Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

He vanished for good the day after graduation. Not that he graduated. But he did dance across the stage wearing the empty diploma case on his head like a tepee. In ’82 I got a letter from his lawyer brother. Carrington dead in Houston, a broken needle jammed in his arm. Our Duke of Cornwall bled to death in a motel room shower. The lawyer wrote his death was a blessing, not very disguised. Can you beat that? His own brother. You run out of time is what I’m saying, is what I’m always saying. Whether you waste it or not. Some people you never shake. Carrington, what, dead fifteen years now and still he’s egging me on? We dumped the fridge in the yard in front of Chuck and Kathy D.’s. We’d crammed it full of Schlitz and watermelons. And Carrington, the maestro in a tux, and Kathy D. running barefoot across the snow, wide mouth, shocked, tits bobbing, yelling, Oh my gods! like she’d just won a convertible on The Price Is Right , except we were in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, my friend, and it was February and we were doing the hula around that sacred appliance in the snow, and oh how fucked up, oh how gloriously — never again — fucked up we were.

None but the wind should warn of your returning.

— TOWNES VAN ZANDT, “NONE BUT THE RAIN”

It wasn’t visiting hours. They let me in anyway, after I begged from a wall phone on the first floor. She was on the third floor. I needed a special code to work the elevator. After I buzzed, I was led into the TV room, which was also a lunchroom. She was waiting there, holding a book. I can’t remember what the title was, but I remember staring at the cover. It had a drawing of an ornate iron gate. Beyond the gate was a gray sea. We sat across from each other. She laughed. She told me about a guy who earlier that morning had called his mother from the phone at the nurses’ station and shouted, so the entire floor could hear, could she please get him out of here so he could kill himself in peace. She pointed to a boy — he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen — sitting at one of the lunch tables listening to headphones, peacefully drumming the table with his palms. That’s him, she said. He’ll be all right.

“You’ll be all right, too,” I said.

“It doesn’t really matter.”

“You will.”

“Don’t say it again, all right?”

I looked around the room. In the corner was a pile of tattered boxes of board games. A stack of old magazines. There was a computer inside what looked like a video arcade game, the screen behind thick glass, a keyboard dangling from a chain.

“I brought you a brownie,” I said.

We used to say we lived in the country of us. I’ve never been able to explain this to anyone, though everyone I have told has nodded like they understood. Nine years we lived there. I watched her eat a brownie.

“Aren’t I thin?”

“You’re too thin.”

“Want some brownie?”

“No, I brought it for you.”

“Take some.”

She handed me a piece of the brownie. Nine years. Our fingers met. A half hour later, the kind small man with an accent — Polish? — unlocked the door and let me out.

Acouple of years before I was born, my mother took my four-year-old brother and ran away from my father, home to Massachusetts and her parents, where they holed up like fugitives. She said she wouldn’t go back to Chicago if she was dragged by a train. My brother had a field day with Grandpa Walt, staying up all night eating doughnuts and talking about whether Johnson would dump Humphrey from the ticket. A week later, my father flew east. He knelt on the sidewalk with white roses and sang her name. Neighbors watched the drama from behind their curtains. Phones rang up and down Robeson Street. Vivian, can you get more romantic with a capital R? But those days before he showed up, I think about them, the stillness of my mother’s mornings. Something peaceful about the possibility of my own nonexistence. My mother didn’t go see any of her friends. The farthest she ventured from her old bedroom was the backyard, where she sat on the huge boulder she used to sit on as a kid, her chin in her hand, and her father would call out the window of his study, Hey, would you look at the thinker perched on her rock? Except that he didn’t say anything, only watched her, she being twenty-six and married now.

FALL RIVER, 1967

My mother stands by the window, holding a duster, listening to Frank Zappa. Like a lot of people, she pretended to like the music more than she actually did, which is what Zappa himself counted on. He figured if people pretended long enough, they might actually start to listen. No one’s here but me, and I am asleep. She dusts a little, but there’s something about the song, the stopping and the starting, the half-talking, half-singing— Movin’ to Montana soon / Gonna be a Dental Floss tycoon —that makes her want to refuse in principle to do anything productive. Zappa’s pretty out there, her friend Judy had said when she gave her the record. It isn’t a place my mother is at all against going — out there. Now I am awake and shrieking. To buy a minute or two, she turns up the volume. My mother examines the duster. It is made of some sort of feathers and she wonders what dead bird was worth this clean apartment, or anybody’s.

CHICAGO, 1973

It may have been in The Wapshot Chronicle where someone — the grandmother? — leaves Middlemarch outside during a storm. All those heroically screwed-up lives — all those hopes, all those beautiful failures — bloated with rain. It made me think of my mother in her room. Sometimes she’d stay up all night, reading. Middlemarch was one of the books always on the table beside the bed. It was the guest room, but we called it her room. She no longer shared my father’s. We didn’t have many guests. The door’s locked. Sometimes at night my father comes and tries the knob.

HIGHLAND PARK, 1978

We’d go out to the hill at night, Stu Barkus and me, and sometimes the moon was out and we could see each other’s lips move in the dark. Old conversations dry up like rain. I haven’t seen Barkus in years. I tried calling him after I heard his father died, but the number I had didn’t work.

Still, out there, there was an easiness, the rare kind of easiness you get with someone you’ve known so long there’s no need to prove anything. Sometimes we’d smoke a little, talk some more, but now that I’m thinking of the hill, mostly what I remember is us not talking. And I remember remembering. My parents used to take my brother and me up to the hill. My mother would lie on her back and stare at the sky. My father would talk. My mother would look at the sky and sometimes answer him, sometimes not. I’d run around in circles in the grass. From the very top you could see the lake. My mother called the hill the moors of Chicago. It wasn’t until I read but didn’t finish Wuthering Heights in college that I understood what she was talking about, but even then I think I realized that there was something unhappy about the place. Maybe not the place itself exactly, but our place in it. It was too vast, too open, and too full of other people’s laughter. Maybe this is why my parents brought us out there. Maybe they thought something would rub off on us. One time my father brought a kite he’d built from a kit. It was made of thin wooden sticks and paper so fine you could blow your nose with it. He spent an hour in the basement that morning gluing the kite together. He got it off the ground, but the wind ripped the spindle — is it called a spindle? — out of my hand, and the kite fluttered and took a nosedive into the grass. I cheered. Then I went over and jumped on it, crushed it to pieces.