“Oh, Dupont, that’s terrible.”
“Yes’m, so I stayed up all night wiff her and then the next day I goes to church and on the way home I bees so tired I falls asleep on the train.”
“I’ll bet you were just exhausted,” Uta said.
“Yes’m, I sho’ was. I sat in that seat and felled stoned asleep while some pickpocket done slashed my pants with a razor and stole my wallet.”
“You’ve got to be sharp when you’re riding those trains, Dupont. Keep your eyes open and look out for danger.”
“I wished I had ahad my eyes open, Miz Uta. They took my wallet wiff all my money and my ID card and the pay-check you gave me last Friday.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” Uta said. “But look at it this way, at least you learned a lesson.”
“I suspect I did. Yes’m, I sho’ be awake now. Can’t sleep a note thinkin’ ’bout that paycheck I worked so hard for and now it be stole. All that money I was hopin’ to save for medical school be stole, and my whole dream be gone.”
“Don’t worry,” Uta said, laying her hand on his shoulder. “There’ll be other dreams.” She really seemed to be enjoying this.
“I reckon there will, Miz Uta, but I need this dream now. I’s hopin’ I could go to medical school… real soon so maybe I could… operate on my mother.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Uta said. “I’m sure your mother’s very proud.”
“What’s left of her,” Dupont said. “Po’ thing be coughin’ up specks of her throat into a napkin and can’t nobody do nothin’ ’bout it.”
“Well, that’s certainly tragic,” Uta said. “It’s a sad, sad story you’ve got there. I only wish I could do something to help.”
“Well, maybe there is one thing,” he said, scratching his head with the point of a pencil. “Maybe if you was to maybe write me anotha check, make up fo’ the one what got stole. What if you was to make me a new check and call the bank tellin’ ’em to cancel out the first check ’fore anybody have a chance to cash it.”
“Don’t you think someone might have cashed it already?” she asked, looking down at his feet. “Hey, nice new sneakers, Dupont. Those are really sharp.”
“Chances most likely that nobody did cash it yet,” he said, changing the subject. “Seein’ how the banks be closed on Sunday.”
“Then they probably took it in first thing this morning,” she said.
“Naw, probably most likely they ain’t on account that it take a while for ’em to work up the nerve to forge my hand-writin’ on the back of the check.”
“You might be right about that,” Uta said. “Chances are it would take a thief a good three or four days to work up that kind of confidence.”
“Oh, please, Miz Uta, you know I weren’t be axin’ if it wadn’t such a mergency. If somethin’ happen and you find out dat first check done already been cashed, I swear I’ll make it up to you, even though it weren’t my fault to begin wiff. I’ll come over to you house and chop some wood or dig you a pool, you know I will.”
Uta sighed. Drying her hands, she reached for her pocketbook.
“Oh, you is one sweet white lady,” Dupont said. “I don’t care what nobody says, you jus’ as nice an’ sweet as you can be.” He folded the check in half and placed it in his shirt pocket, tapping it for safekeeping.
“You’d better get down to the bank and deposit that in your savings account right away,” Uta said dryly. “Otherwise, you might lose it, then you’ll never be able to attend eight years of medical school in time to cure your mother of cancer.”
“Yes’m, I reckon you’s right. I’ll jus’ run to da bank right quick and be back sooner’n you can blink yo’ pretty blue eyes.” He bolted out the door, managing to contain his laughter until he hit the street.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Uta said to me. “But you’re wrong. I was born at night but it wasn’t last night. Thinks he’s so sharp, does he? Well, he doesn’t know the half of it. I was going to give him that money anyway, hand it to him as a severance check as soon as I let him go. Goddamned apple polisher. Promising to dig me a pool, ha! I was paying him a lot less than what I’ve been giving you, but what the heck, I figure I got my money’s worth out of him. Five dollars says he’ll run down to the bank and keep on running. What do you say, five bucks, let’s wager, sharp guy.”
There was no point in throwing my money away, as I knew she was right.
