Making Nice (8 page)

“Where’s Carey?”

We stared at each other through fingerprint smudges.

“You should go home.”

I knew he was looking out for me, but I told him that if he didn’t open the door I’d punch his entire family in the face, and that when I punched his mom in the face, I’d punch her in the forehead during a family photograph, and then I’d have it framed by a professional so that I could hang it on the wall above my couch and look at it every day and smile. He walked away. I paced, talked to myself, sat Indian-style on the concrete square around the magnolia tree. I stood up, knocked on the door, and shouted for Joey until he peeked his head around the corner and walked over.

“Hey man.”

“Hey man.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Nothin’,” he said. “Everybody’s just having drinks. You should probly get outta here. Wait for things to blow over.”

I said all right, I’ll leave, but I’m out of cigarettes and would he give me one. He said he would and I said thanks man, and he reached into his shirt pocket for his pack and took out a cigarette, unlocked the door and opened it a crack, stuck the cigarette through. I took it and put it in my mouth, patted my pockets, said I needed a light. He took out his lighter and cracked the door a bit farther, and I lunged and wedged my face in there, got my left leg in, too, before he pulled it closed on me and started yelling for help. Then I started yelling for help. Then I yelled for Carey. Then I yelled, “Just talk to me,” and “Please,” and “Don’t do this to me,” and “Please,” and “Please,” and “
Please!
” and “Ow!” and “Fuck you Billy you’re a scumbag and your desserts aren’t good!” James and that other guy whose name I can’t remember with the eyelashes came running over and helped Joey push me out, locked the door, threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave. “Good,” I said. “Call the fuckin’ police. I’ll fuckin’ … You guys are assholes.” Then I sat on the concrete square and caught my breath, smoked half a cigarette and went home, called Carey and left a message. Then I called her again and left a message again, called her again and hung up, took a shit and cried, called her again and left another message. She never called me back.

I still have a magic marker drawing she made for me when we were together. It’s a lawn and flowers and the sun is in the upper left-hand corner and in the middle of the air she wrote in purple:
Have a great day, Alby! Love, Carey
. I had it hanging on my refrigerator with a magnet for a few months afterward. Then I put it in a cardboard box with old soccer trophies and a Space Camp graduation plaque.

*   *   *

My sister called the same day I got a toothache, said she ran into Carey in the city and stopped to talk to her. Apparently she was doing really well in advertising and getting married to a banker guy. I asked her if she asked about me. Nope, my sister said. Not at all. Then she went on about politics and the media for a while. It went like: “Fuckin’ … resistance diminishes as commercial interruptions amplify, you know? Like, they’re pumping so much bullshit it serves as some sort of static. TV, satellites, laptops, live-feed Internet … we’ve got all this access but as a society we’re becoming distanced further from the war and the humanness required to fully fuckin’ experience it. I mean … we’ve landed on Mars but aren’t intellectually that far from painting on cave walls.”

“Antelopes and shit.”

“What?”

“On the cave walls.”

“Anyway. The big lie of the television age is that we’re better informed, when really what we’re shown is what we’re told is important, and we think it’s important cause it’s what we’re being shown.”

“Right,” I said. “How does Carey look?”

“She looks great.”

“You’re an asshole,” I said and hung up on her. Then I walked around the block, twice. I noticed things. Cars have wheels. The wood on that house is painted red. That fire hydrant is there in case there is a fire nearby. I haven’t had a girlfriend in two years. Trees.

On Biltmore there was a sprinkler sprinkling an arc of water onto the street and a squirrel on a birch branch. It jumped to a pine branch. It ran up the branch, down the trunk, out another branch, and jumped to a split-log fence post. It ran along the fence, then down the fence, then jumped to the ground. It ran around a little, then stopped and stood on its back legs, looked around. It ran and stopped and looked, ran and stopped and looked. Ran some more and stopped some more. Looked some more. Ran into the street and almost got run over by a red car. The driver didn’t even slow down. My tooth started to throb. I walked to a bar.

