The Unnamed (4 page)

The sidewinding gusts were snow-flecked and bitter and filled his ears with a violent howl. “Janey!” He chased her down. She’d left without her coat and now she hurried away with her arms crossed, hands holding the opposite shoulders and her head lowered into the cold. She turned between two cars to lose him just as he reached for her. She shook him off but he grabbed her again and said, “Please, Jane.” She swiveled and hit him with the back of her fist. The blow landed just below his collarbone and made him flinch. “You stupid bastard!” she cried between clenched teeth. Angry tears came from her eyes like stubborn nails jerked out of brickwork. “You don’t fucking tell me that?” For some reason it came out as a question, which he couldn’t answer. Both confused, both at a loss for words. The little space between them, between cars, was filled with their furious white breath. She put her splayed hands on his chest and pushed him and he stumbled back a few steps while taking hold of her wrists. She yanked loose again.

“It was un-thought-out,” he said.

“After everything we’ve done, you would say that.”

“I would never do it,” he said.

“How do I know?”

A shopper rattled past them with a cart. He put his arms around her, but she kept her arms hugged to her chest.

“I never would,” he said.

The next day she drove into the city, the lower Bronx, to a storefront with a red plastic awning advertising African Hair Weaving. She parked at the curb and stepped out as a snowplow sparked past her down the neglected street. Eroded brick surfaces, dull and defaced, ghettoed the neighborhood. Wind picked up the trash. The chain-link fence to a barren lot was curled up at one corner like a pried-open sardine can.

She checked the name and address against what she’d written down. The front window was plastered over with yellowed clippings from hairstyle magazines and framed by a string of red Christmas lights. The same collage covered the door, obscuring what awaited her inside: two black stylists, one albino with pink pigmentation spots, both in heavy blue aprons and tending to matrons in chairs. Their hands paused in their labor as they turned to look at her. There were cords everywhere, cords and spray bottles and dusty fake plants reflected in the mirror-paneled walls. She saw him against the far wall, sleeping on a row of folding chairs.

A gust blew the door open again.

“Slam it now,” said the albino.

Jane did as she was told. When she turned around to face them a second time she forced a smile, feeling the interloper again, the tension of her unexpected presence in another random subculture. “That’s my husband,” she said, pointing to the man in back.

They were mostly quiet on the ride home. When they were out of the city, he said, “They were nice in there. I offered them forty dollars but they wouldn’t accept it.”

“Why did they agree to take you in?”

“I said I was having chest pains. I said I’d give them money if they let me sit down on one of their chairs, but they wouldn’t take it.”

“But they gave you the chair.”

“You expect the world to greet you with hostility,” he said, “and instead they give you a chair and call your wife.”

“You can’t count on that forever,” she said.

They pulled into the garage and she killed the engine but neither of them moved. She figured now, after African Hair Weaving, he would come to his senses. But he remained silent, and she realized that he was determined to persevere. The light clicked off. They sat in the oily darkness as if they were high school lovers at odds, too inarticulate to put their feelings into words, and with nowhere to go to resolve their differences but the car.

“What do you feel when you see a black albino?” he asked.

“Sorrow,” she said.

He stared through the windshield. “Me too.”

Becka was thirteen when he got sick the second time.

Puberty was hell. Everyone said that she’d lose her baby fat but it never happened. There was no sudden onset, no flash gain. She just never slimmed down.

She first asked her mother the difference between a protein and a carb when she was ten years old. For Christmases and birthdays she drew up lists of fitness books and weight-loss how-tos. “Why am I fat?” she asked them. “Nobody else in this family is fat.”

They did everything they could—consulted dietitians, endocrinologists, acupuncturists; bought her running gear and memberships to women-only health clubs; ordered elaborate machines and highly engineered plastic devices advertised on TV. Nothing worked.

