All of Us (20 page)

I sat down, trying to quieten my heart.

Breath rushing from my nose. I looked

around the table, slowly. Ready

for anything. Mona, I’m sorry to say this,

but I couldn’t eat any of your cake.

I’ve put it away for later, maybe.

Anyway, thanks. You’re sweet to remember

me out here alone this winter.

Living alone.

Like an animal, I think.

Call it iron discipline. But for months

I never took my first drink

before eleven p.m. Not so bad,

considering. This was in the beginning

phase of things. I knew a man

whose drink of choice was Listerine.

He was coming down off Scotch.

He bought Listerine by the case,

and drank it by the case. The back seat

of his car was piled high with dead soldiers.

Those empty bottles of Listerine

gleaming in his scalding back seat!

The sight of it sent me home soul-searching.

I did that once or twice. Everybody does.

Go way down inside and look around.

I spent hours there, but

didn’t meet anyone, or see anything

of interest. I came back to the here and now,

and put on my slippers. Fixed

myself a nice glass of NyQuil.

Dragged a chair over to the window.

Where I watched a pale moon struggle to rise

over Cupertino, California.

I waited through hours of darkness with NyQuil.

And then, sweet Jesus! the first sliver

of light.

I spent years, on and off, in academe.

Taught at places I couldn’t get near

as a student. But never wrote a line

about that time. Never. Nothing stayed

with me in those days. I was a stranger,

and an impostor, even to myself. Except

at that one school. That distinguished

institution in the midwest. Where

my only friend, and my colleague,

the Chaucerian, was arrested for beating his wife.

And threatening her life over the phone,

a misdemeanor. He wanted to put her eyes out.

Set her on fire for cheating.

The guy she was seeing, he was going to hammer him

into the ground like a fence post.

He lost his mind for a time, while she moved away

to a new life. Thereafter, he taught

his classes weeping drunk. More than once

wore his lunch on his shirt front.

I was no help. I was fading fast myself.

But seeing the way he was living, so to speak,

I understood I hadn’t strayed so far from home

after all. My scholar-friend. My old pal.

At long last I’m out of all that.

And you. I pray your hands are steady,

and that you’re happy tonight. I hope some woman

has just put her hand under your clean collar

a minute ago, and told you she loves you.

Believe her, if you can, for it’s possible she means it.

Is someone who will be true, and kind to you.

All your remaining days.

The people who were better than us were
comfortable.

They lived in painted houses with flush toilets.

Drove cars whose year and make were recognizable.

The ones worse off were
sorry
and didn’t work.

Their strange cars sat on blocks in dusty yards.

The years go by and everything and everyone

gets replaced. But this much is still true —

I never liked work. My goal was always

to be shiftless. I saw the merit in that.

I liked the idea of sitting in a chair

in front of your house for hours, doing nothing

but wearing a hat and drinking cola.

What’s wrong with that?

Drawing on a cigarette from time to time.

Spitting. Making things out of wood with a knife.

Where’s the harm there? Now and then calling

the dogs to hunt rabbits. Try it sometime.

Once in a while hailing a fat, blond kid like me

and saying, “Don’t I know you?”

Not, “What are you going to be when you grow up?”

They fill their mouths with alcohol

and blow it over a lighted candle

at traffic signs. Anyplace, really,

where cars line up and the drivers

are angry and frustrated and looking

for distraction—there you’ll find

the young fire eaters. Doing what they do

for a few pesos. If they’re lucky.

But in a year their lips

are scorched and their throats raw.

They have no voice within a year.

They can’t talk or cry out —

these silent children who hunt

through the streets with a candle

and a beer can filled with alcohol.

They are called
milusos.
Which translates

into “a thousand uses.”

When his mother called for the second time

that day, she said:

“I don’t have any strength left. I want

to lay down all the time.”

“Did you take your iron?” he wanted to know.

He sincerely wanted to know. Praying daily,

hopelessly, that iron might make a difference.

“Yes, but it just makes me hungry. And I don’t

have anything to eat.”

He pointed out to her they’d shopped

for hours that morning. Brought home

eighty dollars’ worth of food to stack

in her cupboards and the fridge.

“There’s nothing to eat in this goddamn house

but baloney and cheese,” she said.

Her voice shook with anger. “Nothing!”

“And how’s your cat? How’s Kitty doing?”

His own voice shook. He needed

to get off this subject of food; it never

brought them anything but grief.

“Kitty,” his mother said. “Here, Kitty.

Kitty, Kitty. She won’t answer me, honey.

I don’t know this for sure, but I think

she jumped into the washing machine

when I was about to do a load. And before I forget,

that machine’s making

a banging noise. I think there’s something

the matter with it. Kitty! She won’t

answer me. Honey, I’m afraid.

I’m afraid of everything. Help me, please.

Then you can go back to whatever it was

you were doing. Whatever

it was that was so important

I had to take the trouble

to bring you into this world.”

All I want today is to keep an eye on these birds

outside my window. The phone is unplugged

so my loved ones can’t reach out and put the arm

on me. I’ve told them the well has run dry.

They won’t hear of it. They keep trying

to get through anyway. Just now I can’t bear to know

about the car that blew another gasket.

