet while Mom and Anthony spoke. They were funny, sometimes bland, but I enjoyed the time capsule, too.

We parked on Linden Boulevard then walked around the corner onto Merrick. Two of the four corners at the intersection were occupied by gas stations, the third was a hair salon and fourth the Hillman Christian School.

Hillman A.M.E. was the grandest landowner in Southern Queens; its elders ran the school and other businesses. The church itself, two blocks from this intersection, was one hundred thousand square feet. It looked like a massive clam, a wooden quahog, surrounded by flood lights. A house of worship constantly lit for a Hollywood premiere.

This Hillman church consortium ran for-profit businesses like the Christian School along Merrick Boulevard. Hillman Neighborhood Care Team, Hillman Christian School Early Childhood Learning & Development Center, Hillman Home Improvement Association. Hillman Federal Credit Union.

They placed caregivers with the homebound elderly.

Ran small-business seminars.

They were even buying back homes from the Arabs and Jews who’d been overcharging the largely working-class black renters for two decades. There was much applause for this in local black papers because it was still two years until Hillman A.M.E. raised the rents to prices neither type of Semite would have ever dared.

— How many more of those tapes do you have? I asked her.

— Plenty. Of you. You and your sister. Your sister and I. A couple of Grandma. Isaac.

— We’re all saved, I said.

The long corridor that is Merrick Boulevard pushed sounds up into the ceiling so that car horns and bus horns and truck horns, the music of Queens, floated away. And underneath them I heard the cheerful wind of birds flirting.

I was constantly surprised by how many trees there were on every block out here. Is that a stupid thing to say? When I was at Cornell, Ithaca’s ponds, the foliage, made me forget what my city was really like. When friends who weren’t from New York would call it mechanical and unnatural I agreed. Pretty soon I was describing the piss in building staircases or heaps of trash ten feet high because I thought it made me tougher to come from a hard place. But I didn’t tell enough about Flushing Meadow Park’s scarlet maples. The white-rumped sandpipers of Jamaica Bay.

— I want you to drive with us to a pageant in November. You know I can’t stay awake more than two hours in a car.

I didn’t believe her. Not about the contest, but why she wanted my participation. — You just don’t want to leave me alone in the house for a weekend.

One of the stores on this Hillman-owned block was our destination. — Anyway, she said, here we go. Mom held the door.

I looked up to read the silver letters above the entrance. Hillman Halfway House, it read.

— I’m not going in there.

Mom pulled my arm forcefully. — What’s the problem?

— A halfway house? You want to put me in a hospital, just take me there.

She read the sign out loud then laughed. — I’m not thinking that way. You’ve got the wrong idea.

— How do you mistake the words Halfway and House?

— It’s a saying of ours. ‘Once you step inside you’re halfway to your goal.’

— And what’s my goal?

— To be healthy.

— Healthy?

— To be lean.

— This is a weight-loss clinic?

— It’s a Diet Center.

My mother had to follow me back around the corner to Linden Boulevard, because I walked away.

— What are you doing, Mom? This isn’t going to make things better.

— It’s not? When did you become a doctor?

— Oatmeal in the morning won’t fix me!

She put a few of her nails into my hand. — Worked for me.

I couldn’t deny that she looked force majeure, but this solution was as idealistic as Grandma’s. Labor was not a balm. At a job in the Bronx I’d tried to pick up a couch by myself a day ago and strained my shoulders.

— Maybe you should just get me some of your Haldol. I’ll take it if that means you’ll all stop trying to save my life.

— I’m telling you that’s wrong, Mom said. I stopped taking it a year ago. And look at me.

Reflected in the glass panels of the hair salon on the corner Mom and I looked like a married couple. I was wearing a cheap suit plus my fat added twenty years. I looked forty-three. And Mom, fetching, sinewy, wearing a red rabbit fur scarf, seemed thirty-five at best.

— So what do you use for. . I tapped my right temple twice.