Tim offered her every one of a father’s honest lies about her being the most beautiful girl in the world. At night he secretly wondered why she could not shake the weight. He and Jane talked about it just as often as they did the girl’s good grades and dark moods. They were afraid she was headed toward the tabloid destruction of an eating disorder, but she wasn’t one for easy answers. She packed a lunch with cold tofu. She asked for an alarm clock and woke early to jog. She was twelve years old in black spandex and fleece vest doing three miles a day in the seventh grade. She wore tailored Glad bags under her running gear and imagined the sweat making its way out of her, surface-bound molecules of dairy-white fat. The greasy squish between the plastic bag and her skin was unpleasant but she liked it almost better than anything else, this hard-earned sensation of loss. This was before the nose ring and the dreadlocks and the midnight trips to the Reddi-wip canister.

Her longer run took her around the elementary school. The pink stucco building was painted with murals. A glassed-in sign outside the front entrance offered a daily message from the principal’s office. The message was the same every day now: Enjoy Your Summer, Tigers! See You Next Year.

It was the summer before her freshman year. She cut across the empty blacktop poled for tetherball and sketched with four-square courts and hopscotch and entered the grassy field where the children ran relays and played kickball. Just past the rear fence of the baseball diamond, a well-marked trail led into the woods. The trail opened into clearings in which an outdoor sculpture was coupled with a nearby bench. There were half a dozen such sculptures along the trail—a steel Pink Pearl eraser tall as a tree, another called
Abstract Cactus
—which the village planning commission had installed as a part of a cultural outreach program. She ran across a footbridge into the last of the clearings and there she stopped. The heat materialized instantly. All the stimulated biology of a hard run hummed in her ears along with the summer crickets. She recognized the robe, white cotton with orange pinstripes. He was curled up at the base of
Smiling Bronze Sun
with his cheek on the dirt. His bare feet were bloody. She turned back. She ran home. She woke her mom and told her that Dad was asleep on the sculpture trail.

He woke up after Becka had gone. Utter terror woke him—or utter terror was the condition into which he awoke, hard to tell which. He bolted upright and sprang to his feet in one manic motion, as if expecting to be surrounded by physical threat. The quick rise made him stagger. Slowly he recalled where he was and how he got there. The night before, he had been wheeling the trash down the drive to the curb, one in the morning. It was the second of three bins. He knew halfway down that he would not be back for the third. He knew the sensation as an epileptic knows an aura. As an epileptic feels the dread of an oncoming seizure, he was crestfallen, broken-hearted, instantly depressed by what was now foretold.
It’s back
. The first time, that four-month nightmare four years earlier, he had erased from his mind. Something finite, and, so, forgettable. But now, no denying it: a recurrence. Not finite. Chronic. Mother
fucker
his first thought. Don’t take me away from my home. There’s more garbage. Jane expects it to be taken out. His body’s response: too bad. He read into it, because he had to find meaning, a morality tale: you fool, you blithe, oblivious fool. You should have thought about this possibility
last night
. You should have made it home at a decent hour to enjoy being in bed with Jane. He released the bin at the end of the drive and continued walking. He walked past neighbors’ houses, he walked barefoot down Route 22. He walked past the supermarket: empty parking lot and an eerie glow. He walked past the Korean Baptist church and the Saks-anchored mall into the dreams of late-night drivers who took home the image of some addled derelict in a cotton robe menacing the soft shoulder. He looked down at his legs. It was like watching footage of legs walking from the point of view of the walker. That was the helplessness, this was the terror: the brakes are gone, the steering wheel has locked, I am at the mercy of this wayward machine. It circled him around to the south entrance of the forest preserve. Five, six miles on foot after a fourteen-hour day, he came to a clearing and crashed. The sleep went as quickly as a cut in a film. Now he was standing again, in the cricket racket, forehead moist with sweat, knees rickety, feet cramped, legs aching with lactic acid. And how do you walk home in a robe with any dignity?

The doctor appointments started up again. He wasn’t well that time for thirteen months.

On the night Jane picked him up at African Hair Weaving, he knocked on Becka’s door. “Can I come in?” he asked. No response usually meant her begrudging acquiescence, so he turned the knob and eyed her for permission to enter. She sat up against the headboard.

