J. Lennon - Pieces for the Left Hand - Stories

This went on for about four months, and ended at my request. In the space of those months, my braces had been taken off, and I was prescribed contact lenses and began dating a girl; and it was in imagining how to explain my behavior to her that I realized how awful that behavior was, and I begged my friends to come clean.

In retrospect, I see that this desire was purely self-serving, and that identifying ourselves was the cruelest trick of all, for there could be no deeper blow for L. than to be confronted with our betrayal, and with the knowledge that, if he reacted appropriately — that is, with anger — he would have no friends left. When we finally revealed ourselves, it was by telegram, and we made sure we were all at his house when it arrived.

His response convinced me that I was a coward, a conviction I still hold to this day. He unfolded the yellow paper, read it aloud, and then laughed as long and as hard as we did.

The daughter of old friends had decided to attend college in our town, and was to visit the campus with her boyfriend, a pre-med student at a university in another part of the state. As a favor to her parents, we agreed to provide the two with dinner when they arrived, and answer any questions the young woman might have about life in the area. We had not seen her since she was a little girl.

We prepared a lavish meal, eager to help our friends’ daughter, and to ease any fears she might have about her new independence.

To our surprise, the couple arrived nearly an hour early, and in a strange condition. They were dressed with extreme informality, their T-shirts soiled and blue jeans stained and torn. Both were personally unkempt, their hair knotted and oily, and they reeked of cigarette smoke. The pre-med student had a pinched, impoverished look about him, as if he had been awake studying for days on end with only coffee to nourish him. Most alarming was the fact that our friends’ daughter appeared to be at least seven months pregnant.

Despite our shock, we struggled to make a go of the evening. The couple were obviously hungry, so in lieu of the unfinished meal we made them cold sandwiches, which they ate in huge, anxious bites. We told our friends’ daughter about life at the college, which information she received silently, occasionally nodding to indicate she understood. Meanwhile her boyfriend’s eyes wandered around the room, as if our modest possessions were priceless items in a museum. At one point they asked if we had anything to drink, and they polished off two brimming glasses of milk each, allowing it to spill over their faces and onto their clothes.

Not much later they rose to leave, so we wished them luck and told them they should feel free to come by anytime. In response, they asked us for directions to a free medical clinic downtown, which we gave them. They thanked us quietly and drove away in a dilapidated Buick that emitted blue smoke.

For some minutes we considered what we would say to our friends, particularly on the subject of the pregnancy, about which they had not warned us. It was during this discussion that a knock came at the door. We opened it to find the real daughter and boyfriend, dressed, respectively, in a yellow designer sundress and a shirt and tie. They apologized for being late and presented us with a bottle of sparkling cider and a plastic container of cupcakes. The daughter kissed our cheeks and the boyfriend shook our hands.

We told them our oven had broken down and took them out to a restaurant. Both talked incessantly and with smug confidence about the careers they had plotted for themselves and the country estate where they planned to live when they graduated. My wife and I found them extremely annoying.

For months afterward we expected, even hoped, to be visited again by the first couple, but they never came back.

A witness to a prominent local murder fell under close scrutiny during the trial, when it was revealed that, directly after the killing, he had wandered around aimlessly for an hour and a half before reporting the crime to a policeman who happened to be walking by. Asked for an explanation for his behavior, the witness explained that he had been sitting high in the bleachers of the empty football stadium where the murder had taken place, and had seen the shooting, which occurred beneath the goalposts at the opposite end of the field, from a great distance. Though his view of the murder was clear and the sound of the shot quite loud, the witness found it difficult to believe in something that had happened so far away. Upon further questioning, the witness confessed that, had he not encountered the policeman by chance, he might never have reported the crime at all.

When the trial was over, members of the jury expressed their disgust with the witness, whom they characterized as irresponsible at best, and at worst guilty of some sort of crime himself. The foreman, who had been sitting closest to the witness during the trial, even confessed to a desire to physically harm him, and said that he would have done so had the two not been separated by the walls of the jury box and witness stand.

In the pocket of a pair of long-forgotten pants I was preparing for donation to Goodwill, I found a ten-dollar bill. This pleased me until I realized that the bill was worth far less than when I put it into my pocket, many years ago. As a gift to my future self, and in a bet against inflation, I added a second ten-dollar bill to the pocket, and replaced the pants in the back of my closet.

All the money I ever found, I found during the same year, in the same town, at exactly the time I most needed it, when I had little income and few prospects for more. I was working part-time at a supermarket and living in a large house with four other recent college graduates, where we subsisted primarily on pasta and beans and cheap beer, and I had begun to pine for a better life, free from incessant worry about my expenses, which at the time included a large credit card debt and a substantial student loan.

The first time I found money, I was walking over a bridge and stopped to gaze down on the river below. After doing so, I happened to look at my feet and noticed that I was standing on a twenty-dollar bill.

The second time, I went into a bank to withdraw twenty dollars from my savings account and saw a twenty-dollar bill lying on the floor. Since the bank had just opened and no other customers were around, I kept it.

The third time, I checked a book out of the library and found twenty dollars pressed between the pages.

Though the sixty dollars might have had the power to change my life — I could have quit my dead-end clerk’s job and found something worthwhile — I squandered each of the twenty-dollar bills on expensive restaurant meals. In fact, all three of the meals came out to more than twenty dollars, so I ended up spending money of my own that I would otherwise have saved. I seemed to believe that since the money had been found, not earned, it would somehow be taken from me if I didn’t spend it fast. But the result was that I developed a taste for good food and drink, and my near-poverty became all the more difficult to bear.

I now recognize this year as a turning point, but whether it was for the better or the worse remains unclear.

My father managed apartment buildings for a living, and every June, when the university students left town, he went through each vacated apartment to clean and repair it for the coming school year. Often he found items left behind: radios, shower supplies, an electric typewriter with the price tag still on it. These things would be given to my sister and me, or, in the years after we moved out of the house, sold at an annual yard sale.