Heft (22 page)

A few days after the Easter-egg hunt I came home after having a miserable time at school. My mother was out but I did not know when she would be back. Normally I was a good boy & did my homework straightaway, but I could not concentrate—several boys had cornered me on my walk home & had called me by several nicknames they had for me—& so I wandered around the house for a while before stopping in the kitchen. There, on top of our refrigerator, was the Easter basket, full to the brim with foil-clad chocolate eggs, what seemed to me to be hundreds of them but was probably less.

The taste of them was precise: chocolaty, waxen, made from cream and cocoa. At first I was casual about eating them. After dinner I would stroll toward the basket and grab a few, eating them one at a time while I read with my mother. But that afternoon I snatched the basket from atop the refrigerator & brought it up to my room. I was in a very stormy mood & I sat on the edge of my bed and looked down at my plumpness & felt very disgusted with myself for not being the sort of athletic boy that brutalized me on the playground. I began to eat.

I became an efficient machine. Each foil wrapper came off more smoothly than the next. The chocolates lost their taste but kept their texture. The smooth fattiness of them, the smooth brown glossiness. I thought of nothing but the eating. For twenty minutes I felt I was no longer inside of my body.

& this was the first time I discovered all the joys & possibilities of food.

I finished nearly half in my first sitting & felt very ill & I put the basket under my bed. To accomplish this I bent the high wicker handle until it broke. I vowed that I would never do such a thing again. But the next afternoon, my mother once again out of the house, I came home from school & finished the rest, & then went down into the kitchen to get more food, anything I could think of. Sugar sandwiches were a favorite of mine. Butter and sugar on soft white bread. I knew my mother could return at any time & I listened tensely for her key in the door, stuffing things into my mouth, swallowing dryly & painfully. I hid how much I was eating from her without wondering why.

Eventually she asked me what happened to my Easter basket & I told her that I took it to school to share with my friends.

How many times in my life have I reenacted that first episode? Thousands? Tens of thousands? For a time, when Yolanda was coming regularly, when I felt that the possibility of seeing Charlene again was real, I rarely ate at all except for mealtimes—& then it was only a reasonable amount, for me.

But these days I am up to my old tricks again, for I have been unable to reach Charlene’s son, & I have been unable to find the bravery it would take to leave a message. Three times now I have failed. Twice I dialed the number & faltered & hung up. A third time he answered—I heard him answer—and my voice gave out. I physically could not speak. So although there was a moment when I actually thought I might reconnect with Charlene or might meet her boy, that moment has passed. Hearing his voice took mine from me. And I have not heard again from Charlene Turner. I do not believe her boy needs a mentor or a tutor. I do not think he needs my help. I don’t know why she contacted me to begin with. I told myself that if she wanted me in her life she would call me again, and then every day I woke up expecting a call until finally I told myself, Arthur, you must stop getting your hopes up, it is probably doing very bad things to your health. For example I got a cold after my third day of hopefulness. So now I am not at all hopeful but this means that I’m very very glum, & therefore have resumed certain eating habits that for a time I had successfully eliminated.

On top of this Yolanda has disappeared. I have called and called her little pink cell phone. Since leaving my house over a week ago, she has not returned. I called her phone five days in a row. Then I tried calling the agency, tho I was hesitant to do this for fear of getting her in trouble. I phrased it very casually: “I was wondering if you still employed a certain Yolanda who used to clean for me,” but they said “O we haven’t heard from her in a long time.” So I then asked them if it might be possible for them to contact her and let her know I was interested in having her work for me again, “Because she was so thorough,” I said. And they said they had none of her information on file, which I presume was a lie. In any case it was a dead end.

I became very worried for her welfare, for the last time I saw her, her rabid lunatic boyfriend was practically pounding down my door to harm her. So I searched for her name online, to see if I could contact her parents or find a home address for her, or a landline. But nothing came up.

