INTERSECTIONS: Hudson @ Wadsworth

A BOY, LOVED

by Luanne diBernardo


I hadn’t seen him since he was seven years old, finely boned with skin of gold. He had the knobbed-kneed legs of a newborn colt and the curious keen of an immigrant, the first of his blood to be born here, more often than not, the only one in his house to speak English, a blessing for his grandparents who, (with the tired that followed them this side of the sea) looked after the boy while his father fostered heroin.

At seven years old, Little Anthony was the mouthpiece to whomever appeared on his grandparents’ doorstep: news boys, meter readers, Jehovahs, girl scouts, and each one scrammed by the bird-sized boy spitting first-hand Sicilian into second-hand English while his grandparents hovered behind him, their fear sifted into and out of the boy’s quick mouth with a sound deciphered as anger.

On the day I first met him, Little Anthony greeted me with an expression too old for his years, a look that knew to expect a problem. I was the new bride of his favorite uncle, and so he followed us through the room-after-room of his grandparent’s flat, his face onto mine like a hawk’s to a mouse before finally, (or as close to finally as I knew), his face morphed into a sweetness that just in time remembered him.

It struck me odd that Little Anthony and I were separated by the same math that subtracted me from his uncle. Odd that my own father went missing when I was the age Little Anthony became the bastard child of a seventh son. Of his mother, there was a framed photograph on the dining room buffet, her arms wrapped about her delicate boy, his smile the one that was watching me watch him.

Had she been in the room, I might never have noticed the tinted photograph, less distinct than the porcelain lamps with their wedding cake flowers, the sofa and chairs sealed in shiny clear plastic, the Virgin Mother propped center cushion. I might not have wondered how it came to be that a young mother rifled through drawers and closets for a sweater as pale as her toddler’s blue romper. I would not have wondered how many times she posed with her child in her arms, on her lap, mother and son face to face, and then this pose. No thought to her leaving the photographer’s studio that day, already impatient to return for the proofs, one pile to her left and one to her right, until finally she’d whittle her favorites to two: eenie, meenie, minie, moe.

Had she been in the room I would have had no reason to imagine her choosing an 8 by 10, maybe wallet-size too. To imagine the glossy sheets in their cardboard sleeve, then to K-Mart, then Sears, where Little Anthony’s mother more than likely spent most his naptime comparing gold frames to silver, painted to varnished, a decision she most likely doubted while pacing outside the bus stop portico. Had she been in the room, though she hadn’t for a very long time.

Sam and I parted seven years later, our son the age of Little Anthony the first time I saw him. In that time, my in-laws learned just enough English from daytime soaps to keep them confused, just enough misused words and phrases that their little linguist was no longer needed. In that time, Little Anthony saw his father until less became never, time enough to learn that a bike could be pawned for twenty, a grandmother’s watch, fifteen. Even a banged-up vacuum was worth something to somebody under just the right circumstances.

My in-laws learned it took more than a braid of garlic to keep bad spirits away, learned that three locks and two Doberman’s were useless to someone with gold in his veins. Little Anthony learned that even at fourteen years old, he felt oddly excited at the sound of his father’s name. That though he quit looking for him, he didn’t mind when he happened past the vagrant at Allen and Wadsworth, who (were he heavier and cleaner), reminded him of his father.

My in-laws grew saavy, learned words like bail and brutality, and though he rarely slept home anymore, Little Anthony learned words like accomplice and premeditated.

It was somebody else stealing somebody’s bike, he’d only been watching should somebody come. Somebody did. While the thief was handcuffed and taken away, a second cop carefully leaned Little Anthony, an obvious novice (and while smaller than most, no longer little), into the back of a squad car. He couldn’t understand why he felt safe and angry at the same time; couldn’t understand why the officer accused him of mouthing off, when all he was doing was explaining. By the time he was 17, Little Anthony learned that the sound of his name would change the manner in which a cop would lean him into a squad car. And so how he came to spending more time in holding centers than he’d ever spent in his father’s house.

