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Chapter Two

Life in the Car

I drive all over the American South, all night long, and nobody gives me trouble.

Maybe this farmer would but I buzz down my window and scream at him, “Remember Goat’s Head Soup? What an album! To my mind, it is worth hearing again!”

Couples, in the cars on this interstate, I think, “Ugh. They are stuck.” I think the women must envy me, driving a hundred and five with nobody saying not to, barefoot and chain smoking and squawking along to a song.

And Yet

Overconfidence is a mistake for me. Not a big one, but it kicks open the door for several others.

Now I don’t care about sitting up straight and I’m going to break speed records in Alabama.

Or no I am not, because the U.S. Army is in front of me. You would think that the Army would drive very fast. Not so, at least not in peace time. Good, one more reason to hate the Army. They’re holding me up.

Here’s a sign that reads: “pork!” Some signs aren’t there to make you happy.

In sleepiness, I see a rabble of dogs in a steamy heath, their hard-featured faces mottled with light from the yellow moon. I wonder if my cat’s sleeping somewhere, if she’s dreaming.

There could be nothing worse than wondering about my son Paulie’s dreams.

“work for us” reads the purple neon writing over a trucker’s garage.

I say, “Thanks, but I just want to drive right now.”

Paulie’s hands. They’re large to begin with, and make him bashful and can sometimes seem in his way. Now he has, in reaction to some goop he’s taking, a rash and must wear white gloves. Big ridiculous gloves. So it’s even more like he’s in a cartoon.

Turn Off the Radio

There are alcoholics all over the South. Many of them are inside the cars on this same highway. The alcoholics left over are minding the store.

My wheel explodes as I’m ripping past Mobile. The drunk road workers left a concrete chunk of debris out for me, smack-dab in the center of the interstate.

But I shouldn’t talk. I’m just one more thingamabob.

Waiting around.

And there are two capital letters on my gearshift panel that I can’t identify. I’ve never had to go down there.

Maybe I should be dead sixteen ways, but they can sledgehammer my rim back into shape and plug on any old tire; I’ll pay. Because these folks are fine at the wheel replacement facility. They’re no different. They’re practically the same as the same people I meet over and over in the middle of the night in Mobile when something very frightening is happening to me.

We’re congregated in a stifling hut—the stucco mechanics’ garage.

I lean on a tiled wall. There are fizzing snapping light tubes overhead. The room seems hollowed out to me, a green cavity.

I try to talk to them. I say, “Did you ever read Pierre; or, The Ambiguities? It’s the most disturbing Melville.”

I am crying but I try to stop. “White Jacket is more accessible,” I say.

Here’s a resting place for me—an all-night laundromat. It has a padlocked washroom, a line of shrimp-colored scoop chairs bolted to a wall.

My doctor did not prescribe enough drugs for me. If that ever was, in fact, his intention.

A tumble dryer is spinning my bandanna and the raggedy shop towels I carry in my trunk.

A berserk ringing noise issues from a game machine all the while.

Now a length of red hose untwists itself on the floor between me and the washers, snakes over and squirts water on my sandals and toes.

My car keys are where? They’re my only keys. I know I had them. I got here, didn’t I? Mightn’t those be they, clangoring around in the clothes dryer?

Men Who Are Too Young

“Clean as you go,” Hollis tells me. He says this is something he’s lived and learned.

He says so during this phone call he’s made to me at four a.m. Clean-As-You-Go is his reason for calling.

After I broke up with somebody and there were no more men, I called an old friend of mine, Lillian, and asked if she might fix me up.

“Oh certainly,” she said to me. “Plenty of people.”

“Great, great,” I said. “So, who’re you thinking?”

“Give me just a second.”

“O.K.”

“There’s somebody,” she said.

“Thank you,” I told her and told her I was hanging up.

“Wait,” she said. “Let me try a few things.”

So Lillian called around and she came up with Hollis. Grief-stricken and fresh out of his many-year marriage to Midge.

Now he and I are watching as some charitable organization pleads away on the television. The spokesperson says that without our donations many Third World children will go blind.

