Everything Must Go, Page 3

  He checks his watch again and pushes the receipts together, tapping them into alignment, and tries not to think of the sheer waste his existence is turning out to be. His movements feel clunky and self-conscious. As if he is being watched closely, the subject of a science experiment. An experiment some cosmic deity had cooked up, he thinks, to see just how deep a human being can sink into waking oblivion.

  Or maybe it is a movie, he thinks. The Life Story of Henry Powell, starring (drumroll, please) Henry Powell, ladies and gentlemen. His heart sinks deeper into his chest, an imaginary screenwriter scribbles. He sifts through the shoe box under the counter marked Miscellaneous. Stage notes indicate the box is gray. The screenwriter uses words like pathetic and desolate in his description of the scene. Henry’s shoulders are slumped. The screenwriter in his sunny California office, so remote from Henry’s Northeastern existence. A gray existence. Like the shoe box. The screenwriter tilts back in the ergonomic desk chair all Californians seem to sit in and steeples his fingers together in supreme satisfaction at the metaphor.

  Henry can envision Peterson in a pink T-shirt under his blazer (sleeves up) leaning against the bar at Blackie’s, swigging his beer—for if anyone swigs a beer it’s Peterson, he thinks. With, say, Bob Seger playing on the radio he’ll fling non sequiturs like pizza dough. Hoping to catch the interest of his audience: “Figger” Newton, Gaynor Mills and Chris “Smithereen” Smith, so called because in tenth grade he took a hammer and smashed the box he’d received a D on in Shop. Though his classmates were admiring of the gesture, deep down Chris Smith knew he’d exploded not because of the grade but because the night before his parents had told him of their plans to separate. They never did end up getting back together, as they’d promised him that night. And Smithereen never quite got over it. Henry knows that at some point “Against the Wind” will give way to something by the Eagles. Serpentine conversation will slither from junk bonds and Drexel Burnham and, inevitably, back in time to Bunsen burners and football games won and lost. Bored heads will be fixed on the game scores scrolling along the bottom of the TV hanging in the corner of the bar. Braves lose. Mets up by two. Henry decides then and there he will not be going to Blackie’s tonight.

  The magnetic pull of his new answering machine is too much to resist. Not many people have these tape-recording devices attached to home phones. But Henry had his friend, the manager of Radio Shack, order one for him after reading about them in Esquire.

  He picks up the phone and dials his own number. “This is Henry Powell,” his own voice greets him, “please leave a message when you hear the beep.” Though he knows what awaits him, he enters his code: 22849. He mouths the words as the robotic voice delivers the news: “You have—slight pause—no—slight pause—messages.”

  He knew she wouldn’t call him. He’d met her in the birthday card section at the stationery store that morning. Janine. She had moved closer to him at the precise moment he had unknowingly reached for a card with a pornographic cartoon image. Horrified, Henry had held on to the one he had chosen, hoping she had not seen it, and then, to hide the front, he pulled the matching envelope. But she had seen the slot the envelope came from and there was no denying the fact that Henry appeared to be a complete and total pervert.

  Henry, beet-red but thinking “the best defense is a good offense,” said, “Hi. I’m Henry Powell.”

  Janine stretched her upper lip out first in disgust but then, minding her manners, forced it into a smile, said, “I’m Janine.”

  Henry hoped a conversation would distract her long enough so he could back up against the opposing card rack and tuck the dirty card into a section, any section, from behind his back. “Do you work up the street?”

  “No. I’m in town visiting my college roommate.”

  Henry, successful in relieving himself of the card, smiled. “Huh. Who’s your roommate? Maybe I went to school with her.”

  It appears to Henry that Janine might be warming up and even perhaps—please God—forgetting about the card she thinks he chose on purpose. “Sloan Phillips? Do you know her?”

  Henry once carried a very bombed Sloan Phillips up her front walk after a party they’d gone to together junior year but felt this was not the time to bring it up to Janine.

  “Yeah, I know Sloan. Wow. You’re her college roommate?”

  The conversation went on from there and culminated in Henry saying, “If you guys are going out later, give me a call,” after she’d mentioned wanting to go to Blackie’s since she’d heard so much about it. But he had known she wouldn’t call.