When finally he entered Attica, Little Anthony passed his days lifting weights. Sometimes months, sometimes years, he never grew tired of lowering the pins, always surprised when his body did what it was told to do, no thought to the constant ripping and tearing of what was once good, no longer the slight of his father and grandfather, men not much bigger than Little Anthony when he first wore shackles. Several years after his Attica entry, Little Anthony would be paroled at two-seventy. And after only seven weeks of walking the streets in a form that even his father wouldn’t recognize, Little Anthony would pursue an accuser by car, then foot, until finally (or just a few seconds after) he would realize someone had pulled a trigger.

He had always had a short fuse, a screw loose, a fiery temper, or so someone said on the news. It was said by neighbors that he’d always been in trouble, that he respected nothing, a piece of shit like his father, found more times than not at the corner of Wadsworth and Allen. It was said that he’d never leave Attica, that it’s where he belonged. Sam agreed, said thanks be to God that his parents were no longer there to see it, may their souls rest in peace. It was said that Little Anthony would spend his life in prison, a place to think about what he had done and how he had single-handedly ruined his life.

It’s been thirty years since I’ve seen him, my own life a series of do and do-overs, of odd, sometimes useful distractions. A life so busy turning this way and that, that to not think about Little Anthony ever again would seem natural, even expected. But once there was a photograph on a dining room buffet. Since boxed and moved into somebody’s house, or set at a curb, plucked by scavengers, crushed by compactors. Or maybe its glass grew spidered from the stress of records and books in some neighborhood Amvets, or salvaged for its gilded frame by a junk man who placed the portrait on a chest or a bureau because he liked the story it told: how a little boy was somewhere loved, because once a young mother had taken the time to board a bus for no other reason than to frame the very truth of it. I know this because I almost saw it happen.

INTERSECTIONS: Hoyt Lake @ Jogger Path

SHE WAS

by Luanne diBernardo


The hook jabbed into her back.

She had only just passed him, tall and fat and fishing at the edge of a pond stilled with sewage, the stench of death. Disinterested, he bothered not to turn the way people do when they’re lost in a task, she would have noticed had he glanced her way. Still she knew what it was when it struck her.

She’d been running the same path for years, knew the sting of a pebble snapped back from a passing biker, knew the scratch of a low-hanging limb, and though unexpected, knew that what pierced her back was in some way attached to the man who chose to not glance her way. She felt the slack in his line pull taut, his poorly-aimed cast intending to sink the barb that stubbornly tempted to slow her, his nylon cord unspooling to the speed of her sprint, the speed that he followed. A marathon runner, she managed to keep just ahead of his tug without turning to see who or why. Her heart beat the pace of a toy wound too tightly, her shoulders cranking her right-angled arms into movement, her fists blurred forward, then back.

Her legs moved on their own, her feet barely touching the ground, the earth spitting divots because of the force that thrust her knees her calves her feet, her speed what moved the world into motion. She ran with everything she’d ever known packaged safely inside her, now pulsed into fight, the newfound thrill of a life worth saving. She ran with no thought but this thought: it had come.

Though not penciled on a calendar, nor some scrap of note left deep in last winter’s pocket, this was a day penned in time, inevitable. For years she’d seen it in dreams, his knife popped into the fat of her calf then ripped up the length of her thigh, to her buttocks. She saw it a hundred times in her sleep, her flesh splayed wide like an overboiled hot dog, her muscle the white of citrus peel, while blood streaked both sides of her calf with ribbons of thick, sticky red. She saw how his knife next spliced her other leg and she wondered where each dream would stop, what she thinks of now while the fisherman quickens his pace.

She, (with an exertion that was its own reward, exhilarating if not for the burning across her shoulders and down her spine, if not for the fisherman gaining behind her), could already see him reaching her throat, not to choke, but to fell her balance, her legs collapsing beneath her, her knees overextended and ruined, the promise of a pain she would host the rest of her life. She would slam to the ground like a fallen deer, a thud that would surprisingly have no feeling, not even his fists pounding bone against bone, her offering of jaw, the feature most like her father’s, graceful the way it defined her chin, then upwards to meet her delicate ears, none of which she took for granted.

