A Gesture Life (9 page)

“Not far away, Mother,” Veronica happily answers. “Not far away at all.”

Officer Como winks at her, and I say, “You must be very proud, Officer.”

“We’ll see how proud I can be,” she answers. “Anything can happen. She could fall for some handsome jerk and get pregnant.”

“Jesus, Mom.”

“I’m only being realistic, darling. I have to be because you’re too wide-eyed. You’d think she’d be harder, with those gory novels she reads, and with her mother a cop, but it’s exactly the other way. She doesn’t believe the world is the way it is.”

“I don’t want to believe,” Veronica tells her, now glancing at me. “And neither does my good friend, Franklin. We share the same outlook. Don’t we?”

“We certainly do,” I answer her, though in truth the sound of the words is deeper than the feeling. I’m not sure anymore what I see when I “look out,” if it’s real or of my own making or something in between, a widely-shared fantasy of what we wish life to be and, therefore, have contrived to create. Or perhaps more to the point, what ought we see, for best sustenance and contentment and sense of purpose to our days? Veronica already seems rich in these regards, and seems, as much as a girl of fourteen can, quite unshakeable. So let her believe. I, Franklin Hata, retired supplier of home medical goods, expatriate and war veteran and now suburban lap swimmer nonpareil, can operate only provisionally at present, even
in the wane of my life. I would gladly look to Veronica for a lead, and for the past two days, I probably have.

“Well, we ought to be going,” Officer Como says, motioning to Veronica. “I can’t leave the car out front forever. I’m not a public servant anymore. We’ve got to get dinner together, Ronny. And I want to thank you, Doc, for my daughter.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been very good for her. Most of the time she comes home plain tired, and I think this job is mostly a waste of her time. She should go right to studying after school. But she’s been working hard at home the last couple days, full of energy. You two must have something special going.”

“She’s the one who has been providing the energy,” I say.

“Well, I’m happy you’re being discharged tomorrow, but I’m sorry for Ronny.”

“You’re going home?” Veronica says softly, knowing well that all discharges happen in the morning.

“Yes,” I reply, though I’m looking at her mother. “Dr. Weil thinks I’m recovered.”

Officer Como answers, “I talked to him as he was leaving the hospital. He helped a partner of mine once. He says you’re coming back like a thirty-year-old.”

“Do thirty-year-olds always feel like this?”

Officer Como smiles, touching my arm as she rises from the chair. “Don’t get up, Doc. Ronny, it’s time to go.”

Veronica comes around the bed and stands next to her mother. They’re opposite in shape, a white radish and a pear, the daughter seemingly half her mother’s height, though of course she isn’t. For a moment I wonder if she is an adopted child, but the thought chills me somehow, as if the possible fact should mean a certain set of
complications and unhappiness is imminent for them, no matter how loving they are now. But I’m forlorn because Veronica seems forlorn, and all because of my stupid cowardice.

“Well, goodbye, then,” Veronica says. Her face looks pale. She doesn’t seem to know what to do. Then she reaches out and squeezes my hand for a second, and before I can say anything she’s already out in the hall.

Her mother stares after her and, not wanting to leave abruptly, calls and tells her to wait in the car.

“I’m sorry, Doc,” she says to me, her expression soured, “I don’t know what’s wrong with her. It’s not like her to run off like that.”

“It’s my doing,” I say. “I didn’t tell her I was leaving tomorrow morning.”

“She could have looked at your chart, or asked one of the nurses.”

“Yes,” I say, “but I didn’t give her any reason to.”

Officer Como considers this, working it quickly, and I can tell she’s thinking back to the time when she and I knew each other much better than we might today, when we had a number of conversations whose subject was always the same. I recall how strictly we used to speak, and even sometimes disagreeably, so much so that the simple sight of her blue-and-white car slowly pulling up in front of the store would be enough to halt me.

“You know, Doc, it’s amazing how fast the years go by. When we first met, Veronica was a toddler, if that. And your Sunny was what, around the age Veronica is now?”

“I believe that’s right.”

“It’s truly amazing. It’s nice to see how things can turn out fine, when maybe you thought it was going to be only trouble ahead. I guess that’s why, in a funny way, I still worry so much about Ronny,
even though she’s generally such a good kid. You never know what’s going to happen, for better or for worse. I’m happy that all is going well for you, except maybe this little mishap at your house. And to be a grandfather, well, that’s just great for you. When I saw Sunny again at the mall, you know I hardly recognized her? She’s such a grown-up now! We even had a nice little talk. Can you imagine, the two of us talking like two ladies at the club? And she showed me a picture of her little boy. Talk about who should be proud.”