There was a paper sign in the window hanging from a piece of string, swaying and spinning, rocking back and forth in ceiling-fan air, advertising nothing in particular, just:
LUCKY DAY
. I liked it. I went inside and had a few drinks and then a few more and then spotted a girl down the bar to my right. She had pale skin and pink ears that she tucked her black hair behind, wore white on her eyelids like in the fifties. Each time I looked at her my chest hurt in new and exciting ways. I kept drinking and looking and considering approaches:

Instead, I got very drunk and don’t remember speaking to anyone that night, or leaving, and I woke up on my kitchen floor next to an unopened box of fish sticks. My tooth was ringing. I stood up and tongued it. It kept ringing. I moved to the bathroom and picked up a cap-less tube of the stuff with fluoride and the sonic toothbrush my mother had given me for Christmas a few years before. Brushing didn’t help. Mouthwash didn’t help. Floss made me bleed, and didn’t help. I spat in the sink and the brown-red blood on porcelain was roughly in the shape of South America. I turned on the faucet and watched it spin down and away. I took a piss and flushed, watched it spin down and away. I ate aspirins and called the dentist, said it was an emergency, and they said I could come in the following morning at ten. I baked the fish sticks, ate some, and took a nap. That night I went back to the bar.

That sign was there again, and that girl was there again, and I drank drinks and considered approaches again. Then I quit considering anything at all and walked over not knowing what I would say, which was hello. She turned around and I felt like a hose in my chest kinked. Then it unkinked.

“I think you’re really pretty,” I said. “Got a boyfriend?”

She leaned back and squinted at me. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“I’ll date the hell out of you,” I said. “I’ll date you so hard you’ll puke. Wanna go on a date sometime? We could do something.”

She smiled and blinked and stirred her drink with her drink straw and said, “You know you asked me out last night, right?”

“Oh.” I looked her down and up. “Well … what’d you say last night?”

“I said no.”

“Oh.” I stood there awkwardly for a few seconds, then apologized for bothering her again.

I was already walking away when she said, “You’re cute, but you shouldn’t drink so much.” I kept walking, weaved between people on my way to the men’s room where I pissed two-handed figure eights into the urinal, the intersection crossing an
X
on the blue urinal cake. A guy came in and started pissing at the urinal next to me and pushed out a fart that whispered
Ppppert-Pppplussss
. I nodded. On the wall in front of me in black marker was written SUCK MY BLOATED LOVE KNOB FAGGOT. Underneath that someone wrote
fuck you
with an arrow pointing to FAGGOT, and then a third person with a blue marker scribbled out the tip of that arrow and looped it around so that
fuck you
pointed to itself.

I shook and tucked, zipped and flushed, washed my hands and dried my hands on my shirt and walked out and into the bar and out the front door.

I went home, slept for four hours, woke up at six. I made some coffee, took a sip, spit it out in the sink, and tongued my tooth for a while. I sat in the sun on the porch till nine, then walked the three miles to the dentist. On the way I saw a woman walking in the opposite direction with a brown dog. Inside my skull: There goes another living organism on a piece of rope.

The dentist’s office was in a strip mall between Mr. Video and Angel Tips Nail Salon. I walked in and people were scattered around the waiting room, reading magazines.
Better Homes and Gardens. Cosmopolitan. Us. Time.
I walked over to the counter. The receptionist was on the telephone, and she pointed to a clipboard. A blue pen was tied to it with a piece of green floss, and as I was signing in she asked me if I had ever been there before. When I told her I hadn’t she handed me a stack of forms to fill out: Date, Age, Sex, Height, Weight, In Case of Emergency Contact, two pages of Medical History (Question 8:
Do you bruise easily?
), one-page Patient Information Sheet, one-page Arbitration Agreement, one-page Patient Acknowledgment of Dental Materials Fact Sheet, one-page Patient Acknowledgment of Notice of Privacy Practice. I sat in the lobby for a long time until a woman mispronounced my last name and led me to a white room where a Mexican man with cut-up knuckles X-rayed my head. When he was finished, the same woman led me to another white room. I sat in there for a long time, stared at a crack in the ceiling and wondered if Carey ever thinks about me. When the dentist finally came in I was glad.