She knew her life could have been more, but she knew it could also have been less. Still, it disappointed her when men neglected to notice, or when they did, how they still found reason to walk away, though it’s true she was never so obviously pretty. She knew which features played well because of how they fell on a face of mismatched parts, her cockeyed smile and thick puttied nose, clear dark eyes that betrayed her time and time again. No feature so perfect as that which resembled his, that it meant so much made her angry. Even now while running with a hook to her back, her insides busting because of who chased her, he who happened to be where she happened upon, wrong that his weight would crush her ribs and lungs, her hands at her sides and clenched into fistfuls of fabric, she pulling upwards while he pulled down from where he crowded between her legs, both fisherman and runner unwilling to lose. Pinned and pleading in somebody’s voice, confused by the fisherman’s indifference, by how he forced her pants from the part of her body that nobody (not even the boy who wore his dead father’s dog tags) had the right to see. The part of her body she rarely considered except when time to pee, to bleed, to clean. A part of her body unlike her father’s and so never studied, somehow more foreign with her back pressed against the earth.

He weighted her with a force that planted the hook like a carpenter’s staple, prongs spawning fire that paled at the force of his thickness, a violent push that punctured the mysterious and tender pulp just inside the spread of her legs, no matter that it didn’t fit, no matter the way it ripped her into a bloody nest by cramming and pushing and grunting its way to a place it did not belong, a body he had no right to claim.

Years later she will forget how her flesh looked when as young as that day. Her thighs then firm and strong will remain that way, like her buttocks, though lessening, once dominant. She will remember nothing of his hands or face or if she ever touched him; nothing of his scent or what he wore. Those years later she will understand nothing about his forceful intrusion, profanely impersonal, will think nothing of her broken jaw, reshaped, her knees unhinged, arthritic. Those years later she will remember nothing so well as the violence of his walking away -- not so much the direction he took or if he ran or walked or stumbled –- but the possibility that nothing of her remained with him. That she had not imposed on him something imperceptible and nameless, something he had not wanted but that would linger the length of an average life; a graceful line traced in dirt, what never was, and then gone.

INTERSECTIONS: Robinson @ Bird Alley

HIS UNOBSTRUCTED VIEW

By Luanne diBernardo

                                                                                                                                    

            From the tilt of his head he could easily see the top of every tree that crowded the back and beyond of his property, were they not, that is, for the most part obscured by a dense grid work of steel, roped cables, and hives of buzzing transformers that out-cried the nearby cicadae. And while his head remained cocked only slightly, it was clear that the man (his arms to his sides and slightly forward), was intending to be looking upward, though barely his head.

            He stood almost center of his backyard lawn, some lucky few blades poking upside his shoe tops. Facing him was an old white garage with two sliding doors, hinged and crisscrossed with black-painted trim. The sky was summery blue. To the left of the man, a narrow garden ribboned alongside a chain link fence that begged you not notice the graveled alley just beyond.

            The man is bald, and his body thick from content and from meals like the one I breathe in as I near his house.  His head is axled back in a way that suggests it has reached its limit, against the odds he might see whatever was worth his pained deliberance.   A young girl at the edge of the skinny garden scoops fistfuls of homemade mud from a silver bucket, drizzles the slop into dung-shaped pies.

            A woman’s voice hums from behind a screened window, impossible to see through the silvered screen, though I try.  It doesn’t occur to me that while impossible for me to see through the screen, it was likely the humming woman could see me. Possible that she had been watching me watch the man and the girl from the start, and that the reason the man couldn’t move his head was something she knew like a secret, something to do with why she hummed.  Possible that the man not being able to glance towards a colorform sky had a thing or two to do with who he became on a day intended like this one.  It’s who he is the instant he wakes, when he dresses, when he walks, when he dreams. It’s who he became and would ever be, and why it mattered enough to crane (or attempt to crane) towards what he had not seen for a very long time.

            Whether I was moving or not, I can’t be sure, when I heard the man groan. The sound from his throat was low and winding, not quite enough to become a word, but enough to know it was good.  My eyes have, by this time, grown accustomed to his shape against a vast backyard Maple, and so how I’m able to witness when the tip of his nose edges upwards from a cluster of leaves, a movement not worth noticing, but the small girl does.  Her hands, though filled with earth’s batter, are stilled for that moment, and her face, it widens, and the woman’s humming slows to a hush, and all because of what he saw.