“You saw her at the Ebbington Mall?”

“I see her every day now. As Ronny said, I’m the new head of security. Sunny’s been managing the store almost a year, right? She looks fantastic, all dressed up in those nice new clothes. She was always so beautiful. She’s even more so now that’s she a little older. So beautiful. I guess she always will be.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

“I should be going. It was good to see you, Doc. I’m glad you met my daughter, or that she met you. Should I say anything to Ronny for you? I know she’ll appreciate it. You might not have seen it, but she really is a good girl.”

“I know she is,” I say, wishing all of a sudden for my lungs to fill and tear, for my skin to burn, for things to fall apart for the benefit of Dr. Weil. “I know she is, I know.”

“Well, so long then. Maybe we’ll catch you at the mall.”

“Yes, yes. Perhaps I’ll see Veronica there.”

“Sure, I’ll tell her that.”

And then that is all. I step to the window and I see a car parked in the circle where the ambulances come and go. It’s hard to make out, but I think Veronica is sitting in the front seat, holding a book in her hands. Then I see Officer Como walk out to the car and get inside. They sit and speak for a moment, but not for long. They
drive off and I watch them go down the hill, and I lose them with the angle. But I see their brake lights again when they reach the main road, the two-lane that follows Middle Pete Creek to the west where it crosses over the parkway, on the other side of which begin the stately rises of trees and easy rolling meadows of Bedley Run. They’ll drive swiftly and quietly and without stopping until they cross the buffer zone of old warehouses and railyards, and they’ll see reflected in the reservoir the many-colored lights of working-class Ebbington, home of the fast-food strip and the multiplex, and as well to those who would never get to live in my respectable town, the policewomen and the candy stripers and then all the others in this world who would hardly be known.

SUNNY
, if I recall, was particularly hard on Officer Como. At her worst, she would sit diffidently on the hood of the policewoman’s cruiser as it sat parked on Church Street, smoking a cigarette as though she were idly passing the time on a bench in the park, her favorite mirrored sunglasses perched on her head. I remember one incident quite clearly. It was one of those days of transitional warm weather in the late fall, when I had the door of the shop opened to the street. Sunny was one store down, in front of the stationer’s, and I watched her obliquely from inside. This was long after the time that I could say anything directive or even meaningful to her, for I would have if I had thought it would do either of us any good. She was clearly waiting for Officer Como to come back with her lunch. I felt I was witnessing a staged accident, awaiting the trial run of something that I knew would be terrible.

“Get off the car,” Officer Como said, perching the brown lunch bag near the lights on the roof. She stepped back toward the middle of the sidewalk, facing my daughter. Officer Como was still
very youthful-looking then, sprightly and angular, and fresh of face like Veronica is now, which of course was partly what compelled Sunny to want to test her.

“Get off the car now!”

Sunny slid her hands behind her and pushed off the hood. She stood there on the edge of the sidewalk, inches from the fender. She wasn’t as tall as the officer but her presence was remarkably severe and stolid and it didn’t seem as though she were yielding any room. She was nearly sixteen and her body had filled out; she was just at the point when she was conscious of how to hold herself, how to gain a certain strength of repose by the set of her stance, her hips, her lofted chin. She wasn’t the kind of bad girl who cursed or talked back, there being little of that loudness and bluster to her (except on rare occasions with me, who somehow inspired her), but rather she was intimidatingly and defiantly quiet. She just looked at you, or more accurately, she made it that you looked at her. There wasn’t a hint of vanity or pride. The way she was facing Officer Como, you could tell she knew how to use her splendid appearance. For Sunny had always understood the cooler properties of her beauty, the ungiving stone of it.

“Now come over here,” Officer Como commanded, pointing down at a spot a half-foot in front of her. “Right here, right now.”

Sunny sighed and dropped her cigarette, not bothering to stamp it out. She acted more bored than anything else. And although she was but a couple steps from the officer, it seemed to take her whole minutes to reach the spot, enough so that I wanted to close the shop and rush out there and shake her to sensibility. But then I’ve always wanted to do that, and yet never have.

“You’re really wasting yourself, you know that?” Officer Como said to her, less angrily than anyone could have expected from her
at that moment. “You don’t even know. Others have nothing, not brains, not money, not good looks. They’ve got nothing and they know it and they’re bad. But you have everything going for you. It’s ridiculous.”

“You can’t tell me what I have going,” Sunny answered, keeping her voice low. “So don’t try.”

