“No reception,” she mumbled, biting her lips. She yawned.
There was one thing about my brother I loved. He was loyal. He would punch me, and he would insult me, but he would not betray me. Despite all our differences, I believe he understood me. When we were younger, seven and ten, I suppose, our mother worked at an after-school day care at a church and would let us play in the backyard, where there was a swing set and a sandbox and a bush with berries on it we were warned not to touch. But I liked to collect the berries. I filled my pockets with them and flushed them down the toilet when I got home. MJ and I barely spoke all afternoon. He was a little kid. He dug in the sand and pissed in it, spat, threw rocks at squirrels, shimmied up the posts of the swing set, threatened to throw a shoe at my head. I mostly sat on a swing or under a tree. I was too smart to play any games.
As the weeks passed, we got bored and started taking walks through the neighborhood. It was a wealthy suburb—pretty Dutch Colonials, some big Victorians. Those houses are worth in the millions now. We just strolled around, peering into windows. MJ liked to rifle through mailboxes or ring doorbells, then run away, leaving me standing there with my hands in my pockets. But nobody ever came out of those houses. MJ must have known nobody would. He dared me to do things, stupid things, but I was a coward. “Pussy brains” is what MJ called me. I barely cared. He could say what he liked. He could do whatever he wanted to me. I knew, when the time was right, I would get back at him.
One afternoon we found an empty house and hoisted each other in through an open window. MJ went straight to the basement, but I just stood frozen in the kitchen, waiting, afraid to call out to him, heart tearing through my chest. When MJ came back up, he had a hammer in his hands. “For squirrels,” he said. He opened the refrigerator. Inside it were the most delicious foods I’d ever seen. There was a roasted ham in there, an assortment of cheeses, and there was a pie—blueberry, I think. Something came over me in that moment. I pulled the poisonous berries from my pocket and smushed them inside the pie, up under the crust. MJ gave me the thumbs-up. That was the first time we broke into a house together. I stole a chip of Roquefort that day. We went back the next day and I stole the rest of it. This went on, I think, for months until our mother enrolled us in the aftercare. I still have a buffalo nickel that I stole from inside an old rolltop desk in one of those houses. Many other things we stole and threw away—scribbled notes, address books, a fork, a pack of cards, a toothbrush, things like that. Sometimes I’d sit at one woman’s vanity, smell all her perfumes and lotions, stare at my face in the mirror while MJ mucked around in the kid’s room. I’d douse my cheeks with a powder puff. I’d lie on the unwieldy water bed. I’d sniff things, lick things, then put everything back in its place.
Twenty years later, I still felt that the good things, the things I wanted, belonged to somebody else. I watched the waning light play in Michelle’s somber eyes. She returned my gaze for a moment. It was clear the curtain had fallen for her, too. We shared a moment of recognition, I think, alone there in the darkening cabin.
“I don’t think MJ’s coming,” she said finally. She looked at me straight in the face, shrugging. “If he does come—” she began.
“We’ll say we couldn’t wait. We’ll say, ‘You snooze, you lose,’” I agreed as she uncrinkled the foil.
We shared a wonderful afternoon together. We seemed to be playing our roles, the two scorned lovers. When she picked it up off the windowsill, I had the sense we were accomplishing great things. I let her do whatever she wanted to do to me that day in the cabin. It wasn’t painful, nor was it terrifying, but it was disgusting—just as I’d always hoped it to be.
NO PLACE FOR GOOD PEOPLE
A year after my wife died, I took a job at Offerings, a residential facility for adults with moderate developmental disabilities. They all came from wealthy families. They were slow, of course. You can call them “retarded”—that word doesn’t offend me as long as it’s used the proper way, without pity. I was already sixty-four when I took the job. I didn’t need the money, but I had the rest of my life on my hands and I wanted to spend it among people who would appreciate me. Of course I’d gone through the requisite training over the summer and was stable and willing, so there I was.
I was responsible for the daily care of three grown men. They were reasonable enough people, kind and conversational and generally decent, and they seemed to benefit from my attention and company. Each day I guided them as loosely as possible toward whatever activities the facility had planned and away from things that could be harmful or self-destructive. Most evenings we ate dinner together in the dining hall, a room designed to look something like a country club—pastel tablecloths, dark floral wallpaper, waiters in white dress shirts and burgundy aprons refilling wineglasses. The place had a well-stocked bar. Smoking was even allowed in certain areas. The residents were adults, after all. We weren’t there to discipline them, change them, improve them, or anything like that. We were merely being paid to help them live as they pleased. The official title of my post was “daytime companion,” though I stayed at Offerings later and later into the evenings as time went on.
Paul, the eldest of my charges, had a real enthusiasm for food and fire. He liked to make jokes, mostly bad puns, and he had a few catchphrases that never failed to draw laughs at the dinner table. “The poop is in the pudding,” he’d say every Thursday, wide-eyed, mouth hanging open in anticipation. Thursday was pudding day, of course. Paul’s IQ was up in the high sixties. He could have lived independently with occasional help shopping and cleaning, but he said he liked it at Offerings. He enjoyed himself.
“Larry,” Paul said one day, motioning for me to follow him. His room smelled of Christmas all year round. He was permitted to light candles, so he burned cinnamon-and pine-scented ones constantly, almost religiously. I’d often find him spaced out at his desk, staring at the flickering flames, his hand moving robotically between a bag of chips and his mouth.