Richard Price - The Whites

Dennis came out of the bedroom looking like a surgeon with bad news. For the thousandth time in the last twenty years, Billy wondered if he knew about them and just wasn’t saying.

“Anyways…” Billy slowly rose and reached for his jacket.

“You sure you don’t want some coffee, a shot of something?” Dennis stood there, tilting toward the kitchen.

“I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Seriously, I got to book.”

Giving up, Dennis finally sat back on the couch. “I should have brought your shield down to you, you know?”

“No problem,” Billy said, backing toward the front door.

“I just didn’t want to leave her alone like this, you know?”

“Totally understood.”

“I just hope she doesn’t start getting crazy about Cortez all over again, you know what I’m saying?” Dennis staring right through Billy. “I just could not live with that.”

The night was nothing but softballs, the highlight being a report of two women hacking away at each other with hatchets or swords in front of an NYU dorm, which in the end turned out to be just a drunken fight between two Xenas coming out of a costume party and throwing down with their foam axes. By seven-thirty in the morning Billy was on his way home, making it nearly to his exit before he remembered the date and, with a dulling heart, dutifully hit the turnaround and headed back toward the city.

Carmen saw two therapists, one of them a stocky ex-nun who, sponsored by Local 1146 of the Home and Health Care Workers, bounced around from hospital to hospital in the Bronx like a circuit court judge. She had a makeshift office in the basement of St. Ann’s that faintly reeked of the morgue at the opposite end of the hall, an all-too-familiar odor that seemed to underscore Billy’s attitude toward his bimonthly shared sessions, especially when they were scheduled so early in the morning.

“You have to understand,” Carmen said. “Victor, when he was a kid, he couldn’t even keep his sea monkeys wet, and now he’s going to have a child? It’ll be dead in a month.”

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Are you hearing yourself? That doesn’t even sound like you.”

“Can you elaborate on that, Billy?” the therapist said, her tone mildly sedating.

“Yeah, Billy, can you elaborate on that?”

“Carm, he’s your brother, why are you always so mad at him?”

“Why is he always so mad at me?”

Billy gave up.

“OK,” the therapist said, “let’s take your question first, Carmen. Why is your brother always so mad at you?”

“He isn’t,” Billy said.

“Let her talk now.”

“We went over this a million times,” Carmen said. “When he was twelve, I had to go live with my father in Atlanta and he felt like I abandoned him. One million times I have said this to you.”

“‘Had to’ implies no choice.”

“My father was sick .”

“He was remarried. He had a wife,” Billy said, expecting, then receiving, a warning finger from the therapist.

“His wife was borderline retarded,” Carmen said, “just like him.”

“So a fifteen-year-old girl ‘had to’ uproot her entire young life in the Bronx — mother, brother, school, friends…”

“I didn’t have any friends.”

Except Victor, Billy knew, Carmen always telling him that her younger brother back then was her only friend in the world, “like two nerds in a pod,” she called them.

“… and leave all those she loved in order to be with a man who walked out on her and her family so early in her childhood that she had no memory of what he even looked like?”

“There were other things going on,” Carmen said. “I told you that, too.”

“Yes, you did, but I think maybe the time has come to finally start exploring a few of those ‘other things.’”

The room descended into a tense silence, Billy avoiding his wife’s eyes, hoping that she would finally say something, anything, about what he had come to regard as the Flight to Atlanta.

“Would you feel more comfortable if your husband left the room?”

Carmen shrugged.

And so they all sat there, listening to the squeal of gurneys out in the hall for a full minute or more, until Carmen finally opened her mouth.

“I don’t like the Cymbalta you have me on. It makes me too manic, plus I think it stops me from having orgasms.”

“Jesus, Carmen.” Billy blushed, not so much embarrassed for himself as pained for his wife.

Afterward, as they walked to the St. Ann’s parking lot in silence, each to their own car, Billy remembered asking Carmen once why she hadn’t spoken to her therapist about a serious issue involving their kids. Her answer— “Because that’s personal” —had made him laugh so hard his eyes filled with tears.

Rose of Lima.

Daughters of Jacob.

Ten minutes in either institution made him feel like he was breathing air through a pinched straw. Visiting both in the same day left him feeling like a clubbed seal.

First that fucking school: some kind of parent/career-day event that had him standing there rocking from foot to foot like a beetle-browed dummy in front of two dozen third graders, the good-looking lay teacher in the back of the room nose-down in paperwork, not even listening or raising her eyes to him as he mumbled his way through the joys of the Job.

And those questions…

Did you ever kill anybody?

No.

(One, but he had it coming.)

Can I see your gun?

I’m not carrying one.

(No, you can’t see my goddamn gun.)

Did you ever come to my tío ’s house?

Who’s your tío ?

Reuben Matos. He lives on Sherman Avenue.

Yeah, once.

(At least.)

How much money do you make?

Enough to pay tuition here.

Do you ever get mad at Sofia?

Never.

(Never.)

How come she’s so fat?

Milton looking to his daughter seated front and center, staring at him with resigned eyes, then back at the kid who asked the question.

How come you’re so ugly?

Is her mommy really dead?

Yes.

How did she die?

Hello? This to the head-down half-a-nun in the rear of the room. What are you doing back there, smoking crack?

That’s not a nice question, Anthony, she said, still not looking up.

What’s your favorite team?

The Red Sox.

Boooo…

Do you like Big Papi?

I am Big Papi.

And again: Did you ever kill anybody?

I said no.

(Two, but they had it coming. Three.)

And now this here, the Daughters of Jacob Assisted Living Center, the air redolent of boiled hot dogs and Lysol, Mantovani strings drifting through the halls like musical Haldol, old folks sitting alone in the lobby just staring at air, filling him with anger at their AWOL kids. Before he could even make his way to the elevator banks, and not for the first time, one old lady, confusing him with some José from building services, asked him when he was coming to fix her radiator.

His aunt Pauline had her own small suite — at least he had been able to swing that for her — and as she went on and on about a gluey Hawaiian salad she had been served the week before, he sat on her living room couch and took in the art on display: a bowl of silver and gold papier-mâché fruit, a plaster pair of life-sized praying hands, two — count ’em — two ceramic menorahs, a glazed and mounted ram’s horn, and a framed print of a fiddler floating sideways above an off-balance ghetto. Aunt, excuse, Tante Pauline had stayed in the faith, if only sentimentally, unlike her sister, Milton’s mother, who married a PR to spite her parents. On the other hand, his father had married his mother to spite her parents, too. It was a match made in hell, and if his old man’s this-time-for-good disappearance when Milton was ten was not exactly a cause for celebration, it wasn’t nearly enough of a blow to throw anyone off their feed.