“I’ll tell you whatever I want,” Officer Como said forcefully, now holding Sunny by the arm. “And you know why? I wouldn’t say a word to you if I thought you deserved it. But you don’t. You drink and you probably do drugs and stay out all night with all kinds of sleazy men. It should make you sick to think what your father must feel, how scared he must be for you every time you leave the house. But you don’t care about that, either. You can’t think about that. All you have time for is being a stuck-up little girl who looks for trouble anywhere she can find it. You’re so damn tough and cool, aren’t you? So you sit on cop cars in your hot pants. Wow, young lady. Big deal. You’re a big deal.”

Officer Como let go of her but Sunny didn’t move. For a moment I was certain that one of them would suddenly reach out and strike the other. There were no customers in the store and so I drifted out to the doorway; a few people were lingering about them on the sidewalk. I was perplexed as to what I should do. It’s a strange thing, to have your daughter being publicly accosted by an officer of the law and to know inside that it’s completely right and warranted, and yet on top of that having the impulse to shield her from criticism and unhappiness, and feeling, too, the purest, unbending aggression toward the officer. All this, I realize, is probably fatherhood in a nutshell, but I’m sure it’s true that for most these instances are what they are, momentary and situational and thankfully rare, and not, as in the case of Sunny and me, our lives’ chronic
bout. That day my emotions were running particularly high, I think, because of what was spoken next, by both Officer Como and Sunny, as well as myself.

“What did you say about me staying out at night?” Sunny asked, her voice sounding higher and milder than I’d heard for some years, more like when she was just-arrived, the tone cut-off and vulnerable and like that of anybody else.

Officer Como answered, “Just what the whole town knows.”

Sunny’s face hardened, and she pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes and bent to lift her bicycle from the sidewalk. She began walking away with it, an expensive French racer I had bought for her recent birthday.

“Hey!” Officer Como spoke briskly. “Don’t be running off. I haven’t said anything about our being done, have I? We haven’t finished our conversation.”

Sunny stepped in front of the seat and straddled her bike, not answering the policewoman. There was a peculiar hint of innocence to the stance, despite how grave her expression was, as if she were simply asking the local officer for directions. She was on her bike because I hadn’t allowed her to get her driver’s permit and license, for I was deathly afraid of where she might end up if she had a car. After many weeks of intense arguments she finally gave up and took to riding the bicycle all around town. So much so, in fact, that it was a customary sight for everyone to see Sunny Hata pedaling on her powder-blue twelve-speed, here and there and at all hours of the day and night.

“Why don’t you ask me again what I know about you?” Officer Como said. “Because I’ll let you know.”

“Sure,” Sunny replied severely, sounding like herself again. “Go ahead.”

I was at the door to the shop and as there were no customers on that unusually warm afternoon I couldn’t help but head toward them. Officer Como’s back was turned, but Sunny could well see me. She didn’t give any indication that I was within earshot. She just glared defiantly at the officer without the least expression.

“I hear you’re over at Jimmy Gizzi’s house a lot these days.”

Sunny didn’t answer.

“Jimmy Gizzi. Now
there’s
a nice young man,” Officer Como said thickly. “Someone worth befriending. Let’s see. What, he’s twenty-five, a high-school dropout, and he’s never had a real job? He used to beat up his mother every once in a while, before God blessed her and she had a heart attack and died. We had to go to the house and break things up. I know he’s been selling pot and speed out of the garage, but I guess these days he’s also scoring coke for rich kids at Bedley High.”

“I guess you know everything,” Sunny said.

“I sure do,” the policewoman answered quickly, stepping closer to her. “I know you’ve been spending some weekend nights there, at his house, for example.”

Sunny glanced at me, as if she were actually uncomfortable with my hearing the disclosure. I hadn’t known for certain where she was spending those weekend nights, though I was confident that it was always with one of her girlfriends in the city. She’d go for trips to Jones Beach or for shopping or just “hanging out” in the downtown Bohemian neighborhoods, and if she was getting into trouble there, too, I hoped it was in the spirit of joyful rebellion and independence and enjoyment with her own set of comrades, which I should be glad to tolerate and understand. But to hear that she was staying in town, with a dubious young man whom she didn’t seem to care to defend, was alarming to me, and even hurtful.

“I know a lot of the people who hang out at Gizzi’s,” Officer Como went on. “I hope you know that some of them are serious felons. They’re not like you. They’re not just there to have fun. It’s life to them.”

“Who says I’m there for fun?” Sunny said sharply. “You think I want fun? You think I’m having fun right now?”