— I used to have faith in doctoring. But the doctor’s had no faith in me. They don’t want you well just wasted.

The stinging odor of hair dye made it out to the street. Along with it came the vinegar odor of straightening treatments, the cloying dreadlock butter. We walked back.

— Why is a church running a fat camp? How do they make a profit on it?

— It’s in Hillman’s honor.

— Hillman A.M.E., that’s a real guy?

— Bartholomew Hillman was a slave in New York in 1787. He had a weight problem.

— The church is named for a fat slave?

— I wouldn’t say it that way.

We reached the Halfway House again.

— How could someone be a fat slave? Did he work in the master’s house?

— No, she said. He worked in the field. They think it was a glandular problem.

Inside, the reception area was a mix of purple and cream. The carpet, the chairs, the walls were these two swirled hues. It was like standing inside a bruised sky. Heaven as a lounge.

At the back of the room there was a narrow door and a wide one. A lacquered wood desk with a receptionist behind it; the receptionist was the lady who walked over to greet my mother with a robust hug.

— And this is my son.

— You’re halfway there, the receptionist said to me in a quiet voice, cleared her throat then said louder, You’re halfway there.

I don’t know how my mother found the clothes hooks on the wall. They were part of the misted background, indiscernible as each water particle in a cloud. Mom’s long brown coat floated nearby as she offered to take mine.

— I’ll wear it a little longer.

Mom didn’t fight me. She wore a thin white sweater with silver sparkles on the shoulders as epaulets. Her boots must have been part of the outfit sale at Rainbow Shop because they had sparkles too, on the three-inch heels. My mother was beautiful despite her general tackiness.

There was a buzzing noise because the receptionist was pressing a button, though I couldn’t see where it would be on her desk. My mother walked to the narrow door and pointed to the other one. I didn’t want to go, but it was the only one I’d fit through. The big door was four feet wide, of gray steel, heavier than terror.

— You go right in there, said the woman at the desk.

— You’ll be happy. Mom cried.

The room was in a gloom worse than the Bronx Zoo’s World of Darkness. I could see only because light came through a pane of one-way glass in the wall to my left. We could see out, but the people on the other side didn’t have to look in.

There was space for twenty normal-sized people, but ten of us filled the room to capacity. I thought there were nine big ladies with me but as my eyes adjusted I realized there were only five. The rest were men like me, curvaceous.

A high-pitched groan played in the room. When I shut the metal door the notes bounced around, above and beneath me. Eventually I recognized it as whale song. I suppose it was meant to be soothing, but did it have to be so loud? I thought the damn mammals were floating inside this tiny room.

I pushed past hefty legs, but there wasn’t much room so people had to stand or shift in their seats. This is when I realized that wasn’t whale music cooing from ceiling to floor, but nine poor metal chairs groaning. When I settled in I added a tenth.

For ventilation there was only a grill the size of a steel wool pad in the ceiling; every person was sweating over his clothes. I undid my tie then the top two buttons of my shirt.

Our freight-entrance door was locked from outside.

We faced the glass.

There were two rooms, ours and the other. Where this one was cramped, in shadows, theirs had floor space and an enormous skylight. A column of sun came down as one thick finger of an approving god.

My mother was with him.

I walked right to the large pane and pressed my face against it. Envy was the climate in our room.

Lorraine’s friend Ahmed Abdel was a Japanese man who’d converted to Islam while incarcerated. He was supported by black and Latino college students; also white celebrities. I thought of his romantically gaunt figure from his pamphlet photograph as I mashed myself against the one-way mirror. Each day that it became clearer she wasn’t going to call me I read that nattering tract because it was all I had. Pathetically, yes, I thought that if I got into his struggle, joined that righteous rigamarole, I’d find my way back to her as an attractively conscientious man. I looked at his photo ten times a day, jealous that it stirred the blood of spoon-eyed revolutionaries like Lorraine. Envy.

— You’re hurting our eyes with that glow-in-the-dark suit so sit down!

