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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573668033 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 447 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
the ILLUSTRATED VERSION of THINGS
By AFFINITY KONAR
FC2
Copyright © 2009 Affinity KonarAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-147-8
Chapter One
"I got it last time," I say.But the ringing keeps on so I pick it up and a couple breaths cripple by on the other end, and on my end, or rather, what would be our end—because I'm staggered out on my grandparents' bed and my grandparents, they're in this too, they've got me, there in the middle, and we're all laid out because it's morning now, but still we haven't slept and the three of us, we're all dressed up, and what could be different about us, besides the fact that I'm eighteen and they're in their eighties, is they go to bed in their shoes, but I've given up on all that, all that outrunning at any given moment and while I'm on the phone there's this dumb flopping mutter that I shout through, because I know who it is and even if the caller has never been shown affection this is no excuse.
I hang up. The ringing starts again.
"Will one of you pick up the phone?" Dziadek asks. He can't do it. He has two on either side of him, but he won't answer. We're hemmed by telephones, by button, by wire—the idea is to have ourselves surrounded from any point throughout the house, we have modern, we have past, they beep in pastels, sing in primary, they hook, they cradle—they're made ready for our hands so we can be warned when we need to leave.
My grandmother wonders who it could be. In her wondering she flexes, readies her body to fold or shrink, whatever the avoidance of disaster might require.
"It could be anyone," Babcia says. "It could be anyone but your sister or my sister or your brother or either of our parents. They won't call."
"Because they're dead?" I ask.
"No one should assume anything," Babcia warns. "They were all proud and none of them was buried properly."
"My mother's name was Esther," Dziadek says.
"That's my name too," Babcia points out.
"I know," he says. "Esther." And he reaches across me to take her hand.
"That means you knew my name before you even knew it was mine," she says.
"I know," he says. And then the mattress starts to leak because the mattress is made of water and my grandfather's boot heel has punctured its surface. He leans toward my grandmother. They make brief, contained noises of happiness as the water leaves the mattress, their bodies sinking lower into the bed. Then, suddenly, they part.
"It seems a good idea not to enjoy things anymore," Babcia says.
They go back to admiring their cowboy boots, because actually, they're not wearing shoes. They're wearing cowboy boots, they've always worn cowboy boots, it's their original footwear. These are the first things they bought after leaving Poland.
"Will someone please pick up the phone?" I say. "I got it last."
And so Babcia calculates what's nearer, the touch tone behind her head or the rotary on the nightstand. She goes for the touch tone.
"Hello. Yes, yes, she is right here," she says, and the receiver mouths toward me so fast I have time only to think of how I don't know how to talk.
"I'm sorry?" I say.
And then she says my name so I know it's her, the one that's always getting scraped by a curtain. I've noticed that wherever she goes there are curtains. And small, stained tables. Bits of glass. Doors, sometimes chairs, bathtubs too, and her body slurs against it all so fast that I could forget the proportion of one thing to another if there weren't sudden peals of her voice to my mind, wherein I cover her mouth with my brain and her mouth disappears, taking my thoughts with it so that the white erase of her voice becomes my sole unit of measurement.
"What do you want?" I ask.
She cries a little. She says this is her one phone call. As in the one.
"So," I say. "That's for real? They really only give you one phone call?"
She goes on to explain that this might be more of a cliché than the truth because she's called a couple of other people before me but they weren't home, they were off—who knows what they were doing.
"So what am I?" I ask.
"Number three," she says.
"That's good. Number three. I must be pretty important."
"You are," she says, "you are important."
This is what she tells me. But I made some of it up.
"What do you need?"
She needs me to get her out of there. Inside there are a whole lot of men who would take advantage of a woman like her, and there are other women too, creatures with tongues worn out and necks amuck; it's all uphill as far as being human goes in there and she realizes she isn't much different and so this is frightening.
"Do I look okay?" she asks me.
"I wouldn't know. I haven't seen you for years."
Then she starts to cry again.
"You look good," I tell her. "You look good."
"Please, just get the money. Get the money so I can get out of here."
"I'll get the money."
"Thanks." And then there's this pause, then she says, "So how's school? You must be graduating soon."
"Not really."
"You'll be the first one to graduate from high school," she says. "The first one from my side at least."
But I think even she can tell that I'm not thinking about that.
"How'd you know I was here?" I ask. "How'd you know where to find me?"
"A mother always knows these things," she says. And then her time must have run out because she hangs up.
"What was that about?"
"That was my mother."
"A bad person," Babcia says. "Came from a bad family, came into our family, and now look."
"Can I have some money?"
"Of course," Dziadek says, and he hands me a five.