Uta’s friend, Polly Briggs, arrived the following morning but didn’t start work until after the Cubs game. She was a back-slapper, forthright and loud with short curly hair and a spray of freckles across her nose. Briggs — “Call me Polly one more time and you’ll be wiping vomit off your shoes. Can’t stand the name. Never could.” — spent most of the year in northern Michigan, where she taught physical education at a public high school. During her summer vacations she often came to Chicago to attend baseball games and help Uta with whatever little project she happened to be working on. They struck me as unlikely friends, different in age, temperament, and tastes. Uta did not look unhealthy, but Briggs, with her hale complexion and robust physical stature, appeared as if she had spent the wee hours tossing bales of hay onto a horse-drawn wagon. She was casual and cloddish, while Uta tended to be much more guarded, preferring to think herself infallible, especially in the presence of her employees.
When Briggs complained that she’d gotten bad seats to that afternoon’s game, Uta remarked that all the good spots had been taken by the Jews, who, according to her, also controlled the hot-dog concessions and souvenir sales. “The parking, the players’ salaries, even the making of bats and mitts, it’s all controlled by the Jews. They’ve been shooting the prices right through the roof. Here I am, two blocks from the ballfield, and they’re driving my property taxes sky-high. They want to make it so…”
“Aw, shut up, already,” Briggs said. “You’ve been carping about the Jews ever since you left that dump of a country. Open up a third-grade history book and maybe you’d learn something. Besides, you didn’t think the Jews were so bad back when you were chasing Brandy Fleischman.”
Uta brushed the bangs back from her forehead the way she had a thousand times before, but now the gesture was openly nervous. She pulled the hair back over her eyes as if to hide herself and, after a lengthy pause, muttered, “Well, Brandy was only half Jewish.”
“Yeah? Which half, top or bottom?” Briggs turned to me and winked while Uta huffed and fidgeted, her face rising in color. Dupont and I had often speculated about her sex life. He’d insisted she wanted all the black men she could get her hands on, while I had a hard time imagining her with anyone but one of those retired Nazi generals holed up in the jungles of Argentina. We were both way off the mark.
“Say, Uta, whatever happened to that little Collins girl, the one that used to go with us down to the dunes? You know the one I’m talking about. She used to sell fire insurance or some damned thing, liked to skeet shoot.” Briggs sloshed on the polyurethane with all the delicacy of a toddler, and I followed along behind her, trying to smooth out the drips before they hardened. After the first few days Uta loosened up a bit and allowed herself to enjoy her friend’s company. Their gentle bickering assumed a harmless and comfortable tone, and I tuned in and out according to my interest. They were debating the merits of a high-fiber diet one afternoon when I looked out the window, certain I saw Dupont standing on the corner in front of the small neighborhood grocery. A woman came out of the store carrying two large paper sacks. Dupont said something, and she shook her head no. He moved toward her, his arms positioned to embrace the bags, and she backed away, calling through the screen door. The grocer stepped out and Dupont threw up his hands in what appeared to be either frustration or denial. After exchanging a few more words, he walked away, rounding the corner and out of sight.
We had applied the first coat of finish and were halfway through the second when Briggs accidentally dropped a full cup of Gatorade into the gallon bucket
of polyurethane. “That’s coming out of your paycheck, baby,” Uta said.
They squabbled back and forth until Briggs offered to buy a whole tanker of the stuff if it would get Uta to shut her yap.
“All right, then,” Uta said, “but I’m coming with you to make sure you don’t walk out of there with a cheaper brand. And we’re taking your car because I’ve wasted enough gas on you already. And we’re going to listen to what I want to hear on the radio. How do you like them apples?”
They left the apartment carrying on and had been gone for no more than three minutes when Dupont entered the room.
“Hey,” I said, “what happened? We’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to. Uta’s not here right now, she…”
“Took off in a car talking shit to some curly-headed bitch. I saw them leave. Tell me when she’s coming back.”
