Peter Orner - Esther Stories

We were at Ike’s, at our table by the window, having burgers and sloppy cheese fries, and I was whining about Devon and how she’d dumped me for the twenty-seventh time. On my ass this time, I said. And this time, this time, I swear I won’t call her back when she calls. This time I’m going to have R-E-S-O-L–V-E. This time when I say I’m going to do something, by fucking God, I’m going to do it. Cal yawned a long yawn. He’d heard it all before and didn’t want to waste his breath on eloquence he’d already orated, as he put it. We were circling again. Ike’s, burgers, cheese fries, Devon dumping me number 22, 23, 24, 25, 26…But during take number 27 something happened, something that pushed us out of our routine. A woman’s voice. Crass and loud and roaring and beautiful and low. A woman’s voice, upstairs, in the apartment above Ike’s.

Liar! Nobody lies like you! Nobody! You lie and you lie and you lie, and when you say you’re not lying anymore, you lie about whether you’re lying.

Bullshit, a man retorted. Meek, but not dead yet. Bullshit. What about Martin Jumbileau?

Martin Jumbileau? she raged. Martin Jumbileau! You mean you’re going to bring him into this? Like I’m some kind of lowlife you pulled off the street and saved. Tanya’s right. You are foul.

Then she winged her shoes at him.

I know this because Cal and I were sitting there listening, wiping our hands on our pants — Ike’s got no napkins — when two white shoes dropped into the street like tiny planes crash-landing. Women’s patent-leather pumps with straps. They lay sprawled on the pavement, toe to toe, linked in the agony of the fall.

Cal and I stared out the window at those snazzy shoes as we listened to the silence of victory unfold in the apartment upstairs. And the world was merciful. It did stop its spin, and those shoes were angels dispatched to rescue ourselves from our own grease-soaked and burbling-over hearts.

ON A THURSDAY NIGHT, in the tiny men’s room at the Gopher Hole in Gilbertsville, Iowa, in the infamous pisser with the hidden step down — ask Candice what happened to Frank Knipp’s forehead when it met the urinal after he tripped in the dark — the other Frank, the quiet one, Frank Waverly, saw something alarming in the mirror. Odd furrows, just above and below his eyes, ruts that looked like they were somehow getting deeper by the moment. And his cheeks were now twin percolating spasms. Frank Waverly stared at himself. He’d had two, three beers; he wasn’t drunk. Frank Waverly rarely got drunk. He was known as a light drinker who thought a lot about things, a methodical man who trolled around for answers before making judgments. For this reason, he was a man who could always be called upon to fix odd things — not because he was so clever with his hands, but because he studied what was wrong with something before he touched any of the parts.

Examining his face more closely, Frank went through some of the possible explanations for this strange turmoil. He knew immediately that whatever it was had nothing to do with fear of marriage, of having to be with Nancy forever even if things didn’t pan out, or fear that sex wouldn’t be any good after. All that crap that Raymond and Pauly Sicosh kept razzing him about. He wasn’t afraid of weddings — it was the only thing he’d ever really wanted. When they were boys, his brother Lance drew pictures of himself as a dentist torturing babies; Frank’s drawings were of tuxedos and veils and four-story cakes the size of the Kickapoo township landfill. So it wasn’t Nancy. Nor was it her last name, which was enough to shrivel the balls of most men in town. You had to tread carefully when dealing with a Degardelle, particularly a female Degardelle. If something went wrong, you’d end up with a posse of mothers and aunts and eighteenth cousins chasing you to Sioux City with shovels and rakes and firearms. Nobody (and this had been true, people said, since the Civil War) embarrassed that family and got away with it. Chick Larson’s stunt with Nancy’s cousin Theresa was an obvious case in point. His famous two-days-before-the-wedding waffle; now he lives under Buicks at the Jiffy Lube in Cedar Falls. But Frank had gone to school with Degardelles (Randall, Stevo, Little Joey). He’d delivered pizzas with Degardelles (Little Joey, Nancy’s older sister Steph). He’d been surrounded his whole life by that locally royal family. He wasn’t intimidated by them and besides — and on this he truly walked alone — he actually liked Nancy’s mother. Not accepted, feared, or stood in awe of, but liked. She had been his third-grade teacher (now she was Superintendent of Schools), and even though she’d stomped on his foot whenever he stuttered his T’s, she’d taught him to read.

