Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

The house is closed up, curtains drawn against the heat and Pultwock’s prying eyes. Lavinia parts them and checks. Still there. He has been since the day she moved in, his house crowding toward Lavinia’s like a petulant child who keeps scooting his desk over until it touches his neighbor’s. The house itself has always menaced Lavinia, its peeling paint around narrow windows, its shingles the color of baby poop, some of them hanging loose to reveal a darker, rotting sheathing underneath. One day when she was raking leaves, she looked up at her own house and for a moment mistook it for Pultwock’s. Shabby and menacing in the same way. She felt overburdened, she and Pultwock, the only owners left, expected to hold off the highway bearing down, the crumbling streets with patches of original brick showing through, the charging trains cutting through pebbled parking lots. They called it a railroad yard, but there wasn’t one speck of grass as far as Lavinia’s eye could see.

Lavinia learned that if she kept the drapes closed in the winter, she could go months without seeing Pultwock, but in the summer, he becomes unavoidable, sitting on his porch, blowing smoke through the screen of the window just opposite the one Lavinia wants to open. Her mother told her their houses have identical floor plans, hence his bedroom right across from her living room. A few times she has caught him looking at her at night from this window.

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Lavinia succumbs to sleep and dreams old man Pultwock is in her bathtub singing “Amazing Grace.” The girls wake her, stretching across her lap, then jump down, square on the carpet stain — a blue-gray shape like a mollusk.

Lavinia gets up and looks out all the windows. No Jason. Pultwock still sits on his stairs. “Bastard,” she mutters. She’d go out to tell him off, except it would only make him more apt to sit on his stoop, spying on her, so she decides to clean the basement instead. As long as he’s there, she doubts Jason will leave the yard.

With some old tennis shoes on and her pant legs rolled up, Lavinia gathers the boxes to carry down. At the top of the stairs, above the light switch, the back of a receipt says, Suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it .

The day after Carl was laid off the last time, he woke up earlier than usual and sat for two hours at the kitchen table looking through the newspaper. He read each employment ad twice, then neatly folded up the paper and said to Lavinia, “Well, you can’t waste a day of freedom. How about a drive?”

Their ’74 Olds Cutlass sat on blocks again — no money for repairs — so they borrowed a friend’s car and drove twenty miles down toward Bowling Green to a farmer’s stand.

What they had they spent on blueberries.

Lavinia made a pie while Carl tinkered with the Cutlass.

Then, after dinner, Carl dropped the pie.

He dropped it, the whole thing, flipping it upside down, right in front of his recliner. He’d been on his way to the front porch to watch the lights of the High Level Bridge emerge from the dusk. “Come sit with me, Mary,” he’d said. “At least we still got the bridge, right?”

Then he tripped. Over what Lavinia has wondered many times.

When he started screaming, “God damn it! I loved that pie. I loved that pie!” and fell to his knees, Lavinia thought he was joking. He had that way, a spontaneous burst of brilliant humor in the face of minor tragedies. Then she saw the tears, the snot, his face blurred by anguish, and all sound stopped. Without sound he appeared ridiculous, as if he were acting out a mime’s routine: grown man kneeling on a dirty carpet plucking furiously at a cat’s endless fur, his whole life dependent on one ruined blueberry pie.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lavinia said, “get a grip on yourself.”

A week later Carl hanged himself from a rafter in the basement. A while after that the city towed away the Cutlass.

Lavinia shovels soggy newspaper and feces into several garbage bags which she steals from work. She is careful about it, taking only individual bags, never whole boxes. She feels no pang of guilt because she would gladly buy them if she could, if she weren’t already barely paying the heat and the food bill. Suicide nullified Carl’s life insurance.

As she works, she half-reads the quotes written in black marker here and there on the concrete block.

Next to the bare hookup for the washer and dryer: Is one going to die or take up the heart-rending and marvelous wager of the absurd ?

Near the water heater: A whole being exerted toward accomplishing nothing is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth .

Above the laundry sink, where Lavinia turns on the water for the hose: I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary victories .

The ten or so cats who had shown interest in her shoveling flee upstairs at the sound of the water. Lavinia squirts diluted Mr. Clean as she goes, trying not to get the furnace wet. It’s shorted out once already from the cats urinating on it and she is still paying for the repair.

Done mopping, she washes the mop and reads the quote above the sink again, wondering what souls become contaminated with.

As the floor dries, Lavinia breaks the boxes down flat, then spreads them out to cover the concrete. Their purpose is to reduce sweeping and mopping. At the next cleanup, Lavinia hopes to just pick up the boxes and chuck them in the garbage.

Some of the cats prefer the carpet to the newspaper, so Lavinia has cut several pieces out of the back bedroom and brought them down here. She scrubs each of them with a wire brush, then drapes them over the pipes to dry.

Standing on an old chair to reach a pipe, she reads the rafter Carl used to hang himself: Revolt gives life its value .

After climbing down, she begins to shred the newspaper.

An hour later she emerges from the basement. Pultwock is finally gone. Of course, Lavinia thinks, that asshole. Now Jason may have slipped away. She grabs a can of tuna-flavored food, the most pungent of the varieties, and goes as quickly and quietly as she can out the back door, wondering as she sneaks around her own yard just how old Pultwock really is, how much longer she’ll have to put up with him.

She calls Jason’s name, crooning “kitty kitty kitty,” and waves the can of food back and forth at the height of a cat’s pining nose. Nothing. She walks out front, still crooning, and glances up and down the street, first toward the High Level, then the Amtrak station, and finally past Pultwock’s, to the end of the street, where cars race overhead on the interstate’s enormous concrete arches. Even the train tracks must look like ants in marching formation from up there.

Lavinia turns left, away from the interstate toward Newton, where twenty-year-old cars list at the curb around the corner from The Rusty Tavern. On hands and knees she peers under each one, regretting she owns no flashlight, yet believing Pultwock is wrong, that Jason will recognize she is his savior and come out of his own accord.

Because Lavinia has always understood that cats strike out from the familiar in a circle, next she scouts the alley behind her house, where there are never any newspapers in the The Rusty Tavern’s dumpsters, then trudges downhill toward the Amtrak station.

In the train yard, no attempt is made to shield the tracks. Lavinia walks right past where the chainlink fence simply ends — no gate, no purpose — and begins to call for Jason, a crack in her tired voice. Kneeling in the stone-pocked dirt to peer under cars, she begins to cry, thinking that Camus is full of shit. He claimed, There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Sure.