NO MOTIVE

by Luanne diBernardo

There was nothing more she could do and so that’s what she did, nothing. Variations of it, like the nothing of watching television, her eyes blinking themselves across the room like a fly in search of a worthy landing, hopeless. The nothing of walking past bedrooms that refused to feel empty, the air still fattened with anguish. The nothing of laundering clothes, of dusting furniture, the nothing of feeding herself when hungry or not, her pangs unnoticed for years now. The nothing of washing her face, of walking the hall where she never noticed the threadbare path insisting she search for something since gone, where nobody waited to be stretched, wiped, or bathed in a room where nothing, not anything, remained to be done, to the couch where if she rested or not it just wouldn’t matter.

Irene would be sixty-seven in about as many days, a number she hadn’t given thought to until filling out her sons’ admission forms, Conor and Kirk, forty-four-year-old twins with the same ruddy freckles, same crimson curls, even the same degenerative disease, two who lived longer than anyone reasoned, not her words. She barely noticed their abilities lessen, her duties multiply since they turned nineteen, twenty-one years of caretaking, no use to think about how or if she might
manage one more hour, one more year, not so much as one moment’s thought to her own deterioration, or to the possibility that her children’s lives might have been any different, her own life an afterthought.

Her calendar crossed nine months since her boys had been moved, nine months that Forest Lakes Nursing Home had been doing what she had done for so many years, at least until the seizures grew closer, their heads bent low like swans left sleeping. Food moved through feeding tubes and through to their veins, while beneath the boys’ beds hung bladders of urine, emptied now by nurses and not their mother, though she visits them daily. Daily, though there’s nothing, not one thing left
that Irene can do, and so she does what she does.

The gun she takes from what was once her husband’s dresser, the only drawer unchanged these twenty-three years since his unexpected death. Her hands move to touch his short-sleeved T-shirts, reluctant to waken their hope. Her fingers, precise in their movements, disappear between the folded shirts then return without pause, the pistol not nearly as frightening as the injectors she used to stab her sons’ buttocks, the next day their thighs, always one blackening, always one yellowing. The gun in her hand looks small and uncomplicated, easier to use than the pulleys and lifts that inhabit her home. Irene finds herself drawn by the size of the bullets, how small and good they feel in her hand, how beautifully they slide into each perfect chamber, if only a catheter found a bladder as well. She loads five chambers because five are empty, finds herself moved by the few left in her hand, like sea glass, smooth and cool.

Sea glass, she muses, when in the same manner an ear can pop clear, her mind gives way to a minuscule crack, a jagged rupture that dares to expose what long lay buried. A crack so devastatingly clear that, for a moment, Irene is staring at something unbearable, a sensation more real than the pleasing weight of her husband’s gun pressed into her lap, against her groin. She sees him, her then-alive husband on somebody’s motorcycle, a self-proclaimed freebird like Kirk, with his basketball, his August flirtations. Irene watches, cannot look away from her husband’s back, his body less muscle than movement, his forearms stretched forward to clutch the bike’s handles, his movements motored by impulse, desire. His smile unmatched, unforgettable, though somehow she had managed. Their sons, one like him, one like her, wait on the beach, their
skinny legs bent beneath them like hinges for raising them close to, then down from, their castles of sand. Through this unforeseen crack, Irene watches closely their boyish arms, how they move the way boyish arms are meant to, unknowingly; how, she wonders, could she ever have looked away? For this moment she sees what she didn’t see then, how the pale brown sand catches light against Kirk’s damp thighs, against the blades of her boys’ young wings, daintily dusted with gold from their hole dug to China.

Irene sees it all with microscopic clarity. The sun, selfish when it steals behind clouds leaving nothing for cover, the boys uncaring, she shivers, they stay. She feels what she is certain she didn’t feel then, the cold, cruel drips from her heavy, dark hair (how, unwilling to forget, it held the lake). The pull of her skin slowly drying, her breasts shrunken firm and away from the cups of her cold, damp swimsuit, the close, fine hairs of her face tickling free from bondage, the absolute christening of sun, of wind, on her wet and naked skin. She takes in the lake with painful remembrance, how it roars in rhythmic crescendos, urgent rushes that deafen what might be heard, the ingenuous likelihood of a motorcycle returning, unbearable to now recall.