Once, when we were talking about the name of an actor we both liked, she mentioned that her full name was very long and elaborate.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“It’s stupid,” she said, embarrassed.

“Go on,” I said, and she told me her full name was Yolanda Maria José Veracruz de la Vega, which became a phrase that I repeated in my head over & over again, a kind of a song. I liked the way she pronounced it: a soft little “Sh—” at the start of
it all.

I searched for every possible combination of these names with no success.

So I have been feeling very low. It gets very dark very early now & some bad days I sit on my couch from sunup to sundown without moving, and on even worse days I lie in my bed. Except to eat.

Each night I tell myself that tomorrow it will be different and new—tomorrow it will be less bad, ever so slightly less bad. Tomorrow perhaps I will go for a walk, or jog in place, or pull out from under my bed the damned & dusty step-device that I once ordered from a catalogue, & step along to whatever Spandexed fitness expert happens to come on my television.

I never do.

Each night in bed I repeat the promise. I press my hands together up by my chest because they do not fit over my stomach—a stomach that flattens & expands when I lie down, nearly reaching the edges of my queen-sized bed—and pray to the same God I have prayed to since I was a very small Arthur. My God looks something like Santa Claus, white-bearded & starry & merry. Every night my prayer is the same.
Our Father, Who Art in Heaven,
it goes—I learned as a boy in Confirmation class that this was the way to start all prayers—
Please let me eat well tomorrow. Please let me be healthy and good. Please let me lose weight.
For it is still my intention someday to go out of the house. So I cross myself for good measure, & breathe deeply through my nose, & let my mind drift to places I have been or have always wanted to go to.

All in all I feel I am right back where I started in October, before Charlene Turner Keller called me, before I ever met Yolanda. I am one of the world’s lonely.

• • •

A
rizona’s average annual temperature is 72 in the desert
and 50 in the mountains. It leads the nation in copper mining. Its flower is the saguaro cactus blossom and its bird is the cactus wren. Phoenix is its capital. It is the 48th state. Celebrities with ties to Arizona include Curt Schilling, Danica Patrick, David Spade, Jordin Sparks, Kerri Strug, Phil Mickelson, and Meadowlark Lemon, the Clown Prince of the Harlem Globetrotters. Arizona has many ranches on it and many horses and cows.

As a younger boy I thought over and over again of running away to Arizona and when I found the Internet I used to look up images of Arizona and imagine my father the ranch hand. Whenever I was at a computer I would search for
Kel Keller,
hoping something about him would come up, but the only thing returned to me was me. Baseball stuff. And an artist, and an engineer, and a consultant, none of whom looked anything like the pictures of my father that I have seen. So then I would look up other things about Arizona.

There are homes on mountains in Arizona. There are deserts and flowering things. There are 2,210 miles between Yonkers and Arizona’s northeastern corner, according to MapQuest, and it would take 35 hours to get there. I used to think about that when I was very low. I could be in Arizona in less than two days. There is something very calm and beautiful about that state the way I imagine it. I have never been anywhere outside of New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts—all of these for baseball—but I feel I know what Arizona is like. I used to have dreams about it. There was a class trip to the Grand Canyon when I was in eighth grade and I wanted to go so badly that I tried to raise the money myself when my mother said it was too much. But I couldn’t. I came close but I couldn’t.

My first thought upon reading my mother’s letter was Liar. You’re lying, I thought. Or crazy, or so drugged and so drunk that you didn’t know what you were saying.

I sat in the police station and felt like my legs were asleep. They felt numb suddenly and I thought maybe I was having a heart attack and dying. I waited and waited for somebody to come back and talk to me, to pick the phone up off the table, to take the letter out of my hands. I thought of ripping the letter up.

My mother was gone.

I did not want to lose my father.

I did not want to believe her.

I wanted to find Kel Keller and tell him—Dad, Mom is dead. To say those words.
Dad.
Is what I always called him in my mind. He was Dadd
y
to me when I was small. I remember it. I know I do.

