Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  What do you want me to be when I grow up? he asks, stirring, licking a fingertip.

  I want you to be good.

  I’m good at potato prints, he says, my earnest little potato prince.

  No, I don’t mean good at something, I mean just plain good. Being just plain good.

  I’m good, he says.

  You’re good, I smile, mussing up his hair and smoothing it down again.

  He reaches up, plays with my earring. I like it when you get dressed up, Mommy, he says.

  I step out of the bathroom with nothing on.

  Well, Tom, Sergeant, babydollbaby. Do I get into a prone position? A provolone position? I lumber into bed like a mammoth cheese.

  Tom reaches under the covers and clasps my hand. Riva, I’m worried about you. Everything’s a joke. You’re always flip-flopping words, only listening to the edge of things. It’s like you’re always, constantly, on the edge.

  Life is a pun, I say. It’s something that sounds like one thing but also sounds like even means like something else.

  Riva, what you just said. It’s empty. It doesn’t mean anything. He says this with a sort of tender reluctance, as if it were the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

  It doesn’t? I ask, suddenly embarrassed, confused, thinking that there is so much sanity in the insurance business. I slide down into the bed, press my face into his ribs, his strong ribs, the health food lady, I think, should have these ribs against her Velcro lips for a night, just a night, and then it occurs to me that maybe she already has.

  I have brought my mother roses and a Tolkien trilogy. She smiles weakly, then lays them aside. Now, what was his name again? she asks, pouring ice water into a glass.

  In the Leigenbaum’s employees’ ladies’ room, someone has written: I’m a virgin what is wrong with me? Beneath that, other people have written a string of feminist graffiti to reassure her, and underneath that, someone else has written in huge red letters: I don’t care if I’m a fish, I still want a bicycle.

  By the scarves, a woman asks me skeptically about designer names. I go into my rap about differences in French and Italian mills and also about supporting living working artists.

  Do you think it really matters if you get laid in a Pucci scarf rather than one by somebody else? she asks.

  I stare at her nose, tough as a root. You get laid in scarves? I finally say.

  There are problems with these receipts, says the district manager, who is in for the day, on an official visit. Amahara is sitting next to him, not looking at me, her face blank as a window shade. I have just been called into the office.

  I’m not sure what you mean, I say.

  I think you are, he says. We could get into accusations here of gross negligence or outright criminal behavior. But the outcome would be the same. I don’t know what sort of stress you’ve been under, but, Riva, you are fired. Without severance pay. You can pack your stuff and leave this afternoon.

  Excuse me? I ask, not at all the right question, for he gets up and leaves without answering, Amahara close behind.

  A smoky, hot pretzel smell in the city of blubbery love. A woman with jam on her plastic arm is attracting bees in Ritten-house Square. Steam jostles the manhole covers, traffic resetting them, flat, flush, a regular metallic thud. The dusty burn of subway wafts up from concrete descents, and a peddler with a hint of mange at the hairline shouts fourteen carat, twenty at Bonwit’s we’ll give it to you for ten. Music grows loud and near, then fades and is gone, a casual invasion, hasty imprint and flight like the path of a bullet. I wander the streets frowsy and bloated, a W. C. Fields in drag, my mascara smeared like coal around my eyes, in store windows it is hard to recognize myself. I walk into places and flip through the racks, then leave, not really seeing too much, people spinning through doors, buzzing by me. They have drunk too much coffee. Caterpillars crawl the edge of the sidewalks like chromosomes. Looking for food, I roam slowly.

  At Beefsteak Charley’s I stop to blindly read the menu and the poster for the circus and suddenly notice Tom inside eating. He is with a thin, dark-haired woman and Jeffrey, whom he wasn’t supposed to pick up from Mr. Fernandez’s until six. The circus clown grins.

  I pull the door open, walk in. It is fairly empty. In the center is a giant salad bar island with sneeze guards. They must have three kinds of macaroni salad here.

  Tom looks up and is a bit taken aback at seeing me. Riva, he says unimaginatively. I thought you were working late tonight.

  Hi Mom, chirps Jeffrey, his mouth full of corn relish and pickled beets. Look what Julia gave me. He points to the blue University of Kentucky T-shirt he is wearing.

  Neat, I say.

  I went to graduate school there, smiles the brunette.

  Oh, introductions, says Tom, a bit frantic. Riva, this is Julia. Julia is a poet, he says hopefully. She teaches in Scranton.

  Yes, I’ve heard, I say, my eye in third gear, hives blooming, lumps forming under my skin, near my mouth, ready to be lanced. How do you do? It sounds like the right question. I continue: I’ve never met a skinny poet before.

  Tom looks at me oddly, vaguely yellow. Julia smiles sweet as cake.

  Tom, can I talk to you for a moment? I ask, still standing, and he says sure and we walk together back toward the entrance by the unmanned cash register and a phone and extra menus and matches with “What’s Your Beef?” printed on them, and I place my pocketbook in the after-dinner mints, slowly reach for a steak knife from an empty table and when he says what are you doing, what is it, I look at his murky hairline receding like a tide and I say you are my goddamned husband and jam the knife hard into his ribs.

