revision
Gutting
Georgie Faile can’t go into a room without thinking how to tear it apart, down to the boards. He can see only the skeleton in all things, the frame beneath. Tick, tick, tick – the rhythm of the studs. He can’t walk into El’s without thinking of how the chair-rails would make an easy job: wedge a crowbar in; heave his weight into the wall; watch the nails stipple out as the rail peels in one go like the tine of a fork, bent-back. Then, a tug at the drywall makes it crash in a single sheet: a dropped rectangle, a fallen flag. Fail that, there’s always the sledgehammer and the place will crumble apart; gypsum powder loose and white as the day-old biscuits from Down-Low’s that the hippies buy.
And that’s how it’s been going mostly, this late into the summer; the drywall out so long it’s gone to mash. All this clubbing has taken the anger Georgie has and spent it, has made him forget his father on the other end of the phone saying House five? House five?; has made him into the kind of man who can’t walk into a bar without thinking how to destroy it, but who doesn’t say anything of it, just orders a Bud and walks over to Dennis. Because Dennis is hard up the same way, with all he’s seen. Dennis is a driver, taking the loads out to the dump. And Georgie doesn’t think to ask what he’s watched fall into the bed of the truck.
El’s is just a long counter and Greta standing behind it ordering some new girl around and Dennis, clocked-in, almost, at the end of the counter sipping like a woman off the top of a shaky pour. “The new girl,” Dennis says, pinky to the foam. The light in here is white. It’s five-o-clock, overcast; August weather.
“A bud,” Georgie says to Greta. “Bottled.”
As Georgie pulls out a stool, Dennis reaches down. He’s rustling around in his duffel. And when he pokes his head back up he says “Shhhh…,” holds a finger to his lips, like what he’s hauling up might wake up and scream. It’s wrapped in paper – the AUTO section of the Picayune – and it’s twice as tall as a pint-glass, with a bulbous base that rises to a neck so slender you could hardly fit a flower in. From the shape of it Georgie thinks it might be … but it can’t.
Georgie unwraps it. Slow. Careful. It’s Amethyst. “Nineteen-thirty,” Georgie says. “Thirty one, maybe.”
Dennis looks back at Georgie, arches his eyebrows as if to say, “Well?,” and takes a pull of his beer. The foam is down by now and he can drink half in a gulp. “You’re the expert.”
Georgie has instructed Dennis what to keep an eye out for. He has sat the little man down with catalogues, with Depression Era Glass: A Collector’s Guide. With A Little Night Music: Collecting Amethyst and Cobalt. He has laminated a cut-out card of the most valuable pieces: the Skyscraper Martini Shaker, the Orchid Tint Butter Dish, the Lotus Candlesticks in “Satin Rose.” And on the back side of that card he has printed the Dell Tulip Decanter, Amethyst. A full color photograph of its bulbous base, its slender stem. It has a shot glass with a cork bottom as a stopper. It is never found with its cap, it is never found in Amethyst. So rare, it can’t be priced. Without thinking, Georgie’s hands feel for the factory imprint – yes, it’s there – and the whorl on the third inch up from the base. Yes, that’s there too. He can’t look at it and speak at the same time. It is collecting all of the bar’s light. He feels it might fall over and break itself, without anyone touching it. He feels it is already broken.
Dennis is watching Georgie’s face. Dennis yells, “Greta, come here,” so loud that everyone in the bar – four hippies and the black lady who owns the place, look over. Greta comes. But she comes real slow –like the floor is covered in mud and she has to pull one foot out at a time. The new girl is behind her, almost skipping. “Would you put this thing in your house?” Dennis asks her. “Your apartment? Your pad?”
“Maybe,” she says, frowning. “If you bought me roses.”
To the new girl, Dennis says, “You?”
“It’s pretty,” she says. Greta has a hard, stern nose; small lips; jet hair. Everything about her is sharp – a tool, designed for functionality. The new girl is all curves and plump. She has mousy-brown hair; eyes half green, half brown – like the mud slick with oil from the Baton Rouge refineries. “I got something like that at Pier 1,” the new girl is saying. “Got it from my mother. She said I could put little stones at the bottom, to hold the flowers up. But I never found those kind– like the ones in fish tanks, you know?—So I tried it with just sand. You can use sand on that I bet. And—”
Dennis isn’t listening to her; he’s looking Greta straight in the eye. Dennis says, “What would you say if I told you this was worth oh, how much?” He elbows Georgie.
“Three, three thousand.”
“Hear that?” Dennis says, “Hear that?”
“If we authenticate it,” Georgie says. “If we—“
“Sure it is,” Greta says, already turning away.
The new girl hasn’t budged. “Is it because of its color? The purple?”
“Tell her,” Dennis says. “Tell her, Georgie.”
“It’s boring,” Georgie says. “A boring story.”
“Tell me,” she says, leaning down, elbows-on-the counter, to stare straight at the vase, like it’s the one that’s going to tell her.
//
Depression-Era Glass.
What it’s worth: Anything from ten dollars to ten thousand. In the 1920s, 1930s, early 1940s, in gas stations and movie theaters; in packages of Morton’s Soap and General Mills Cereal – it was given away for free. Try the new, ludicrous brand of oatmeal! See a meaningless movie in an overpriced theater! He finds them in the houses he’s gutting. It’s New Orleans, summer 2006. And the families here whose lives were destroyed don’t know half the value. Dennis is picking this stuff up by the box right out of the dump. Georgie is finding it in kitchens, in the cabinets high enough that the water didn’t rattle it too bad.
He knows all of this thanks to his mother, who wasted his father’s paychecks in antique malls and garage sales and that fair she would go to every year, held out on the Astros field where you could walk around the bases, holding up tumblers. He remembers her in salmon-colored slacks out on second base when she stopped him – put her hand on his arm. “See the stem?” she said. She’d made him hold a vase, weigh it, look for the whorl on the third line. “That should be a ‘D’. But it’s a fake,” she said. “It’s a fake. Can you see that? No one wants a fake.” He felt the raised “D” with his thumb. He felt what he should never feel for. “Can you remember that?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll remember.” And he did. For her he’d look in neighbors’ kitchens, in the garage sales where he rooted for old comics, and even in the formal parlor of his first girlfriend, Ellen Sloane, whose mother had agreed to let him weigh the tulip vase in his palm while Ellen giggled. By Monday most of the school knew that Georgie Faile was a queer who knew all about furniture, and the story had floated until he took a job laying rebar with Elvin Murray for the new CitiBank – a job he took, mostly, so they would stop talking about him in that way.
His mother collected only “Amethyst,” the official name for a purple darker than lilac, grayer: the color of an old asphalt lot, of a black tee gone through the wash. He had helped her wrap it, lay it in the moving boxes, pile it in the bed of her old Volvo sedan.
About a month after she had moved out, Georgie stopped for dinner at his father’s house. Georgie was living in an apartment downtown, which he shared with Charla though he had not yet told his father so. To dinner he brought a Honeybaked Ham, a bottle of Martinelli’s. “What’s the occasion?” his father had said, un-corking the cider above the sink, so that it could run over all the pots and pans. But when they walked out to the table, he saw his father had made an occasion of it as well. The white cloth was laid with a full set of Cobalt xxxxx, a glass from ’32, maybe, as far as Georgie could tell. “Started collecting some myself,” Georgie’s father said. “Just made sense, since I knew so much about it anyway.”
“Makes sense,” Georgie had said.
Cobalt. The pattern his father collected – xxxx – was lacy, feminine; was everything that was missing in the house, with his mother now in New Orleans, sending Georgie postcards with photographs of the “Elegant Hotel Spa” at which she had taken a job: “Age sixty and giving facials,” she wrote. “Who knew!?!?”
//
“Find anything?” his father says, over the phone. And Georgie lists what he’s seen, what Dennis has found. It’s not much – a new boxload, really – but it’s enough that his father now thinks of himself as winning, which is all Georgie wanted out of this summer in the first place. To placate the man, get him off his back for a few months at least. After the divorce, it is all Georgie can do to keep his father pleased with whatever new plans he is scheming to replace his mother, who cannot be planned to come home.
“You telling the families their stuff was smashed?” his father asks.
“Don’t think I need to tell ‘em anything,” Georgie says. “They’ll think as much.”
//
Georgie’s mother now lives in a house out on Washington. He remembers it’s a big white house, with blue paint on the underside of the porch roof. But he has only been here once, two years ago, and he has to look for the numbers to figure it out. The house is number 83. He parks down the street at 95 -- both because he doesn’t want her to say anything about the Toyota on loan from his father and because he wants a minute to walk over, so he can tuck his shirt into his khakis without her watching him do it.
In the yard, hosing down some purple flowers, is Terry. He’s wearing a polo the color of egg yolk, no shoes. His toes writhe beneath white hair. Georgie hates to imagine those toes in bed with her, those toes in bed at all. Terry has a tan, reddish face – like he’s been outside for years and years – and he’s smaller than Georgie’s father, though broader in the shoulders. A former gymnast, which is why his calves are so immense.
“Whatsit?” Terry says, as he looks up. Then he sees Georgie. “George!” he says, “George, my boy!” opening his arms wide, almost spraying Georgie with the hose. “Ooopsy-daisy,” Terry says, laying the hose on the grass, like it’s an animal he’s putting to sleep. “Katharine, can you turn off that water?” Terry yells, up at the house. It’s Georgie. Georgie’s here.” Nothing happens. “Katharine!” he yells. “I said the boy’s come home.”
Georgie’s mother hovers in the doorway. She’s wearing a purple house-dress. Her wide, moon-shaped face has ballooned over the years. It looks like his old mother, inflated, the colors heightened. Her lips are red. She’s wearing arcs of blue over her eyes. “What?” she says to Terry. “What are you saying? If you’re gonna say something, come in and say it.” She doesn’t see Georgie, standing there, holding white flowers. Maybe she thinks he’s some kind of salesman. A salesman for flowers, going door to door.