I’ll find him and ask him, I thought.

I had never met Arthur Opp and all I could think of was that I didn’t want to. Arthur Opp to me was a secret that my mother and I had between us, a joke nearly, something we shared happily whenever a letter from him came. Her secret admirer. He was magical. He existed in my mind like Santa Claus. He was not supposed to be real and he certainly was not supposed to be my father.

I felt a slowing down of my body and a coldening of my veins. I read the letter again and tried to think of everything I ever knew about Kel Keller, my mother’s ex-husband, and tried to see in my mind’s eye the pictures that I saw of him growing up. I couldn’t imagine him as anyone but my father.

The worst part was having to tell Officer Connor what had happened, when he came back into the room.

My mother died, I said to him, and it was puzzling to me to say those words aloud.

Just . . . now? asked Officer Connor.

I nodded, and then I put my head down on the table so he could not see, but he came around the table and put one hand on my shoulder and I wanted for him to leave it there forever, to feel the protection of his hand on my shoulder for the rest of my life.

They brought in a man to set bail and then took me outside. They drove me to three ATMs and I had just enough. But there’s nothing left for me now, barely anything at all.

There are decisions I have to make, said the hospital. What to do with her body.

Her body. Her body.

When I left it was early evening and I had nowhere to go. They let me out on my own because I’m eighteen. They had towed my car to the station’s parking lot and I owed them money for that and it would all be on some big huge bill that they’d hit me with later.

Where are you gonna go, baby? asked the woman at the desk when they signed me out. She was nice and older.

Home, I said, but the word sounded wrong.

I stood out on the front steps of the police station. It was cold but the rain had stopped. On the street, expensive cars went by slowly, and their drivers stared.

I pull up outside my mother’s house. I think of her on the steps outside, as she was on good days. Once she pulled me in between her knees and sat me down and leaned her elbows on my shoulders. This was when I was small enough not to protest.

You’re getting so grown-up, said my mother. I was maybe ten.

No I’m not, I said, because I did not want to be. I always had a feeling that things would start to go wrong when I got older.

There was a drink she used to make: lemonade and iced tea mixed together. I have heard this called an Arnold Palmer, but she always called it iced lemon.

She put rum in it when I was older but when I was younger she drank it plain, we both did, and we sometimes sat out on the steps, and in these moments I felt happy.

At the top of the steps I put my key in the lock and turn it.

Inside it is freezing and strange. The sun has set. I flip the switch to my left and nothing happens. The electricity has probably been shut off. This happened whenever she forgot to pay the bill while I was growing up. Until finally I took responsibility for it when I was older. But the first time it happened, when I was little, we made a game of it, my mother and I: we put a blanket on the floor and used two little flashlights to light our way. The only kind of candles she had were birthday candles, the little ones, so she stuck plenty of these into a pot full of dirt that used to be a plant and then lit them. And put it into our fireplace, which has never worked, and called it our fire in the fireplace over and over again.

I stand still until my eyes adjust. I look for the outline of my mother on the couch. Horrible visions come to me of her ghost, and what it would look like—I imagine that if I wanted to see it, I could. I don’t want to see you, I tell her. I don’t want to see you yet.

I think of her body, her empty body inside of a drawer in the hospital. Filed away like information. Cold.

From the streetlights, from the fading light outside, I can faintly make out the contents of the room. I walk toward the kitchen with my arms outstretched. And there is the flashlight, plugged into the wall. It makes one bright spot on the walls and the floor and I swing it around and around looking for things I can’t name.

I open the refrigerator. There is no cold inside. The smell of rotting things comes toward me and I shut it tight. In the pantry there are chips and things, my mother’s junk—the stuff I bought for her and brought to her and which helped to kill her. I open one of the bags and stuff something roughly in my mouth. I chew without tasting.

I try adjusting the thermostat on the wall but there is no rush of noise from the basement, no click that tells me the heat’s gone on.