“Where the fuck is my government?” asks Hollis. “Why should this be left up to me?”

He says, “Suppose I don’t have any money to contribute?”

I don’t want to hurt his feelings or make things worse but I have to say, “That, is not too big a suppose.”

I should be ashamed, though. This is a man who buys, at a reduced price, milk and bags of bread that have expired.

We’ve moved over into my dining room. Hollis is backed up against the wall, measuring his height and marking over his head with a pencil. “You go next,” he says to me. “It’s fun to do!”

“Can’t just now,” I tell him.

He’s giving me a cool look and preparing a criticism. He carefully pockets his pencil, eases into the chair opposite, stirs the green tea in his steaming cup. “I don’t think—” he begins.

I say, “Well, no you don’t, do you? You don’t think this! You don’t think that! Don’t relay any more thoughts to me if you do not have them.”

I don’t open the door very wide for the spiteful hunchbacked landlord. He’s snooping around to see if I have a pet.

“No pet here,” I tell him, which is true, true, true.

I end up at the cat shelter. I step inside and announce that I am here for an animal who needs me.

Which is not true if they think I mean any cat in an iron lung or this ET-lookalike with the plate-sized face; technically a cat, considered so by a stringent application of the rules.

I say to myself, “Stop it.”

Or so I say. It doesn’t work.

Ain’t Life a Brook

Paulie says he’s crying because he’s tired and because his trousers are too long. He says they’re the only pants he brought to the hotel and they’re too long. He’s calling from somewhere in Manhattan. I know this from the 212 showing on my caller ID.

There are two cops keeping Paulie company tonight, I hear them in the background. They are Mikey and Rob. “Where are the other channels?” one of them is asking. And the other says, “No! You mean it isn’t even cable?”

Simple Machines

I would remind the ex-husbands, “We’re still awaiting your well-wishes and cards of concern, your outpourings and bids of assistance. You, who had something or other to do with my son.”

Paulie’s caretakers from the Sexual Crimes Division escorted him to the medical facility where the doctors are giving him TB tests and what all to learn something about his immune system. The Crap-Head Rodent Criminal, meantime, is in a cage at Rikers. That answers a few of my wants and desires. Not all.

Now I’m at a mall having indecision shopping and trying to buy something nice to send along to Paulie. A coat? No, no, he’s got plenty of coats. What’s that leave, then? I can’t think. A what? A what? A shower curtain?

And with bitterness sigh before their eyes.

And it shall be when they ask you,

“Wherefore sighest thou?” that you shall answer,

“For the tidings, because it cometh.”

And every heart shall melt.

—ezekiel 21:6–7

I’m at IHOP in a red booth seat, over a swiped tabletop and a Swedish stack.

In the booth ahead, with her back to me, is a woman, her bushy hair under a moss-green scarf. “Just say you’re my brother,” she tells her companion. “They’ll believe it. If they ask you, say you’re my brother.” The companion is facing me. He peeks up as he pours salt. Should I wag my head at him, no? Is that the right thing to do or the wrong?

I’m nobody’s judge. Not these days, certainly. On my blouse here, for instance, I missed the buttoning sequence by two.

Straight across from me there’s a couple on a study date. The male has a loose-leaf binder opened. He says, “Now we’ll go through these notes and pick out similarities and differences. O.K.? Here we go: ‘Traditional beliefs, customs, laws. Social strife was commonplace.’” He stops and peers through his wire-rims. His girl’s Rollerball is wiggling furiously. “Sheila,” he says, “don’t write the verbs. You don’t have to write ‘was,’ just write ‘commonplace.’”

Ah, but I hope they keep it up. I hope they don’t load their knapsacks and leave. I hope this stack of pancakes lasts so I don’t have to go home and try horribly to sleep again ever. The sky out there is like your head’s dunked down in the iodine water. And there are prickly white stars. The wind has tugged up the pine trees and is rocking and swaying them loose.

When I try to call Paulie back, there’s no answer, he’s gone and I guess the people from the Sexual Crimes Division have relocated him for safekeeping in some other hotel.