The bizarre doings in his face didn’t stop. His gurgling cheeks were beginning to expand. He thought of Nancy after she got her wisdom teeth pulled and came home morphed into Louis Armstrong. And it wasn’t that Nancy talked too much, even though she did. That was what he loved about her, that she never stopped the chatter, that she went on about who knew what half the time. Babbling onward about Nick Desmond’s wife, Suzie, and how nuts she was with her backward jogging. Then she’d switch and talk about summers up at the Degardelle family cottage in Rhinelander. Then, a related story, maybe, about her Uncle Vasco and his seasonally wandering hands. Then she’d inexplicably about-face into another merciless attack on Barbra Streisand. “I mean what the hell do I care how many neuroses she has?” What mattered to Frank was not the content but the dependability of her patter. Nancy filled the often unendurable silences of his life. He didn’t exist in silence literally. S and F Packaging was as loud a place as any. It was just that there were times in the day — even when he was working side by side with people — when he’d feel the silence build to a low whine, as if a mosquito were trapped and slowly dying in his ear. An odd, sometimes nagging, sometimes blissful silence that cut him off from everybody, even his closest friends, guys he’d grown up with and now worked beside. Guys whose kids called him the Other Uncle Frank on the Fourth of July. For the most part he hid the problem well. Nobody except Nancy even knew about it. Whenever it was obvious to others that Frank was trying to read their lips rather than listen to them, most just thought, That’s Frank Waverly, thinking so hard about other things that he can’t keep up.

For a long time he’d been certain that his brother was the cause of what he considered his private condition. He might be filling an invoice code or on hold with a wholesaler when he’d be struck by the simple thudding fact of his brother. That his brother hiccuped, that his brother farted, that he could do both, proudly, at the same time. That it was Lance who once changed the channel for an entire hour. That Lance was the one who squirted his mother’s hair jizz in both his ears and asked him if he could hear the Pacific Ocean now. That he was the one who cross-country skied on the roof of Hoover Elementary and whooped at the fat cop to come up and get him if it was so illegal. That it was Lance who threw the alarm clock and then the basketball to wake him up on the morning of a day he has no other reason to remember now. Sometimes he thinks he’s co-opted his brother’s dumbest memories and made them his own, because remembering what Lance did is easier than remembering the physical Lance, the one with the disgusting fungus toes, the one who slept with his eyes half open, like a bad imitation of a dead guy.

Frank gripped the sides of the sink and glared at himself in the murky light. Someone jiggled the door handle. Frank’s shoulders knotted, the way they did if anyone tapped him from behind when he was in the silence. Except now he was watching it happen in the mirror, and it wasn’t temporary. His shoulders stayed hunched. The ruts around his eyes were deepening into ditches and his cheeks were still blimping. A dark-purple fluid was beginning to drip from his nose into the sink. The handle rattled again. Frank managed a shallow “Still in here.” Whoever it was — it sounded like Tony Lemoyne — said, “Laying an egg in there or what?” Frank didn’t answer. He just kept staring. Not only at everything that was going wrong in his face, but also at the things that remained the same. His skimpy eyebrows, his slightly bucked teeth, his disproportionately fat upper lip. At the mustache he’d hated for six months but didn’t shave off and couldn’t say why not. He pressed the tab of the soap dispenser and caught the pink splat. He foamed up his face and rinsed, but still couldn’t get rid of any of it, what was new or what was him. He checked his pulse, which seemed okay, though the Red Cross class had been years ago and he couldn’t remember how long to keep his fingers on his wrist. But there was a beat there. One, one, one, one, one. Then he said, out loud, “God?” It was unlike Frank in that he didn’t think about it before he blurted. It came from his mouth not his brain. Here in this bathroom that Candice cleans twice a year, once because she always hides Easter eggs behind the toilet and again before the health inspector comes. That asshole Lemoyne kicked the door. “There’s a man out here that’s gonna start squealing like a pig.” Frank laughed, but not at Lemoyne. No one laughed at Lemoyne, even when he was funny. Nancy once asked him if he was an atheist. Her Grandmother Degardelle was worried. He’d lied, said he was a believer. Now here he is, a secret blasphemer, in this stink of a bathroom with Tony Lemoyne holding his legs together outside the door, trying to read his face for a message from on high. Shit, if John Denver can talk to Him in the rearview mirror of a Pinto, why not me? He hoped it didn’t have anything to do with politics, because he hadn’t read the Register in days. Maybe this has something to do with Sadaam again. Another call to arms. Rallying the troops to kill some more Arabs in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. If that was the case, though, why wouldn’t He go through Raymond, because he’d been in Desert Storm the first time around and he was right there at the bar? (Or Nancy, because she videotapes C-Span.) Frank’s eyes turned from their usual hazy brown to black, and his upper lip curled over his mustache and began to dam up the purple fluid, so that he started to breathe it back up his nose. He finally got scared and considered leaving his face and calling Nancy — Candice would let him use the phone behind the bar. He would tell her what was happening, and Nancy would say, Wow, Frank, reminds me of that Bible thumper convention my sister Julia dragged me to: eighty thousand people in a football stadium taking turns narrating their personal experiences with God. God on the call-waiting, God on the intercom at the Department of Motor Vehicles, God in the plastic-only recyclables. What’d you say was wrong with your nose, Frank? Disgusting purple what’s coming out of your nostrils?