free to a good home

This short story first appeared in Phoebe Magazine in spring 2003.  It was workshopped in an MFA class at George Mason University with book critic and author Alan Cheuse, who suggested I expand the story to let it have more breathing room. I took his advice, and the story turned into my 2014 novel I KNOW WHERE I AM WHEN I'M FALLING.  Interesting how I experimented with a different voice here. I was finding ways into the material I later explored in more depth in the novel. 

 

Manfred busses tables at a restaurant in Quincy Market.  After Nicky went to jail, I started going to Cityside after work, and Manfred would stare at me and smile while wiping down tables and filling a basin with dirty dishes.  So after a few months I found myself going past this restaurant on my way home from work, or walking Gnasher past the restaurant just in case I bumped into him.  Manfred would come out and pet the dog.  I thought he was a professional busboy, until one day he said, “I passed the bar exam this week.”

“You’re a lawyer?”

“Going to be,” he said, giving me that smile.

“Start with me,” I said. “I need a divorce.”

“You’re a pretty strong lady,” Manfred said, after my shortened down version of the Nicky story.

“Not strong enough,” I told him.

“You know what you’re doing,” he said one night, several months after this. “You’re making me fall madly in love with you.” So we walked Gnasher around Waterfront Park at the end of his shift, and there was nowhere but where we were touching.  Manfred had green eyes, beautiful teeth and silky hair.  He was fluid, and I knew he could effortlessly fill any space I gave him.

He said,” If you hadn’t been married, I’d have snapped you right up.  I’d never have waited all these months to kiss you.” My lips brushed his face, his wrists, oh the tenderness and strength in those wrists. “Why did you marry that guy?” he asked.

Back in my apartment he pushed up my shirt and kissed my breasts. He said he could come just looking at me. “This part of your body is really pretty.” I was soaking wet down there, not having done it since Nicky went to jail.  Then Manfred was inside me, pressing to the center of me, and even now when I remember the way it happened, the energy sinks to my crotch and my head gets light just thinking about him.

So I get home from work one day, and unlock my door, and Nicky is standing in the living room. “Hey Jules, I just got out of jail.”  He’s picking my things up, turning them over, and he must have been working out.  No one normal looks that substantial, like he’s in front of a painted back drop and the apartment is diluted compared with him.  Then I notice that Gnasher is missing.

“That was your dog?” he says. “I think he ran out when I came in.”

I haven’t seen Nicky for almost a year, but inside a minute I’m seething. “How did you get in? Wait a minute, how long have you been here?”

“Forget the dog,” he says, moving towards me with a flat-eyed grin. “Hey, I missed you.”

Don’t you hate the smell of alcohol breath when you yourself have not been drinking?  Well, that’s what I was thinking when Nicky got close and had his finger in a loop on my jeans.  Gnasher might be in the middle of city traffic, or ingesting rat poison from some dumpster.

“You’ve got a fucking nerve, breaking into my place like this.” And now I’m really angry. Whatever I feel for this guy it’s always extreme.  He jerks his head back, laughing, and part of me could almost laugh too. He moves like a boy with trouble to get into. Trouble looks so good on him, which is why I can’t imagine him without it.

“Come on, Jules. I thought you’d be happy.”

“We’re getting a divorce, remember?”

“So where did you expect me to go?”

I have to get out of here. I’ve got to get away from him and find my dog.

Red is slumped on the stoop downstairs with a paper-bagged bottle in his hand.  I’ve been letting him sleep in the hallway at night, which is fine by me because the building is empty except for some guy on the top floor. Our building is slated for demolition because it’s a neighborhood in transition.  Red and me will soon be transitioning out.  Red is like my doorman. No problem, sure, he says.  He’ll look out for the dog. In the street there’s a whiff of rotten garbage and exhaust fumes, but at least the sun is shining.

Beyond the overpass, a hundred yards away is the developed part of the neighborhood, the boutiques and outdoor cafes, and that’s where Manfred works.