“I said,” Terry says, throwing his hands in the air. “I said, turn off the water.”
“The water?” she says.
“The hose water,” Terry says. “For the hose. It’s Georgie. It’s your son.”
“What?” she says. And then she sees him. “George!” she says.
When his mother says his name it sounds as it is supposed to be said. Each sound in its place. He feels suddenly thankful for her, mournful at the same time. He has not heard his name in years, feels sad that he feels anything, coming from her.
Inside they have fresh cakes from Down-Low’s and a pot of peppermint tea. “It’s what you always liked,” his mother remembers, pouring the water. But it’s hot out, and Georgie can barely drink it. They sit on two hard-backed love-seats that face each other -- his is striped, his mother’s is stippled with small purple flowers – and there are white carpets on all of the floors, a coffee table with a glass top. It feels like someone’s beach house, or like the lobby of a hotel he can’t afford, and the air smells of windex, perfumes – a smell in the air that is all smell, with no air. He worries, suddenly, that he smells of the mud he works in; the bars; Toby’s trailer.
“I hear you’ve been finding things,” she says, pouring more. “Finding things for your father. He was saying you’re finding the most wonderful things. A Cobalt Martini Shaker, a real Skyscraper!”
“You shouldn’t talk to him,” Georgie says.
“Oh, nonsense.”
“Really,” Georgie says, “It’s—“
“Why shouldn’t I talk to my husband of thirty-two years?”
“--As if you’re leading him on. Like some high school--”
“So you came here to lecture me,” she says. “So that’s what you came for.” Her eyes are downcast. She is a pouting child, whom Georgie must care for. She is a woman making every mistake. Terry – Terry with an addiction to online poker, with a grown daughter who lives in India (of all places!), with a flirtatious manner, which he uses with waitresses, gas station girls, ladies in the street. Terry is no better than Georgie’s father, who in his sullen way loves her like a child loves the house it has grown up in; it is the only way the man knows how to live. Georgie can say none of this to her. He says, instead, jokey and light. “Nope, just came for the A/C!” They laugh. It’s three in the afternoon. Ninety-five degrees, probably. He misses the dry heat of Houston, how you feel it come up off the asphalt t, when you open a shop door. They speak of the weather. It's hot, but not too hot for this time of year. “Want a spritzer?” his mother says, finally. “Something cool?”
“Sure,” Georgie says.
“I knew you’d want one,” she says – like love is just predicting what people want to drink. She goes off somewhere, to the kitchen. He hears clanging. An ice-cube tray. The fizzy opening of a bottle of soda. His mother in the other room yells, “Oh shit. The thing exploded.” Georgie looks around. On the glass table at his elbow there is a framed photo of the two of them – Terry and Katharine – standing before a white railing. There is a sea in the background. Georgie doesn’t recognize the sea, doesn’t recognize the railing.
“Didn’t get any flooding?” Georgie says, when she comes back with the spritzers in two amethyst tktktktktk, ice cubes clinking. “The place – the place looks nice, is why I ask.”
“That was in the Bay,” his mother says. “Vacherie.”
“What?”
“The picture, the one you were looking at.”
“Oh yeah,” Georgie says. He’s quiet, gulping his drink. His mother lays a hand on his pants – on his new khakis. Her fingernails are bright pink, foreign as a flamingo on a lawn. “Talk to your mother,” she says. “Talk to old Mrs. Mother. Your father: Is he ailing?”
“He’s fine.”
“How’s Charla?”
“Broke up."
“She left you?”
“I – I was the one who left," he says. He takes a bite of a biscuit, lets the crumbs fall in his lap. He takes pains sweeping them off his pants into his hand, dropping them into the coaster. "Back in June,” he says.
“Georgie!” his mother says. “Never leave a woman like that. Never. Never ever.”
Terry comes in. He wipes his bare feet on the door mat. “What’s he done this time?” he says, winking to Georgie. “What did the boy do?”
“Charla left him,” his mother says, throwing up both her hands – as though to say, what can be done about this boy?
“I left,” Georgie says.
“That’s even crazier,” Terry says. He points at Georgie, like he’s about to sell Georgie something. “Now let me tell you, I remember that brunette. And I don’t have an easy memory – going on all these years.”
“No really,” Georgie’s mother says, changing her tone. “Let’s be proud of the boy, Terry. You’re taking a shot at real happiness. You’re not settling for some…some twat.”
“You’re my twat,” Terry says to Georgie’s mother, making her scooch so he can take a seat beside her. She pats his bare thigh. He sips from her spritzer. He makes a face like yowzah! at its strength. He lays his hand – fat, pinkish – over Georgie’s mother’s, and they clamp at eachother, fingers intertwining.
“I thought you’d approve,” Georgie says, a bit darkly.
“What’s that?” his mother says. She’s smiling.
“I said: I thought you would approve.”
“Of Charla?”
“I thought I was doing the same thing you did—leaving someone. Someone, you know, who’s supportive, who wants me to be happy and all that. It’s hard. Everyone disapproves. Dad disapproves. I thought you would…understand.”
“No no,” his mother says. “It’s different. You were doing what I—what I didn’t have the courage to do. I waited until you were grown. I didn’t have the courage. To be alone.”
“You weren’t for long,” Georgie says, looking over at Terry, who’s smiling, foolishly, at the two of them. Like a dope. He sees only a family, sees only the happy luck that this woman has a son who visits, who cares.
He and his mother are quiet for a moment, and Terry fills the space. “You were asking about the flooding,” he says, “When I came in. Well we didn’t get much. But I did see some things you can say I’ll never see again.” He lectures of the things he saw while Georgie’s mother nods along; she’s heard all this before. Everyone in the city, now, has their flood stories – their alligators on the roofs, their cruise-boats stocked with only pizza. Terry remembers aloud that there was a big, strange pothole that opened up on Napoleon; Terry remembers the Korean deli was abandoned and looted. There were black hooligans walking around, asking for water. Then, a few days later, there were all these cats that came up out of nowhere, that started walking around looking for food. “I started off by feeding them but they were sleeping in the yard, mushing up all of my poor begonias,” Terry says, throwing up his hands. “All the missing peoples’ cats. All those poor, poor cats.” They talk for a while more about flowers, Terry’s garden. After a minute or so of polite nods, Terry gets up. He’s going to finish the watering before he forgets where he stopped. Doesn’t want to over-water, he says. Never wants to do that.
“He’s obsessed with his begonias,” Georgie’s mother says, when he’s gone. “Obsessed. Ohhhh…It’s nice to find someone who loves something, who’s passionate about something.”
“Dad was passionate.”
“Ha!” she says. “And what was he so passionate about?”
“His job,” Georgie says. “He had a job at least.” Terry is retired from a salesman job at IBM, has lived on a pension since 55 and he’s 62 now.
“Con Edison," she says, laughing at even the word. "Con Ed is nothing to be passionate about. Con Ed is the definition of boring."
“To some people,” Georgie says. “But electric power is--”
“All I’m saying is I don’t like you working for him. That man can work and work and suffer and suffer and he’ll never be done. What are you on? How many houses?”
“Five.”
“What a saint he is.” She laughs. “And you’ve got how many left?”
“Two,” Georgie says.
“Two more, the poor boy says. By August thirty-first? In ten days? Come to me at the end of the summer. Come to me at the end of the summer. See if it’s really over then. See if your work for him is over, if you can finally be free.”
//
“House five?” his father says. “Still?” The phone is scratchy out here. Something about the flood messed with service, so that there are only certain spots where you can stand. Georgie is on the raised porch of a house no one came to claim, three doors down from the lawn where FEMA plugged Toby’s trailer in, where Georgie’s staying now – somewhat illegally, given that he’s not exactly the victim of all of this, Toby is. But he is fixing up Toby’s place, so he can rationalize that, if anyone cares. “What about Pete’s place?”
“That’s the one I’m on.”
“That’s the one the boy says he’s on,” his father yells, to whoever’s in the room with him.
“Who’s there?” Georgie asks. “Pete?” The porch is higher than the one-story houses he’s been working on, and he can see pretty far over the neighborhood. The Lower 9th is a scrap yard. Tan-colored, the color of mud that sifted over all the streets and dried there, so that you can’t really tell some places if they paved to begin with. The flooding here, this far away from the wall, was six, six-and-a-half, so it isn’t nearly up to the roofs, except in some of the out-buildings. But if he looks closer over to the wall he can see boats on top of garages, SUVs nose-down in the dirt. There aren’t many people, anywhere; nothing moving except an ice-cream truck that sells sandwiches to the day laborers and, in a lot two blocks over, a group of men standing around a garage watching the nose of a car, hooked up to a tow, as they pull it out. It looks from here like a Plymouth. Georgie has good eyes.
“Who’s over? Let’s see,” his father is saying. “Pete, Mike, and Mike. Both Mikes.”
“I finished Mike Ross’s,” Georgie says. “That’s done.” Something’s going wrong and one of the tow men keeps having to crawl under to look at what the wheel is snagging on.
“I know,” his father says. “So you’ve just got Mike L’s.”
“Mike L’s and Toby’s.”
“Well,” his father says, in a burly voice. “Toby’s you can leave.” There’s laughter on the line. “For godsakes,” his father says, “Do Toby’s.”
A hiss of static. Toby is on the line. “For god sakes, do mine,” Toby says. “How you doing, Georgie?”
“Fine,” Georgie says. “Put dad on.”
“You got ten days,” Toby says. “Took you two months to do five houses – that’s a week – that’s over a week a house--”
“I can do the math,” Georgie says. “Put him on.”
“I’m here, I’m here,” his father says. “Hold your horses.”
“Two houses, ten days,” Georgie says. “Anything else?”
“Find anything?” his father says. “Anything good?”