  The door chime sounds as Henry replaces the phone onto its receiver. A work fantasy blitzkriegs his brain: the buxom and ponytailed St. Paulie girl blowing in through the front doors with outstretched arms finally free of the frothy mugs she’s gripped ever since he discovered her in ninth grade and lovingly attached her image to the ceiling over his twin bed with circles of Scotch tape. But no. It is Mr. Beardsley, grinning hard underneath the single section of hair carefully directed from the left ear across the top of his head to just above the right ear.

  “Henry, my boy, life is good,” he says, breezing past him, all Old Spice and mentholated cough drops. “Life. Is. Good.”

  “How’s it going?” Henry asks, defying his boss’s admonitions to steer clear of colloquialism.

  “I’ll tell you how it’s going, my boy,” his exaggerated enunciation a friendly but firm correction. “We’re going big time.” His arms stretch out, his face clownlike with wide-eyed enthusiasm. “Big time.”

  Henry winces at the “we.”

  It was not supposed to be we. This was to be an interim job, one that supplied just enough income to keep afloat until something better came along. The classified section had conspired, though, to keep Henry here. Work From Home, one ad would announce. That hadn’t sounded too bad until he called the number at the bottom of the square and found it had been disconnected. On Your Way to the Top, another read, but when Henry called he’d learned getting to the top required a significant amount of seed money. “To make money you have to spend money,” the man on the phone had explained. When Henry told him he had little to nothing to give, the man abruptly terminated their conversation, which, until then, had been super friendly. Each week produced more discouragement until finally Henry decided to postpone his job search. Just for a while, he told himself.

  “Big time?” His indifference was a way to keep Mr. Beardsley from confusing interest with shared enthusiasm.

  Beardsley swings around to face Henry. “I just came from lunch with Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan.” He pauses to bask in admiration he’s certain will follow. It appears, though, that this announcement will not have the impact he had counted on.

  “Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan?” Beardsley repeats himself, annoyed that he must now suffer the indignity of explaining the significance of the meal, diminishing its triumph. “Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan are legends in boutique men’s clothing. Legends. I know it’s hard to believe but you know Clarke’s over in Westtown? Well, it wasn’t always the big draw it is now. Used to be you wouldn’t be caught dead in Clarke’s—all Sansabelt pants and white vinyl. You wouldn’t take your grandfather in there, much less find anything for yourself, God forbid. Schmidt and Logan went in, cleaned house, turned it into a multimillion-dollar cash cow.”

  Beardsley’s remaining shred of excitement finally dissipates, deflated by Henry’s blank stare. “You young people,” he says, “you think everything magically works. Everything’s all taken care of. You don’t have to do a thing, businesses just run themselves. Bills just magically get paid….”

  Henry watches his boss’s lips move. Their ugly stretchy movements remind him of the eel listlessly snaking back and forth in its tank in the Chinese restaurant near Route 3.

  “…but you and me, we’re the workers. We’re the ones behind the scenes, making sure when people come down Main Street they’ve got choices, a nice string of shops to go in and out of, famil
y places….”

  Carefully, so carefully, Henry reaches his right hand over to his left wrist and pretends to scratch a spot just beside his watch. Twisting it so the face angles up and he can check the time without the giveaway wrist roll, he nods in agreement to Mr. Beardsley’s mouth, opening and shutting around the words pouring out his sales philosophy. When Beardsley glances at the front door midsentence, Henry sees his chance and successfully negotiates a quick glance-down.

  It is three-fifteen.

  It’s warm enough to take off the top of the Jeep. It’s been smelling like mildew lately but then again it could rain so maybe I should just keep it on.

  “Hel-lo? Anybody in there?” The rapping at his skull rattles him out of his head and back to Mr. Beardsley, who is holding up the bundle that is Peterson’s pants. “I suppose I’m expected to psychically divine what I am to do with these pants balled up here behind the desk?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Henry says. “I was going to do that after—”

  “After what? After your daydream?” Mr. Beardsley jabbers on as he folds Neal Peterson’s pants around the tailor ticket. “Honestly, Powell, I can’t keep following you around reminding you about how the system works. You never used to need that, as I recall. What happened to those days? What happened to that energetic young man I hired not so long ago? Yes, Mr. Beardsley. No, Mr. Beardsley. Anything I can do, Mr. Beardsley? Now all I get is ‘how’s it going’ if I’m lucky.”

