|
|
An Appropriated Story, 1974
By
Richard Grayson, Dec 17, 2006
My protagonists are the fragments of a memory. They
are the only ones you may trust.
My whole wheat bread is weeping. Crying
silently. Even now. As I hold the sandwich in my hands, my pudgy
architect’s hands. Lorna must have put too much liebestod in the batter.
Otherwise why would it cry? With each bite, the tears grow less, and they
are muted inside of me. Each bread-tear takes that no-frills journey down
my esophagus, into the central cavity that is my stomach, their river
Lethe. On the television, guns are being fired. An old movie replayed:
Each Dawn I Die.
“Is that with John Garfield?” I ask Martin.
Martin is annoyed with me. Without changing his expression, he gives a
look of disapproval and says, “No. James Cagney.”
“We are all eight-year-olds with earaches,” somebody says.
I awake two seconds after midnight. The pain
has gotten much worse. I can hardly move my head, and when I try to move
my head, there are paroxysms so great that I must moan without wanting to.
All night I am like that.
I hear Lorna cry out, “What’s the matter?” from the room next door. But I
say, “Go back to sleep.”
Somehow I sleep. But my dreams are all of pain. In one, Martin refuses to
believe that my neck hurts as much as it does.
When I awake in the morning, the situation goes back to what it had been
the evening before, when the tuxedos were out and the fountain full of
soap suds. It is back to what it was. A twinge, a feeling that something
had snapped and needed only to solidify again.
But I can move around with greater comfort.
The Book of Revelations is misplaced, there
at the end of the New Testament. It should be in the Old Testament, or in
the Apocrypha at least.
I finally realize that Lorna does not want to look at me. I ask Martin to
read the letter I received during the January thaw, to see what Martin
thinks.
He reads the letter without his glasses. Martin announces that the letter
is matter-of-fact. He looks down at the parson’s table and says, “It
sounds like she’s straining for things to say.”
I am too close to the situation.
“Maybe Lorna will be at the airport in New Amsterdam,” Martin says.
“And maybe there’s an Easter bunny, too.”
I have the anger of disillusionment, but as Martin says, it’s my own
doing. Always. I have been working since fall, working and planning, and
now it is here and there’s nothing. I’m busy. I’ve stopped running to the
mailbox. I’ve been gathering myself together, preparing for the worst in
New Amsterdam.
A strange woman, an old alcoholic nurse with baggy eyes, comes into my
room and takes my hand. “Maybe it’s better to let it out now,” she says.
“No,” I tell her. “I’ll control myself until I get there. I will not break
down until I see her. Or don’t see her, as the case may be.”
Three Elavils, several thousand miles and a bolt of lightning later, I am
there. Lorna is waiting.
She kisses me, a rerun of that New Amsterdam
kiss. I can feel that her throat is sore.
Lorna has been singing three hours for friends who may go to Canada with
her this summer. She tells me, perhaps facetiously, that she hopes I can
get together with her friends someday.
She asks how I am.
“Right now I’m rather confused,” I say. “Things are happening too quickly
for me to come to terms with them all. Although I’ve been doing nothing if
not trying.”
Lorna says that she’ll say awhile; she’ll stay until it’s time for her to
go.
Martin’s girlfriend, the new one with the
nose, the one whose name I cannot remember, phones us. I tell her that
Martin is out playing cards.
Martin’s girlfriend giggles.
“At least that’s what he told me,” I add.
A short silence, a principal holding up his hand in assembly. “Yeah,” she
says. “Well… I don’t know if he’s talking to me.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well then, should I tell him you called?”
“You can if you want to.”
The story of my life.
“Okay,” I say, and I think that the word comes from ‘Old Kinderhook,’ the
nickname for Martin Van Buren. And I think of our Martin, who is supposed
to be playing cards.
“Do you know anything?” Martin’s girlfriend asks me.
“I’m a high school graduate,” I tell her. “So I know some things.”
Martin’s girlfriend giggles and hangs up without saying goodbye.
“In high school everyone used to wonder
about you,” Lorna tells me.
Did they? Why didn’t I know that?
“But they were all wrong,” she says. “You’re a man.”
There is freeze-dried coffee on the table, but neither of us will drink
it. We talk of our generation, who is in law school and stuff:
“Still, you can’t blame her.”
“Even if he’s not important to her anymore?”
“But on the other hand, she can’t help feeling abandoned.”
“He’s married, and a paraplegic to boot.”
“They’re still talking of marriage even if they do bicker somewhat.”
“She’s found another man.”
“They waited in line for Springsteen for hours.”
“It probably won’t happen until the end of summer.”
Martin came down the stairs, and our conversation ended. Lorna gave him a
wary smile. He had a book with him, and he drank our coffee, and he sat
with us and recited words borrowed from Arabic:
“Saffron ... mattress ... cotton ... safari ... henna ... assassin ...
algebra ... alcohol ... arsenal ... hashish ... gazelle ... lemon ...
albatross ...”
For Martin, it is a cinch.
“Like…” everyone says. The unfinished
simile.
There is a person living in the State of Ohio, County of Franklin, who to
this day believes she has ruined my life.
Like, she did ... for a while. She had one of those Jane Wyatt deliciously
sweet but vicious characters. She believed in fate. And her fate was to
ruin my life.
For months I did not leave my room. A nurse was assigned to me. My car
made a funny noise. My acne flared up again. I screamed obscenities out
the window. I had strange thoughts. Radios made me cry.
But I got over it. Somehow. I learned to trust the strange thoughts, to
metamorphose them with a finality I had barely suspected of existing.
And my life was not ruined. Once, at a wedding, an old maid cousin told
the bride in her dressing-room: “Nobody ruins anybody else’s life anymore.
They don’t even want to try.”
This person tried. But unlike Lorna, she could not succeed.
One day I discovered Lorna’s secret, quite
by accident. I was on a Greyhound bus going to Philadelphia. Two elderly
black churchwomen were sitting in the seats just in front of me. The one
near the window was deaf, and her companion had to speak loudly and
clearly. They couldn’t have realized I was behind them because I was using
Martin’s ticket; the ticket had Martin’s name on it, not mine. Martin was
with his girlfriend, the nosy one, at my house. They were indeed trying to
get rid of me, but I didn’t care. Because on that bus ride I learned
Lorna’s secret. The non-deaf black old lady said:
“She done it ‘cause she a fool!”
After that, it didn’t bother me so much. It had nothing to do with me, in
a way. I had done my best; I had behaved decently. Politely. I had never
given Lorna a hard time. I never raised my hand to her as I had with
Martin or the others. It was all Lorna’s doing. Because she was a fool. Is
a fool.
I sank back into my seat in the last row of the bus, leaving the driving
to others. For the first time in weeks, I began to feel hungry. In the
travel bag that Martin packed, there was a sandwich. His girlfriend had
made it for me.
I took it out of the Ziploc bag. It was peanut butter and marshmallow
fluff, on whole wheat bread that did not cry. By the time we got to
Philadelphia, it was gone.
Richard Grayson is
a retired lawyer and teacher. His short stories have
appeared in literary magazines and webzines since 1975 and in book-length
collections that include With Hitler in
New York, I Survived
Caracas Traffic, The
Silicon Valley Diet, Highly Irregular
Stories and And to Think That He
Kissed Him on Lorimer Street.
Back |