“Some milk glass. Some milk glass in the last house.”
“I don’t care a damn about anything after ’42,” his father says. “Milk glass.” He huffs.
“Then nothing but what I already told you,” Georgie says.
“Can’t wait to see it,” his father says. “You back when, September?”
“The third, if I can,” Georgie says. The men working the tow have pulled the car out now. It’s inching up the back of the truck. And even from here, he can see that toothpaste-colored frost that clings to the metal; a flood car, dead. The wiring shot. The body rusted. What’s re-usable are the windows. Not much else. Hubcaps, maybe. Could sell the hub-caps. He hasn’t been to the scrap-yard Dennis drives to but Dennis says the cars get melted. It’s just pile-up of hub-caps, windows without any frames.
“Well, we’ll be seeing you when you’re home then.”
“We” is a kind of halfway house of single men, to whom his father has extended charity. The seven men are all Con-Ed men, brought to Houston by job-transfers after the flood. His father, retired now, living in the house his wife left him – big and empty and falling apart on Herkimer Street in The Heights – had posted to the Con-Ed volunteer board a sign asking for Single Men Only!!!, advertising -- Lots of ROOM. HOT Water. HOME MADE GRUB.
Toby, his father’s cousin, had started sleeping in Georgie’s old room a day before the flood. The rest of the men curled up in the guest bedroom (two twin beds, one cot) or in the basement (the L-shaped couch, the trundle), where they slept beneath the afghans his mother had knitted out of all of Georgie’s old and ugly sweaters, unraveled. His father embraced the role of a B&B host, consulting Georgie on pancake recipes that he dug out of his mother’s old cook books. “You remember this one, this bananas thing?”, his father asked one Sunday, opening to a page under CREPES. Georgie just shrugs, nods, eats what his father makes when he comes over. He likes that the men are around for his father to boss, instead of him, and on his last dinner there – before he drives down Highway 10 – his father serves a kielbasa lasagna, the whole thing improvised, based on what his father proudly reports just happened to be on sale at CostCo. And his father, spooning it up, is happier than Georgie remembers ever seeing him – looking in every way like the father he always wanted to be, telling everyone where to sit and what to eat, and everyone grateful to hear it.
There had been enough contracting work in Houston to keep Georgie there, even a mini- boom because of the flood. But this had not been his father’s plan for him. Gutting could make you $5,000 a house – big insurance money for a 5-day-job that won’t require any materials. And then the State instituted the August 31st deadline. Gut your house, clean the mold, pass an inspection – or we tear it down – and it was clear he was going to New Orleans, whether he wanted to or not. Because the men around his father’s table would need someone to work on their own houses – little places, four-room shot-guns in Holy Cross and Arabi and the Lower 9th – while Con-Ed kept them there. “You won’t even have to build anything,” his father had said, while Toby sat in Georgie’s mother’s floral recliner tipsy on Buds bought with his father’s social security check. “Think of it. All trashing. All destruction. Hell, I wouldn’t mind that kind of a job. But you know, about my back. Best I could do would be to sit out on the porch watching you.”
“I don’t mind building,” Georgie said.
“You’ll just have to take apart,” his father said. “You’ll just have to do a lot of clearing. Like we did on leaves.”
That was their first business together. Fall clearing. Leaf piles. Jumping in and messing everything up together. Georgie’s mother shaking her head when they came in, hair full of leaf brittle, stems. “Go shampoo yourself,” she’d say, stern. And his father would wash Georgie’s hair with his stubby fingers -- more loving then, as though made gentle by all of their work, than he was ever otherwise.
But he had gone, not only because of all of that, but because it had felt like good timing. He took Charla on a walk along Heights Boulevard, past the Victorian mansions. They sat on a bench. She seemed to know, as they were walking, why he had come to such a public place. And when, sitting, he cried into his hands – that was when he was sure she did know. “Going away,” he said. “The whole thing with going away makes me realize that it’s what I want do anyway,” he said.
“I can come,” she said.
“What I’m trying to say,” he said. “Is that I found I was looking forward to it, to being alone.”
“It’s your father and all those guys,” she said. “You just need a little quiet break.”
“No,” he said. “What I’m trying to say is I want to take a long break. To be alone. For a while, at least.”
She seemed to understand, this time. He had wanted to leave Carla for a year, maybe. They had started dating just before his parents got divorced. And when the rest of his life was all pampering – dinners at his father’s, to make the man feel less lonesome; phone calls with his mother so she wouldn’t feel like “such a ghoul; the ghoul Marge makes me out to be” – being with Carla was when he was free to just be dumb: to make silly faces in the mirror when they brushed their teeth, to eat ice-cream with a knife right out of the carton, since they couldn’t bear to do the dishes. He was a child again, with her. She would bend to tie his shoes. She would wash his back. One morning, she packed his lunch: hard-boiled eggs in a little metal box, chopped carrots, last night’s beef in wax paper, a cookie frosted with his initials: “GF.”
“What’s all this?” he said.
“It’s your birthday!” she said. He had forgotten.
Her own parents were still married, living in an avocado-colored apartment tower in Eagleton. When Georgie had first visited, bringing roses, her mother had taken his coat along with “those nice flowers.”
“I’ll box them up for you,” she had said. “So you can have something better to carry them when you leave.” And Carla, coming out from the hall mailboxes, had laughed. “No, Ma. Those are for you.”
They expected nothing, all of them.
How sad it made him to think of their faces – dark eyes, set far back in the sockets like Carla’s were – looking over the platter of Beef Stroganoff as Carla said what he had done. But there was no changing it. He did not feel about her anything other than comfort, and he had begun to feel – perhaps, it was the spate of romantic VHS tapes he had been watching with his father – that there was something else you were supposed to feel, some union of minds, some kind of daring passion. Random Harvest, Beauty and the Beast (the original), Brief Encounter.
He had left all his things at the apartment and instead, headed to his father’s on Herkimer. Crossing the park, seeing the sight of the old porch, he remembered suddenly – his heart clanging at the thought of it – his mother out on the porch. He remembered being twenty-five.
It had been three years prior when she had announced the divorce in the kitchen, while he and his father sat across from her at the oak table. And it had felt, when she was doing it, that she was divorcing not only Georgie’s father but also him. And Georgie felt that now, it would be Georgie’s job both to take care of his father – who from this, could not recover – and it would be his job to also run from him, to sit across from his father at the table when he came over for supper so that his father could see that he was not there to replace her; that he was also twenty-five, with a life he was trying to live with a girl downtown who hung her uniform, washed, over the bath rail each night and made him lunches.
Afterward, he had followed his mother out to the porch. “Why,” he had said. “Why.” Unabashed, perversely wanting her to lecture him on the health risks, he had taken out a Newport sharply, smoked one right in front of her. She bummed one – a move of solidarity, he thought, for she only smoked Davidoff Slim Lights, and only in her most foul tempers. Sucking in the smoke made her cough. He didn’t give a shit. Let her.
“I just wanted to be alone,” his mother said. “Everything about your father bothered me. First he always wanted to be entertained. And second, he was always following me. And then he was always giving me little jobs to do. And when I’d come back to him and there’d be no end to them, to the things he wanted from me. Maybe I should get a job. Maybe I should do the canning volunteer work. Maybe I should start an at-home pet-sitting business like Marge did. And I wondered if any of it was good for me, self-improving, like he said it was. Or just good for him.” She stopped herself. “I don’t mean to badmouth your father. I love him very much. But I wanted to be alone. Just alone. For a while, at least. See who I was. You know how that is.”
He had known, he had known, he had known.
Twenty-five, in the throes of post-adolescence, wanting to be away from his father, away from his mother – he had known what it was to want to be alone.
The night after he left Carla, he lay in the basement between the bodies of three men whose snores would not syncopate. Rolling over and over, unable to sleep, he cringed at the thought that he was just like his mother. He was just like her. And what he had done was just what she had done, and why she’d done it.
//
“There’s something else that I wanted to tell you,” Georgie’s mother says. He’s two days into the last house now – Toby’s house. And he wants to just be done with it. He’s working long, crazy hours. He doesn’t want to be here right now. He wants to either be asleep or be working. He wants his father off his back, finally. He wants to be listening to KRWK 104.1 and tearing out a base-board. Instead, he’s on the porch with her. The porch all the way on Washington Ave – a good half hour from the Lower 9th. She’s not smoking, though he offers. “I don’t smoke much anymore,” she says. “Not anymore. Terry says it makes the house smell like a lounge bar!” She giggles. The weather has let up a bit, a brief blast of Fall air, perhaps due to last week’s rain, which kept the dust down, which made the work seem to go faster. While she talks he can’t look at her face. He looks at the flowers in the yard. Begonias, Terry had called them. They look stupid, showy. Like the fussy hats of ladies at a Church social.
“I didn’t have the courage to say it then,” his mother is saying. “Maybe because you broke up with Charla, I don’t know. I just thought you would hate me. I always think you’re judging me.”
“I’m not,” Georgie says. Though he is. Though he knows he always is. He can feel, already, what she’s going to say to him like it’s water surging up to the level of the house, shaking it so the pictures fall; so a pothole opens up on Napoleon, wider than they’ve ever seen; so the black hooligans come roving in the neighborhood, looking for drinking water; so the cats come crying, pissing in the Begonias. He’d like to see that, he thinks. Yes He Would.
“I’m getting married again,” she says. “I know it’s crazy. The veil and everything. A potluck. Maybe a crab cookout, like Uncle Toby used to have in summer, is what I was thinking.”
“Oh.”
“Terry proposed. When we went down to Vacherie. He dropped down on one knee and said, ‘I know this is crazy, what with my bad knees!’ It feels stupid, to have a second wedding. We’re just going to do something small. Maybe in the yard. Commander’s Palace is close by but it’s so expensive,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
“So you approve?” she says. “I had nightmares you wouldn’t approve. That you would hate me. That you’d judge me. And I don’t know why the thing about Charla changed my mind about finally telling you.”
