Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“Ma, I told you already, I’m just sleepy.”

“Sleepy? You got how many hours sleep today and you’re still sleepy? No, something’s wrong with you; I know.”

He moved his head away from her hand and shut his eyes.

“Please, Max, I got meatloaf on the table, so come eat it while it’s hot.”

“I’ll eat it cold tomorrow. I always liked it better in a sandwich with ketchup on it.”

“You’ll eat nothing cold tomorrow. I’ll throw it out the window before I give it to you that way. Now I’m not kidding, Max. Supper’s ready and you’re holding up your father.”

He propped himself up on his elbows and stared at her. She’d seen this pose of his before and nervously grabbed his flannel pants off the chair and tried ironing the cuffs between her thumb and forefinger.

“Here,” she said, holding out his pants.

“Here, nothing,” and he slapped at the swaying pants in front of him. “I’m warning you, Ma. If you don’t leave the room I’m going to a hotel for the night and tomorrow find my own apartment.”

She left the room, saying, as she closed the door, that she’d make two meatloaf sandwiches for him tomorrow when he looked for a job—“just as you like then, with lettuce and ketchup and a little sprinkle of salt.”

Next morning Mr. Silverman tiptoed into Max’s room, his old underpants hanging loosely at the crotch. He carried the first section of the Times , which he’d just finished reading during his usual half-hour stint on the john. He said “Jesus, how do you stand it; it’s so cold in here,” and shut the window. He shook Max’s shoulder, and when he heard his awakening grunts, asked if he wanted to ride downtown in the subway with him.

“No thanks, Pop,” Max said, his voice muffled in the pillow.

“You still feeling sick?”

“I was never sick.”

Then maybe you should get up. It’s quarter of eight.”

“Quarter to eight?”

“Sure, quarter of eight. Be smart and get to the agencies first. That’s what I used to do when I looked for work.”

“Friday’s the worst day for looking…you know that. Besides, it’d be silly going downtown now when I got an interview in Brooklyn at noon.”

“In Brooklyn?” his father said, chattering from the cold. “You’d travel all the way out there for a job?”

“At this stage of the game I’d take one in Newark. You should get dressed. You’re freezing your ears off.”

“But in Brooklyn it’ll mean a good hour and a half ride from here. That’s before seven you’ll be getting up if the job starts at nine.”

“So I’ll get my own apartment there — I don’t know. I’ll tell you about it later tonight.”

“But why should you pay rent when you got your own room and plenty of food here? Look, don’t get desperate, all right? A good job you’ll get Monday, so just sleep your worries away today.”

When he returned to his room, his wife asked if Max was getting up.

“He still looks a little sick,” he said. “Why don’t we let him sleep?”

She jumped out of bed and went to Max’s room.

“Max!” she said, throwing open the door.

“Yeah, Ma?” he said, his head under the covers.

“I’m not fooling around now. Max. Get up this instant. You got to get a job.”

“Like I told Dad, Ma, I’ll go later — in an hour or so.”

“You’ll go now!”

“I said later. Now, please?”

She threw the covers off him. He was curled up on the far side of the bed, one hand under his head.

“Max, you was never a loafer. I’m surprised, really surprised,” and stormed out of the room, leaving the door wide open. He got up, shut the door, opened the window a few inches, picked the covers off the floor and went back to bed.

The only movement he made from his room that day, besides going to the john a few times, was a quick trip to the kitchen for a few slices of seeded rye and a knife and an unopened Velveeta cheese, and another trip into the living room two hours later for a book of Reader’s Digest novel condensations, which he’d purchased for ten cents and a coupon through the mail. His mother, who always cleaned the apartment thoroughly on Mondays and gave it a good going-over on Wednesdays and Saturdays, twice opened his door by bumping it with her vacuum cleaner as she turned the doorknob. Both times, after saying “Excuse me, that was an accident,” and peeping into his dark cigarette-smelling room, she slammed the door shut and continued vacuuming the hall outside his room another ten minutes.

Max admitted to himself he was never that reflective a person, but began thinking a lot as to why he refused to leave his room other than for the toilet and snacks. First, thinking about the psych course he took in his second and last year at college, he blamed it on his mother’s strong pushy nature and his father being kind of meek and browbeaten and such. But that was a lot of nonsense, he thought, No matter what he felt about them, he still couldn’t tie staying in bed to all that Freudian crap he’d read in his textbook and heard long discussions of in the City College cafeteria. So next was that he did it because he did it and that was that. He liked this one better because it fitted his concept or image or something about himself in the way he made decisions; quickly and forcefully, without time-wasting thought or going back on it. Anyway, that was good enough for now, and he opened the Readers Digest book, lit a cigarette, and knocked off a condensation of Uris’s Exodus .

That evening his Uncle Barney, the sage and Ann Landers of the family, knocked on Max’s door. He walked in when he didn’t get a response, and sat on the bed.

“Is it all right if we talk nicely — with the light, too?” Barney said, turning on the night table light and squeezing Max’s foot through the covers.

The folks call you in?”

“Stopped by on my own. Just wanted to see how my favorite nephew’s doing.”

“What time is it?”

“Time for supper, kid, so what do you say? Though we were only dropping by, your Aunt Dee and me are thinking of gracing this happy household by eating over tonight.”

Max turned to the wall-side of the bed. “See you at the table then, okay?”

“Come on, kid, what’s happened to you? You used to be such a go-getter — a real driver for the almighty buck. Believe me, I know what I mean when I say if you don’t get up now you’ll be chained to this bed like an addict.”

“I can’t right now, Uncle Barney — just try and understand.”

“What do you mean ‘can’t’?”

“Just that something around me — a voice, even — is telling me to stay here another night. Then when I leave, the whole world will open up for me. Not exactly that, but something like it.”

“Huh? What’s with this voice stuff? Listen, the only things you’ll get staying here so long are bed sores and a free ticket to the loonybin. I’ve always done right by you in the past, haven’t I? So I’m telling you now, kid: get up.”

Max rolled over to face him and said “Will you just get out of here already and let me sleep? And shut the light before you go, because you turned it on when I didn’t ask you to.”

“Okay, okay, you’re going off your rocker and I won’t waste my breath on you anymore; okay,” and he shut off the light, left the room and shut the door. Max then heard from the hallway his mother carrying on the way she did over the newly dead: “Oh my God; what am I going to do? Oh my God.”

He wasn’t bothered much after that. Twice his father tried to make contact through the door, with a couple of taps and then some mumbling about Max’s health and appetite and did he need anything? Max answered the first time with a grunt that he was doing fine, don’t worry. But the second time, feeling sorry for his father, he said that he’d see him the next morning when they’d go to the Bronx Botanical Gardens, something Max had been promising to do with him the past ten years. The Gardens were only a twenty-minute ride across the Bronx, but neither of them had ever been there.