Or the trailer I thought I’d paid for long ago,

now foreclosed on. Or the son in Italy

who threatens to end his life there

unless I keep paying the bills. My mother wants

to talk to me too. Wants to remind me again how it was

back then. All the milk I drank, cradled in her arms.

That ought to be worth something now. She needs

me to pay for this new move of hers. She’d like

to loop back to Sacramento for the twentieth time.

Everybody’s luck has gone south. All I ask

is to be allowed to sit for a moment longer.

Nursing a bite the shelty dog Keeper gave me last night.

And watching these birds. Who don’t ask for a thing

except sunny weather. In a minute

I’ll have to plug in the phone and try to separate

what’s right from wrong. Until then

a dozen tiny birds, no bigger than teacups,

perch in the branches outside the window.

Suddenly they stop singing and turn their heads.

It’s clear they’ve felt something.

They dive into flight.

There was a great reckoning.

Words flew like stones through windows.

She yelled and yelled, like the Angel of Judgment.

Then the sun shot up, and a contrail

appeared in the morning sky.

In the sudden silence, the little room

became oddly lonely as he dried her tears.

Became like all the other little rooms on earth

light finds hard to penetrate.

Rooms where people yell and hurt each other.

And afterwards feel pain, and loneliness.

Uncertainty. The need to comfort.

After the winter, grieving and dull,

I flourished here all spring. Sweet light

began to fill my chest. I pulled up

a chair. Sat for hours in front of the sea.

Listened to the buoy and learned

to tell the difference between a bell,

and the sound of a bell. I wanted

everything behind me. I even wanted

to become inhuman. And I did that.

I know I did. (She’ll back me up on this.)

I remember the morning I closed the lid

on memory and turned the handle.

Locking it away forever.

Nobody knows what happened to me

out here, sea. Only you and I know.

At night, clouds form in front of the moon.

By morning they’re gone. And that sweet light

I spoke of? That’s gone too.

In the garden, small laughter from years ago.

Lanterns burning in the willows.

The power of those four words, “I loved a woman.”

Put that on the stone beside his name.

God keep you and be with you.

Those horses coming into the stretch at Ruidoso!

Mist rising from the meadow at dawn.

From the veranda, the blue outlines of the mountains.

What used to be within reach, out of reach.

And in some lesser things, just the opposite is true.

Order anything you want! Then look for the man

with the limp to go by. He’ll pay.

From a break in the wall, I could look down

on the shanty lights in the Valley of Kidron.

Very little sleep under strange roofs. His life far away.

Playing checkers with my dad. Then he hunts up

the shaving soap, the brush and bowl, the straight

razor, and we drive to the county hospital. I watch him

lather my grandpa’s face. Then shave him.

The dying body is a clumsy partner.

Drops of water in your hair.

The dark yellow of the fields, the black and blue rivers.

Going out for a walk means you intend to return, right?

Eventually.

The flame is guttering. Marvelous.

The meeting between Goethe and Beethoven

took place in Leipzig in 1812. They talked into the night

about Lord Byron and Napoleon.

She got off the road and from then on it was nothing

but hardpan all the way.

She took a stick and in the dust drew the house where

they’d live and raise their children.

There was a duck pond and a place for horses.

To write about it, one would have to write in a way

that would stop the heart and make one’s hair stand on end.

Cervantes lost a hand in the Battle of Lepanto.

This was in 1571, the last great sea battle fought

in ships manned by galley slaves.

In the Unuk River, in Ketchikan, the backs of the salmon

under the street lights as they come through town.

Students and young people chanted a requiem

as Tolstoy’s coffin was carried across the yard

of the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo and placed

in the freight car. To the accompaniment of singing,

the train slowly moved off.

A hard sail and the same stars everywhere.

But the garden is right outside my window.

Don’t worry your heart about me, my darling.

We weave the thread given to us.

And Spring is with me.

Awakened this morning by a voice from my childhood

that says
Time to get up
, I get up.

All night long, in my sleep, trying

to find a place where my mother could live

and be happy.
If you want me to lose my mind
,

the voice says
okay. Otherwise
,

get me out of here!
I’m the one to blame

for moving her to this town she hates. Renting

her the house she hates.

Putting those neighbors she hates so close.

Buying the furniture she hates.

Why didn’t you give me money instead, and let me spend it?

I want to go back to California
, the voice says.

I’ll die if I stay here. Do you want me to die?

There’s no answer to this, or to anything else

in the world this morning. The phone rings

and rings. I can’t go near it for fear

of hearing my name once more. The same name

my father answered to for 53 years.

Before going to his reward.

He died just after saying “Take this

into the kitchen, son.”

The word
son
issuing from his lips.

Wobbling in the air for all to hear.

I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns, and

an infinite eight to nine hours of work.

I devour the time outside the office like a wild beast.

Someday I hope to sit in a chair in another

country, looking out the window at fields of sugarcane

or Mohammedan cemeteries.

I don’t complain about the work so much as about

the sluggishness of swampy time. The office hours

cannot be divided up! I feel the pressure

of the full eight or nine hours even in the last

half hour of the day. It’s like a train ride

lasting night and day. In the end you’re totally

crushed. You no longer think about the straining

of the engine, or about the hills or

flat countryside, but ascribe all that’s happening

to your watch alone. The watch which you continually hold

in the palm of your hand. Then shake. And bring slowly

to your ear in disbelief.