So I search for Gnasher around Waterfront Park and head towards a triangle of crab grass near the tunnel. It’s where I sometimes walk him in the mornings, but now he’s nowhere in sight. And I really am pissed off. I waited for Nicky for two whole years before giving up.  I really gave him the chance to clean up his act.  Weekend afternoons I sat on a plastic chair in the visitor’s room at MCI Norfolk.  Is that what girls do in their early twenties?  But he fucked up again.  He managed to order all this weird equipment and have them send the bill to me.  He phoned from the jail and billed it to my house, all kinds of crap like that.  That’s when I finally gave up.  The stupid part is, I might have waited forever.  Which means the good part would have been breaking into my place and letting my dog out.

I’m thinking about Manfred the Good and Slick Nick the Bad. I’m crying and looking for Gnasher.  That’s when I step off the curb, and there’s a car with a gleaming hood shooting up from the Callahan Tunnel.  I guess I’ll never know what I looked like, flying over traffic and landing on my head.

Suddenly my ears are screaming and I’m hot and greasy like blood and motor oil mixed up together.  It’s not like the next thing you know.  It’s more like life ends here and a new reel of film begins in a bright ambulance, my neck in a brace and a paramedic checking vital signs.

“Where’s Gnasher?”

“Gnasher?”

“My dog.”

“You had a dog with you?”

I got Gnasher in Harvard Square.  Someone had him on a rope with a sign saying “Free to a good home.” He looked so intelligent sitting there with his paws crossed.  It was the crossed paws that did it.  I’ve always had a weakness for German Shepherds, and with Nicky in jail, I figured I could use the protection.

I stopped to admire him.  A girl had rescued him from the pound because he was about to be put to sleep.  “Do you want him?” and I said, “I guess so.” I thought, if I didn’t take him, who would? The girl goes, “This dog is super intelligent, but he doesn’t know who he belongs to. Don’t let him off the rope whatever you do, or you’ll never get him back.”

With Gnasher it was his crossed paws.  With Nicky, his black curly hair and the way that he kissed.  It felt like I was floating. I remember him buying me a pair of gloves at Saks Fifth Avenue.  We sat on stools at the glove counter with these stupid grins on our faces because we were so in love, and the salesgirl was going, “This pair is really her.” I don’t think Nicky even looked at them because he was too busy getting a kick out of me.  All my memories of Nicky have this big fault line through them.  They’re built on stolen money.

I’ve been hit by a car and the technician is holding my hand and they trundle me out of the ambulance and they’re wheeling me down a hall and I feel like I’m at the end of a telescope. I feel them turn me from side to side. Something cold on my face.  And nurses talking.

It feels like I’m tilted, so that most of me is spilled into the side of my face.  They don’t want me looking in the mirror.  I can only see through one eye anyway.  At some point, Manfred appears with a bunch of Black Eyed Susans. He’s bobbing around in the background, earning his right to be loved by me.

Manfred drives me back from the hospital in his second hand Pontiac with the worn out shocks, but he has to pull over on the way so that I can throw up.  But in my head I’m slipping, sleeping, running away in one of those dreams where you want to run but your legs don’t work.

I’m lying on a sofa, Manfred’s sofa, I guess.  The air is light and fragrant.  Gnasher’s wet nose hits my cheek.  I hear the tail thump.  He’s panting, and I can tell that if a dog could smile, Gnasher would be smiling. Manfred goes,” Red found him trotting down Milk Street in the financial district, and when you didn’t come back, he brought him to the restaurant.  That’s how I knew something was wrong.” Good old Red. Damaged yes, but he has a heart.  Most people think that damage is a bad thing.  But I can’t decide that it’s totally bad. At least, not all the time.