“Sure,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say. He can barely hear her. He dreads telling his father; dreads not telling him; dreads any way in which the old man finds out. He feels shame at the thought that his own mother is marrying before he is, is living with a man and he is alone, in Toby’s trailer, washing out Cobalt xxxx tumblers to wrap and stack in a box marked DAD, like he’s some kind of schoolboy doing volunteer work for the Boy Scout brigades.
“Begonias,” she’s saying. “He’s so silly with his Begonias. You know, he’s that silly for me. I just want to be pampered. Like a woman wants to be.”
“Yeah,” Georgie says. But he doesn’t hear her, not really; he is fuming. He feels completely alone. He feels not like his mother, not like someone who is doing the leaving – as he had felt of himself, when Charla was gone – but like his father, standing in a dark kitchen putting away the last dish.
All he can think to do is get drunk. “You at El’s?” he asks Dennis, over the phone. “Where else,” Dennis says.
Georgie gets there and there’s the jukebox on. The number of hippies have doubled. All he can see, at first, is the new girl behind the bar getting hounded by a bunch of guys in matching suits, lavender-cumberbunds. A wedding band, it looks like. In the back, Greta and Dennis are sitting on the same side of the booth, with a red cocktail between them and two pink straws stuck in it, and when Greta sees him coming up through the smoke of the bar she pulls away from Dennis.
“It’s a Shirley temple,” Dennis says, seeing Georgie eye the cocktail. “I can’t convince her to drink on the job.”
“I should go back,” she says, scooching out to get up.
“You don’t have to,” Georgie says. But she’s already up and gone. He slumps on the side of the booth across from Dennis. “Let’s get stoned,” Georgie says. “I feel like getting stoned.”
They get some of the hippies to light a joint in the alley. $12 bucks for that one and a take-away. When they come back in, the new girl stops him – a hand on his shoulder, the other on a tray of empties. “Hey,” she says. “You’re the vase guy.” She giggles and he – stoned – giggles, too. “Sure am,” he says. “That’s me. I’m Mr. Vase man. Vase man.” He’s singing. He’s wildly jovial. Dennis looks at him askance, like there might be something off with him.
“Mr. Vase man, Give me a dream.” The tune he has appropriated is something like “Mr. Sandman,” with a few notes off. He can’t sing for shit.
“Give me a sec,” she says. “We’re off at two.”
Greta drives Georgie’s Toyota, which fits all of them, and she won’t stop cursing the clammy stick. “It takes some oomph,” Georgie says, from the backseat, between sessions of kissing the New Girl’s neck so that she says “It tickles. That tickles.” And he says, “What tickles, this?” They take North Claiborne, which is empty. It’s been a year and no one’s cleaned the trash off the shoulders. Headlights graze a life vest; orange, child-sized. Flotillas of cans and water bottles, have been herded by the wind into little thickets where they nest together, like families. It is the year of ripped tires -- of a Michelin recall – and they’re everywhere; moustaches of rubber, black orange peels, enormous commas.
At his trailer they smoke some of the hash he keeps in a 1929 xxxxxx Butter Dish and while they’re all sitting on his bed, smoking, he holds the dish up to the light so they can marvel at it, at a cobalt so deep he thinks, stoned, of twilight back in Houston, the lightbulb through it like the bleary headlights of cars far off. There’s nothing anyone wants to do right now, buzzed, more than look at a blue light. “Forty bucks,” Georgie says. Then he picks up another out of the box marked DAD. “Twenty.” Then another. “Fifty.” Then another. “Ten.”
The New Girl is ooohing and aahing but then she falls back, suddenly, and passes out on Georgie’s bed – on Toby’s bed, really. “She’s off a twelve hour shift,” Greta says, voice gravelly from the smoke.
Dennis says, “Let’s leave her for a nap. Let’s go for a drive.”
“Yeah,” Georgie says. “Sure. Give me a sec.”
“Where we taking this stuff? Only because I doubt Antique Row is open at four a.m. You dropping it off in the morning?”
“Shhhh, Dennis,” Georgie says. “Always with the questions.”
“Well?” Dennis says.
“We’re keeping it at my mom’s.”
“Oh good,” Greta says. “That’s just where I wanted to go at four a.m., stoned. Some guy’s mom’s.”
Georgie doesn’t say anything past directions. They pull straight up to Number 83. The lights are off.
“Looks like they’re asleep,” Dennis says.
“Duh,” Greta says.
“I told her I’d put them on the lawn.”
“Think that’s safe?” Dennis says.
“Oh, sure,” Georgie says. “Garden District.”
Georgie hauls himself up, one foot on the wheel well. From the top of the truck his mother’s house looks small, dark. He can see over the hedges straight down into Terry’s precious little nest of Begonias.
“You gonna lower one?” Dennis asks, hands open, ready to receive.
Georgie flaps open a box, un-taped, and heaves up an Amethyst xxxx platter – priced $18. He lets its newspaper fall, then tosses it porch-ward, like it’s a Frisbee. The crash sounds like water – a fountain.
“Are you crazy?” Dennis says. “That was worth—“
“I know how much everything is worth,” Georgie says. “Don’t you think I know how much everything is worth?” His voice is deeper than he recognizes. Next is a bud vase, Amethyst. Next is a butter dish, Amethyst. Next is a plate set, Amethyst. Next is a vase, Amethyst. Next is an Alladin Lamp, limited run, worth $450 retail. Amethyst. A light goes on upstairs. A shade flips up. Terry’s figure is in the window, then his head is poking out into the yard. “Hey!” he yells. “Whatsit?”
Georgie picks up the rest of a box and tosses it out over the brick walk. Most of it shatters on impact, though some lands in the grass, softly. He does it with a second box, then a third. There’s only one box left and it’s the heaviest. Dennis is just standing behind the cab now, watching. “You’re drunk,” he says. “You’re stoned. You’re high as a kite. You’re off your rocker. You’re being crazy.” Greta, who Georgie now loves more for it, doesn’t say anything, just watches. He wonders if he thinks what she thinks: That it’s kind of pretty, being stoned and watching the glass break. It’s like snow, but the opposite, with the shards are flying upward. And there’s something nice about the purple color at night – how it holds the reflections of the street lamps. The last box goes everywhere. Dennis ducks, like it’s going to hit him, but it doesn’t go anywhere near the truck.
Georgie doesn’t have much more time. He can hear Terry on the staircase. He can hear his mother’s voice. “What’s the—“ she’s asking. “What?” But he can’t hear past that. He sees the Dell Tulip Vase in the last box – in its own box – a shoebox, meant to house ADIDAS TRAINERS. He leaves it there, jumps down out of the truck, then reaches back for it and takes it, cradling it, to the little pile he’s made of all the broken glass. There he leaves it, at the top, like some little orphaned Moses, like some child that must be cared for.
On the drive back, they can see that half the neighborhood has woken up from the sound. Lights are on. A siren springs up, singing its woozy birdcall. Georgie says, “Pull over.” They’re three blocks away, on Prytania and Second. Greta cuts the engine. Georgie pops open the door, runs out.
“Where you going?” Dennis asks. “Georgie, don’t. Georgie!”
But Georgie is already jogging over, along with the building herd. “Is it a fire?” a woman in a pale blue robe asks him. “I heard those sirens. You hear ‘em?” Her arms are crossed over her chest like she’s cold, though it’s hot out – the heat still rising off the street tar.
“It’s a break-in,” says a man in striped PJs. “I heard glass breaking.” They’re talking amongst themselves about the Korean Deli – how it can’t be, not again. Georgie walks straight over to 83. There’s a small crowd, now, around Terry’s garden. The old man must love the attention his begonias are getting, Georgie thinks. He stays back, far back. “It’s a bunch of broken glass,” a lady says ahead of him says. “I mean, who would do something so—“
“A hate crime,” says a man. “CrystalNacht.”
Georgie, still stoned, wants to snicker at their guesses. Past the crowd, he can see his mother, speaking with an officer. She looks less stunned than he thought she would look. She just looks tired. She is rubbing her face with her hands. She is wearing a purple robe. The officer is leaning down toward her, making no marks on his pad. Terry stands behind her, rubbing her shoulders. He is wearing a white tee, gray shorts. He is looking around at his begonias, probably assessing damages.
“I don’t know who,” she’s saying. “I don’t know who would…”
But she does know, she does. He knows she can see the tulip vase, saved there. He knows she knows that he knows that she would know. And standing back, fifty feet back, watching his mother protect him, Georgie thinks of seeing her, when he was young. He is up to bat and Ellen Sloane’s new boyfriend yells through the wire-links, “Sissy! Sissy!” It’s a lame insult, empty and childish, but it grates on Georgie, gets his nerves up. And the next he sees of it, while he’s out on second base waiting for the Colts to send a batter up, for god sakes, is his mother reaching her hand through the wire and grabbing at the boy in the dug-out, ripping at his $30 dollar uniform. He’s embarrassed for her, embarrassed for himself. This is his mother, the actor. This is his mother, the intervener. But later, he thinks of it; how she would protect him while his father sat back. “I’m not the one who has a problem sending you into the army,” his father would say at dinner, at those silent dinners before they got divorced – as though that meant his father trusted him, and that that trust was love.
“I won’t have you go,” she’d say. “I just won’t.”
And he had not wanted to go, anyway. He had just not wanted to be a sissy. What he wanted was to roam the long, glass halls of antique malls with her, tugging at her salmon slacks, holding up vases and saying, “This one?” “This one?” “This one?”
She is the one who protects him. She picks up the vase he holds. She turns it around. She feels for the whorl. She says, “This one is fake.” She does not want him to be disappointed. She wants him to know what to look for in this life, and how to know when it is not good.
