Elegies for the Brokenhearted (14 page)

“Oh, Carson,” I said.

And you said:
Shut up, fool. Didn't I tell you? Didn't I tell you not to say a word to me? You ever say one more word to me again I'll kill you. I'm leaving in the morning, my daddy's driving up to get me, and if you say one goddamn word to me I swear to God I'll scratch your eyes out. We're done here.

The next morning you were up early, stuffing your sheets and blankets and pillows into a white trash bag you'd pilfered from the bathroom wastebasket (
White trash,
you said to yourself, and chuckled), going around the room pulling out drawers again and again until you were satisfied that no trace of yourself remained. You made trips outside, carrying down your suitcases, then the television. Then you came back up and stood in the window watching for your father. I sat up in bed and said hello, but you didn't say anything. A long time passed until finally you saw what you were looking for, the stout figure of Merriweather Washington making his way toward the dorm, and you up and left.

Bye!
you said, and slammed the door behind you.

After you left I stood at the window watching—you knew I would. Your father was walking on ahead of you carrying the television and your bag of bedding, slouchy and weary as Willy Loman. You were following lazily behind him, a suitcase in each hand. Just when I thought you weren't going to look back you set your suitcases down, you turned and called up to me, hands cupping your mouth.
Hey,
you said,
I forgot to tell you something!

By now you had attracted the attention of clusters of students walking past, the normal kids who were out enjoying the fine spring air. They stopped and stared, some looking at you, some looking at me.

“What?” I said.

“You better work on being famous,” you called. “Otherwise you gonna drown.”

 

A
few days later it came time for me to see James Findley Ramsey III, who was my academic advisor and therefore responsible for helping me with the selection of fall courses. I had failed to register for anything and this had come to his attention; he had sent a letter. It was funny to see him in person, more or less exactly as we imagined him, pink and plump as a Christmas ham, blue suit, white shirt, blue-and-orange-striped tie, silver hair, false teeth, hot handshake. He was the jovial “Come in, come in! Sit down, sit down!” type who you couldn't help but oblige. “Mary Murphy,” he said, and opened a manila folder stuffed with papers. I wondered what was in there. “You've taken quite a variety of courses,” he said. “Which is what liberal arts is all about, isn't it?” He chuckled. Then sighed. Then frowned. He said that he regretted the necessity of settling down and focusing one's efforts on a single field, but that it was time to do so. It was time to start thinking about what I wanted to do with myself. Had I thought of this?

I said I had.

“And what,” he asked, “did you conclude?”

I said I had concluded that I had no particular talents and couldn't imagine myself in any type of job whatsoever.

“Well,” he said. He leaned forward, clasped his hands together in little fists. He was getting excited. His skin flushed and he appeared for a moment to be on the verge of cardiac arrest. A challenge! An academic soul in need of direction! “People with no particular talents,” he said, “don't win full scholarships, do they?”

I regretted to inform him that, in some unfortunate cases, it appeared that they did.

“Nonsense! You must have some special abilities.” Desperately he scanned my file. “French!” he said. “You placed out of French! A nice, high score, too. That's special. What about French? Have you thought about French?”

“Sure,” I said. Though I'd never really seen French as a skill. I'd taken it in high school and only done well because my grandparents were both first-generation French immigrants, and I'd spent a lot of time with them as a kid. My grandparents had always spoken to each other in French when they didn't want me to understand what they were saying, but over the years I'd picked up a working vocabulary. “Get out of here,” I learned to say. “Give me a break; Stop screwing around the house and get out of my hair; I've had enough; You're driving me crazy; Leave me alone; Where are my keys; You've had too much to drink again; When is their mother picking them up, when is she going to stop fucking around and take responsibility for things; It's not my fault; It's never anybody's fault, but it has to be somebody's.” My grandfather was a bus driver, and in my teenage years I'd spent my afternoons riding around the city with him, on the seat behind him, and he'd taught me more. “Look at this guy about to get on,” I learned to say, “what a pathetic bastard, his spine so crooked he looks like a question mark. If I ever get crippled like that I want you to kill me immediately.” I had always enjoyed the language—how it had a way of softening even the most grotesque phrases, of lending an air of sophistication to the mundane life around me—and I told James Ramsey that I supposed its virtues were worth further study.

