The scratched train windows refract light through the cabin. The seat headrests are oiled from men’s pomade over the years. A coffee cup rolls in a twirl, clockwise then counterclockwise. Even though the car smells like soot and urine, there’s a sense of holiday and goodwill, and Elise and Jamey lean against each other and drink coffee and eat cinnamon doughnuts out of paper bags, and are very happy.
The conductor looks lost in time, like he’d been punching tickets since 1931. His sandy hair combed back, his face handsome in a blustery, committed way. Keys jangle off his belt, a schedule pad and leather pocket of tickets hanging from it too. All his equipment sways with the train. A gold cross on a chain is barely visible under his pale-blue uniform shirt.
“Where you kids headed?” he says, clipping their tickets.
“Gonna see my family in Bridgeport,” Elise says.
“Yeah? Sounds nice. Happy Christmas to yous.”
“Have a merry Christmas too,” Jamey says.
“I’m gonna,” he says, whistling as he moves down the dirty aisle. “Soon’s I get done with this shift.”
And Jamey feels included, assumed into the ethics of finishing the shift, commiserating with other working stiffs without disrespecting the job. Last year, the conductor wouldn’t have said much to him if Jamey had been on this train, and he wouldn’t have been on this train.
When they get off, their cabdriver is a fat lady whose dyed-black hair has an inch of white at the root. Her radio is tuned to Christmas oldies, and she rolls through every stop sign. The town seems empty—as in deserted forever—and Jamey’s nervous. They pass a boarded-up theater, a hair salon with a bullet-cracked window.
They pull up to barracks set unceremoniously in rows, with zero landscaping. A sign says WELCOME TO THE SALLY S. TURNBULL HOUSES. The brick units are flat, and a white iron barrier enclosing every lawn says prison yard more than picket fence. Dead grass is clumped with snow. A pink kid-sized car is bleached by weather and wheel-less.
He’s meeting his wife’s family—his heart rate explodes and his testicles are drawn up into his groin. Now, too late, he sees it was obscenely rude not to request her hand in marriage from the family. He never even wondered what they said when she told them.
“Elise!” shrieks someone from a window.
They lug shopping bags from the trunk to Building 5. On the ground are malt-liquor empties, and a face peeps out the door.
“Yo, Elise is here!” says the face.
Elise looks at Jamey. “Here we go.”
Jamey has met hundreds of people, been left to entertain famous strangers, been relied on to charm parents’ friends or schoolmates’ siblings or Alex’s business partners. He can smile like a cat, make them nervous, be intimate and faraway, warm and cold—he can whip out the survivor skills of charisma. But he’d rather be honest for once.
The yard smells of piss. There are audio echoes of television, EPMD, children shrieking. The smell of food cooking all day.
As they enter the hallway, kids jump around Elise, talking about Santa and stockings and toys, pulling at the bags. Jamey’s heart is skipping. He can tell Elise is scared, because she won’t look at him. A paper wreath is scotch-taped to the door of the apartment.
“Get out of my way!” she grumbles at the kids sweetly.
Walking into the fluorescent-lit room, Jamey braces for scrutiny, and he grazes the faces, but mainly he’s ignored.
“Oh my fucking God!” Denise throws her spoon into the pot and wipes her hands on her apron and tackles Elise with a hug.
Mother and daughter hold each other, rock back and forth, and everyone is silent, murmuring.
Jamey’s speechless, shocked by this love, that Elise has been away from it.
Denise is a ghetto Mae West, with huge half-lidded eyes, globes of breasts, and a strut. She flings the dishrag over her shoulder and evaluates Jamey, her pupils smoking.
She grins, wet and mean. “Well, if our girl loves you, we got to love you too. We don’t have no choice.”
Jamey tries to smile.
Angel is a mountain, with a mullet, curly on top, hair so thin his scalp is visible. “How you doin’, man,” he says to Jamey, and his hand is a cinder block.
“This is Dawn, Jesus, and Little Marie,” Elise says, and the children stare with mouths open.
“Who are you?” Dawn asks.
“My name is Jamey.”
“What are you doing here?”
Denise swats at her head with the dish towel. “Shut the fuck up, baby. We don’t talk that way.”
The dog is like a cotton ball pulled out of a drain. Teeth and gums so nasty her breath transcends a closed door. (She torments Angel, waking him by standing over his face and breathing into his nose. Jamey will hear all about it later. Angel opens his eyes every morning to this gremlin. When he moved back in recently, she shat in his disco loafer, a twirled army-green turd, curlicued with malevolence.) A blue tinsel tree is wired with lights the colors of Jujyfruits candies. The same Elvis songs from the taxi play on this radio: “Blue Christmas,” “Merry Christmas Baby,” and “Silent Night.”
A silent night it’s not! Jamey sits with the men, where Angel rules. Someone hands him a snifter of Hennessey and an El Presidente. The men smoke cherry cigars, the windows cracked. The kids chase one another, shrieking. The kids he met seem to have spawned more kids.
Everything is out in the open. The second someone gets angry, there’s a fight. Then it’s resolved. Denise and the other women catch children who come and lie against their laps for a minute, languidly scratch the kid’s head with their long nails, then let them go.
Elise is overwhelmed by how different everything seems, and how it’s the same as when she left. Even while she’s in here, talking and arguing and laughing, she’s also coming down the hall, nine years old, in a clothing-drive parka with a grocery bag on her hip. It’s stacked with bread, milk, and diapers. She’s putting her key in the door but she forgot the beer! She goes back into the cold because she’ll get a beating if she doesn’t.
On the fridge, Jamey sees a photo of Elise in a basketball uniform.
“Look at you,” he says.
“I played on the boys’ team. For one year.”
“That team, what a fucking tragedy,” Denise says. “Them boys, the second they got good, they was arrested, hooked on drugs, or they family was falling to pieces and they hadda take over. Like, two kids would show up at those practices.” She laughs hoarsely.
Jamey looks at Elise looking at the picture. She doesn’t seem bitter—just curious about the girl on one knee, greasy hair parted in the middle.
The ladies drink Amaretto sours for the holiday.
“Cheers, all-a you!”
Aunt Shay busts in from her house on the next block. Cracks jokes about Jamey—but won’t look at him. It’s an aggressive shyness. A shy aggressiveness.
“I keep expecting you to like start waltzin’ or some shit,” she says, gesturing loosely at Jamey and looking around at everyone else, a comedian.
“Oh, she flirtin’ with your man,” Tara says to Elise.
“No, I ain’t!” Aunt Shay protests with sass and a hand spread over her heart. “I like em tough. You know what I like.”