Georgie Faile can’t go into a room without thinking how to tear it apart, down to the boards. He can see only the skeleton in all things, the frame beneath. Tick, tick, tick – the rhythm of the studs. He can’t walk into El’s without thinking of how the chair-rails would make an easy job: wedge a crowbar in; heave his weight into the wall; watch the nails stipple out as the rail peels in one go like the tine of a fork, bent-back. Then, a tug at the drywall makes it crash in a single sheet: a dropped rectangle, a fallen flag. Fail that, there’s always the sledgehammer and the place will crumble apart; gypsum powder loose and white as the day-old biscuits from Down-Low’s that the hippies buy.
And that’s how it’s been going mostly, this late into the summer; the drywall out so long it’s gone to mash. All this clubbing has taken the anger Georgie has and spent it, has made him forget his father on the other end of the phone saying House five? House five?; has made him into the kind of man who can’t walk into a bar without thinking how to destroy it, but who doesn’t say anything of it, just orders a Bud and walks over to Dennis. Because Dennis is hard up the same way, with all he’s seen. Dennis is a driver, taking the loads out to the dump. And Georgie doesn’t think to ask what he’s watched fall into the bed of the truck.
El’s is just a long counter and Greta standing behind it ordering some new girl around and Dennis, clocked-in, almost, at the end of the counter sipping like a woman off the top of a shaky pour. “The new girl,” Dennis says, pinky to the foam. The light in here is white. It’s five-o-clock, overcast; August weather.
“A bud,” Georgie says to Greta. “Bottled.”
As Georgie pulls out a stool, Dennis reaches down. He’s rustling around in his duffel. And when he pokes his head back up he says “Shhhh…,” holds a finger to his lips, like what he’s hauling up might wake up and scream. It’s wrapped in paper – the AUTO section of the Picayune – and it’s twice as tall as a pint-glass, with a bulbous base that rises to a neck so slender you could hardly fit a flower in. From the shape of it Georgie thinks it might be … but it can’t.
Georgie unwraps it. Slow. Careful. It’s Amethyst. “Nineteen-thirty,” Georgie says. “Thirty one, maybe.”
Dennis looks back at Georgie, arches his eyebrows as if to say, “Well?,” and takes a pull of his beer. The foam is down by now and he can drink half in a gulp. “You’re the expert.”
Georgie has instructed Dennis what to keep an eye out for. He has sat the little man down with catalogues, with Depression Era Glass: A Collector’s Guide. With A Little Night Music: Collecting Amethyst and Cobalt. He has laminated a cut-out card of the most valuable pieces: the Skyscraper Martini Shaker, the Orchid Tint Butter Dish, the Lotus Candlesticks in “Satin Rose.” And on the back side of that card he has printed the Dell Tulip Decanter, Amethyst. A full color photograph of its bulbous base, its slender stem. It has a shot glass with a cork bottom as a stopper. It is never found with its cap, it is never found in Amethyst. So rare, it can’t be priced. Without thinking, Georgie’s hands feel for the factory imprint – yes, it’s there – and the whorl on the third inch up from the base. Yes, that’s there too. He can’t look at it and speak at the same time. It is collecting all of the bar’s light. He feels it might fall over and break itself, without anyone touching it. He feels it is already broken.
Dennis is watching Georgie’s face. Dennis yells, “Greta, come here,” so loud that everyone in the bar – four hippies and the black lady who owns the place, look over. Greta comes. But she comes real slow –like the floor is covered in mud and she has to pull one foot out at a time. The new girl is behind her, almost skipping. “Would you put this thing in your house?” Dennis asks her. “Your apartment? Your pad?”
“Maybe,” she says, frowning. “If you bought me roses.”
To the new girl, Dennis says, “You?”
“It’s pretty,” she says. Greta has a hard, stern nose; small lips; jet hair. Everything about her is sharp – a tool, designed for functionality. The new girl is all curves and plump. She has mousy-brown hair; eyes half green, half brown – like the mud slick with oil from the Baton Rouge refineries. “I got something like that at Pier 1,” the new girl is saying. “Got it from my mother. She said I could put little stones at the bottom, to hold the flowers up. But I never found those kind– like the ones in fish tanks, you know?—So I tried it with just sand. You can use sand on that I bet. And—”
Dennis isn’t listening to her; he’s looking Greta straight in the eye. Dennis says, “What would you say if I told you this was worth oh, how much?” He elbows Georgie.
“Three, three thousand.”
“Hear that?” Dennis says, “Hear that?”
“If we authenticate it,” Georgie says. “If we—“
“Sure it is,” Greta says, already turning away.
The new girl hasn’t budged. “Is it because of its color? The purple?”
“Tell her,” Dennis says. “Tell her, Georgie.”
“It’s boring,” Georgie says. “A boring story.”
“Tell me,” she says, leaning down, elbows-on-the counter, to stare straight at the vase, like it’s the one that’s going to tell her.
//
Depression-Era Glass.
What it’s worth: Anything from ten dollars to ten thousand. In the 1920s, 1930s, early 1940s, in gas stations and movie theaters; in packages of Morton’s Soap and General Mills Cereal – it was given away for free. Try the new, ludicrous brand of oatmeal! See a meaningless movie in an overpriced theater! He finds them in the houses he’s gutting. It’s New Orleans, summer 2006. And the families here whose lives were destroyed don’t know half the value. Dennis is picking this stuff up by the box right out of the dump. Georgie is finding it in kitchens, in the cabinets high enough that the water didn’t rattle it too bad.
He knows all of this thanks to his mother, who wasted his father’s paychecks in antique malls and garage sales and that fair she would go to every year, held out on the Astros field where you could walk around the bases, holding up tumblers. He remembers her in salmon-colored slacks out on second base when she stopped him – put her hand on his arm. “See the stem?” she said. She’d made him hold a vase, weigh it, look for the whorl on the third line. “That should be a ‘D’. But it’s a fake,” she said. “It’s a fake. Can you see that? No one wants a fake.” He felt the raised “D” with his thumb. He felt what he should never feel for. “Can you remember that?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll remember.” And he did. For her he’d look in neighbors’ kitchens, in the garage sales where he rooted for old comics, and even in the formal parlor of his first girlfriend, Ellen Sloane, whose mother had agreed to let him weigh the tulip vase in his palm while Ellen giggled. By Monday most of the school knew that Georgie Faile was a queer who knew all about furniture, and the story had floated until he took a job laying rebar with Elvin Murray for the new CitiBank – a job he took, mostly, so they would stop talking about him in that way.
His mother collected only “Amethyst,” the official name for a purple darker than lilac, grayer: the color of an old asphalt lot, of a black tee gone through the wash. He had helped her wrap it, lay it in the moving boxes, pile it in the bed of her old Volvo sedan.
About a month after she had moved out, Georgie stopped for dinner at his father’s house. Georgie was living in an apartment downtown, which he shared with Charla though he had not yet told his father so. To dinner he brought a Honeybaked Ham, a bottle of Martinelli’s. “What’s the occasion?” his father had said, un-corking the cider above the sink, so that it could run over all the pots and pans. But when they walked out to the table, he saw his father had made an occasion of it as well. The white cloth was laid with a full set of Cobalt xxxxx, a glass from ’32, maybe, as far as Georgie could tell. “Started collecting some myself,” Georgie’s father said. “Just made sense, since I knew so much about it anyway.”
“Makes sense,” Georgie had said.
Cobalt. The pattern his father collected – xxxx – was lacy, feminine; was everything that was missing in the house, with his mother now in New Orleans, sending Georgie postcards with photographs of the “Elegant Hotel Spa” at which she had taken a job: “Age sixty and giving facials,” she wrote. “Who knew!?!?”
//
“Find anything?” his father says, over the phone. And Georgie lists what he’s seen, what Dennis has found. It’s not much – a new boxload, really – but it’s enough that his father now thinks of himself as winning, which is all Georgie wanted out of this summer in the first place. To placate the man, get him off his back for a few months at least. After the divorce, it is all Georgie can do to keep his father pleased with whatever new plans he is scheming to replace his mother, who cannot be planned to come home.
“You telling the families their stuff was smashed?” his father asks.
“Don’t think I need to tell ‘em anything,” Georgie says. “They’ll think as much.”
//
Georgie’s mother now lives in a house out on Washington. He remembers it’s a big white house, with blue paint on the underside of the porch roof. But he has only been here once, two years ago, and he has to look for the numbers to figure it out. The house is number 83. He parks down the street at 95 -- both because he doesn’t want her to say anything about the Toyota on loan from his father and because he wants a minute to walk over, so he can tuck his shirt into his khakis without her watching him do it.
In the yard, hosing down some purple flowers, is Terry. He’s wearing a polo the color of egg yolk, no shoes. His toes writhe beneath white hair. Georgie hates to imagine those toes in bed with her, those toes in bed at all. Terry has a tan, reddish face – like he’s been outside for years and years – and he’s smaller than Georgie’s father, though broader in the shoulders. A former gymnast, which is why his calves are so immense.
“Whatsit?” Terry says, as he looks up. Then he sees Georgie. “George!” he says, “George, my boy!” opening his arms wide, almost spraying Georgie with the hose. “Ooopsy-daisy,” Terry says, laying the hose on the grass, like it’s an animal he’s putting to sleep. “Katharine, can you turn off that water?” Terry yells, up at the house. It’s Georgie. Georgie’s here.” Nothing happens. “Katharine!” he yells. “I said the boy’s come home.”
Georgie’s mother hovers in the doorway. She’s wearing a purple house-dress. Her wide, moon-shaped face has ballooned over the years. It looks like his old mother, inflated, the colors heightened. Her lips are red. She’s wearing arcs of blue over her eyes. “What?” she says to Terry. “What are you saying? If you’re gonna say something, come in and say it.” She doesn’t see Georgie, standing there, holding white flowers. Maybe she thinks he’s some kind of salesman. A salesman for flowers, going door to door.