— Who said that? I asked.

Nothing’s uglier than unattractive dieters. Even if they lose the weight their faces are still half-Wookie. The grim little pudge who’d yelled at me pointed toward the back of the room. When I returned to my seat it made the whimper of a humpback whale again.

— Oh shut up, I told it.

In the other room seven trim women and men were doing routine tasks while we watched them. Opening letters. A pair danced in a friendly way. One tall man climbed a seven-foot ladder and then came back down. After thirty seconds he went up again.

My mother sat on a wooden footstool lacing up her sneakers. When the right and left foot were done she pulled both strings out to start again.

— See, they don’t need food every minute of the day.

To my right the outline of a man’s large head shifted as he spoke to me. My eyes had adjusted enough to see the mound of his face, but not the features.

— Thanks, I said, because I’d been confused as to what the hell we were doing.

His stomach was even bigger than mine. That was comforting. He wasn’t actually short, but because his thighs were so thick his feet didn’t touch the ground while sitting. When he introduced himself I repeated the name three times because I couldn’t believe it.

— Ledric?

— Ledric.

— Ledric!

— Yes! he yelled at last. Ledric Mayo, he said.

I thought of a war chest of jokes, but before submitting the first one the beetle-faced man who’d mocked my bright green suit yelled, — I can’t concentrate with that jibber-jabber going on back there!

This was an isolation tank, not a meeting room.

— How long does it take to get on that other side? I asked.

— You’ve got some time, Ledric said.

Yeah.

After an hour the seven fetching men and women over there had gone through so many different tasks I forgot my own name. Besides those lacing boots and climbing a ladder there were others filling out credit card applications. They’d actually fill in the name, address, home-phone-number business and press the completed paper against the glass. There weren’t any subliminal messages playing. It was a hard sell with a soft touch.

For sixty minutes.

Without any other stimulus.

One hundred twenty minutes and my big pink walnut of a brain kept wandering no matter how much I agreed with their weight loss training. I marveled as the others in the room nodded like they were learning something new; as if it had never occurred to them that they could play catch without hot dogs in their mouths.

When my family came to get me from Cornell I tried to act like I was fine. After we’d packed my essential books and clothes I took them for a tour of the campus. For ten seconds I pretended that they were wrong, I was still going to school and doing fine. They would have humored me if I’d wished, but being patronized is worse than straight failing. I showed them Olin Library, where I could have studied. Potential classrooms in Uris Hall. They were happy to see such tidy facilities.

I was an English major before leaving school. One of those squishy guys who make up a third of any college campus. Weasels in glasses. I took my family past Day Hall to the Arts and Sciences quad; even inside Goldwin Smith because it was left open on the weekends. Up to the second floor; the English Department’s locked wooden doors; we posed for twenty pictures in front of them. That evening I rented two movies, Camera Furio and Chilly Grave. I thought they’d want to see how I passed my free time in Ithaca, but horror films were too depressing considering their mood. I enjoyed the pictures when they slept.

I’d stayed in Ithaca for two years after getting expelled because off-campus rooms were cheap. I worked a lot. Cleaning houses and offices, mostly. They were satisfying jobs; I feel calm once I put messes in order. When snow packed onto Ithaca’s hills during the long winters I pretended my apartment was a ski chalet. This time was so much fun for me that I hardly slept. I didn’t want a moment to pass without me. My living room clogged with Arthur Machen, Joe R. Lansdale and the Dictionary of the Supernatural. Twenty Years of Congress by James G. Blaine just because I thought the title was a funny fucking pun. The most uninspired life can seem charming to a twenty-one year old. Sitting next to Beebe Lake on Cornell’s North Campus, reading Lord Dunsany’s awfully overblown prose, I had a laughing fit because I was so blessed.

Without a warning Ledric opened a plastic container that emitted a smell bad as bunion paste. To my right, there he was, with the plastic container balanced on his serving tray of a stomach. His face was so greasy that it reflected light.