I said fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. “Say, guess what? It turns out that Uta is a…”
“Give me twenty dollars,” Dupont said, lighting a cigarette. “I’ll pay you back next week.” He stood in front of the fireplace mirror, inspecting his hair, which had been treated with oils and now hung in lank curls. For a moment I hardly recognized him. It wasn’t just his hair that had changed, it was his whole manner. The question mark had been removed from both his speech and his posture. He stood straight, his shoulders squared and his head positioned as if it had been screwed to a post. “Give me twenty dollars,” he repeated.
When I told him I didn’t have it, he closed his eyes and let out an impatient sigh, the sort you deliver the moment you decide someone needs to learn a lesson.
I pulled out my wallet, “Look, see for yourself. I spent my last five dollars on lunch.” It’s always nice when, by some freak of nature, you can rely upon the truth to get you out of an uncomfortable situation. There was a checkbook in my knapsack, but in terms of cash, my wallet held nothing but an outdated school ID, my library card, and the telephone numbers of people I could no longer recall.
“Well, I need twenty dollars,” he said. “That’s just the way it is. I need it.”
“Maybe you can wait until Uta gets back, and she’ll let you work for a few hours.”
He looked at me as though I’d suggested he pan for gold in the gutter.
“OK, maybe you could borrow the money from your girl-friend,” I offered.
“Right,” he said. “My girlfriend. You’re real quick, aren’t you. I guess I’d forgotten just how smart you really are.” His voice had a hard, bitter edge to it. “You’re just as sharp as a fucking ice pick, aren’t you.” He paced the room. “Sharp as a jackknife, aren’t you, Boy Scout.”
I looked in the mirror and watched as he picked Uta’s purse off the window ledge. “That’s Uta’s,” I said. “Maybe you should talk with her before opening it because, well, it’s hers and you know how she is about her things.”
This was about as forceful as I get. Were America’s safety in my hands, we would all be wearing burlap sacks, polishing the boots of any invader capable of pronouncing the word boo.
Dupont found her wallet and removed three twenties, a five, and two singles. He arranged the bills into a flaccid fan and waved them before his face, as if the tiny breeze were all he had intended them for. Then he folded the money, placed it in his pocket, and walked out the door.
I left shortly afterward, mounting my bi-cycle and riding toward the bank for three twenties, a five, and two singles. Uta was the type of person who knew exactly how much she had riding in her wallet. She kept lists of withdrawals and carefully tabulated all her receipts. “Can you believe I spent seventeen dollars at the Osco? And for what? One tiny bag I walked out with.” She would certainly notice that her money was missing. I couldn’t tell her that Dupont had taken it, as she would have yelled, “You let him into this apartment? And then what, he rifles through my pocketbook and you didn’t think to stop him? You just let him take my money and waltz out the door?”
I would have felt the same way had I been her. If I’d told her that Dupont had stolen the money, she probably would have called the police and I’d have had to go through the entire conversation again. “And you let him take the money?” the officer would ask. Had the case gone to court, I would have been the one to run into Dupont late some night after he’d served his thirty days or whatever the going rate is for petty larceny.
Neither could I have lied, telling Uta that I’d left for some small errand and neglected to lock the door behind me. “You did what? Why not just roll out a red carpet and hang up a sign inviting every crook in Chicago to come on in and rob me blind? That sixty-five dollars is coming out of your pay-check, mister.” And again, that would have been my reaction, too, were I an aggressive or forthright person. Instead, I am not, and because of that, I felt a real hatred, not for Dupont or Uta, but for myself for being so weak and cowardly with the both of them. They had presented themselves, each in their own way, and it was always my option to draw some sort of a line, to voice my opinion or defend myself; to be brave or be frank or just be something. It had nothing to do with changing people — forget that, on a good day you’re lucky if you can talk someone into changing his socks. Neither could I tell myself that this was strictly job-related behavior. My spine retains this buttery consistency with or without a pay-check. Unlike other people I have known, my silence will never be interpreted as wisdom. It is my chattering teeth that give me away every time.