“I said,” Terry says, throwing his hands in the air. “I said, turn off the water.”
“The water?” she says.
“The hose water,” Terry says. “For the hose. It’s Georgie. It’s your son.”
“What?” she says. And then she sees him. “George!” she says.
When his mother says his name it sounds as it is supposed to be said. Each sound in its place. He feels suddenly thankful for her, mournful at the same time. He has not heard his name in years, feels sad that he feels anything, coming from her.
Inside they have fresh cakes from Down-Low’s and a pot of peppermint tea. “It’s what you always liked,” his mother remembers, pouring the water. But it’s hot out, and Georgie can barely drink it. They sit on two hard-backed love-seats that face each other -- his is striped, his mother’s is stippled with small purple flowers – and there are white carpets on all of the floors, a coffee table with a glass top. It feels like someone’s beach house, or like the lobby of a hotel he can’t afford, and the air smells of windex, perfumes – a smell in the air that is all smell, with no air. He worries, suddenly, that he smells of the mud he works in; the bars; Toby’s trailer.
“I hear you’ve been finding things,” she says, pouring more. “Finding things for your father. He was saying you’re finding the most wonderful things. A Cobalt Martini Shaker, a real Skyscraper!”
“You shouldn’t talk to him,” Georgie says.
“Oh, nonsense.”
“Really,” Georgie says, “It’s—“
“Why shouldn’t I talk to my husband of thirty-two years?”
“--As if you’re leading him on. Like some high school--”
“So you came here to lecture me,” she says. “So that’s what you came for.” Her eyes are downcast. She is a pouting child, whom Georgie must care for. She is a woman making every mistake. Terry – Terry with an addiction to online poker, with a grown daughter who lives in India (of all places!), with a flirtatious manner, which he uses with waitresses, gas station girls, ladies in the street. Terry is no better than Georgie’s father, who in his sullen way loves her like a child loves the house it has grown up in; it is the only way the man knows how to live. Georgie can say none of this to her. He says, instead, jokey and light. “Nope, just came for the A/C!” They laugh. It’s three in the afternoon. Ninety-five degrees, probably. He misses the dry heat of Houston, how you feel it come up off the asphalt t, when you open a shop door. They speak of the weather. It's hot, but not too hot for this time of year. “Want a spritzer?” his mother says, finally. “Something cool?”
“Sure,” Georgie says.
“I knew you’d want one,” she says – like love is just predicting what people want to drink. She goes off somewhere, to the kitchen. He hears clanging. An ice-cube tray. The fizzy opening of a bottle of soda. His mother in the other room yells, “Oh shit. The thing exploded.” Georgie looks around. On the glass table at his elbow there is a framed photo of the two of them – Terry and Katharine – standing before a white railing. There is a sea in the background. Georgie doesn’t recognize the sea, doesn’t recognize the railing.
“Didn’t get any flooding?” Georgie says, when she comes back with the spritzers in two amethyst tktktktktk, ice cubes clinking. “The place – the place looks nice, is why I ask.”
“That was in the Bay,” his mother says. “Vacherie.”
“What?”
“The picture, the one you were looking at.”
“Oh yeah,” Georgie says. He’s quiet, gulping his drink. His mother lays a hand on his pants – on his new khakis. Her fingernails are bright pink, foreign as a flamingo on a lawn. “Talk to your mother,” she says. “Talk to old Mrs. Mother. Your father: Is he ailing?”
“He’s fine.”
“How’s Charla?”
“Broke up."
“She left you?”
“I – I was the one who left," he says. He takes a bite of a biscuit, lets the crumbs fall in his lap. He takes pains sweeping them off his pants into his hand, dropping them into the coaster. "Back in June,” he says.
“Georgie!” his mother says. “Never leave a woman like that. Never. Never ever.”
Terry comes in. He wipes his bare feet on the door mat. “What’s he done this time?” he says, winking to Georgie. “What did the boy do?”
“Charla left him,” his mother says, throwing up both her hands – as though to say, what can be done about this boy?
“I left,” Georgie says.
“That’s even crazier,” Terry says. He points at Georgie, like he’s about to sell Georgie something. “Now let me tell you, I remember that brunette. And I don’t have an easy memory – going on all these years.”
“No really,” Georgie’s mother says, changing her tone. “Let’s be proud of the boy, Terry. You’re taking a shot at real happiness. You’re not settling for some…some twat.”
“You’re my twat,” Terry says to Georgie’s mother, making her scooch so he can take a seat beside her. She pats his bare thigh. He sips from her spritzer. He makes a face like yowzah! at its strength. He lays his hand – fat, pinkish – over Georgie’s mother’s, and they clamp at eachother, fingers intertwining.
“I thought you’d approve,” Georgie says, a bit darkly.
“What’s that?” his mother says. She’s smiling.
“I said: I thought you would approve.”
“Of Charla?”
“I thought I was doing the same thing you did—leaving someone. Someone, you know, who’s supportive, who wants me to be happy and all that. It’s hard. Everyone disapproves. Dad disapproves. I thought you would…understand.”
“No no,” his mother says. “It’s different. You were doing what I—what I didn’t have the courage to do. I waited until you were grown. I didn’t have the courage. To be alone.”
“You weren’t for long,” Georgie says, looking over at Terry, who’s smiling, foolishly, at the two of them. Like a dope. He sees only a family, sees only the happy luck that this woman has a son who visits, who cares.
He and his mother are quiet for a moment, and Terry fills the space. “You were asking about the flooding,” he says, “When I came in. Well we didn’t get much. But I did see some things you can say I’ll never see again.” He lectures of the things he saw while Georgie’s mother nods along; she’s heard all this before. Everyone in the city, now, has their flood stories – their alligators on the roofs, their cruise-boats stocked with only pizza. Terry remembers aloud that there was a big, strange pothole that opened up on Napoleon; Terry remembers the Korean deli was abandoned and looted. There were black hooligans walking around, asking for water. Then, a few days later, there were all these cats that came up out of nowhere, that started walking around looking for food. “I started off by feeding them but they were sleeping in the yard, mushing up all of my poor begonias,” Terry says, throwing up his hands. “All the missing peoples’ cats. All those poor, poor cats.” They talk for a while more about flowers, Terry’s garden. After a minute or so of polite nods, Terry gets up. He’s going to finish the watering before he forgets where he stopped. Doesn’t want to over-water, he says. Never wants to do that.
“He’s obsessed with his begonias,” Georgie’s mother says, when he’s gone. “Obsessed. Ohhhh…It’s nice to find someone who loves something, who’s passionate about something.”
“Dad was passionate.”
“Ha!” she says. “And what was he so passionate about?”
“His job,” Georgie says. “He had a job at least.” Terry is retired from a salesman job at IBM, has lived on a pension since 55 and he’s 62 now.
“Con Edison," she says, laughing at even the word. "Con Ed is nothing to be passionate about. Con Ed is the definition of boring."
“To some people,” Georgie says. “But electric power is--”
“All I’m saying is I don’t like you working for him. That man can work and work and suffer and suffer and he’ll never be done. What are you on? How many houses?”
“Five.”
“What a saint he is.” She laughs. “And you’ve got how many left?”
“Two,” Georgie says.
“Two more, the poor boy says. By August thirty-first? In ten days? Come to me at the end of the summer. Come to me at the end of the summer. See if it’s really over then. See if your work for him is over, if you can finally be free.”
//
“House five?” his father says. “Still?” The phone is scratchy out here. Something about the flood messed with service, so that there are only certain spots where you can stand. Georgie is on the raised porch of a house no one came to claim, three doors down from the lawn where FEMA plugged Toby’s trailer in, where Georgie’s staying now – somewhat illegally, given that he’s not exactly the victim of all of this, Toby is. But he is fixing up Toby’s place, so he can rationalize that, if anyone cares. “What about Pete’s place?”
“That’s the one I’m on.”
“That’s the one the boy says he’s on,” his father yells, to whoever’s in the room with him.
“Who’s there?” Georgie asks. “Pete?” The porch is higher than the one-story houses he’s been working on, and he can see pretty far over the neighborhood. The Lower 9th is a scrap yard. Tan-colored, the color of mud that sifted over all the streets and dried there, so that you can’t really tell some places if they paved to begin with. The flooding here, this far away from the wall, was six, six-and-a-half, so it isn’t nearly up to the roofs, except in some of the out-buildings. But if he looks closer over to the wall he can see boats on top of garages, SUVs nose-down in the dirt. There aren’t many people, anywhere; nothing moving except an ice-cream truck that sells sandwiches to the day laborers and, in a lot two blocks over, a group of men standing around a garage watching the nose of a car, hooked up to a tow, as they pull it out. It looks from here like a Plymouth. Georgie has good eyes.
“Who’s over? Let’s see,” his father is saying. “Pete, Mike, and Mike. Both Mikes.”
“I finished Mike Ross’s,” Georgie says. “That’s done.” Something’s going wrong and one of the tow men keeps having to crawl under to look at what the wheel is snagging on.
“I know,” his father says. “So you’ve just got Mike L’s.”
“Mike L’s and Toby’s.”
“Well,” his father says, in a burly voice. “Toby’s you can leave.” There’s laughter on the line. “For godsakes,” his father says, “Do Toby’s.”
A hiss of static. Toby is on the line. “For god sakes, do mine,” Toby says. “How you doing, Georgie?”
“Fine,” Georgie says. “Put dad on.”
“You got ten days,” Toby says. “Took you two months to do five houses – that’s a week – that’s over a week a house--”
“I can do the math,” Georgie says. “Put him on.”
“I’m here, I’m here,” his father says. “Hold your horses.”
“Two houses, ten days,” Georgie says. “Anything else?”
“Find anything?” his father says. “Anything good?”
“Some milk glass. Some milk glass in the last house.”