— What are you doing? I asked him. What is that?

Ledric breathed heavier than lust. — There’s salmon and some perch in here. Pike too.

— That’s fish?

It looked too old to be fish. Maybe the rumor of fish. A fable of fish.

— Not that bad, Ledric answered. I let this sit out for twenty-three days, he said.

The salmon wasn’t even that appealing bright pink anymore. Just a gray custard saturated with orange oil.

— I’ll go get you some KFC, I offered. Anything’s got to be better than that.

He shook his head. — You don’t understand.

— Just put the fish down and I’ll take you out for some pizza.

Instead he mashed the stuff around with his spoon. Some delicate grayish-white bones stuck out of the meat. The food made squelching sounds when he touched it.

Ledric looked at me. — I can’t wait ten years to get skinny. I can’t do it. Not no more.

— That’s diet food? I think you could find better stuff through Weight Watchers.

But Ledric would not be stopped.

The guy who’d given me lip before started banging on our metal door.

A woman stood so fast that the chair stuck to her ass while she went to the glass and yelled.

Ever see that film The Thing? John Carpenter’s version. The people in here were like the dogs that had been shut off in a cage with the alien. The canines scratched, yelped, barked to get out because they were encountering an unnatural terror. A creature so hideous that it would destroy them. A Magogdamn terrible sight.

— There’s cestodes in here, Anthony. Ledric enjoyed the drama. He dug two fingers into the pulp then pulled out a wad of chaw. He swabbed a dollop of rotten fish between his lower lip and gum, then chewed.

A guy at the door begged. — I need some air! I need some air.

— Cestodiasis, Ledric said to me.

— Why did they lock us in here? I yelled as the thin people ran from their section.

— Whenever we get a new guy they block the door so you can’t leave, Ledric explained.

I heard the key go in and twist.

— What are you doing?! I screamed at Ledric.

— Tapeworms, he said.

5

I quit my moving job after falling down a flight of stairs. We were taking an old Quaker woman from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania so she’d be closer to her friends. Books were already boxed when we got there, with categories written on the side. History, Literature, Geography, Religion-West, Religion-East.

A framed letter from Lyndon Johnson was still on the wall. In it the departed President thanked the Quaker’s deceased husband for his speechwriting work. I told her I didn’t know why Kennedy got sole credit for helping out black people when it was Johnson who signed the Civil Rights Act.

— He was a locomotive with a little boy at the engine, she said.

Holding an armful of books I walked from the third floor of her house to the second when this asscrack of a man, another mover, dropped his box on top of mine. Said he needed water but before I could tell him to set his load at the top of the stairs he laid it on me; I shut my mouth to get the work done faster.

Four hundred and fifteen pounds going down makes more noise than a subway car derailing. Three hundred and fifteen pounds of me lay on the landing next to one box called ‘Architecture’ and the other, ‘Divine.’

I tried not to vomit while the Quaker woman did what Quakers apparently do best. She brought me a cool cloth compress for my forehead; she brought Band-Aids though I wasn’t bleeding. She disappeared.

Moving furniture wasn’t for me. For days I’d been pretending my chest didn’t hurt dramatically at the end of each strenuous job. That everyone gets light-headed from taking a small lamp up two flights of stairs. I liked the idea of being a mover more than the work. Cleaning houses had calmed me, but really I was only washing dishes, rearranging the living room: small acts of tidiness. I’d thought that packing, lifting, moving whole homes would be exponentially easeful. Instead it felt like I’d flattened a few disks in my spine.

The Armenian foreman, who was also the driver of our truck, asked me if I was going to be okay, but as he asked lifted ‘Architecture,’ and his question trailed off down the stairs toward the sidewalk. Leaving me sweating, staring at the box of ‘Divine.’

Later the foreman butted one chubby forearm into my gut as a friendly gesture. He spoke a melted English; only half of each word was actually spoken. — You’re not so bad, right? he asked. You’re a big guy, shake it up.