Uta and Briggs were back at it by the time I returned. “Say, David, we’ve got a little wager going here. Who won the pennant back in fifty-seven?”
I told Briggs I had no earthly idea.
“I still say it was the Oreos,” Uta shouted.
“The Oreos, listen to this one!” Briggs rolled her eyes and squatted to pry open the new can of polyurethane.
I waited until it was time to leave. The women were in the other room changing out of their work clothes, and I crept over to replace Uta’s money, feeling more anxious than I would have if I were stealing it. Opening her pocketbook, I thought of how unfair it was that, of all the involved parties, I was the one who would have to pay. Dupont knew that I wouldn’t have stopped him or told on him. Uta had a half dozen rental properties and a thick portfolio of stocks under her belt. They were having a ball, never questioning their actions or the things that they said. What made them so sure of themselves and why couldn’t I feel the same way? I told myself that as opposed to them, I had a conscience, but the moment I thought it, I knew it was a lie. Had it been a sense of goodness that motivated me, I would have thought nothing of it. Instead, this was a soft and flabby cowardice that had assumed the shape of virtue.
She was in her stocking feet, and wallet open, radio blaring, I didn’t hear Uta coming up behind me. “What is it you’re doing in my purse?” she asked. “What, I don’t pay you enough, is that it?” She cupped her hands to her mouth, “Hey, Briggs, get in here. I just caught our friend going through my wallet.”
The air rushed out of the room, through the open windows and the cracks beneath the door, leaving, in its wake, a vacuum. “So tell me about it, friend. Just what exactly is it you’re looking for?”
The mind plays tricks on the memory. Time is skewed to benefit convenience. Events are compressed for greater efficiency or expanded to accommodate a false sense of triumph. This being the case, it’s hard to say exactly, but it seems to me that I spent close to fifteen thousand years standing stock-still in that exact same spot, searching for an answer to her question.
ashes
The moment I realized I would be a homosexual for the rest of my life, I forced my brother and sisters to sign a contract swearing they’d never get married. There was a clause allowing them to live with anyone of their choice, just so long as they never made it official.
“What about children?” my sister Gretchen asked, slipping a tab of acid under her tongue. “Can I not marry and still have a baby?”
I imagined the child, his fifteen hands batting at the mob
ile hanging over the crib. “Sure, you can still have kids. Now just pick up your eyebrow pencil and sign on the dotted line.”
My fear was that, once married, my sisters would turn their backs on the family, choosing to spend their vacations and holidays with their husbands. One by one they would abandon us until it was just me and my parents, eating our turkey and stuffing off TV trays. It wasn’t difficult getting the signatures. The girls in my family didn’t play house, they played reformatory. They might one day have a relationship — if it happened, it happened; but they saw no reason to get bent out of shape about it. My father thought otherwise. He saw marriage as their best possible vocation, something they should train for and visualize as a goal. One of my sisters would be stooped before the open refrigerator, dressed in a bathing suit, and my father would weigh her with his eyes. “It looks like you’ve gained a few pounds,” he’d say. “Keep that up and you’ll never find a husband.” Find. He said it as though men were exotic mushrooms growing in the forest and it took a keen eye to spot one.
“Don’t listen to him,” I’d say. “I think the weight looks good on you. Here, have another bowl of potato chips.”
Marriage meant a great deal to our neighbors, and we saw that as another good reason to avoid it. “Well, we finally got Kim married off.” This was always said with such a sense of relief, you’d think the Kim in question was not a twenty-year-old girl but the last remaining puppy of an unwanted litter. Our mother couldn’t make it to the grocery store and back without having to examine wallet-size photos of someone’s dribbling, popeyed grandbaby.
“Now that’s different,” she’d say. “A living baby. All my grandchildren have been ground up for fertilizer or whatever it is they do with the aborted fetuses. It puts them under my feet but keeps them out of my hair, which is just the way I like it. Here’s your picture back. You tell that daughter of yours to keep up the good work.”