“What do you want?”

“To apologize.”

“For what?”

He sat down on the bed. “For ignoring you.”

She drew her legs up to her chest and hugged her knees. Her thighs expanded in their black sweatpants.

“Let me try to explain,” he said. “I’ve always felt a strong sense of duty to provide for you and your mom. I’ve worked hard so that you would never have to want for anything.”

She looked at him skeptically. “I don’t really think that’s why you worked hard.”

“And that meant,” he said, “that I had to put certain opportunities aside.”

“Like what?” she asked. “Like did you want to become a painter on the Left Bank?”

“I mean opportunities with you.”

“Or an astronaut? Did I keep you from becoming an astronaut?”

“I would have liked to spend more time with you,” he said. “And your mother would have liked me around more.”

“So she could have somebody else to bitch at besides me?”

“Becka,” he said. He put a hand up. “Give me a second here, okay?”

She frowned and grew quiet.

“But the last couple of years,” he said, “the last couple of years have been different.”

He stared into the dead aquarium in front of him, a quarter full of rock-and-roll buttons and Mardi Gras beads and CDs and cigarette papers.

“Different how?” she asked.

“The last couple of years,” he said, “I haven’t really wanted to be around you.”

He turned on the bed to look at her, making a small vortex of the sheets below him. She didn’t move. They were never still anymore in each other’s presence. There was always some context for movement, some unspoken vectoring away. Now they stared as if startled by each other, years after having forgotten what the other looked like.

“I love you more than anyone in the world,” he said, “but I didn’t give a damn if I saw you or not. I didn’t understand the phase you’re in. The duct-taped sneakers, the dreadlocks. The music.”

“Right. It’s so hard. The Beatles.”

“You don’t just listen to the Beatles,” he said.

“Ew,” she said, “the Ramones.”

“Point is,” he said, “I hid behind my duty. I used work as my excuse to avoid you.”

He said he was sorry. He didn’t anticipate her saying anything in response and didn’t expect it or need to be absolved or even understood. He needed only to come clean. She said nothing as he left the room.

She found him sitting at the kitchen counter slouched over an uneaten orange, looking morose and inward. It had been only a few minutes, five at the most, since he’d left her, but in that time the kitchen had filled entirely with the weight of his self-pity. When he got like this, bundled up in his coat and carrying around his backpack, she wanted nothing more than to beat a retreat the hell away from him. It was like he was dying or something, when he wasn’t dying. He was just worried that he couldn’t go in to work anymore. It made him grumpy. He wasn’t even sick really.

“You think I care?” she asked.

He turned on the stool. She stood on the runner in her torn flannel and concert tee, barefoot, hands on her hips.

“You think I’ve been waiting around this whole time for an apology? That I give a shit what you think or what you do?”

He put his hands in the pockets of his down jacket. It was a defeated gesture, as if he were the child his daughter was scolding.

“The only reason you’re apologizing is because you’re sick again. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have even thought about it. You could have been stoned on crack since I started high school, nothing would be different. You think too much of yourself, Dad.”

And with that she turned and went back upstairs.

Coffee and a powdered doughnut sat on his desk. He might have thought to get something more substantial but he didn’t care to interrupt the flow of work. Night after night, he sat at his desk just as a sphere of oil sits suspended in dark vinegar—everything blotted out but his own source of light. To save on energy costs, Troyer, Barr and Atkins, LLP, had installed motion sensors on the overhead lights. From six in the morning until ten at night, the lights burned continuously; after ten, the sensors took over. He worked past ten most nights, and most nights found him sufficiently absorbed in something that required only the turn of a page or the click of a mouse—too little activity for the sensors to register. The lights frequently switched off on him. He’d look up, surprised again—not just by the darkened office. By his reentry into the physical world. Self-awareness. Himself as something more than mind thinking. He’d have to stand, a little amused by the crude technology, and wave his arms around, jump up and down, walk over and fan the door, sometimes all three, before the lights would return.