a voice so large that it destroys the girl who’s singing. Her body doesn’t so much matter anymore: the voice is somehow greater than the body. If the room had been any smaller, I wouldn’t have been able to stand it. Too private, too intimate. But she might as well be handing me a chain, pulling me up the side of the highest mountain, link by gorgeous link.
Uptown, going down, old lifeline ...
The song punishes as much as it feeds. It comes apart in pieces just as soon as I can pick out a pattern. I’m not sure I even like the song, but that’s not exactly the point. It’s as if I haven’t even known my skin before; it feels stranger, yet more beautiful. I’d always thought my body was mine alone: small and wholly mine and expendable: who would have known that it was a part of something else? I glance back at those who stand behind me. There’s Tom Pomeroy, there’s Jose O’Neill. Though they’re concentrating, they’re not as radically changed as I. On a pure animal level, they only know the voice is something they have a duty to hear. God wants it from them, though they wouldn’t call it God.
She finishes. I want to get away before she starts the next number, because I know she’ll never sound like that again, and I need to preserve it, like something I’d keep in a jar. But I’m wedged in between two people; I can’t move without stepping on feet. Someone turns, and then I see her between two heads. She isn’t radiant or extraordinary anymore, but she’s one of us, a senior. Someone I’ve seen walking up and down these halls. There’s nothing remarkable about her, nothing to write home about her rounded shoulders, her deep-black bank of hair, her height. But her singing tells me something different: she’s an old soul, older than anyone I’ve ever known, including my grandfather.
Walking down faster, walking with the master of time ...
Life could still change: that’s what her singing told me. She came at a moment when she was exactly what I needed. It wasn’t like those were the worst of times. My father hadn’t died yet; nor Uncle Moishe or my cousin Danny. Or none of the friends that were to come later. But listening to that bright big sound, I could tell that my life wasn’t going to be the neat, predictable shape I’d already pictured. There was no way out of it. The years ahead were going to be hard, harder than I had it in me to imagine. And yet the news didn’t make me want to run or curl into myself. Though it took me a year and a half to speak to her, I already knew that we’d share the same house and bed one day. I saw us sitting across from each other in our kitchen, a warm, yellow sun streaming through a part in the curtains, lighting up the table.
The fact of that gave me comfort, and I walked on to algebra, where the teacher, Mrs. Voorhees, didn’t seem to care that I was late, and flashed, somewhere beneath the sternness, a look of approval.
CHAPTER 3
I have a job.
I said it to the pitch pines, the violets, and the gravel, though no one was there to hear it. I jogged past the shopping center, the marina, the boats with their pulleys and eyelets. I was telling Laura, Joan—anybody, in my head—that Craig Luckland would see to it that Ferris would take me on as a property manager: one of those guys who checked up on houses while their owners were away. Of course Joan would say, “You’re going to work for Ferris? You can’t stand Ferris.” And she’d be right. Not that I couldn’t stand him, but one minute you were his best pal, and the next he’d walk right past you as if he couldn’t be bothered. At least a hello, buddy. And is it my fault that you walk through the world like an old man, or at least an old man before his time? But things would change once he got to see how hard I worked. Me, the human tractor.
I’m going to pay off my Visa, and after that, I’m going to buy Laura a new car and dig a water feature!
I laughed aloud like a madman, startling a woman who was hauling out her trash. What supreme, nutty pleasure it was to laugh in the night like a madman!
Our house couldn’t have been quieter, though my ears roared. I walked from room to pretty room, fighting off the urge to cry, I’m here, I’m here, waving the flags of my good news. Lights burned as if in a stadium. I shut them off, one by one by one, and did twenty pushups on the kitchen floor. Not just everyday pushups, but the kind with a clap in them.
The washing machine churned sloppily, as if glad for its work.
I stood still outside Joan’s room, chest banging and large. Light leaked beneath her door. She was talking to somebody, but it wasn’t her phone voice. It was higher than usual, less from the chest, in cold clear tones. Maybe she was already talking to Ferris, scoping out the details of my employ. But there was nothing of that familiarity or ease about the conversation. Her voice sounded hard, the syllables slack, as if the roof of her mouth had been scorched.
I miss you terribly, Mama.
Saving a neighborhood ... what was I thinking?
Things aren’t so good here. This is not how I’d pictured my life. (A little laugh.)
Whatever made me think that this would be enough for me?
I stood absolutely still, stolid as a suitcase. I’d never heard anything so lonely and remote. Really, she had every reason to be mad at her mother, and was she mad?
I sat down on the floor, still breathing, head buried on my folded arms. I licked, just once, a patch of my skin.
Years ago I’d seen a fox in the bracken across Route Nine. She had mange; her hair had come off in circles, skin smelly, a deep outrageous pink. We faced each other from a distance of twenty feet, both of us ashamed, both knowing there was no way I could make things better, even as I wanted to. I only had myself here: poor, hulking with excitement and spent dreams. I saw a part of me then—a part of me that I didn’t know I possessed—rise up and off my body to put my arms around Joan from behind.
I held her like that, in my imagination, until she stopped talking.
Then the part of me that was my body just had to get out of that house.
I lifted the bar above my chest. I’d put on fifty more pounds than I could handle, but why not? I was wired tonight. Little impulses sparkled, crackled like ice chips inside my brain. Burning nurtured my biceps; my axis, throat to furry belly, tensed and vigilant. I couldn’t hurt my back again, not now, now that I had a job. Twelve reps, twelve deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. One, two, three, four, five....
The bar went back on the rack with a clatter.
I sat up quick, too quick. Panting, a little dizzy, winded. It occurred to me that my protein intake was low. Was I dehydrated? Luckily the gym was empty after nine, none of the usual types escaping their wives, slumping on benches, yelling into cell phones. No one in sight but the Russian, a pale guy with black hair, whose fanatic devotion rendered him practically fatless, everything hard about him. He bent over the water fountain, sipping a mouthful, swallowing it, sipping. If we’d exchanged more than five words within the last year, I would have asked him to spot me. But we hadn’t talked since the night he walked by Laura, Joan, and me at Chi-Chi’s, where he must have figured out the three of us were related. I suspected it had something to do with Joan; there were plenty here who wouldn’t talk to us anymore—maybe they were realtors, contractors, building inspectors, plumbers, whatever. Maybe they thought she was a troublemaker. So went life in our town. None of that crap made any sense to me.
I
