Mark Chiusano - Marine Park - Stories

One fall day we sat on the stoop in front of our house, waiting for people to come buy from our garage sale. It’s not a garage sale, said Lorris. It’s a stoop sale. But that doesn’t sound as good, I said. A step sale then, he said. Fine, I said, a step sale. In the crevice from the sidewalk and the indentation that the bus made coming through every morning, there was a puddle of water, a quarter foot deep and buzzing with gnats. Lorris was picking up brick pebbles from our neighbor’s unswept stoop and landing them in the puddle.

An old woman stopped and asked how much the paperbacks were.

We’re selling them for one dollar, I said.

One dollar! That’s not enough, she said. I’ll give you three.

Told you, Lorris said to me.

The woman smiled fondly at Lorris. Do you like to read? she said.

Yes, said Lorris.

What’s your favorite book? she said.

His head dipped down and he became less excited. He hated questions about favorites: red versus blue, Yankees or Mets, the sport that he was best at. He didn’t like making choices.

He’s reading Sherlock Holmes now, I said.

The old woman patted his arm and he looked carefully at her sandals.

Can you tell me the plot from one of your favorite Sherlock Holmes stories? she asked.

Lorris’s face looked like when you press pause in a video game.

I’ll give you an extra dollar, she said.

We’d only made six dollars all morning.

How about if your brother helps you? she said. He still looked the same way. Or any story at all. Otherwise I’m leaving. She mimed walking away.

Lorris took his hands out of his pockets and put them on my arm, like someone had pressed start.

Tell her a story about us, he said.

Lorris asked if he could get a ride home from the train station later that night somewhere in the neighborhood of three a.m. It was a Friday in December, and I hadn’t left the house in a week and a half, which is what happens when you live at home. I said, What, you don’t think I got plans of my own? He just stood there looking in the mirror in the living room adjusting the hat he’d borrowed from me and never returned, a little to the left, more to the right, until he got the perfect tilt he was after the whole time. It was a flat-brim, the first one I’d ever gotten, gray with the Mets logo in front. I’d never liked the color royal blue, and that’s what all the other Mets caps were. But this one I’d connected with, and I used to wear it everywhere, until Lorris started asking for it and I gave it to him one birthday. People are always giving people useless things for birthdays. That’s something I can’t abide with.

He said, And it might be closer to four — I’m not really sure. I said, How about you give me a call and we’ll see where I’m at, and if I’m in any state to drive. Really, I meant if I was awake. He said that sounded fine, and asked if I minded if he took some of the cologne Mom had gotten me for Christmas. It had a note on it that said, Something nice for someone nice. I told him it was in my junk drawer, which I hadn’t opened in a while, but it was somewhere in there, if he wanted to dig into it and look.

• • •

Nights I drove around. I had a 1991 Ford Taurus that my aunt had gotten rid of when she got a new job. She didn’t want to own a car that was practically twenty years old. She’d been working with Bank of America and then there was what she said they called the Little Slowdown, and she’d been out of work. Another place hired her a year later, with pay cut and demotion, but she took it, because it wasn’t so easy to get jobs anymore.

It was a dirty tan car, and whenever I drove my mother to the Key Food to get groceries, she insisted we stop at the gas station and fill up the tank. I wasn’t making much of an income. I worked at the cell phone place at Kings Plaza a couple days a week. That’s all the time they could give me, though they said they wished it could be more. I was good with following directions, went along with the company policy of introducing yourself and asking the customer’s name when they got in the store. I liked hearing the names, trying to guess what block they lived on, if they were on the right side or the left side of Flatbush. I wasn’t taking any classes that year. Sometimes these things just happen.

When we hadn’t gone to the grocery store in a little while or I didn’t have any extra to put in the tank, I walked around. There’s a painting-poster my dad has, on the wall leading up to our bedrooms, of a café somewhere with people sitting in it, the sky dark at the top and the only light coming from inside the café. He said it was Barcelona, but he’d never been. Why don’t you go there and talk to someone, if you’re so attached to it? he said. It’s not like Marine Park had that, though it wasn’t so bad. I could stand for hours looking at the Lott House, the old Dutch estate between Fillmore and S, the one that was Parks Department property and that the Brooklyn College archaeologists were doing excavations on, to find old slave quarters. I’d been on the porch once, when they decorated for Christmas. Every night, they put a candle in the top middle window, and I liked leaning on the fence looking at that and the old wood. The windows were shuttered up, and there were signs to stay off the grounds around the house. They thought the ground was unstable, because there were supposed to be Underground Railroad tunnels underneath. This had been one of the last stops. They’d get them out at night somewhere through a false plank in the kitchen floor.

• • •

Lorris texted the first time at midnight, said, Place is lame, but somewhere else soon. Also, you could come, call if you want to. He always wrote in full sentences in texts. Some girl had berated him about it once, he said. She said, You’re going to Williams next year and you write like this? At first he just did it for her, but then it was easier to be right for everyone.

I was still in front of the TV at home. Mom was sitting in the kitchen, ice on her legs for the shin splints, massaging her feet. A few hours before Dad had said he was going out for a movie. Do you want to go? he asked Mom aggressively. Does it look like it? she said, pointing at her feet. She’d had the ice on since she got back from work. I told her, Mom, maybe take a day off from running once or twice, and they might feel better. She’s like, I’m a school secretary. I sit at a desk all day long. You ever see a school secretary take a lunch break? she says. I have to move around a little or I’ll forget how. She’s scared that she’ll get Alzheimer’s like her mother did.

I texted Lorris back that it was nice of him, but I was a little busy at the moment. Didn’t want to make something up, because you could always tell — the name of such and such club, friends that didn’t live here anymore. Too easy to say too much and get caught in the lie. That would have been the embarrassing part. He couldn’t even drive yet. I said, Let me know when you do need the ride, I’ll probably be OK to come get you.

We live in the worst possible place for getting anywhere. It’s a twenty-five-minute walk to the subway, or a bus, the least-served area by the MTA in the whole goddamn city. I checked on a map one day. My dad always complains about the fact that Mom moved him into a two-fare zone. He means that you have to pay twice, once for the bus and once for the Q train, if you’re trying to get yourself into Manhattan, or even downtown Brooklyn, where everything that’s happening is. I’m pretty sure he knows that it’s all one fare today, even if you have to transfer, but he’s been driving so long now and takes trains so infrequently that you never know. He got mugged too many times in the eighties, even when he was on dates. That’s the kind of embarrassing thing that’d drive a guy to the DMV, no problem.