Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Page 9

  “She’s not from Spain, she’s from Fort Bragg.”

  “Well, maybe she was bought there,” I said. “But she’s supposed to be Spanish.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” It was hard to tell without the eyebrows, but I think she was mad at me.

  “It’s not supposed to mean anything,” I said. “It’s just true.”

  “You’re full of it. There’s no such place.”

  “Sure there is,” I said. “It’s right next to France.”

  “Yeah, right. What’s that, a store?”

  I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. How could you not know that Spain was a country? Even if you were nine years old, it seems you would have picked it up on TV or something. “Oh, Brandi,” I said. “We’ve got to find you a map.”

  Because I couldn’t do it any other way, we fell into a tight routine. I had a part-time construction job and would return home at exactly 5:30. Five minutes later Brandi would knock on my door, and stand there blinking until I let her in. I was going through a little wood-carving phase at the time, whittling figures whose heads resembled the various tools I worked with during the day: a hammer, a hatchet, a wire brush. Before beginning, I’d arrange some paper and colored pencils on my desk. “Draw your doll,” I’d say. “Copy the bullring in her little environment. Express yourself!” I encouraged Brandi to broaden her horizons, but she usually quit after the first few minutes, claiming it was too much work.

  Mainly she observed, her eyes shifting between my knife and the Spanish doll parked before her on the desktop. She’d talk about how stupid her teachers were, and then she’d ask what I would do if I had a million dollars. If I’d had a million dollars at that time in my life I probably would have spent every last penny of it on drugs, but I didn’t admit it, because I wanted to set a good example. “Let’s see,” I’d say. “If I had that kind of money, I’d probably give it away.”

  “Yeah, right. You’d what, just hand it out to people on the street?”

  “No, I’d set up a foundation and try to make a difference in people’s lives.” At this one even the doll was gagging.

  When asked what she’d do with a million dollars, Brandi described cars and gowns and heavy bracelets encrusted with gems.

  “But what about others? Don’t you want to make them happy?”

  “No. I want to make them jealous.”

  “You don’t mean that,” I’d say.

  “Try me.”

  “Oh, Brandi.” I’d make her a glass of chocolate milk and she’d elaborate on her list until 6:55, when friendship period was officially over. If work had gone slowly and there weren’t many shavings to sweep up, I might let her stay an extra two minutes, but never longer.

  “Why do I have to go right this second?” she asked one evening. “Are you going to work or something?”

  ”Well, no, not exactly.”

  “Then what’s your hurry?”

  I never should have told her. The good part about being an obsessive compulsive is that you’re always on time for work. The bad part is that you’re on time for everything. Rinsing your coffee cup, taking a bath, walking your clothes to the Laundromat: there’s no mystery to your comings and goings, no room for spontaneity. During that time of my life I went to the IHOP every evening, heading over on my bike at exactly seven and returning at exactly nine. I never ate there, just drank coffee, facing the exact same direction in the exact same booth and reading library books for exactly an hour. After this I would ride to the grocery store. Even if I didn’t need anything I’d go, because that’s what that time was allotted for. If the lines were short, I’d bike home the long way or circle the block a few times, unable to return early, as those five or ten minutes weren’t scheduled for apartment time.

  “What would happen if you were ten minutes late?” Brandi asked. My mother often asked the same question—everyone did. “You think the world will fall apart if you walk through that door at nine-o-four?”

  They said it jokingly, but the answer was yes, that’s exactly what I thought would happen. The world would fall apart. On the nights when another customer occupied my regular IHOP booth, I was shattered. “Is there a problem?” the waitress would ask, and I’d find that I couldn’t even speak.

  Brandi had been incorporated into my schedule for a little over a month when I started noticing that certain things were missing—things like pencil erasers and these little receipt books I’d picked up in Greece. In searching through my drawers and cabinets, I discovered that other things were missing as well: a box of tacks, a key ring in the form of a peanut.

  “I see where this is going,” my mother said. “The little sneak unlatched your porch door and wandered over while you were off at the pancake house. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

  I hated that she figured it out so quickly.