  He shriveled up and died of boredom, Henry thinks. Rest in Peace. RIP.

  Chapter three

  1977

  Henry parks his bicycle in front of the shoe repair shop, one store over from Baxter’s, so he can readjust his tie and run a hand through his hair. He checks over his shoulder to make sure no one is around before he studies his reflection in the window. But the shoe repairman has not washed the window so Henry does not notice the piece of tissue paper still glued by a dot of blood to his freshly shaved face. The Help Wanted sign is still propped in the corner of Baxter’s window so he knows he still has a shot. Supplemental Help, Mr. Beardsley said on the phone when he called to inquire the day before. Henry assumed “supplemental help” would be explained and so did not ask what that meant for fear of sounding ignorant.

  “Ah, the young Mr. Powell.” Mr. Beardsley takes off his glasses and walks to Henry, arm extended for what ends up being a surprisingly hearty handshake for such a delicate-looking man. “How are you, son?”

  “Fine, sir,” Henry says. “Thank you.”

  “Right on time—” Mr. Beardsley taps the face of his watch “—I like that. How’s the season going so far? Let’s go sit over here. Take your pick.” He motions for Henry to take one of the two armchairs situated outside the dressing rooms.

  “Good, we’re just practicing right now actually,” Henry says. He pulls his trousers up in front and settles into the chair, mirroring Mr. Beardsley’s erect posture. His legs are already sore from the squats and suicide drills they ran that morning.

  “Good old FRCP,” Mr. Beardsley says. “You’re a lucky young man. You’ve got the world at your feet.”

  Fox Run College Preparatory is uniforms, leafy walkways between old stone buildings, dowdy teachers, a mutli-million-dollar endowment, a competitive student body in love with Weejuns and bent on trying to appear indifferent. It is a private school as rich in tradition as it is in collective student body wealth, counting a U.S. president, fourteen senators and countless CEOs as alumni. Friendships forged in the dining hall were lifelong and tangled in well connectedness. Its hallways reeked of the carelessness that comes from knowing money will never be far out of reach. Few in Henry’s class knew that the bloat of money filling up the pockets of, say, the Sandersons or the Childers offset the relative obscurity of funds in the Powell family. But Henry knew. He felt it when Kevin Douglas drove his sixteenth birthday present to school. Or when tags appeared on zippers after winter break. Tags reading Aspen, Stratton, Snowbird. Or when January sunburns started to peel. His academic scholarship was, he felt, a form of parole. Should some felony be committed, Henry sensed he would be the first one called up for a police lineup. When the headmaster called an assembly to lecture the upperclassmen about pranks and threatened to keep all the seniors from graduating if those responsible for the burning effigies meant to represent himself and his deputy did not step forward, Henry was sure the remarks were directed at him. The scholarship felt creaky, impermanent.

  “You understand this is a temporary job,” Mr. Beardsley says. His porkchop sideburns impress Henry.

  Henry wore his hair long, below his ears—an unspoken uniform at Fox Run. But he made a mental note to aspire to Mr. Beardsley’s choice of sideburn design. Henry was conscious of his looks but not sorry for them. In other towns, in faraway regions, the Powell nose, for instance, would be attached to adjectives like huge. But in their Northeastern town Henry’s facial centerpiece might be referred to as patrician. Befitting his angular, oversize features. Gangly. His limbs long, all muscle and sinew. He had seen pictures of his father in his teens and knew this was just a phase: someday he, too, would grow into his face and body. The cheekbones that jutted out, the chin that pointed from his neck and, yes, the nose, they would all make sense someday. He told himself the girls would be sorry and until then he tried to look at people head-on, postponing the profile view as long as possible.

  “We’ll see how well you do but I can’t promise anything past the winter sale. This fall you’ll get a lay of the land and then it’s trial by fire. But after the sale I can’t promise anything,” Mr. Beardsley is saying.

  “No, no, that’s totally fine,” Henry says.

  “You make good eye contact,” he says, scribbling something on his clipboard. “I like that.”