“I don’t care a damn about anything after ’42,” his father says. “Milk glass.” He huffs.
“Then nothing but what I already told you,” Georgie says.
“Can’t wait to see it,” his father says. “You back when, September?”
“The third, if I can,” Georgie says. The men working the tow have pulled the car out now. It’s inching up the back of the truck. And even from here, he can see that toothpaste-colored frost that clings to the metal; a flood car, dead. The wiring shot. The body rusted. What’s re-usable are the windows. Not much else. Hubcaps, maybe. Could sell the hub-caps. He hasn’t been to the scrap-yard Dennis drives to but Dennis says the cars get melted. It’s just pile-up of hub-caps, windows without any frames.
“Well, we’ll be seeing you when you’re home then.”
“We” is a kind of halfway house of single men, to whom his father has extended charity. The seven men are all Con-Ed men, brought to Houston by job-transfers after the flood. His father, retired now, living in the house his wife left him – big and empty and falling apart on Herkimer Street in The Heights – had posted to the Con-Ed volunteer board a sign asking for Single Men Only!!!, advertising -- Lots of ROOM. HOT Water. HOME MADE GRUB.
Toby, his father’s cousin, had started sleeping in Georgie’s old room a day before the flood. The rest of the men curled up in the guest bedroom (two twin beds, one cot) or in the basement (the L-shaped couch, the trundle), where they slept beneath the afghans his mother had knitted out of all of Georgie’s old and ugly sweaters, unraveled. His father embraced the role of a B&B host, consulting Georgie on pancake recipes that he dug out of his mother’s old cook books. “You remember this one, this bananas thing?”, his father asked one Sunday, opening to a page under CREPES. Georgie just shrugs, nods, eats what his father makes when he comes over. He likes that the men are around for his father to boss, instead of him, and on his last dinner there – before he drives down Highway 10 – his father serves a kielbasa lasagna, the whole thing improvised, based on what his father proudly reports just happened to be on sale at CostCo. And his father, spooning it up, is happier than Georgie remembers ever seeing him – looking in every way like the father he always wanted to be, telling everyone where to sit and what to eat, and everyone grateful to hear it.
There had been enough contracting work in Houston to keep Georgie there, even a mini- boom because of the flood. But this had not been his father’s plan for him. Gutting could make you $5,000 a house – big insurance money for a 5-day-job that won’t require any materials. And then the State instituted the August 31st deadline. Gut your house, clean the mold, pass an inspection – or we tear it down – and it was clear he was going to New Orleans, whether he wanted to or not. Because the men around his father’s table would need someone to work on their own houses – little places, four-room shot-guns in Holy Cross and Arabi and the Lower 9th – while Con-Ed kept them there. “You won’t even have to build anything,” his father had said, while Toby sat in Georgie’s mother’s floral recliner tipsy on Buds bought with his father’s social security check. “Think of it. All trashing. All destruction. Hell, I wouldn’t mind that kind of a job. But you know, about my back. Best I could do would be to sit out on the porch watching you.”
“I don’t mind building,” Georgie said.
“You’ll just have to take apart,” his father said. “You’ll just have to do a lot of clearing. Like we did on leaves.”
That was their first business together. Fall clearing. Leaf piles. Jumping in and messing everything up together. Georgie’s mother shaking her head when they came in, hair full of leaf brittle, stems. “Go shampoo yourself,” she’d say, stern. And his father would wash Georgie’s hair with his stubby fingers -- more loving then, as though made gentle by all of their work, than he was ever otherwise.
But he had gone, not only because of all of that, but because it had felt like good timing. He took Charla on a walk along Heights Boulevard, past the Victorian mansions. They sat on a bench. She seemed to know, as they were walking, why he had come to such a public place. And when, sitting, he cried into his hands – that was when he was sure she did know. “Going away,” he said. “The whole thing with going away makes me realize that it’s what I want do anyway,” he said.
“I can come,” she said.
“What I’m trying to say,” he said. “Is that I found I was looking forward to it, to being alone.”
“It’s your father and all those guys,” she said. “You just need a little quiet break.”
“No,” he said. “What I’m trying to say is I want to take a long break. To be alone. For a while, at least.”
She seemed to understand, this time. He had wanted to leave Carla for a year, maybe. They had started dating just before his parents got divorced. And when the rest of his life was all pampering – dinners at his father’s, to make the man feel less lonesome; phone calls with his mother so she wouldn’t feel like “such a ghoul; the ghoul Marge makes me out to be” – being with Carla was when he was free to just be dumb: to make silly faces in the mirror when they brushed their teeth, to eat ice-cream with a knife right out of the carton, since they couldn’t bear to do the dishes. He was a child again, with her. She would bend to tie his shoes. She would wash his back. One morning, she packed his lunch: hard-boiled eggs in a little metal box, chopped carrots, last night’s beef in wax paper, a cookie frosted with his initials: “GF.”
“What’s all this?” he said.
“It’s your birthday!” she said. He had forgotten.
Her own parents were still married, living in an avocado-colored apartment tower in Eagleton. When Georgie had first visited, bringing roses, her mother had taken his coat along with “those nice flowers.”
“I’ll box them up for you,” she had said. “So you can have something better to carry them when you leave.” And Carla, coming out from the hall mailboxes, had laughed. “No, Ma. Those are for you.”
They expected nothing, all of them.
How sad it made him to think of their faces – dark eyes, set far back in the sockets like Carla’s were – looking over the platter of Beef Stroganoff as Carla said what he had done. But there was no changing it. He did not feel about her anything other than comfort, and he had begun to feel – perhaps, it was the spate of romantic VHS tapes he had been watching with his father – that there was something else you were supposed to feel, some union of minds, some kind of daring passion. Random Harvest, Beauty and the Beast (the original), Brief Encounter.
He had left all his things at the apartment and instead, headed to his father’s on Herkimer. Crossing the park, seeing the sight of the old porch, he remembered suddenly – his heart clanging at the thought of it – his mother out on the porch. He remembered being twenty-five.
It had been three years prior when she had announced the divorce in the kitchen, while he and his father sat across from her at the oak table. And it had felt, when she was doing it, that she was divorcing not only Georgie’s father but also him. And Georgie felt that now, it would be Georgie’s job both to take care of his father – who from this, could not recover – and it would be his job to also run from him, to sit across from his father at the table when he came over for supper so that his father could see that he was not there to replace her; that he was also twenty-five, with a life he was trying to live with a girl downtown who hung her uniform, washed, over the bath rail each night and made him lunches.
Afterward, he had followed his mother out to the porch. “Why,” he had said. “Why.” Unabashed, perversely wanting her to lecture him on the health risks, he had taken out a Newport sharply, smoked one right in front of her. She bummed one – a move of solidarity, he thought, for she only smoked Davidoff Slim Lights, and only in her most foul tempers. Sucking in the smoke made her cough. He didn’t give a shit. Let her.
“I just wanted to be alone,” his mother said. “Everything about your father bothered me. First he always wanted to be entertained. And second, he was always following me. And then he was always giving me little jobs to do. And when I’d come back to him and there’d be no end to them, to the things he wanted from me. Maybe I should get a job. Maybe I should do the canning volunteer work. Maybe I should start an at-home pet-sitting business like Marge did. And I wondered if any of it was good for me, self-improving, like he said it was. Or just good for him.” She stopped herself. “I don’t mean to badmouth your father. I love him very much. But I wanted to be alone. Just alone. For a while, at least. See who I was. You know how that is.”
He had known, he had known, he had known.
Twenty-five, in the throes of post-adolescence, wanting to be away from his father, away from his mother – he had known what it was to want to be alone.
The night after he left Carla, he lay in the basement between the bodies of three men whose snores would not syncopate. Rolling over and over, unable to sleep, he cringed at the thought that he was just like his mother. He was just like her. And what he had done was just what she had done, and why she’d done it.
//
“There’s something else that I wanted to tell you,” Georgie’s mother says. He’s two days into the last house now – Toby’s house. And he wants to just be done with it. He’s working long, crazy hours. He doesn’t want to be here right now. He wants to either be asleep or be working. He wants his father off his back, finally. He wants to be listening to KRWK 104.1 and tearing out a base-board. Instead, he’s on the porch with her. The porch all the way on Washington Ave – a good half hour from the Lower 9th. She’s not smoking, though he offers. “I don’t smoke much anymore,” she says. “Not anymore. Terry says it makes the house smell like a lounge bar!” She giggles. The weather has let up a bit, a brief blast of Fall air, perhaps due to last week’s rain, which kept the dust down, which made the work seem to go faster. While she talks he can’t look at her face. He looks at the flowers in the yard. Begonias, Terry had called them. They look stupid, showy. Like the fussy hats of ladies at a Church social.
“I didn’t have the courage to say it then,” his mother is saying. “Maybe because you broke up with Charla, I don’t know. I just thought you would hate me. I always think you’re judging me.”
“I’m not,” Georgie says. Though he is. Though he knows he always is. He can feel, already, what she’s going to say to him like it’s water surging up to the level of the house, shaking it so the pictures fall; so a pothole opens up on Napoleon, wider than they’ve ever seen; so the black hooligans come roving in the neighborhood, looking for drinking water; so the cats come crying, pissing in the Begonias. He’d like to see that, he thinks. Yes He Would.
“I’m getting married again,” she says. “I know it’s crazy. The veil and everything. A potluck. Maybe a crab cookout, like Uncle Toby used to have in summer, is what I was thinking.”
“Oh.”
“Terry proposed. When we went down to Vacherie. He dropped down on one knee and said, ‘I know this is crazy, what with my bad knees!’ It feels stupid, to have a second wedding. We’re just going to do something small. Maybe in the yard. Commander’s Palace is close by but it’s so expensive,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
“So you approve?” she says. “I had nightmares you wouldn’t approve. That you would hate me. That you’d judge me. And I don’t know why the thing about Charla changed my mind about finally telling you.”