  When I confronted Brandi, she broke down immediately. It was as if she’d been dying to confess, had rehearsed it, even. The stammered apology, the plea for mercy. She hugged me around the waist, and when she finally pulled away I felt my shirtfront, expecting to find it wet with tears. It wasn’t. I don’t know why I did what I did next, or rather, I guess I do. It was all part of my ridiculous plan to set a good example. “You know what we have to do now, don’t you?” I sounded firm and fair until I considered the consequences, at which point I faltered. “We’ve got to go . . . and tell your mother what you just did?”

  I half hoped that Brandi might talk me out of it, but instead she just shrugged.

  “I bet she did,” my mother said. “I mean, come on, you might as well have reported her to the cat. What did you expect that mother to do, needlepoint a sampler with the Ten Commandments? Wake up, Dopey, the woman’s a whore.”

  Of course she was right. Brandi’s mother listened with her arms crossed, a good sign until I realized that her anger was directed toward me rather than her daughter. In the far corner of the room a long-haired man cleaned beneath his fingernails with a pair of scissors. He looked my way for a moment and then turned his attention back to the television.

  “So she took a pencil eraser,” Brandi’s mother said. “What do you want me to do, dial nine-one-one?“ She made it sound unbelievably petty.

  “I just thought you should know what happened,” I said.

  “Well, lucky me. Now I know.”

  I returned to my apartment and pressed my ear against the bedroom wall. “Who was that?” the guy asked.

  “Oh, just some asshole,” Brandi’s mother said.

  Things cooled down after that. I could forgive Brandi for breaking into my apartment, but I could not forgive her mother. Just some asshole. I wanted to go to the place where she worked and burn it down. In relating the story, I found myself employing lines I’d probably heard on public radio. “Children want boundaries,” I said. “They need them.” It sounded sketchy to me, but everyone seemed to agree—especially my mother, who suggested that in this particular case, a five-by-eleven cell might work. She wasn’t yet placing the entire blame on me, so it was still enjoyable to tell her things, to warm myself in the comforting glow of her outrage.

  The next time Brandi knocked I pretended to be out—a ploy that fooled no one. She called my name, figured out where this was headed, and then went home to watch TV. I didn’t plan to stay mad forever. A few weeks of the silent treatment and then I figured we’d pick up where we left off. In the meantime, I occasionally passed her in the front yard, just standing there as if she were waiting for someone normal to pick her up. I’d say, “Hello, how’s it going?” and she’d give me this tight little smile, the sort you’d offer if someone you hated was walking around with chocolate stains on the back of his pants.

  Back when our neighborhood was prosperous, the building we lived in was a single-family home, and sometimes I liked to imagine it as it once was: with proud rooms and chandeliers, a stately working household serviced by maids and coachmen. I was carrying out the trash one afternoon and came u
pon what used to be the coal cellar, a grim crawl space now littered with shingles and mildewed cardboard boxes. There were worn-out fuses and balls of electrical wire, and there, in the back, a pile of objects I recognized as my own: things I hadn’t noticed were missing—photographs, for instance, and slides of my bad artwork. Moisture had fouled the casings, and when I backed out of the cellar and held them to the sun I saw that the film had been scratched, not by accident but intentionally, with a pin or a razor. “Yur a ashole,” one of them read. “Suk my dick why dont you.” The spelling was all over the place, the writing tiny and furious, bleeding into the mind-bending designs spewed by mental patients who don’t know when to stop. It was the exact effect I’d been striving for in my bland imitation folk art, so not only did I feel violated, I felt jealous. I mean, this girl was the real thing.

  There were pages of slides, all of them etched with ugly messages. Photographs, too, were ruined. Here was me as a toddler with the word shity scratched into my forehead. Here was my newlywed mother netting crabs with her eyes clawed out. Included in the pile were all of the little presents accepted with such false gratitude, the envelopes and postcards, even the towelettes, everything systematically destroyed.

