Certain American States Read online

This is just temporary, she said, just until I find a place of my own.

  I started staying at the office late, then taking roundabout routes home, trying to exhaust myself so I could sleep.

  What do you do all day? she asked one night, looking bewildered and somehow tiny, shrinking. She’d made an eight-dish dinner in my tiny kitchen, most of it involving corn: creamy corn salad, bean salad with corn, corn bread, corn-stuffed chicken, gazpacho polka-dotted with little white kernels.

  I have a job, Ma. I have to work.

  With rent as high as it is, I guess you do have to work pretty hard. (The girlish fear in her eyes reminded me of a memory I had of Dad before he left—how angry he seemed about the mail, ripping junk to pieces and making stacks of the rest, statements or bills or whatever. I feared the mail for years after, afraid of what responsibilities and problems would become mine.)

  The weekends were somewhat better. I took Mom to museums and free concerts and we had some nice moments. She made us picnics for the park, where we’d end up napping, catching up on the sleep we’d lost to the birds. Eventually she seemed to stop looking for an apartment, though I couldn’t bring myself to mention it. Maybe this was my life now. Maybe my mother just lived with me. And anyway, it wasn’t as hard sharing the studio as I’d thought. She did all the grocery shopping and cooking, packed me lunches for work, and even started taking care of the birds, which had, in turn, chilled out enough for us to almost forget about them.

  The respite lasted a week, until that last time I saw Maurice. We were walking to the F when he came running up, waving his flip phone at me with one hand, the other holding up his pants. Mom clutched her purse and whimpered.

  His screen: Ur hack in der got done

  He looked happier than I’d ever seen him, ecstatic, nearly manic.

  No! Just—ugh, no, I said, hoping he could at least read lips, that he could see a no.

  What does he want? Mom asked. What’s going on? She leaned into me—Is this about drugs? Are you involved in some kind of—

  He’s just confused. I don’t know this guy.

  He seems to know you.

  Maurice seemed to finally realize how pointless this was, how far away he was from making anything clear to me. He walked off, gave up as if none of this had meant anything to him. Then it finally felt so fucking sad, that he would someday die with whatever he’d tried to say.

  Mom was still rattled but we went to the Met anyway. A few times on the train she asked me if I was in trouble, and I told her it was too stupid to explain. (I don’t know why I didn’t just tell her the story. (It felt like the most private thing that had ever happened to me.))

  Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please, a man on the train said several times to us, taking our attention whether or not we wanted to give it. He played some music from his phone and danced as if he were trying to throw his arms off his body.

  Is he okay? Mom asked. Is this all right? Do people just…?

  It’s fine, Ma. He just wants some money.

  The dancing man went up the aisle with a cracked take-out container but no one gave him anything.

  Ha-ha! You guys—y’all—ha! the dancing man said, as if this were all just a hilarious joke we had played on him, not paying him a cent.

  The rent is too high here, Ma said, and I was comforted by her floaty, oblivious voice.

  * * *

  At the museum we hardly spoke, just moved in and out of the galleries, drifting by the artifacts as if we’d seen them many times before. Wow, that sure is something right there, Ma would say every twenty minutes.

  We went to the cafeteria in the basement, bought plates of beef stew. In the booth next to ours an elderly couple were also eating stew and each drinking a miniature bottle of wine, and it was easy to imagine that this was what they did every Sunday for decades—wine and stew at the Met. That was their booth. That was their whole life right there.

  You know, I didn’t realize how dangerous it is here, Mom said.

  It’s not that dangerous.

  She nodded at me, took this statement superficially into account.

  There’s so much need, she said. And there’s no space. Everyone’s so desperate.

  (But what was wrong with feeling desperate? (I kept this question to myself.)) We forked our beef and chewed without looking at each other.

  I read an article about the best cities to get old in and it said New York was a good place. You can walk around. Lots of resources and hospitals, she said. Community and everything. So, I thought, well, I’ll just move there. I’ll sell everything I don’t need, because after all you’d have to deal with all of it eventually …

  Her eyes drifted around the low-ceilinged cafeteria in a kind of awe. The man from the elderly couple was spitting a piece of something into his napkin, a shaky hand holding it to his mouth. I wanted to hear what the woman was saying but she spoke quietly and with some kind of accent.

  And I thought if I lived here I would need so much less, Ma went on. Everyone says that’s good—living with less. And you could check in on me since no one would really do that in White Deer, you know. People just leave each other alone so much there and Maude is too busy and doesn’t seem to care much for me anyway. So I thought, well, nobody really has to die so alone in New York. It might be a good place to get old and die—oh, goodness, isn’t that a sad thought?

  I shook my head but I didn’t know if I was agreeing or not.

  Well, you know, these kinds of conversations are never easy.

  With a mouth full of potato and gravy, I leaned away from my plate to push this food down my throat, to turn it into me.

  I just want to prepare you for that, you know, since you’ll have to take care of all the arrangements on your own since Rae’s gone and you’re not married. But I don’t think I’ll be moving to New York, and in fact, I’m going to buy my return ticket for this week. So—I don’t know. I don’t know what we’ll do.