  It doesn’t seem to go very far, like something thrust into a radiator, but I let go and it sticks there for a long moment, then falls toward the carpet like a small, dumb, wingless bat. Tom’s face is a horrible orgasm with eyes. He slumps toward the phone, lifts the receiver, slowly begins dialing 911, blood splotching onto his white shirt like cardinals in the snow, or sunburned nuns, I have lost my mind there is now I realize some commotion, some howling about the place, waiters in bow ties have come out from the kitchen and Julia flushed and murmuring like a very true poet holy fuck it damn it all comes stumbling over and the little University of Kentucky is frozen in his chair clutching a forkful of corn relish, his face a terrified marshmallow, oh my god, my god, I whisper into my hands.

  You’ll never see Jeffrey again, murmurs Tom, you can count on that, the pain on Tom’s face, in his chest something enormous and sad, and then he is giving information to the operator and soon there are sirens.

  I have my own room. Someone has sent me flowers. Is it you, Phil, who could it be, thinking of me?

  Mr. Fernandez drops by to see me at St. Veronica’s during visiting hours.

  Do you realize, he says, that there’s a nuclear bomb hanging over each and every one of us like a monster pinata?

  I begin to understand his metaphors.

  And you go off and do this, he says. Who the hell do you think you are?

  I think to myself that this must be the right sort of question, the sort one is supposed to ask.

  Pride cometh before the fall, I say, lost, foundering. Sometimes in May.

  He leans over and kisses me. Riva, he says. I saw your husband today. He’s fine but says he and Jeffrey will not come to see you.

  I look out the windows, at gray, gray buildings, and say shit, and then start crying. I am crying, I can’t help it.

  I brought you a treat, Mr. Fernandez says, holding me with one arm and handing me a cheese danish wrapped in cellophane.

  I blow my nose, unwrap the danish, break off part and push it in my mouth. I’m bonkers, aren’t I? I ask with my mouth full.

  You’re unhappy, says Mr. Fernandez. It can be the same thing. You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

  I stop eating. I feel sick. This danish is too sweetish to finish, I say, a little Scandinavian humor, and fillip the crumbs off the bedsh
eets.

  I’m going to leave you now. I just stopped by for a minute.

  I look at his magic Jesus beard and panic. Please don’t go.

  I’ll stop by tomorrow, he says gently.

  Thank you, I say, never more grateful for anything in my whole life.

  Orderlies roll the days by me like carts.

  Mr. Fernandez visits, but only him. My husband and son are off someplace, walking and trying not to cry.

  Aging flowers, daisies when they die look like hopeful hags, their sunny, hatless faces, their shriveled, limp hair. Tulips wither into birdcages, six black stamens inside, each dried to a dim chirp.

  The gray buildings fill my windows, my gibbering with salt: Who were you ever? An apoplexy to fill my days, to fill my insomnia with your insomnia, my bard of lard, my long ago husband, sometimes I think I made you up, but sometimes I think you live close, in this city, in my house, buried in the cellar or in paperwork and business trips, rising up at night like a past repast I can wish to death: Please die.

  My mother is two floors above me. It would be humorous, but it’s not humorous. We are allowed finally to meet in our bathrobes in the coffee shop downstairs.

  Well, I say, quoting Humphrey Bogart in a line to Ingrid Bergman at a table at Rick’s: I guess neither one of our stories is very funny.

  Riva, she says. Your father was a madman. He used to punch cars and threaten to swallow things. Maybe you inherited his genes.

  I like to swallow things, I say.

  Today is Friday. The nuns are friendlier, my eye flickless, my skin, body, brighter, thinner. I take an afternoon nap and dream bittersweetly that all the friends I’ve ever had march in here to see how I am.

  When I wake up, Sister Henrietta knocks at my door and says a gentleman is here to see you, Riva.

  I am disoriented from my dream, quickly straighten my hair, and say, as in the movies, Sister, you can send him in now. I turn to look out the window: the gray buildings of my life, the gray buildings.

  And it is Jeffrey who appears in the doorway. He hangs there small and alone. Mom? he squeaks, then steps closer to the bed. He is wearing an oversized U. of Penn T-shirt, twisting and wringing at the bottom of it with one hand. Hi, Mom, he says.

  My hips ache. My eyes burn happy sad happy. Nice shirt there, Batman, I say.

  He tugs at it. Dad says this is where you went to college, he says, too far away for me to touch his arm.

  How have you been doing, Jeffrey? I ask.

  I broke my pinata, he says. I just broke it open, he shrugs, gulps, a small wrenching glug, looks at the ceiling. And there was nothing in it, he adds. But there’s a circus coming pretty soon. There’s gonna be a circus.

  He stands there, away from me, afraid, holding his fingers. I am strange to him. Perhaps he thinks I have turned into Gramma.

  Mom, are you my friend? he asks, barely audible, his face pale and homeless.

  I nod yes.

  Are you my mother?

  I nod again, smiling, and he thinks about this, then approaches me, reaches and climbs up into my lap, curls into my breasts, clutching my gown, bursts into tears, his face crumpling against me. I want to go to the circus and see the horse people, he cries, wet and red, and I hold him close, warm, in my arms, in this room, and tell him we will go.