  I gathered it all up and went straight to Brandi’s mother. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and she was dressed in one of those thigh-length robes people wear when practicing karate. This was morning for her, and she stood drinking cola from a tall glass mug. “Fuck,” she said. “Haven’t we been through this?”

  “Well, actually, no.” My voice was higher than normal, and unstable. “Actually, we haven’t been through this.”

  I’d considered myself an outsider in this neighborhood, something like a missionary among the savages, but standing there panting, my hair netted with cobwebs, I got the horrible feeling that I fit right in.

  Brandi’s mother glanced down at the filthy stack in my hand, frowning, as if these were things I was trying to sell door-to-door. “You know what?” she said. “I don’t need this right now. No, you know what? I don’t need it, period. Do you think having a baby was easy for me? I don’t have nobody helping me out, a husband or day care or whatever, I’m all alone here, understand?”

  I tried putting the conversation back on track, but as far as Brandi’s mother was concerned, there was no other track. It was all about her. “I work my own hours and cover shifts for Kathy fucking Cornelius and on my one day off I’ve got some faggot hassling me about some shit I don’t even know about? I don’t think so. Not today I don’t, so why don’t you go find somebody else to dump on.”

  She slammed the door in my face and I stood in the hallway wondering, Who is Kathy Cornelius? What just happened?

  In the coming days I ran the conversation over and over in my mind, thinking of all the fierce and sensible things I should have said, things like “Hey, I’m not the one who decided to have children” and “It’s not my problem that you have to cover shifts for Kathy fucking Cornelius.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” my mother said. “A woman like that, the way she sees it she’s a victim. Everyone’s against her, no matter what.”

  I was so angry and shaken that I left the apartment and went to stay with my parents on the other side of town. My mom drove me to the IHOP and back, right on schedule, but it wasn’t the same. On my bike I was left to my own thoughts, but now I had her lecturing me, both coming and going. “What did you hope to gain by letting that girl into your apartment? And don’t tell me you wanted to make a difference in her life, please, I just ate.” I got it that night and then again the following morning. “Do you want me to give you a ride back to your little shantytown?” she asked, but I was mad at her, and so I took the bus.

  I thought things couldn’t get much worse, and then, that evening, they did. I was just returning from the IHOP and was on the landing outside Brandi’s door when I heard her whisper, “Faggot.” She had her mouth to the keyhole, and her voice was puny and melodic. It was the way I’d always imagined a moth might sound. “Faggot. What’s the matter, faggot? What’s wrong, huh?”

  She laughed as I scrambled into my apartment, and then she ran to the porch and began to broadcast through my bedroom door. “Little faggot, little tattletale. You think you’re so smart, but you don’t know shit.”

  “That’s it,” my mother said. “We’ve got to get you out of there.” There was no talk of going to the police or social services, just “Pack up your things. She won.”

  “But can’t I . . .”

  “Oh-ho no,” my mother said. “You’ve got her mad now and there’s no turning back. All she has to do is go to the authorities, saying you molested her. Is that what you want? One little phone call and your life is ruined.”

  “But I didn’t do anything. I’m gay, remember?”

  “That’s not going to save you,” she said. “Push comes to shove and who do you think they’re going to believe, a nine-year-old girl or the full-grown man who gets his jollies carving little creatures out of balsa wood?”

  “They’re not little creatures!” I yelled. “They’re tool people!”

  “What the hell difference does it make? In the eyes of the law you’re just some nut with a knife who sits in the pancake house staring at a goddam stopwatch. You dress that girl in something other than a tube top and prop her up on the witness stand—crying her eyes out—and what do you think is going to happen? Get that mother in on the act and you’ve got both a criminal trial and a civil suit on your hands.”

  “You watch too much TV.”

  “Not as much as they do,” she said. “I can guaran-goddam-tee you that. You think these people can’t smell money?”

  “But I haven’t got any.”

  “It’s not your money they’ll be after,” she said. “It’s mine.”

  “You mean Dad’s.” I was smarting over the “little creatures” comment and wanted to hurt her, but it didn’t work.