  She pushed a pea across her plate, picked up a roll but lost interest in it before she could lift it to her mouth.

  Well! Listen to me—doing all the talking like this. Do you have anything you’d like to say about all this?

  There was something I wanted to say, something I needed to tell her. She put one hand up to her face and smiled as if this were some kind of teatime chat instead of what it was—cafeteria-grade beef in a stuffy basement under so many tons of the past.

  Don’t you have anything you’d like to say?

  Certain American States

  I was one of those babies who look as if they won’t survive to dinnertime, but somehow do, then become toddlers with the tics and nerves of a used-up veteran. Nervous about the television, whether it was on or off; nervous about the sun rising or setting; nervous over every knock at the door and nervous in the silence too. Leonard, that man who raised me, he is the one who remembers my nervousness. He once told me that on the first day of my life, on that still-dark morning, I looked up at him and he looked down at me and he knew and I knew and we both knew that we’d always dislike each other. My mother was such a good friend, though; he felt he had no choice. He couldn’t possibly say no—not to a woman whose belly had watermeloned overnight.

  Godfather? Me?

  Yes, she said, who else?

  Leonard always told it that way and I always thought, in fact, it wasn’t such a good question, not even a little useful. There wasn’t anyone even pretending to lurk in the shadows of that neighborhood of foreclosed homes. Just burned-brown grass and black-eyed Susans. He didn’t know anyone else. She didn’t know anyone else. They were just there, as if they had survived something together and couldn’t help the affection it gave them.

  The loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely—I think he said that once, Leonard did, while I was thumbing the photo albums again, trying to figure out what happened, how I got here. The loneliness of the trailer park. The loneliness of a warped Polaroid. The lon
eliness of the gay decade when I appeared.

  But even though Leonard always disliked me, he had a stubborn bit of mercy, and for that I am still thankful. (If not a merciful God, at least a merciful godfather.) It wasn’t his fault that she died while the ink was still wet on my birth certificate. We both blamed the other and we raised me in a cloud of resentment. He’d lost his only friend; I’d lost a whole type of future. Together we had gained something that neither of us ever wanted.

  A week later a nurse removed me from my clear coffin and handed me, screaming, to Leonard. Despite his prayers to a God he didn’t believe in, I’d survived.

  As a kind of backhanded gift, Leonard told me we could speak to her and I believed him for so many years. We spoke to her aloud, giving her a summary of our days, what we ate, what we saw, and twice a year Leonard read my report card out loud. I spent all the school day thinking, revising, rehearsing the nighttime messages Leonard was careful not to call prayers.

  Sometimes I’d ask a question and it would just dangle there, answerless.

  One night I tried to kneel at my bed, but he told me to get up, that’s not how we do it.

  But that’s what they do in the movies.

  You’ve been going to the movies?

  I saw a movie once.

  Oh, you did?

  They played it at school.

  That’s not a movie, that’s what they call an educational video. What kind of education they put in it?

  I guess to kneel at night like this.

  And what do they call what you do down there?

  They call it a prayer.

  And what have I told you about praying?

  That it’s useless.

  That’s right.

  And that God doesn’t exist.

  You are such a smart goddaughter.

  Can’t I just call you Father since God doesn’t exist?

  It’s not the same thing. Being a godfather has nothing to do with that God. God is just a sound made of a g and an o and a d. It’s a good sound. That’s part of the reason it’s so popular. Everyone loves a nice noise. That and people don’t want to die. They will believe anything on the off chance that it will help them not be dead.

  He put a brick-hard hand on my scalp and I felt all the pounds of him pressing down.

  Sleep, he said, and turned out the light.

  * * *

  On the night of my sixteenth birthday, at the time when we usually talked to Mother, Leonard told me he had something to say and he wasn’t going to say it to her; he was going to say it to me.

  I didn’t ask for you. I had no part in your creation. I still cannot even understand how she had a baby inside her to begin with and she never even told me how. I was the only person she knew and she never told me what happened, not even once. Someone must have driven up at an opportune moment and done what they wanted just because she was there.

  That is what he said, exactly as he said it. I wasn’t surprised. I’ll even say, it made a good deal of sense because I’ve always had a box in my brain packed to the lid with vengeance.

  That night he wrote me a check for two thousand one hundred and forty-three dollars, left the car keys on the dresser, walked to town, and never came back. I started packing my own lunches, signing report cards, and doing what I had to when the money ran out.

  * * *

  Decades passed and one night I answered the phone because it rang and that’s what you do. That’s what you do for the person who calls your phone. You hold up your side of the bargain. It doesn’t matter how much I want to throw the phone straight through the screen door some days. I still answer it. I have always answered it.

  This time it was a stranger, a nurse with a tiny voice.

  Sophia?

  I’m afraid you have the wrong number.

  Oh. Well. You wouldn’t happen to know Sophia, would you?

  No.

  What about Leonard Brown?

  I heard that after a certain large earthquake or hurricane, a major river temporarily ran in the opposite direction. This was basically like that.