How could I ask to go to the hospital when the company didn’t have insurance? Their business sign at the main office on 138th Street and Amsterdam was written on posterboard in black marker. Every two weeks they discarded one company name then made up something new. No paychecks, always bills, none larger than a twenty.

I was compensated for the seven-hour shift, $42. Then the Armenian put me in a cab to Rosedale which cost as much as I did for a whole day. My only regret about leaving early was the tip the Quaker would give. Probably $20 a man if the foreman didn’t pocket much.

Better to go home, though, because I couldn’t think properly the rest of the afternoon. I poured soda in a soup bowl. Grandma rubbed mentholated cream on my back and made me rest in bed all evening.

It was Grandma who woke me the next morning because Mom and Nabisase had left for work and school. If they fought that morning I didn’t know it. I tried to go get some bandages Mom kept in her room, but she had actually installed a new lock on the door, as threatened. One that used a key. I twisted the knob for a few minutes, strenuously. Stubborn sturdy mechanism. I pressed my nose to the door crack trying to smell my mother’s secrets. I listened patiently, but her room offered no sound.

I was actually doing well enough that standing, bending, working was possible and I would have felt childish pretending with my grandmother. She expected people to act maturely. She was glad I woke up early. She rubbed the mentholated cream on my back again and gave me a card for a job advertised on the posterboard over in the Associated Supermarket on 228th Street.

The company was nearby. Twenty-minute walk; ten minutes on the Q85. Just past Green Acres Mall, which meant that it was actually in Long Island. The mall and the company were on Sunrise Highway, the expressway that started near my home at the ass end of Queens, then ran like a long intestine to the tip of Long Island where, seasonally, waste was stored in the great colon known as the Hamptons. (Thus I strike a blow for the masses! How’s that Ahmed Abdel? Lorraine?)

They hired semi-temporary laborers. Do badly and get fired the same day. Do better and they’d keep you on. It was a husband and wife from Baldwin, Long Island. Men so rarely applied that the office manager thought I’d read the ad wrong. Clean Houses— Get Paid, that’s easy. The owners were a middle-aged couple who, like most people, never left the era of their bloom. Curtis Mayfield on the office stereo. Otis Redding, like that. And they called the business Sparkle.

Even after opening her front door to me the woman was suspicious, because I wasn’t wearing my uniform. I wore the Bing cherry red baseball cap with ten thousand glitter bits spelling Sparkle on the brim, so who needs the jumpsuit? It didn’t fit me anyway. She only opened the door a stitch.

— Sparkle ma’am. I’m here to make your home shine.

If I didn’t say the motto then, according to our rules, she didn’t have to tip me. Not that she was going to anyway. Blacks and old Jews were cheaper than Chinese food when it came to gratuities. I don’t want to complain. The money could be better, but I liked the work.

The woman at the front door of this Rochdale Village home finally let me inside and I followed her down the hall. She wore the dark slacks, jacket and belly of a bus driver. There were no photos on the walls, but prayer plaques.

She said, — My husband is going to stay here today, he’s sick. I wrote a list for you so leave him alone. He’s going to be in bed.

There were four gold rings on three fat fingers of her right hand.

She took me around, but her house was weak; it could barely hold me up. The tiled floor dipped in the middle of the kitchen, moaned when I walked across it.

— Under the sink we keep the cleaners, and this closet has mops. Do you need gloves?

I tapped my coat pocket. — I’ve got.

Outside, in one of the company’s K cars, I had my own vacuum, towels, cleaning chemicals, sponges. But homeowners took issue with the equipment. This was true at nearly every cleaning job I had. And Sparkle’s was as raggedy as the rest; the vacuum only worked if run for twenty minutes first.

Her list was under a magnet shaped like a fridge that was stuck to their fridge.

— This is what needs doing on one floor and the rest on the second.

— No basement?