“Sure,” he says. He doesn’t know what else to say. He can barely hear her. He dreads telling his father; dreads not telling him; dreads any way in which the old man finds out. He feels shame at the thought that his own mother is marrying before he is, is living with a man and he is alone, in Toby’s trailer, washing out Cobalt xxxx tumblers to wrap and stack in a box marked DAD, like he’s some kind of schoolboy doing volunteer work for the Boy Scout brigades.
“Begonias,” she’s saying. “He’s so silly with his Begonias. You know, he’s that silly for me. I just want to be pampered. Like a woman wants to be.”
“Yeah,” Georgie says. But he doesn’t hear her, not really; he is fuming. He feels completely alone. He feels not like his mother, not like someone who is doing the leaving – as he had felt of himself, when Charla was gone – but like his father, standing in a dark kitchen putting away the last dish.
All he can think to do is get drunk. “You at El’s?” he asks Dennis, over the phone. “Where else,” Dennis says.
Georgie gets there and there’s the jukebox on. The number of hippies have doubled. All he can see, at first, is the new girl behind the bar getting hounded by a bunch of guys in matching suits, lavender-cumberbunds. A wedding band, it looks like. In the back, Greta and Dennis are sitting on the same side of the booth, with a red cocktail between them and two pink straws stuck in it, and when Greta sees him coming up through the smoke of the bar she pulls away from Dennis.
“It’s a Shirley temple,” Dennis says, seeing Georgie eye the cocktail. “I can’t convince her to drink on the job.”
“I should go back,” she says, scooching out to get up.
“You don’t have to,” Georgie says. But she’s already up and gone. He slumps on the side of the booth across from Dennis. “Let’s get stoned,” Georgie says. “I feel like getting stoned.”
They get some of the hippies to light a joint in the alley. $12 bucks for that one and a take-away. When they come back in, the new girl stops him – a hand on his shoulder, the other on a tray of empties. “Hey,” she says. “You’re the vase guy.” She giggles and he – stoned – giggles, too. “Sure am,” he says. “That’s me. I’m Mr. Vase man. Vase man.” He’s singing. He’s wildly jovial. Dennis looks at him askance, like there might be something off with him.
“Mr. Vase man, Give me a dream.” The tune he has appropriated is something like “Mr. Sandman,” with a few notes off. He can’t sing for shit.
“Give me a sec,” she says. “We’re off at two.”
Greta drives Georgie’s Toyota, which fits all of them, and she won’t stop cursing the clammy stick. “It takes some oomph,” Georgie says, from the backseat, between sessions of kissing the New Girl’s neck so that she says “It tickles. That tickles.” And he says, “What tickles, this?” They take North Claiborne, which is empty. It’s been a year and no one’s cleaned the trash off the shoulders. Headlights graze a life vest; orange, child-sized. Flotillas of cans and water bottles, have been herded by the wind into little thickets where they nest together, like families. It is the year of ripped tires -- of a Michelin recall – and they’re everywhere; moustaches of rubber, black orange peels, enormous commas.
At his trailer they smoke some of the hash he keeps in a 1929 xxxxxx Butter Dish and while they’re all sitting on his bed, smoking, he holds the dish up to the light so they can marvel at it, at a cobalt so deep he thinks, stoned, of twilight back in Houston, the lightbulb through it like the bleary headlights of cars far off. There’s nothing anyone wants to do right now, buzzed, more than look at a blue light. “Forty bucks,” Georgie says. Then he picks up another out of the box marked DAD. “Twenty.” Then another. “Fifty.” Then another. “Ten.”
The New Girl is ooohing and aahing but then she falls back, suddenly, and passes out on Georgie’s bed – on Toby’s bed, really. “She’s off a twelve hour shift,” Greta says, voice gravelly from the smoke.
Dennis says, “Let’s leave her for a nap. Let’s go for a drive.”
“Yeah,” Georgie says. “Sure. Give me a sec.”
“Where we taking this stuff? Only because I doubt Antique Row is open at four a.m. You dropping it off in the morning?”
“Shhhh, Dennis,” Georgie says. “Always with the questions.”
“Well?” Dennis says.
“We’re keeping it at my mom’s.”
“Oh good,” Greta says. “That’s just where I wanted to go at four a.m., stoned. Some guy’s mom’s.”
Georgie doesn’t say anything past directions. They pull straight up to Number 83. The lights are off.
“Looks like they’re asleep,” Dennis says.
“Duh,” Greta says.
“I told her I’d put them on the lawn.”
“Think that’s safe?” Dennis says.
“Oh, sure,” Georgie says. “Garden District.”
Georgie hauls himself up, one foot on the wheel well. From the top of the truck his mother’s house looks small, dark. He can see over the hedges straight down into Terry’s precious little nest of Begonias.
“You gonna lower one?” Dennis asks, hands open, ready to receive.
Georgie flaps open a box, un-taped, and heaves up an Amethyst xxxx platter – priced $18. He lets its newspaper fall, then tosses it porch-ward, like it’s a Frisbee. The crash sounds like water – a fountain.
“Are you crazy?” Dennis says. “That was worth—“
“I know how much everything is worth,” Georgie says. “Don’t you think I know how much everything is worth?” His voice is deeper than he recognizes. Next is a bud vase, Amethyst. Next is a butter dish, Amethyst. Next is a plate set, Amethyst. Next is a vase, Amethyst. Next is an Alladin Lamp, limited run, worth $450 retail. Amethyst. A light goes on upstairs. A shade flips up. Terry’s figure is in the window, then his head is poking out into the yard. “Hey!” he yells. “Whatsit?”
Georgie picks up the rest of a box and tosses it out over the brick walk. Most of it shatters on impact, though some lands in the grass, softly. He does it with a second box, then a third. There’s only one box left and it’s the heaviest. Dennis is just standing behind the cab now, watching. “You’re drunk,” he says. “You’re stoned. You’re high as a kite. You’re off your rocker. You’re being crazy.” Greta, who Georgie now loves more for it, doesn’t say anything, just watches. He wonders if he thinks what she thinks: That it’s kind of pretty, being stoned and watching the glass break. It’s like snow, but the opposite, with the shards are flying upward. And there’s something nice about the purple color at night – how it holds the reflections of the street lamps. The last box goes everywhere. Dennis ducks, like it’s going to hit him, but it doesn’t go anywhere near the truck.
Georgie doesn’t have much more time. He can hear Terry on the staircase. He can hear his mother’s voice. “What’s the—“ she’s asking. “What?” But he can’t hear past that. He sees the Dell Tulip Vase in the last box – in its own box – a shoebox, meant to house ADIDAS TRAINERS. He leaves it there, jumps down out of the truck, then reaches back for it and takes it, cradling it, to the little pile he’s made of all the broken glass. There he leaves it, at the top, like some little orphaned Moses, like some child that must be cared for.
On the drive back, they can see that half the neighborhood has woken up from the sound. Lights are on. A siren springs up, singing its woozy birdcall. Georgie says, “Pull over.” They’re three blocks away, on Prytania and Second. Greta cuts the engine. Georgie pops open the door, runs out.
“Where you going?” Dennis asks. “Georgie, don’t. Georgie!”
But Georgie is already jogging over, along with the building herd. “Is it a fire?” a woman in a pale blue robe asks him. “I heard those sirens. You hear ‘em?” Her arms are crossed over her chest like she’s cold, though it’s hot out – the heat still rising off the street tar.
“It’s a break-in,” says a man in striped PJs. “I heard glass breaking.” They’re talking amongst themselves about the Korean Deli – how it can’t be, not again. Georgie walks straight over to 83. There’s a small crowd, now, around Terry’s garden. The old man must love the attention his begonias are getting, Georgie thinks. He stays back, far back. “It’s a bunch of broken glass,” a lady says ahead of him says. “I mean, who would do something so—“
“A hate crime,” says a man. “CrystalNacht.”
Georgie, still stoned, wants to snicker at their guesses. Past the crowd, he can see his mother, speaking with an officer. She looks less stunned than he thought she would look. She just looks tired. She is rubbing her face with her hands. She is wearing a purple robe. The officer is leaning down toward her, making no marks on his pad. Terry stands behind her, rubbing her shoulders. He is wearing a white tee, gray shorts. He is looking around at his begonias, probably assessing damages.
“I don’t know who,” she’s saying. “I don’t know who would…”
But she does know, she does. He knows she can see the tulip vase, saved there. He knows she knows that he knows that she would know. And standing back, fifty feet back, watching his mother protect him, Georgie thinks of seeing her, when he was young. He is up to bat and Ellen Sloane’s new boyfriend yells through the wire-links, “Sissy! Sissy!” It’s a lame insult, empty and childish, but it grates on Georgie, gets his nerves up. And the next he sees of it, while he’s out on second base waiting for the Colts to send a batter up, for god sakes, is his mother reaching her hand through the wire and grabbing at the boy in the dug-out, ripping at his $30 dollar uniform. He’s embarrassed for her, embarrassed for himself. This is his mother, the actor. This is his mother, the intervener. But later, he thinks of it; how she would protect him while his father sat back. “I’m not the one who has a problem sending you into the army,” his father would say at dinner, at those silent dinners before they got divorced – as though that meant his father trusted him, and that that trust was love.
“I won’t have you go,” she’d say. “I just won’t.”
And he had not wanted to go, anyway. He had just not wanted to be a sissy. What he wanted was to roam the long, glass halls of antique malls with her, tugging at her salmon slacks, holding up vases and saying, “This one?” “This one?” “This one?”
She is the one who protects him. She picks up the vase he holds. She turns it around. She feels for the whorl. She says, “This one is fake.” She does not want him to be disappointed. She wants him to know what to look for in this life, and how to know when it is not good.
posted by AQ at 17:11
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home