My thoughts about Paulie are a thing, over there, I’ll have to go through and sort sometime. Maybe keep some of it separate.

Rain batters the trees until they’re slick and dripping. There is certainly, outside, a lot going on.

And whatever the thing I was looking for, it’s maybe in my hand, mouth, on my fucking head, whatever the thing.

“I’m at the store,” I say to the ringing phone.

Nevertheless, Belinda’s revolting voice issues on my brand-new answering machine. “Our edits have been formally delivered. They’re on Lionel Shumacher’s desk,” says she. “Now all we can do is pray.”

I don’t care what the fuck she’s talking about. And Belinda’s afraid of chain letters. She shouldn’t be allowed to pray.

Are You Sure You’re All Right

Daughter Mev lives in a rental, a white house with red shutters and doors. Inside are sunny rooms, gleaming golden hardwood floors.

“Try this,” she says, giving me a spoon of something to taste from her mixing bowl.

“Um, I’m not really very—”

“What, Mother? These eggs are like, from hens who were pets.”

I say, “There’s Methadone in your refrigerator. Mightn’t it have an effect on the neighboring foods?”

“You don’t get any of this, changed my mind,” says Mev.

Now we’re seated on the floor together and I have a hand outstretched as Mev silently, painstakingly brushes my nails with a coppery lacquer.

There behind her is the stepladder she painted cornflower blue, and stacked on the ladder’s rungs are clay pots in which there’re hearty examples of the cephalopod plants that grow so very well down here in the country’s dumps.

Mev moved here with a Methadone habit. Over a year ago. After she had spent six months in rehab. Which she disliked.

Now, weekdays and Saturdays she rides the Amtrak over the pine-woodsy border into Louisiana, where Methadone can be legally obtained. For Sundays she’s given little plastic take-home vials.

Leave Some for Others

You don’t want to bother Miss Mev sometimes, she’s a very preoccupied person. Anyway, if she were involved in something, you’d have to tackle and maybe blind her to get her to stop.

I say to myself, “Whatever it is you think you’re doing right now? Lying on the couch there, doing whatever it is you think? You’re going to have to cut it short, know what I mean?”

“Stop pestering me,” I say. “I have problems to solve. Be with you soon as I can.”

But, But, But

“They’re replaying The English Patient,” says the Deaf Lady.

She says, “Which I have to confess I like.”

Hollis has such a look of disdain, she adds, “All right, so I’m a sucker for a love story.”

“No,” I say, “you most certainly are not. The English Patient is the most profoundly important movie ever made.”

And when Hollis wants to talk I won’t let him. I say, “You’re only going to say something incorrect about The English Patient!”

After he slumps off, the Deaf Lady and I relax and spread out on the bench a little. There is a white sky overhead and a flock of screaming birds.

I’m positive The English Patient is a good movie that I too would enjoy.

A paperwad pops around in the grass. It blows over my way and catches between my shoes. I snatch it up, undo the crinkled page.

“What’s it say?” asks the Deaf Lady. She props her chin on my shoulder so she too can read.

Printed in faint shaky capitals is “you will obey me.”

“Who in the world . . . ,” I say.

“Oh, that’s the mailman,” says the Deaf Lady.

“How so?” I ask.

“It just is,” she says. “Believe me. Pay no attention. It’s some Freudian nightmare he’s trapped in, you don’t want to know.” She takes the note away from me, wads it back up.

“Another thing that happened,” she says. “I went to play my Walkman and found a tape stuck in there. It was the soundtrack to Les Misérables. Show tunes? I never listen to that junk.”

“No, uh-uh, that’s not right,” I say and lower my eyes to look straight into hers. “That didn’t happen to you. That happened to me. Remember my telling you about it? Remember that we decided Hollis was playing a trick? Do you even own a Walkman?”

“Well, I do, yes,” she says. “However, of everything I’ve been telling you, Olive. I found a strange tape. I had a memory that isn’t my memory. My owning a Walkman is not the astounding part.”

I have to ask her sometime who is Olive.

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