Officer Como seemed surprised by her response, as was I. But the policewoman quickly took back her ground. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again. Don’t ever raise your voice. Do you hear me? I’ll make things miserable for you, I promise. I don’t have to care about you. I can write you off like any other good-for-nothing slut who’s pissing her life away. Your father deserves better. I hear the stories about the parties, from Jimmy himself, actually. He was run in yesterday, as you probably know. He’s out but we’ll get him soon. He’s a little punk who’s in over his head with those brothers from the city. But he had a lot of colorful things to say about you especially. How generous you are to all the guys. What a good sport you are. He said you never get tired.”

“Fuck you.”

Officer Como lunged at Sunny, grabbing the handlebars and pulling them down to the sidewalk. Sunny fell over the bicycle, landing hard on her knee and forearm. Officer Como shouted, “Fuck me? Is that what you said? Little bitch!”

“Stop it!” I cried, barely able to keep myself from assaulting the officer. She’d turned just in time and by training had automatically unsnapped her holster. The sight of her reaction enraged me. “You cannot speak to my daughter that way. How dare you make such horrible accusations? This is slanderous. A public servant should not exhibit such unbecoming conduct.”

“Doc—”

“I must ask you to leave her alone! If she’s not done something illegal, you should move on and pursue your duties elsewhere. There are many other young people who are in fact committing crimes in this district, vandalizing and loitering. Why don’t you berate and intimidate them? My daughter does sometimes go to the city with her friends, and what a felon says to you has no weight at all. None at all. Now please let us end this, Officer. You and I have a good relationship and I don’t wish to see it ruined.”

The officer nodded to me and stepped back from Sunny. With anyone else, certainly, Officer Como would have set in her heels, leaned in and returned to me what I deserved, but in deference (and respectful gratitude for my past efforts on her behalf) she grabbed her lunch bag from the roof of the cruiser and went around to the driver’s side.

“I’m truly sorry, Doc, that I upset you,” she said, opening her door. “I am. I wish you hadn’t seen me just now. But I think you know better, too, about the real truth of things. Your daughter is this close to getting into some serious trouble, the kind you can’t ignore or forget once it happens. I don’t mean to upset you, but you’re a good man and so I’m telling you just as I see it. I’m sorry that I am, but there’s nothing else I can do. I don’t really like your daughter and maybe I don’t even care about her, but I owe you too much and so I won’t lie. I’m sorry, again. You can call the station and ask for me whenever you want.”

She drove off and left the two of us there by the parking meter, Sunny picking herself up from the pavement. I made her follow me inside the shop, for onlookers had begun to gather. The skin on her elbow was raw but not broken. When I tried to examine the abrasion more closely she shook me off, her hands raised diffidently in that long-familiar gesture of hers, as if my closeness were an
unbearable weight. But this time the feeling was also mine. For the first time, I felt cold to her, like an ice sheet had fallen between us, and a picture of her began entering my mind, her dark form moving through the corridors of a dingy, slovenly house, peals of surly laughter trailing after her.

“Why must you insist on always provoking the police?” I said. “Officer Como wouldn’t have bothered you had you not been so insolent. But you gave her no choice.”

Sunny wouldn’t answer me, instead propping her bicycle against the counter and drifting down an aisle, her back to me. When she was a young girl, she would skip along the racks and shelves, ticking the merchandise with her little fingers as she went, murmuring a made-up song. Back then I used to toy with the thought of her taking over the business when I retired, running Sunny Medical Supply as her own, even expanding it to open satellite stores across northern Westchester. I imagined her as a kind of mini-mogul who was raised in the trade, that she’d be well known in the business circles and be asked to speak before the audience at the colloquiums and conferences. Of course none of these hopes had much to do with who Sunny truly was, her personality and character, though it was my belief that she was actually well suited to the commerce of every day, for although she wasn’t overly talkative she was strangely comfortable dealing with people, whether for better or worse.

“I’m going to ask you to stay here on the weekends from now on. I don’t want you to go down to the city anymore. You’ve gone there all summer, and with school in session you ought to be studying more on the weekends.”

“I haven’t been going to the city,” she said, handling a pair of aluminum crutches. She started using them, pretending to favor the knee that was skinned. “So there’s nothing to change.”

“Are you saying that you’ve been at that man’s house, as Officer Como mentioned?”

“There and other places,” she said. She ambled awkwardly to the far end of the store. The crutches were for a taller person, and she had to hop up slightly over the arm pads with each step. “What did you think, that she was making it up?”

“I assumed she was making a point.”

“She wasn’t.”

“What are you doing there, then? Tell me, I want to know.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes! Now tell me!”

She had turned back and slowly lurched forward, landing on both feet. She collected the crutches and looped them on the display hook.

She said, “I have friends there. But Jimmy Gizzi isn’t one of them.”

“The house is his?”