Manfred wants us to move to Plymouth, thirty miles from town.  He thinks it will be good for me to get away from Boston.  Summer convalescence by the ocean.  He’s got it all planned.  You can live pretty cheaply in Plymouth, he says, and he’s found a job at a living museum where you dress up like pilgrims in a village, pretending that history stopped in 1620. He’ll chop wood and thatch while conversing with tourists in pilgrim dialect.  The job pays as much as bussing tables, only without the tips, and I can work as a waitress at the Inn for all Seasons.  The last stupid jobs of our lives, because everything will change when he starts to practice law, and the first thing he’s going to do is get me my divorce.

So we rent a three room cottage on Billington Sea Road.  You walk past a lopsided row of mailboxes and up a dirt lane beside the lake.  There’s a deck in the back surrounded by scrubby trees.  The air smells like pine. I string up fairy lights and Japanese lanterns.  I do it in stages because I still don’t have much energy.  My face throbs.  There’s a scar from my lip to my nose, a lump on my cheekbone.

In Plymouth, they have herbal shops with names like Sun and Moon. In the checkout line with my aromatherapy candles and vitamin E (for my scar), I feel people staring, but they look away suddenly and don’t ask any questions.  When Manfred is with me, he gets dirty looks because they think I got the scar from him beating me up.

“Hey Julie, do you want to know how this lake got its name?” Manfred is showing off because now he’s an expert in pilgrim matters. “One of the first settlers, a guy named Billington, thought he’d found the coast.  But what he’d actually found was a lake. He was very short sighted.” While Manfred talks, he looks at my mouth and then back up to my eyes and smiles as if we have an inside joke that goes beyond the story.  “So the pilgrims teased him, by naming the lake Billington Sea.” We’re sitting on a big rock overlooking the water.  Manfred pulls off his boots and woolen pilgrim socks. We’re twenty-five years old, but me, I feel like a hundred.  He wants to make me happy.  Happy, I think? I forgot about happy.

“Come on Julie, let’s go for a swim.” So we take off all our clothes and Manfred swims to the middle, and when he’s nothing but a little head bobbing on the water, he nods to Gnasher, and Gnasher bounds out and paddles towards him with his tongue lolling out.

I’m swimming and the trees around us reflect on the water.  Gnasher trots off into the beach plums, but now he always comes back. At night he barks beneath our bedroom window. “Hey guys, let me in.”

Every day I walk him down a woodchip path and worry about Nicky.  He’s just too intelligent to go to waste.  I thought I could save him and all he needed was a good home. I made an unusual connection with him, and I thought I’d get something unusual back.  But being fucked over is sometimes the price you pay for unusual. Unusual is good. At least, this is what I think as I walk past an Indian totem pole, down a path that comes out at the cranberry bogs.

My face is almost completely better and I decide to telephone Nicky, just to see how he is. He took over my apartment and I’m hoping it got him started on the right foot. He lets the phone ring for a good long time, and who knows why, but my heart is thumping.  Then the ringing stops and it’s silent. “Nicky?”

“Jules?” He sounds half asleep. “Hey.” Then, “You really let this place go. The apartment was filthy.  And that old bum who slept in the hallway? I mean, what the fuck, Jules.”

“You mean Red?” I say. “He was like a doorman to me.”

“Not anymore,” Nicky answers. I think he hung up, because it goes so quiet and then I hear him crying.

“What’s wrong, Nicky?”

“I’m scared.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“I don’t know what to do, Julie.  I fucked up big time.”

“Not again.”

“What am I going to do?”

The screen door bangs and Manfred walks in from work, wearing this stupid pilgrim hat, which looks terrible on him.  He blows me a kiss and reaches into the refrigerator for a six-pack.  I’m listening to the silence between Nicky and me, and now Manfred’s out on the deck under the lanterns and fairy lights, socializing with a bunch of pilgrims from the plantation. “I don’t know, Nicky,” I say at last. “I don’t know what you should do. One thing right, I guess. Just one thing right after another.”

And that is our last conversation.