She grabbed my arm. — We couldn’t pay you enough to fix that place up.

That made me like her because few of the homes I’d cleaned had owners with any objective sense. This lady was the first in a while to admit her family had made too big a mess to ask for help. I considered going down there and doing the job for free.

She called upstairs before leaving.

No answer, so I thought he was still asleep. I hoped I wouldn’t have to wash out bedpans.

The front door shut then maybe eleven seconds passed and I heard the husband’s feet on the stairs. They were faint footsteps pattering above my head. Then this skinny guy comes down dressed sharp enough to cut. Wearing a gray, thin suit as cheap as one of my own. The lapels looked about as thick as wax paper. He was breathing heavy from running.

— You’re not no girl, he pointed out.

He stood in the living room watching me at the kitchen sink. I’d been planning to sit a moment, but washed dishes to seem busy.

— No I’m not.

— I thought they was going to send some girl.

The man was crestfallen; he was dressed for a funeral and now he had the proper face. He came into the kitchen and poured a drink while I finished the breakfast dishes.

— You got to do the laundry.

— That’s not on her list, I said.

— Well it’s on mine.

— Yes.

— We got machines in the basement. You can turn them on and go back to the rest.

I walked into the living room and he followed me. He sat on the couch because I was about to move it. Instead I pulled their big round table to a corner after I unplugged a lamp.

Finished with the orange juice, the master of the house put his cup down on the carpet.

— You could put that in the kitchen now. He pointed below him.

He retied his dress shoes by pulling the black laces hard. A young boy ready for chapel.

I took up the cup into the kitchen where the floor announced its weakness for me with another moan. — Oh shut up, I muttered.

This house would have been silent if not for the oven clock, light bulbs. The rechargeable battery case worked constantly. Three hundred years earlier the background noise would have been wind through the crops, Jameco Indians in the dirt. I lifted the blind from one kitchen window where Englishmen in frock coats and breeches once walked. In the back slaves collected salt hay to feed the animals. Three centuries and now I stood in a kitchen filling a bucket with hot water. It was hard to imagine I was even the same species as any of them. Their lives must have been so difficult and now mine was easy. I know some people long for bygone days, but not me.

— Well then, the bus driver’s husband said from the threshold of the living room. Guess I’m going out.

I untangled the phone cord wrapped around a chair leg in the kitchen. Kept to busy work around him so he’d believe I knew my profession. If he even suspected I was an amateur he’d lecture me about how to sweep to his specifications. Everyone thinks they’ve invented the best way to wipe down a fridge. With this guy, just looking at him, I’d have had an embolism if he took a professorial tone while mispronouncing words like ‘ammonia’ and ‘broom.’

— How long you’ll need? he asked when I didn’t answer.

— Seven hours?

— Seven hours?! He yelled it. How much you think we got to do here? Shit. She didn’t tell you to do the basement too, did she?

— No.

— Then what you talking all this seven hours mess? I’ll be back in four and that’s what I’m paying you.

He made for the door then turned back. — And what the hell you wearing a suit for?

To appear professional.

When the man got gone I ran back to the kitchen to call Ledric. He didn’t pick up for twenty-three rings.

— Who’s this? He breathed heavily through his mouth.

— How’s your disease coming? I asked.

— Tapeworm’s not a disease, it’s an infestation.

— How’s your infestation coming?

— I lost weight already.

— It’s only been eleven days!

— So? I bet I lost eight pounds by now.

— You told your family about all this?

— It’s only my mother and father out in Chicago. But my long-distance got shut off.

— When’s the last time you spoke?

— I sent them some bootleg videos for Christmas.

— Last year?

— Why are you bothering me about all that?

— I’m not trying to down you, I told him. You’re not feeling sick?

— Of course not, he said.

I was committed to Ledric because, well, wouldn’t you be? Also, what if it worked?

After seeing him so desperate to lose a few hundred inches that he’d actually ingest bugs, refraining from my usual three — Big Mac snack-attack seemed hardly a sacrifice at all. And what if it worked?