She was older, pale and pretty, thin to the point of delicate-looking, had a mole on her left eyelid. I’d date her, big-time. She said hello and asked how I was, looked through a folder, put on rubber gloves. She was very polite.

She adjusted a surgical mask and goggles and my chair and the light. She arranged metal things on a metal tray. “OK,” she said, “let’s have a look.” She opened my tooth without a local and poked at it with a metal toothpick, asking, “Does this hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Does this hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Does this hurt?”

Yes.

A
MERICAN
N
INJA
2

My brother bet me five hundred dollars she wouldn’t make it past December. I accepted and won—Grandma died January third. I took time off work and went home to help my mother with funeral arrangements, but mostly I ate snacks and watched shitty movies. After
American Ninja 2
I got up from the couch and kicked a bag of microwave popcorn. Unpopped kernels went everywhere.

I did a cartwheel into the kitchen and looked at food in the refrigerator and thought about my grandmother’s dentures. They were yellowed and ugly and shifted in her mouth, and I wondered why the dentist didn’t make them pretty and white. Realism, I guessed, the truthful treatment of material. Here’s some more: V. C. Andrews romance novels are popular, the dentist hurts, and Q-tips get yellow when you clean your ears. The dog waddled by and I imagined cutting her in half with a sword.

I grabbed the two-liter bottle of Coke, put the bottle on the table, unscrewed the cap, walked over to the cabinet, got a glass out of the cabinet, put the glass on the table, picked up the bottle, poured some Coke into the glass, paused, looked at the dog—who was looking at me—while I waited for the fizz to go away, topped off the glass, put the bottle down on the table, picked up the glass, drank half, put the glass down, thought about my grandmother, and punched the bottle off the table. Sparkles licked puddles of cola.

I sat down, at the same table where I used to eat sweet breakfast cereals with 2% milk while listening to the sound of my mother’s high heels click the floor as she got me ready for school. I thought the Poconos were Caribbean islands back then. After school my brother and I toasted Ellio’s pizzas and talked about the pretty girls we liked to watch chewing sandwiches and drinking juice boxes through straws. Every Thursday night the white bags of drive-thru McDonald’s sat next to the sink, every Friday night a grease-stained box of Chinese from Wing Wah Kitchen. It is the table where I admitted to my father that I was afraid of porcelain dolls, and the table where my mother admitted to me, after her second coffee mug of Fu-Ki plum wine, that her father was a fucking asshole who killed stray cats with a shovel when they wandered into his backyard.

My grandmother died in this kitchen, near a toaster full of pizza bagels that weren’t quite ready, ten days after her asshole grandson, me, had given her a
Dance Your Pants Off!
workout video for Christmas. Her mouth was open and there was shit in her diaper. My mother found her.

I was the first one back, eager to help, less disturbed by the death of my grandmother—we had expected it for years—than by the note on the table asking me if I would clean up my crumbs and vacuum the den before my brother arrived. He was flying into JFK and my mother had gone to pick him up. The note set me off, and so while Sparkles was pink-tonguing brown puddles, I turned and threw my empty glass at the toaster, threw the toaster at the microwave, picked it up by the cord, walked into the hall swinging it over my head, and smashed it into the bookcase shelving my mother’s favorites—
Women Who Love Too Much
;
Womanspirit Rising
;
Too Good for Her Own Good
;
Only the Strong Survive
;
If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love
;
Loving the Self-Absorbed
 … I wonder if she bought all those thinking of me, or my brother, or my father, or her father, or all of us. I was still kicking the thing when Sparkles came bounding in, pounced on it, bit the cord, shook her head, and dragged it around the room. We had a little tug of war before she rolled on her back, exposing her belly. Her vulnerability made something in me ache to hurt her.