  “I mean our money,” she said. “You think I don’t know how these things work? I wasn’t just born some middle-aged woman with a nice purse and a decent pair of shoes. My God, the things you don’t know. My God.”

  My new apartment was eight blocks away, facing our city’s first Episcopal church. My mother paid the deposit and the first month’s rent and came with her station wagon to help me pack and move my things. Carrying a box of my featherweight balsa-wood sculptures out onto the landing, her hair gathered beneath a gingham scarf, I wondered how she appeared to Brandi, who was certainly watching through the keyhole. What did she represent to her? The word mother wouldn’t do, as I don’t really think she understood what it meant. A person who shepherds you along the way and helps you out when you’re in trouble—what would she call that thing? A queen? A crutch? A teacher?

  I heard a noise from behind the door, and then the little moth voice. “Bitch,” Brandi whispered.

  I fled back into the apartment, but my mother didn’t even pause. “Sister,” she said, “you don’t know the half of it.”

  Blood Work

  For many years I cleaned apartments in New York, which is not a bad way to make a living. My boss ran a small agency and charged clients fifteen dollars an hour, five of which went to him and ten to the employee. You could earn more working for yourself, but to me it was worth it to have a middleman, someone to set up the schedule and take the occasional flak. If something got broken, our boss would replace it, and if something was stolen, or alleged to have been stolen, it was he who defended our character. With the exception of a chiropractor’s office, all of my jobs were residential, apartments and lofts I visited once a week or once every other week. The owners were usually off at work, and on the few occasions that they were home they tried to make themselves as unobtrusive as possible, acting as though it were my apartment and they were just guests.

  One such client was a claims adjuster in his mid-sixties. I’d been cleaning his apartment for over a year and finally met him while he was at home reco
vering from an operation. He had some kind of a heart condition and approached me while I was cleaning out his refrigerator. “I hate to bother you,” he said, “but I’m going to go lie down for a while. I’ve set the alarm, but if for some reason I don’t wake up, I’m wondering if you could possibly insert this into my anus.” He handed me a rubber glove and a translucent lozenge filled with amber liquid.

  “If you’re not awake by when?” I asked.

  “Oh, say, three o’clock.”

  He went into the bedroom and I started wondering what I’d do if the alarm failed to rouse him. Which was worse—inserting a lozenge into a stranger’s anus or feeling responsible when his heart stopped beating? As with most things, I supposed it all depended upon the person. The man had never complained to my boss or asked me to do his laundry, and he had been thoughtful enough to provide me with a rubber glove, so who was I to deny him this one favor?

  The alarm sounded at three, and just as I was screwing up my courage, the claims adjuster stepped out of the bedroom, looking refreshed and ready to take on the afternoon. The following week he returned to work, and though I cleaned his apartment for another two years, we never saw each other again.

  My boss was horrified by the suppository incident, but in retrospect I saw it as an adventure. It got sort of boring being alone all day, and so I asked to be sent on more jobs where the client was at home. Often these were one-shot deals. The apartment owner had hosted a particularly rowdy party or recently had some plaster sanded and wanted someone to straighten up the mess. Once I went to the home of a former Playmate who needed help reorganizing her closets. We got to talking, and she showed me pictures of her three ex-husbands, explaining that her family motto was “Eat, drink, and remarry.”

  “That’s old,” my boss said, but I had never heard it before.

  In December of 1992 a story I’d written was broadcast on NPR, and six months later the New York Times ran a little article headlined HE DOES RADIO AND WINDOWS. It came out on a Sunday morning, and by ten A.M. people began calling me at home, asking if I could come clean their apartments. Many of them had an ulterior motive and wanted me to report on something they considered important or unfair: a discriminatory hiring practice, secret meetings held by their co-op board, a controversial medical breakthrough the bigwigs had chosen to suppress. “That’s not really the kind of thing I do,” I would tell them, but they were persistent and plied me with what they called “important contact numbers.” This was always said in a whisper, implying that spies were everywhere.