Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“Heart condition?” and she laughed.

“And diabetes, liver trouble, glaucoma, plus a half dozen other equally enfeebling afflictions. He’s an old man, if you must know the truth,” and Amby kept on laughing, his father joining in with her. “His doctors said long ago that a person in his condition can barely stand the strain of walking, less any great globe-trotting with an adventurous young woman — a tramp.”

“Now hold off, Ray. Amby’s a fine young lady.”

“She’s an insidious conniving tramp who’s going to ruin your life. So get her out of here — I don’t want to look at her anymore.”

His father took Ray’s hand and shooed Amby out of the room. “Calm yourself, Ray. You’re upset and tired, besides not feeling too well. We’re only going for a week. When we get back, we’ll come see you again, okay?”

“You won’t find me here.”

Then in San Diego we’ll come visit — but just take care.”

“Don’t bother visiting with her. I won’t have you both out there, and not because I don’t have room.”

“Anything you say. But relax, son.” He put his fingers on Ray’s temples, as he used to do when Ray was a boy and had a headache, and rubbed them so gently that Ray soon felt himself falling asleep. His father whispered goodbye to the other patients and left the room.

“Dad?” Ray said a minute later, jolted out of sleep by a pain in his side. He dragged himself out of bed to the window, and opened it.

“Dad?” he shouted to his father hustling through the parking lot with Amby. “You’re being used, fleeced, swindled by a pro. You’ve got to get out of her scheme fast before she takes you for every dime you have. Now you’re coming to San Diego with me when I’m feeling better, you hear? We’ll take long ocean walks, sit out in the sun, talk over good times, go out for nourishing dinners, and see all the better TV shows together. We’ll take good care of each other is what I’m saying, and I’m going to have to insist on your coming, you hear? I said, do you hear? Goddamnit, Dad, you get so headstrong where you can’t even listen to me anymore?”

Max Silverman figured he had about the softest job in the Bronx: assistant manager of a large five-and-dime on Jerome Avenue, under the El tracks. Most of the administrative duties were handled by Mr. Winston, the manager for fifteen years, so all Max had to do was roam the aisles to prevent kids from pocketing merchandise, relay Mr. Winston’s orders to other workers and fill in for him when he wasn’t there, and do a little bookkeeping and stock-control work at his mostly empty desk in his windowless office in the back of the store.

Then another recession came, this one, as the newspapers put it, the worst economic downturn since the end of the Korean War. In a month, four salesgirls were fired on the spot. A few days later, after the President had said on TV that all reports of a serious recession were grossly exaggerated, Mr. Winston gave Max a check for his salary and three weeks’ severance pay, told him how much the company appreciated his efforts to raise the store’s sales volume during this unfortunate reversal, and regretfully said goodbye.

The two times Max had been laid off in the past, he blamed it on the ineptitude of government and the greediness of big business moguls and stockbrokers and the like, whom he pictured smoking fat cigars and playing cards beside the pool at some swanky West Indian hotel, while he and other victims of their bungling and schemes were being tossed into the streets. But this time he didn’t feel so had. The way he looked at it, he hadn’t been fired as a common laborer, which is all he was in the past, but that part of management which had to be sacrificed for the economy to survive. And then his mother, who was planning an early semi-retirement for his butcher-father on Max’s future earnings, took it lightly — even lifted his spirits a bit by saying she’d heard he had an A-1 reputation as assistant manager and would be sure to get a similar position sooner than he thought. But after a month of job-hunting and Wednesday morning visits to the State Unemployment Office, where the lines each week seemed to get longer with men much better dressed and groomed than he and who looked much shrewder and so were more likely to find work, he became depressed, lost what confidence he had, and once more was blaming his being unemployed on the President, Congress, the New York Stock Exchange and top executives of huge corporations and businesses.

A week later, after having no luck at three employment agencies before it was even ten o’clock, he became so disgusted with everything that he decided to call it a day. He took the subway back to Burnside Avenue, waved to his mother as he hurried through the apartment, and shut his bedroom door behind him. Putting on his pajamas and yelling to her that nothing was wrong, when she asked through the door, he got into bed and soon fell asleep, a cigarette, which he’d taken only a few drags from, still lit in the ashtray on his night table.

That afternoon, his mother braved a look into his room. Seeing him sleeping soundly, she pushed his door till it banged against the wall. Max rustled around, opened one eye and peered at his mother, who was mumbling to herself and fidgeting with a dish towel.

“Max?” she said, bending over him.

“What?” he said drowsily.

“Max!”

“What, for Christ’s sake?”

“You sick or something, lying there? Before, you said you wasn’t, but your cheeks have lost all their rosiness.”

“I’m fine, Ma, thanks.”

“If you’re fine, why you lying in bed like you’re sick?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired. And frustration, not finding work. I thought maybe my luck will change with a good night’s sleep.”

“Night? Three in the afternoon is night?”

“What’s it, three?” he said, shutting his eyes and trying to doze off.

“What then, midnight?” She pulled a wristwatch out of her housecoat pocket and dandled it above his eyes. “You see what time it is?” nudging him till he opened his eyes and looked at the watch.

“Yeah, three.”

“Three it is. That’s my point. So what are you doing still lying in bed?”

“Don’t worry about it, please,” he said, getting up. “It’s just a day’s rest. Now if you don’t mind?” He grabbed her elbow and escorted her out of the room.

“You’ll end up a no-good loafer if you make sleeping in the day a habit,” she said from behind the door. “Get a job, why don’t you. Only then can you sleep; then you’ll have the right to. Max? You taking in what I’m saying?”

That evening Mr. Silverman was unmoved by his wife’s story of their son’s behavior. Things are tough all over,” he said, opening a beer. “A lot of good intelligent workers are unemployed now — good young butchers in the market, even — so don’t be concerned if he’s discouraged for a day or so. It’s only natural.”

“But why should he get discouraged? I mean, five or six jobs he could’ve got today if he looked hard enough. But no, he’s in his room all day doing what? Sleeping off all his chances, that’s what.”

He lifted his shoulders and murmured that he supposed she was right. “Your worrying, though’s, not going to hold up dinner, I hope. At the table we’ll have a little talk with him.”

She summoned Max to dinner a half hour later, but he said through the door he was too tired. She immediately got worried, because for Max to miss or pass up one of her Thursday meatloaf dinners meant he was either working late or drastically ill. She went into his room, turned on the ceiling light, and felt his head.