  * * *

  I had never imagined hospitals in the Dakotas, just acres of unremembered earth, but I suppose people must be destroyed there too. North Dakota is where he landed, where Leonard ended up and ended. Bald and in a bloodless haze he told all the nurses about the remote islands he visited, the mercenary armies he fought in, about beautiful women in dresses that fit just so. He told them my name was Sophia, which it is not, and in my pocket I thumbed the beet-dyed foot of a long-dead rabbit. I’d bought it out of a machine outside a bowling alley outside a town where I had run out of options. I looked at Leonard, my godfather, my once merciful godfather. I don’t believe in godfathers anymore.

  * * *

  But when he said, on the last day of his life, that we needed to finish our dinner quickly because the last ship to Tanzania would be leaving soon, I decided to be merciful.

  Madagascar has been beautiful, I agreed, and also I find it strange that there are so many Italians here.

  His knees, beneath a sheet, trembled.

  How is your ravioli?

  I started to answer him, but then he broke character, looked at me, said my real name. Said he wanted to know how I was. Asked me how I was doing like it was nothing. Like he’d said it a million times. It took me a second, but I answered. Answered like he’d asked me a million times. Like I knew just what to say. He was no longer really the man who had somewhat raised me and I wasn’t really the child he had raised. Those people were gone and now he was just a dying person and I was a living person and the dying and living have certain agreements about these states we’re in.

  I am good, I said. I have a good husband who has a good job as a manager and I am a manager too, which means I am managing. We get juice in cartons so big it ferments before we finish it. We think this is good; this means we are on the right side of things. We know what I am, and he knows what he is, so that means I take out the trash.

  Leonard twitched again, a smile whimpered into a frown.

  Sophia, he said, what about the opium trade?

  I can’t tell you much, you know.

  A comrade is always discreet.

  I thank you for your discretion.

  Opiates, as you know, are recession-proof.

  I waited patiently for the last few hours, most of them silent, his breath getting wintery, slow and cold. The nurses told me I should leave, that it could be weeks, days, months, but I knew what was going to happen.

  He woke up suddenly, right at the end, and told me he was going very far away, to a remote location, in the Commonwealth of Dominica.

  Of course, I said. I crossed my legs and shut up and slumped.

  Time travel, he whispered, they’ll kill us if they know we’ve harnessed it. We must say we’ve never met. They could be following us right now.

  Because You Have To

  The telephone hardly ever rings but when it does, there is a good chance it is someone asking me how I am, and if I really tried to answer that question I suppose I could say I’m doing as well and as terribly as I ever have been, but if you stop answering questions, people stop asking them, and if you stop answering the phone, it eventually stops ringing.

  A month goes by, you think—Oh, I’ve finally done it.

  * * *

  Yesterday I opened the side door because the dog was barking at it and I called out, almost called out your name, almost thought you’d be coming back now, that it was all a joke, ha-ha, and you’d be coming back, just like that.

  Obviously it wasn’t you. It was Wayne from two yards over, though it was dark so I couldn’t see his face, could barely hear his voice over the barking. Wayne had found a loose dog and wondered if it was mine.

  Wayne had the mystery dog—sand colored and fat—under one arm and I was holding my dog by the collar (that is, our dog—no—my dog, a dog, anyway, no one’s dog, this dog you didn’t take with you). This dog was lurching and screaming his do
g scream and trying to get out the door. God knows what he’d do out there, dark as it was, afraid of flies as he is.

  Are you missing a dog? Wayne asked.

  No, I said, looking at this shit-eating dog of mine. I went back inside. There was only one dog relevant to me. I knew precisely where that dog was. In fact he was the only person in my life of whose location I was certain.

  * * *

  Something my grandmother, who was a fascist, used to say was You have to count your blessings. Once I asked her why you have to count your blessings and she gave me a great smack to the ear. Because you have to. She was the most beloved fascist in my family, all of whom were flag-waving fascists.

  Do I sometimes think fondly of her? Do I have a choice?

  * * *

  A cat has been stalking around the yard, chewing up the tomato plants, hissing and clawing at the birds.

  The dog sticks his head out his dog door from time to time or sits on the porch panting while the cat murders bird by bird. The dog seems delighted to do nothing. He licks the shit from his ass and smiles at me.

  * * *

  You have been calling and hanging up.

  I know it’s you. The telephone rings differently when you call.

  You can’t tell me I don’t recognize this. You have no idea what I hear, though it is so like you to doubt me, to assume I’m wrong. It is so like you to not be here and to call as if to point out your absence and to say nothing just to frustrate me.

  * * *

  Furthermore, a mouse and her extended and ever-extending family have taken up residence in the shed, living on pilfered compost scraps.

  The cat is uninterested in the mice and is set on his task of pouncing on birds when they land in the garden to peck around for a shriveled berry or worm. This cat wants to destroy beauty—I can tell. He is more than animal, he is evil, a plain enemy of the world. I wish him ill. I do. Almost daily I find a mess of feathers in the dirt. Some mornings there are whole bird carcasses left on my porch—eyes shocked open, brilliant blue wings, ripped and bloody. I have thought often of what it would take to kill a cat, quietly and quickly, with my bare hands. I have thought of this often. In fact I am thinking of it right now.