“Excellent!” he said. “How do you say ‘excellent' in French?”

“Excellent,” I said.

“Right-o!” he said.

Suddenly he was plotting my entire future, flipping through the course catalog and choosing courses on Hugo, Voltaire, Flaubert. “These aren't in translation, see?” he said. “The whole text is in French. Quite a challenge! Wow, right?”

“Wow,” I said.

“There's a good buck in French!” James Ramsey said. “Kidding, kidding. There's not a good buck in French, of course. But you could teach. Maybe even on the college level. That's a nice life. I taught history here for a number of years and found it very satisfying.” He rubbed his hands together. I stood up, and he actually gave me a little hug. I had made his day, he said. He had saved my life in under five minutes and he was going to go home and tell his wife about it.

And so, because I was nothing if not suggestible, I spent the next three years as a French major and with characteristic French selfishness more or less forgot about you. Sophomore year I became an R.A. myself, became the French-major version of Belinda Wimpy. I lived alone in a dorm room smoking French cigarettes one after another through a foot-long ebony holder. I wore black turtlenecks and listened to French music and read French newspapers and watched French films. Whenever two or more people gathered in a room and started to enjoy themselves, I knocked on their door and reminded them of the dormitory policies forbidding their behavior. I quit Donut Land and took a job checking books out of the library, which was more like Donut Land than I cared to admit. In both cases people had to go through me to get something they wanted, and I didn't want to let them have it. I sat in judgment of them. I was silent and huffy with the date stamp, I slid the books across the counter with a glare that said: You're lucky I'm letting you have this. I made a habit of hating everyone and the time passed quickly.

In my junior year, in a class on Tocqueville, I met and went crazy for one Roger Preston Fairbanks, political science major, son of an ambassador, former prep-school classmate of Dan Quayle's son. Roger had been to Dan Quayle's house, had even been to George Bush's house in Kennebunkport, Maine, and believed that this was all one needed in life to be successful. And indeed this seemed to be true. After my first date with Roger I went back to my dorm and stood in front of the bathroom mirror and said, over and over,
I am Dan Quayle's son's friend's girlfriend!
mostly realizing how pathetic I sounded but also secretly thrilled.

Roger said that he liked my look, as if it was something I'd cultivated, some kind of anemic chic. We dated all through junior year and spent the summer together at his Maryland house, at which there were yachts. Yachts! And though these people—these friends of Roger's with whom I had nothing in common, and who furthermore seemed to be in some way responsible for the misery of everyone in my family—were not my people, I was, in truth, desperate to know them, to become one of them, to speak and dress and carry myself just like they did, I had never been so desperate in my life. But then Roger dumped me the next year, as soon as he got into law school, saying that he wanted to arrive in New Haven focused and unattached.

Dumped!

I had been dumped!

I spent the rest of the semester in my dorm room and only left when I absolutely had to. These instances I dashed from place to place, wearing sunglasses and headphones, so that if I ran into Roger or any of his friends I would not have to speak. I went so long without talking to anyone that I started having trouble with things as basic as purchasing groceries. The exchange of money at the register, the back-and-forth with the cashier, was becoming difficult.

In the afternoons I crossed the street to a Chinese restaurant, the Dragon Lady, which sold giant bowls of wanton soup for a dollar, and I sat there for hours eating that soup, long since turned cold, thinking that it was strange to be alone in a restaurant so much, although slightly less strange, on the whole, than sitting alone at home.

