Marie-Helene Bertino - Safe as Houses

“I’ll take you home tomorrow,” he says. “You can stay at my place tonight.”

Then it is a new, dangerous night, one that will not end with me at my mother’s house. I give him a sloppy, generous smile. He glares at me.

A man at the counter says to the waitress, “I hear they’re talking about exploding it and putting up two new stadiums.”

The waitress seems impressed. “Yeah?”

“No,” the man says. “Not exploding. What is it when it goes in instead of out?” He makes a motion with his hands, lacing his fingers into one another over and over.

My brother smiles at me. “Imploding,” he says.

“That’s it.” The man swivels to look at us. “Imploding. They’re gonna sell tickets. Get a load of that.”

My brother takes a large bite of his cheeseburger. He puts a finger up, to signal to the man, the waitress, and me to wait. “They’ll never fucking do that,” he says, when he has the meat in his mouth under control.

The man isn’t convinced, hacks into his hand. “That’ll be a Philadelphia event. All of us tailgating to watch a stadium implode.”

My brother is certain. “No fucking way they’ll do that. This city is nothing without the Vet.”

The man shrugs. “They’ve already done it. They signed contracts and everything.”

“Who are you, the mayor?”

They both laugh. My brother’s teeth are stained with meat.

The door slams and rattles the ketchup bottles. A tall girl stands in the doorway of the diner unwinding a scarf. Then she seems to make her way toward our table.

My brother scrambles to make room for her in the booth. “I’m glad you came,” he says.

“No problem.” She sits down and is face to face with me. I don’t know where to look.

He gestures as if I am a mess on the floor. “My sister.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Genevieve.” She pulls her scarf from her neck and I am able to see how red her hair is. It is the closest I have ever been to someone who looks like they could be famous.

“Genevieve and I work together.” My brother is having a hard time swallowing. “I have to take a leak,” he says.

When he is gone, she looks at me and I look at my soup. Her perfume smells like Vanity Fair magazine.

“I heard you ran away,” she says.

I nod.

She drags one of my brother’s French fries through a hill of ketchup. “I ran away once. I got all the way to Wanamaker’s. I got scared and called my mom.”

“Was she mad?”

“Oh boy. She was so mad, she sent my dad to come get me. He bought me a slice of pizza.”

She has impressive eyebrows. What could I say that would mean anything to her? I decide on an idea I had been toying with since the ride was over, the beginning of a line of thinking.

“You were freewheeling.” I am careful to laugh after I say it like I don’t mean it, in case she rolls her eyes.

“That’s right,” she laughs. “Like Bob Dylan.”

“Oh. Do you like him?” I say it like, Nothing much to me either way, toots .

“Are you kidding?” she says. “He’s my favorite.”

“He’s mine too,” I say. I am not lying.

“You should talk to your brother,” she tilts her pretty eyebrows toward the men’s room. “As of last week, he had barely even heard of Bob Dylan.”

I chew a piece of cheese and she arranges a stack of creamers. “Are you my brother’s girlfriend?”

When she opens her mouth, I can see all of her teeth. “You’d have to ask him,” she says.

My brother returns from the bathroom, wiping his hands on his jeans. His hair is wet.

“Let’s go,” he says. “ Saturday Night Live is on.”

He lives in a crumble of an apartment next to the diner. Trucks turn in to the parking lot and light up his front room, waking up whichever one of his friends is sleeping there. We sit in his basement and he howls through the entire show. I look back at him and he wipes tears from his eyes. After it is over, he throws a pillow at me. He and Genevieve go upstairs. “Night, squirt.”

I sleep on the couch in his front room. The headlights from the trucks scan me in my sleep.

The next day, he drops me off at our mother’s house.

“Kiddo,” he calls me back to the car.

“What?”

“Don’t ever fucking do that again.”

His face is twisted. I assume with concern.

“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “You don’t have to protect me. I can take care of myself.” I throw open my arms to take on the neighborhood, the world.

He spits. “Come here.”

I lean into the car and he lays his hand on my arm, no trace of expression around his eyes or mouth.

“I mean,” he says, “don’t ever fucking do that to Mom again.”

I go inside. My mother pulls at her hair and weeps in a slow collapse against the wall of the kitchen.

…

This is my high school. This is my first play. Here are the good grades, the medals, and the prom. This is the scholarship to the private college and here is the field where, in my cap and gown, I hugged my teachers good-bye. There were no friends. My father was fifteen years dead. My brother was the man in my life.

“So long,” I tell him. “I’m going to New York City.”

This is the gas station where my brother worked until he and the owner had a “difference of opinion.” This is the hardware store where my brother worked until he told the manager to fuck himself. This is the auto parts store that gave him a job because he and the owner went to the same high school. Philadelphia is a network of my brother’s buddies. He doesn’t stay unemployed for long.

The first year I live in New York, I find a job I still have. He calls every so often to ask if I have seen any celebrities.

…

If the people at the convenience store on Bloomingdale Road are surprised to see the bloated Voice of a Generation using the candy display to scratch the low part of his back, they keep it to themselves. Bob Dylan has been looking for Tootsie Rolls for ten minutes. He’s wild over them, but they appear to be out.

I leave him to it. I am happy to be with the people on Thanksgiving, albeit the ones who do not think ahead. There is something reassuring about being among strangers on a national holiday. In the cereal aisle, the mood is decidedly last-minute.

“Can you use Corn Flakes instead of bread crumbs?” A man in slippers asks his bored-looking teenager. “I feel like you can but I don’t want Mommy yelling at us when we get home. Go ask the cashier.” The son shuffles off.

Bob is grouchy and empty-handed when he returns to me.

Seeing him, the man with the canister of Corn Flakes asks himself a question I cannot hear. Then he says to Bob, “Oh, jeez. Aren’t you Vincent Price?”

This has been a problem before. I pray Bob hasn’t heard but the man says it again, louder, as if remembering Vincent Price is deaf. He taps Bob’s shoulder a couple times and calls for his son. “Get a load of Vincent Price!” he says.

This is all Bob needs. First his lip is busted, then no Tootsie Rolls, now this. He screws his hand into a punch and lurches toward the man, who almost as an afterthought performs a delicate side step. Bob’s momentum hits the candy display and he falters, swiping at the ground with his feet. Trout-sized chocolate bars slither down his faded coat.

The teenage boy is back. “What happened, Dad?”

The man is dumbstruck, joyous. “Vincent Price just tried to punch me and he missed!”

Someone got us while we were sleeping, so this Thanksgiving is the year of the American flag. There are American flags on overpasses, on tricycles. There are American flags printed on condoms at the counter of this convenience store; America will screw you hard .