— It’s not bugs, he said on the phone.

— Bugs, worms, insects, whatever. I don’t think the fish had to be rotten to get tapeworms.

His faith would not be shaken. — I didn’t want to take any chances about that.

After hanging up I set the two dirtiest pots in soapy hot water to let them soak last night’s meat loose. I went to the car for my tools.

In the living room I ran the vacuum. I lifted the couch on its side and left it there.

People don’t want to return to a neat house. They want to enter fifteen minutes before the finish, when the rooms are still a little disarrayed. If they see no proof that work’s been done they quibble about hours, swear that the appliances were that shiny before I got there. They cut even cheaper with the tip and I’m not talking about generous clientele to begin with. It’s necessary to let people think they’re seeing backstage at the theater minutes before the show. They want to be the producers, not the audience.

I mopped the kitchen floor quickly and let it dry while I wiped down the living room surfaces. The second time I mopped the kitchen I did it slower. We were supposed to use only one bucket of water per house, but I was alone so the policy faced revision. Water, water everywhere.

Washed those two stubborn pots.

Washed the utensils.

Washed the washcloths too.

Why didn’t anyone admit that work was fun?

To touch things and move them and lift them and clean them.

The constant activity pacified my mind; my body became a device.

I worked for one hundred and thirty minutes. Laundry had been easy since it was already gathered in bags down by the basement. There were some pillowcases in the dryer when I went down there, still warm; I touched one to my chin. Lorraine’s strong hands on my face.

Lorraine was sweet, and fat.

What should have taken me three and a half hours was done in about two.

It’s not that I was efficient, just I needed to slow down. I was working so quickly that I’d sweated big patches under my arms and between my thighs. I felt great, but a headache grew. I sat on the living room stairs before going back to the second floor.

I took a while to catch my breath and wiped my sweaty forehead against a wall.

My chest felt plugged with wires that ran from every socket in the room.

I took that stupid pamphlet out of my wallet. Yes, I had it with me constantly. In the photo Ahmed Abdel’s narrow handsome face was fringed by enormous black dreadlocks. I could never grow mine into such a pretty mess as this Japanese guy had.

In the pamphlet there was an interview with him conducted by a law student from BU. Ahmed Abdel went on about the anti-immigrant bias of the Boston courts then lambasted the U.S. entirely; condemned Leif Ericson and Eric the Red. But when asked about Japan’s own imperial way Mr. Abdel dismissed it. He became mawkish instead. He mentioned the tony gardens of his father’s home. (My grandfather would describe a boyhood of public tours through Kyoto Palace in 1928, one of Abdel’s answers read. He told the law student, I always drew terrible pictures of the Kitayama cedars. They looked more like a row of spears than trees!)

I mildly hated this man. How was I going to contend? Kyoto played musically on an American girl’s eardrum while Southeastern Queens was a bum note. We have aluminum-sided homes, not fortresses.

With an hour and a half until the husband returned I shut my eyes on the stairs and reclined. The carpeted steps were firm, but plush against my sore back end.

Eventually the boredom would have made me a fridge pillager, but I remembered that there was a video store around the corner. I’d seen it when finding this address.

A place with a Lotto machine by the register; a beeper sales booth near the front door. And, usually, a broad selection of the best action, comedy and horror films.

I left the front door of the house propped slightly open by stuffing a rag in the jamb. At these low-end stores a video membership cost only five dollars. The tape was three bucks for three nights. I rented one then ran back feeling amped. An errand that would have been twenty minutes finished in five.

Other guys would’ve picked a porno. Rub one out while getting paid. My preferences come with a different kind of warning label. Not frank depiction of sexual situations, but blatant use of gore.

We Like Monsters, released in 1993. It was seventy-five minutes; I might see the whole story while the little master was out. Their TV and VCR were upstairs in the bedroom.