One night in April there I was at the Dragon Lady, reading as always, but occasionally staring out the window, and in the way that we sometimes notice things we have overlooked a thousand times before I noticed a phone booth in the parking lot. I could see its fat directory dangling from a metal cord, twisting slightly in the wind. I sat and tried to think of someone to call. I thought of my family—a person could always call family, I thought. But I didn't know where Malinda was, and my mother wasn't really my mother anymore. Earlier that year she had suffered a religious crisis and gotten married for the fifth time, to a preacher from Atlanta whom she'd seen on cable television. She'd started calling me every day to encourage me to accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. Now she spent her days running her husband's church's child care center, a service the church provided, my mother said, to make sure that its dearest, most innocent lambs got the love and compassion that all of God's creatures deserved. The last time we'd spoken I could hardly hear her over the chatter of so many children in the background.

“Any word from Malinda?” I'd said.

“God's looking after her,” she said. “I have that as a comfort.”

“What?” I said. “I couldn't hear you over all that screaming.”

“God is a comfort,” she said.

“I can't hear you,” I said. “I guess you'd better get back to your new family. Don't let me keep you.”

People walked in and out of the Dragon Lady in pairs, talking and laughing, and I sat trying to think of a single person I knew well enough to call, and what I might say. No one to call! It seemed to me that if a person couldn't think of a single person to call, then that person was in trouble.

Finally I thought of you. And when I did it seemed you were the answer I'd been searching for, it seemed that if I could talk with you, make some kind of connection with someone, then something might change, I would be okay again.

I didn't have your number, but how many Merriweather Washingtons, I thought, could there be in that one-stoplight town, in fact in the world? I went to the register and bought a roll of quarters, then out to the pay phone. Everything was automated by then and I had to give that name, Merriweather Washington, to a robot. But the robot had trouble and kicked me out of its system to a human being—
WHAT LISTING, PLEASE
?—and I had to say it again, Merriweather Washington, and then the number came up, the robot speaking again, and I had to listen twice because I was having trouble holding things in my mind. In fact I had trouble believing that one could punch numbers into a machine and, as a result, actually speak to someone. The fact that the phone rang and someone answered fairly bewildered me.

“Is Carson there?” I said, my voice tight from disuse. There was a moment of silence.

“You kidding?” said the voice on the other end, a woman's. “Who is this?”

“A friend from school. Does Carson still live there?”

And then she, your sister I suppose, told me the news. “Carson don't live here no more,” she said. “She dead.”

I slammed the phone down in its receiver, as if by doing so I could change things. A hot shame came over me, a pounding sort of panic. I sank down and sat on the floor of the phone booth, my knees pulled into my chest. In brief flashes I convinced myself that there had been some kind of mistake, that I had misheard, but the voice on the phone came back, and back, and back again: she dead, she dead, she dead.

Some days later I gathered the nerve to call again and this time your mother answered. I told her my name, told her I was a friend of yours. “Of course,” your mother said. “I remember you, Mary. Carson talked about you all the time.” When your mother spoke of your death, the year before, she used the word “expired.” When she spoke of the car crash, the boy you'd been with who ran off the road and into a ditch, she used the word “misfortune.” I heard Regis scream in the background and my throat went tight, I couldn't speak, I managed to thank her and hung up the phone.

 

I
kept thinking of all the things you'd planned to do—raise Regis, open your café, see your name in lights—and I couldn't believe you were gone. Not long ago you had lived and breathed. You were a living body, you heart beat, blood pushed through your veins, cells split and multiplied, you ate and drank, you thought and spoke, you were alive—and now you weren't anymore, now you were dead, now your image was taped to the wall hovering amongst the departed, and I couldn't get my mind around it, I couldn't believe it. I could hear your voice in my head with such clarity. I kept hearing you talk about the Oscar you were going to win one day, the moment they would call your name.
I'm sitting way up in the back probably,
you said,
and then they call my name and the music playing and everyone looking around, saying, “Who the hell Carson Washington?” and it take a month and a half for me to get myself down the aisle and up on stage, and then they try and tell me I ain't got time left to thank nobody but I say, Listen, baby, I'm three hundred pounds and you just
try
and move me, that's something I'd like to see.
And I couldn't believe you were dead, I couldn't believe it.