It is with thoughts from those places that Irene recalls her sons in their nursing home suite, fire- and sun-proof curtains behind them, worn linoleum their feet never met, that smell. Where nurses steal time to swathe their prickled skin or wheel them to the Activity Room where more able patients will do what they can, where Conor and Kirk will do nothing, their torsos strapped to the back of their chairs. Their minds, she prayed, were staled or calcified, inconceivable to think they might be aware of even one moment, or worse, that through some jagged crack of their own, they might, like her, remember.

It is with thoughts from those places that Irene gets up from the blond veneer bed that was meant to be temporary, a loan from Kirk’s mother their first year of marriage. Beside it, a wooden dresser with wooden knobs she always meant to replace with pulleys of iron or faceted glass. Over the dresser stares a square mirror with its years of brazen judgments, until now, she thinks while noticing not the way it reflects, but rather how it condones her movements, to the point she almost considers looking back before moving away from the temporary scape of dresser, bed, and mirror, a room she knew well, completely
unchanged into something she barely recognized.

It is with thoughts from those places that Irene leaves her house and drives the seven miles that still feel foreign, her hands on the wheel of a car passing buildings she’s never entered, past trees never seen, past streets not yet paved. Past corner after corner of look-alike marts built for last-minute pleasures. She stops for lights at intersections that only serve to stall her progress, though for once she isn’t rushing.

It is with thoughts from those places she enters the nursing home lobby, to the pasteled paintings of seascapes, of seagulls, to the Maalox-pink drapes, the peach-flavored walls that left her more queasy than chemo, the treatments she took in a room of paisley, with skylights, with floor lamps instead of fluorescents, with music and plants and magazines that haven’t already expired, a room for the living. Treatments that asked less than thirty minutes, a selfish hal-hour with doctors who nodded to nurses who stopped for a smile. To her they spoke of an end in sight, her guilt eased only when doubled with pain, her ribs left weak, her penance renewed with each convulsion, her conscience clear for one more night.

These eighteen months later, Irene passes through her sons’ benign lobby, her body renewed by remission, not her words. For once she hears nothing—not Agnes’s tormented pleading, or beyond the nurses’ station, not Olive who cries for her mother, or Buddy who warbles “Tennessee Waltz” from one of many misaligned wheelchairs. Not Mary, who hails garçon! to anyone boarding her cruise ship, if only a ruse for Irene’s two sons.

She passes them all, each foot grounded, flat as permanence. If asked, she would say that she had no thoughts, no mind left to know what allowed her to act in ways a mother should never—to prick and poke the flesh she bore, to pipeline fluids from paralyzed organs, to mimic movement despite limbs numbed by atrophy. She would say that she had no thoughts at all, too ashamed to acknowledge all she recalled from the lake, the remembered caress of leftover sand mixed with evening’s damp sheets on their sunburned skin. No mind for thinking about what she does next, just one foot in front of the other until she passes the fire extinguisher that signals the bend towards Kurt and Conor’s room.

She approaches the skirt of her sons’ doorless entry—inside, two boys, never men, now strangers. Her hand moves the way her feet once moved, on their own, a necessary function, and so effortless as she aims for the head that was Conor’s, not one moment’s pause before sighting the head that was Kirk’s. She waits and she watches, uncertain, their bodies unchanged by what she has done, as if nothing at all just happened. Only that blood flows freely from both boys’ heads, for once not out through a needled vein, for once not pressured into a vial, their blood long tired, futile.

As if nothing at all just happened, she turns from the still-pumping pumps and the still-breathing tanks, away from their room and back down the hall past the fire extinguisher. Nothing, as she passes through the stagnant air, through Agnes’s chant, “Help me, help me, Mr. Odairs, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers,” to whomever might listen. Not Irene, who returns to the pale peach lobby where she sits and waits, for the first time unafraid, for the first time not guilty for what she has done. Somewhere in the distance the wail of sirens screaming for someone who waits for their arrival, finally not Conor, not Kirk, though her body remembers to stiffen, Irene unaware. Unaware how her hand still wraps the graceful machine that responded each time, her fingers still clenched as if her life depended on it.