Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“And we both really liked the idea,” Margaret said, “that you could go as far away as you could possibly get, and there would be your child.”

“Uh-huh.” Naomi nodded, soberly. “How crazy is that?”

—

“I abase myself,” Otto told William as they washed and dried the champagne glasses. “I don’t need to tell you how deeply I’ll regret having embarrassed you in front of Naomi and Margaret.” He clasped the limp dishtowel to his heart. “How deeply I’ll regret having been insufficiently mawkish about the miracle of life. I don’t need to tell you how ashamed I’ll feel the minute I calm down. How deeply I’ll regret having trampled your life, and how deeply I’ll regret being what I am. Well, that last part I regret already. I profoundly regret every tiny crumb of myself. I don’t need to go into it all once again, I’m sure. Just send back the form, pertinent boxes checked: ‘I intend to accept your forthcoming apology for—’ ”

“Please stop,” William said.

“Oh, how awful to have ruined the life of such a marvelous man! Have I ruined your life? You can tell me; we’re friends.”

“Otto, I’m going upstairs now. I didn’t sleep well last night, and I’m tired.”

“Yes, go upstairs.”

“Good night,” William said.

“Yes, go to sleep, why not?” Oh, it was like trying to pick a fight with a dog toy! “Just you go on off to sleep.”

“Otto, listen to me. My concert is tomorrow. I want to be able to play adequately. I don’t know why you’re unhappy. You do interesting work, you’re admired, we live in a wonderful place, we have wonderful friends. We have everything we need and most of the things we want. We have excellent lives by anyone’s standard. I’m happy, and I wish you were. I know that you’ve been upset these last few days, I asked if you wanted to talk, and you said you didn’t. Now you do, but this happens to be the one night of the year when I most need my sleep. Can it wait till tomorrow? I’m very tired, and you’re obviously very tired, as well. Try and get some sleep, please.”

“ ‘Try and get some sleep’? ‘Try and get some sleep’? This is unbearable! I’ve spent the best years of my life with a man who doesn’t know how to use the word ‘and’! ‘And’ is not part of the infinitive! ‘And’ means ‘in addition to.’ It’s not ‘Try and get some sleep,’ it’s ‘Try to get some sleep.’ To! To! To! To! To! To! To! Please try to get some sleep! ”

Otto sat down heavily at the kitchen table and began to sob.

How arbitrary it all was, and cruel. This identity, that identity: Otto, William, Portia, Molly, the doctor…

She’d be up now, sitting at her own kitchen table, the white enamel table with a cup of tea, thinking about something, about numbers streaming past in stately sequences, about remote astral pageants…The doctor had rested his hand kindly on her shoulder. And what she must have felt then! Oh, to convert that weight of the world’s compassion into something worthwhile — the taste, if only she could have lifted his hand and kissed it, the living satin feel of his skin…Everyone had to put things aside, to put things aside for good.

The way they had smiled at one another, she and that doctor! What can you do, their smiles had said. The handsome doctor in his handsome-doctor suit and Sharon in her disheveled-lunatic suit; what a charade. In this life, Sharon’s little spark of consciousness would be costumed inescapably as a waif at the margins of mental organization and the doctor’s would be costumed inescapably as a flashing exemplar of supreme competence; in this life (and, frankly, there would be no other) the hospital was where they would meet.

“Otto—”

A hand was resting on Otto’s shoulder.

“William,” Otto said. It was William. They were in the clean, dim kitchen. The full moon had risen high over the neighbors’ buildings, where the lights were almost all out. Had he been asleep? He blinked up at William, whose face, shadowed against the light of the night sky, was as inflected, as ample in mystery as the face in the moon. “It’s late, my darling,” Otto said. “I’m tired. What are we doing down here?”

Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt. His father is offstage, unaccounted for. His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the colors of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange. Every six months a miner is laid off, gets drafted, or dies, and is replaced by another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects — empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers — mute, incapable of memory.

Tom is four when he starts fainting. He’ll be rounding a corner, breathing hard, and the lights will go out. Mother will carry him indoors, set him on the armchair, and send someone for the doctor.

Atrial septal defect. Hole in the heart. The doctor says blood sloshes from the left side to the right side. His heart will have to do three times the work. Life-span of sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky. Best if he doesn’t get excited.

Mother trains her voice into a whisper. Here you go, there you are, sweet little Tomcat. She moves Tom’s cot into an upstairs closet — no bright lights, no loud noises. Mornings she serves him a glass of buttermilk, then points him to the brooms or steel wool. Go slow, she’ll murmur. He scrubs the coal stove, sweeps the marble stoop. Every so often he peers up from his work and watches the face of the oldest boarder, Mr. Weems, as he troops downstairs, a fifty-year-old man hooded against the cold, off to descend in an elevator a thousand feet underground. Tom imagines his descent, sporadic and dim lights passing and receding, cables rattling, a half dozen other miners squeezed into the cage beside him, each thinking his own thoughts, men’s thoughts, sinking down into that city beneath the city where mules stand waiting and oil lamps burn in the walls and glittering rooms of salt recede into vast arcades beyond the farthest reaches of the light.

Sixteen, thinks Tom. Eighteen if I’m lucky.

—

School is a three-room shed aswarm with the offspring of salt workers, coal workers, ironworkers. Irish kids, Polish kids, Armenian kids. To Mother the school yard seems a thousand acres of sizzling pandemonium. Don’t run, don’t fight, she whispers. No games. His first day, she pulls him out of class after an hour. Shhh, she says, and wraps her arms around his like ropes.

Tom seesaws in and out of the early grades. Sometimes she keeps him out of school for whole weeks at a time. By the time he’s ten, he’s in remedial everything. I’m trying, he stammers, but letters spin off pages and dash against the windows like snow. Dunce, the other boys declare, and to Tom that seems about right.

Tom sweeps, scrubs, scours the stoop with pumice one square inch at a time. Slow as molasses in January, says Mr. Weems, but he winks at Tom when he says it.

Every day, all day, the salt finds its way in. It encrusts washbasins, settles on the rims of baseboards. It spills out of the boarders, too: from ears, boots, handkerchiefs. Furrows of glitter gather in the bedsheets: a daily lesson in insidiousness.

Start at the edges, then scrub out the center. Linens on Thursdays. Toilets on Fridays.

He’s twelve when Ms. Fredericks asks the children to give reports. Ruby Hornaday goes sixth. Ruby has flames for hair, Christmas for a birthday, and a drunk for a daddy. She’s one of two girls to make it to fourth grade.