Above their bed a set of knives were nailed to the wall, but only for decoration not defense. They had great black handles. Some spikes on the hilt. I sat on their bed to watch the movie, but couldn’t stop imagining a blade falling loose and right through my neck.

The floor was comfortable, too. I felt so good that I had to take my shoes off.

It was a terrible movie. About a guy named Ziff who so wishes to be famous that he disfigures himself in the background of a morning show newscast by pouring an unspecific acid on his face. He becomes famous, but the same stunt that propelled him to stardom is what’s killing him now. The acid is still burning under his skin. A ‘scientist doctor’ explains this seemingly impossible fact. Ziff is disintegrating.

I don’t want to explain any more, because this is the moment when the film turns to standard fare. Ziff’s skin melts, his skeleton shrivels, until he’s just this sniffing meaty creature that goes killing everyone ‘for revenge.’ But what revenge? He kills a business-woman who’s said to have created the acid, but it’s more likely that the stuff was mustered in a lab. He kills another woman said to be his ex-wife, but at the start of the film Ziff laments that he’s never been married.

These films mattered more to me than I should say. I sat, half-depressed, as the tape neared its end. Only stubbornness propelled me through to the foolish conclusion.

Okay, by the end Ziff has gone to the home of the reporter who first interviewed him. Ziff asks that his death be broadcast live. The reporter calls over a crew. The scene is arranged for vulgar effect as Ziff reclines on a white bed in a white bedroom; suddenly the reporter is wearing a white contamination suit; this is so that each time Ziff moves the surfaces are flecked with ruddy goop.

Ziff is asked why he did this. The acid on his body. The murders. The actor pronounced some treacle about ‘wanting to matter in this world’ and I nearly put my foot through one of the bus driver’s bedroom walls. I stopped the tape, popped it out and would have stumped it underfoot, but I’d given my real name on the membership form. $80 fine for lost tapes.

What shit me about the finale was that these creatures always have an explanation. The Devil. An alien. A terrible childhood. Why did the virus in Small Evil cross the European continent only to ravage a small town outside of Budapest (on the Pest side of the placid Danube)? Because a Roma musician placed a curse on the land where his young daughter was beaten to death by Magyar police.

There’s always a reason for monsters. Human beings need rationales.

The machines in the basement had finished thumping so I took the mass of fabric out of the dryer then folded it into separate pieces. I worked quickly because, bad movie or not, the far end of the crowded basement began to seem creepy. There were thirty big cardboard boxes laying around, some open and some taped shut.

Their dining room was smaller than it had been one hour ago. Now the glass dishware cabinet rose seven stories high. The plates inside it rattled when I walked by, which was because of my weight, yes. But what made them shake again as I stood in the kitchen?

In the living room I’d been surprised to find a bookshelf, if only because most of the homes I’d worked could fit all their books in a sandwich bag. I didn’t like the man, so I credited his wife, the bus driver, with the library. It’s elitist, but I always check the spines on people’s bookshelves to find which ones are for status and which ones are a pleasure.

I was impressed because they had The Seven League Boots by Albert Murray, but when I opened it the covers cracked audibly; there was the rubber gum smell that wafts off unread pages.

I’d cleaned for black people and Jewish, an Italian family, Latinos, too. Stupid people had a few authors in common: Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel. What nonsense. Such dreck. How about H.P. Lovecraft, just once. Disposable income was wasted on the dumb.

I closed my eyes. I took one of their trade paperbacks off the shelf. Opened it randomly and spat on the paper. I mean a real goober. Shut the first then went to another.

I did that in their romances, the generational dramas. Thrillers, war stories and immigrant boo-hoos. When my mouth went dry I drank water.

A mirror hung over their living room couch. As I was about to hock into Alex Haley’s Queenie I noticed the mirror reflecting me.

My pants had ridden up between my thighs and bunched over the hump of my great big ass.

My shirt had risen over the belt line so that my stretch marks showed.

My shoulders were massive, but soft.

My God just look at that thing.