  “Thanks,” Henry says. The mumbling, though, appears to dent Mr. Beardsley’s smile. Another mark goes onto the clipboard.

  “You’d be available for overtime work during sale week, right?” Mr. Beardsley peers up at him. Suspicious. The look of a man who has been the brunt of one too many crank phone calls, Henry thinks. A bolt of imaginary lightning illuminates Mr. Beardsley: “I think my refrigerator is running…”

  “Yes, sir,” Henry says. “Absolutely.”

  The Baxter’s sale, heavily advertised in the County Register, begins every year on New Year’s Day and lasts one week. The towns that circle this one like a skirt invade the store during the weeklong event—an event as much about acquiring new clothes as it is a hibernation hiatus. A chance to compare Christmas gifts and vacations. Henry and his brothers had gone with their mother every year when they were little. They would run through aisles with friends while their mothers chatted and picked through bins marked by sizes.

  Between working the stockroom in the fall, on the floor during the holiday season and then during the sale, Henry hopes to save enough money for the used Jeep he has his eye on. A CJ-7.

  “Those suck,” Brad said to Henry just before he left home for good. Henry, ripping out a picture from Car and Driver, said, “No, they don’t,” and regretted it because it had made him sound like a baby.

  Sure enough: “No, they don’t,” Brad whined back at him.

  “The thing is, it pays well,” Henry says to his father a few hours later. “And Mr. Beardsley says I could make a schedule work around football practice and all. So I could work Thursdays when he stays open later anyway—after practice till close—and Saturdays. And days we don’t have practice. Yeah, I’m pretty sure about that.”

  Henry has not quite thought it all through, this job at Baxter’s. He pauses to check his father’s reaction and to figure a way to spackle up the holes in his speech. His father’s tie in muted diagonal stripes of pale yellow and brown is barely back in fashion after two decades off. In the dim light Henry can hardly see the frayed flecks of pulled silk.

  “The away-game days, though, I know Mr. Beardsley won’t mind,” he says as much to himself as to his father. “He said so, actually. Oh yeah, I
remember he said he wouldn’t mind if it was different week to week. So then it’s fine with the away games. And it pays well.”

  Henry stops there as he notices his father’s spoon has stopped circulating in his coffee mug. He has made a bad choice in ending with the pay factor. He knows that now and knows his father knows. But it is too late to rectify so Henry remains quiet, watching his father’s wrist resume the trips around the perimeter of the chipped mug they had picked up on a family road trip to Vermont in the summer.

  It is the great unspoken understanding in the Powell house that any discussion that points to their lack of fortune would be in bad form. In theory the Powells came from money. In theory. Their name a good, solid-sounding name sure to be connected somehow to English nobility somewhere deep in the rings of the trunk of the family tree. But in actuality Henry Powell’s parents were Brontë penniless. A small trickle of money from a family trust fund kept them above the below, but the fact of the matter was they were below the above. Still, his mother’s grandfather had had a lot of money that was to be stingily disbursed “in perpetuity” and that enabled them to continue the illusion—with manners and bearing—that they came from old money. They surrounded themselves with wealthy friends. They wore shabbily preppy clothing. But most of all, they wore their lack of great fortune proudly. And so they were accepted into society.

  It was just not done in the Powell circle, the speaking of money. A previous mention had ended badly, with Edgar Powell crying a single, solitary Native-American-looking-out-at-a-now-littered-land tear. Henry had only heard about the heartbreaking spectacle from his cousin, Tommy. Henry Powell had never seen his father cry. But he suspected seeing someone perpetually on the brink of crying is worse. The way nausea makes its victims pray for vomit. To be rid of the sickness. “How come your father cried?” Tommy had asked, unaware that he would now be eternally disliked for his Holy Grail sighting. From that point forward Henry refused to allow Tom into his fort. Henry sometimes imagined it was he who had seen his father show such emotion. He even concocted a scenario that entailed him offering his father a tissue, a kind pat on the head thanks for the thoughtfulness of the gesture. All fantasies ending with Henry and his father in a loving embrace, Henry inhaling the wet-dog tweed of his father’s clothes, his father—eyes closed in reverie—inhaling his son’s smell, the smell of childhood.