I catch a bus across town. I try to pay the dollar but the driver won't let me, she says, oh no honey you only have to pay two of those quarters since you're so young. I don't correct her because at this point, anything saved is good. I go to my little brother's school. I haven't been to school for three or so years now myself, but I know that I've probably changed more than school has, which means that I probably shouldn't hit back and I probably shouldn't make eye contact with anyone but my brother. Which is fine, because he's the only one I want to see anyway. My brother is a freshman and he always has about five dollars. I figure five dollars can't hurt in helping our mother. I find him in the cafeteria, sitting alone in the back. It takes some looking to recognize him because when I last saw him—this was two years ago—we hadn't eaten in a very long time, and now he's wide and drinking out of a straw.
"Hey," he says. "When'd you get out?"
"Yesterday."
"What do you want?"
I explain the situation. He's not impressed.
"We're family," I say.
"About that—"
"Yes?"
"It's come to my attention," he says, "that you and I probably do not have the same father."
"You sure?"
"Positive," he says. He wears paper napkins splayed across his lap. The polite napkins make him even less recognizable to me, even more of a stranger.
"Who are your sources?"
"Listen," he says, and he blows a bubble in his milk. "I'm Mexican. Hispanic. You know, a bean bandit? When I grow up I'm supposed to whistle at girls all day from the back of a pickup truck but my ancestors may have been kings."
"What are you trying to say?"
"Look at us. Just look at how different you are next to me."
"Of course we're not the same. I'm older, you're younger."
He bites into his sandwich.
"That good?"
He nods. He knows I like to act as if I want something just so I can turn it away. So he doesn't offer. He just wipes his hands with one of those napkins instead. I'm jealous of that napkin. But I try to focus on the problem at hand, instead of the one balled up in his fist.
"Are you liking the new place?" I ask.
"I'm pleased with the situation. My new fosters—they are a pleasure."
"They have good food there?"
"Definitely. We eat chickens. And cheeseburgers, you know, which are hamburgers with cheese on them? And once a week we have an ethnic meal—that means a meal outside the American culture—so I can learn more about my Mexican heritage."
He reaches over with his napkin. He tries to wipe my face. I didn't know I was so dirty. Somehow, being around family always makes me aware of it.
"It's a lot better than the stuff they've got over at your grandparents I bet."
"They're your grandparents too."
He wipes my face harder, which is something people do when they want to argue with you but choose to change the subject instead.
"So when did you get out? I heard that you were involuntary. Which means you didn't have a choice but it's not exactly against your will."
"I had a choice. Just not at first."
"So when? When did you get out?" He waves his fork at me.
"You know," I say. "I remember when we were little and my baby teeth weren't falling out but my adult teeth were coming in. So I had two sets of teeth. And you had none. I had a stutter, two coughs, and three ways of screaming. And you had none. I had too much. So I tried to give you what I could. I tried to take care of you—"
And then we're interrupted. This wheezy kid comes and sits down opposite us. His eyes are crossed. He looks like he got hit in the head with a lollipop. He probably did, but I don't think it was my fault. I wouldn't have wasted something so sweet on a kid like that.
"Hey Miguel," he says. And then the kid starts shoveling it down like the melee of skin he is, all crossed up and full of nothing. I think that plate of peas knew more than he did.
"Hey Christopher," my brother says. "You ready to run some miles after school today?"
"Let's do it."
"I'll motivate you," my brother says. "We'll motivate each other."
"Yeah," says Christopher. "They can't keep us off that team forever."
"Christopher," my brother says. "This is a friend of mine."
"I'm his sister."
"Really? You don't look related." Christopher tilts his brain towards me as if to empty it.
"She's my half-sister. Which means we share half our blood."
"Much of our blood comes from our mother," I add.
"That doesn't mean anything," my brother protests—slow and loud, as if he's talking to someone who can't hear, and I didn't know that Christopher had problems hearing our language, but his deafness shouldn't matter to me anyway, because this is between my brother and me, no one else—"I'm trying to tell you," my brother insists. "Our blood is not the same."
"I know," I say. "I have more of it than you." His stare follows me as I leave the cafeteria. The whites of his eyes make me want to forget we're family. I want to forget so I can have the chance to remember things over, differently maybe, or at least for keeps.
I remember when we were kids and our mother took us to get tests. This was when the disease first broke. They gave us pictures to color while we waited. My brother, he got lucky, he got one of those mazes like on a placemat in a pancake house, one of those things where the object is, quite often, to wend a line through ducts and tunnels of air-fat without stopping—bad as it is to stop it's worse to start again, and that hesitation mark in crayon could be larger than anything, larger than running headlong your overestimations of what constitutes an ending. He wasn't doing it right. He wasn't strong enough. And so I helped him out, we hunched together over the paper. We drove those lines hard and fainted. We fainted because the nurses had taken blood-loads from us for the test. The results were negative, but in that good way, as in negative, your kids don't have that disease, but bring them back later anyway, this is a new thing, we don't know much about it, we could be wrong.
When I finish remembering the day of the disease, I go to find my brother again, down by the tracks where it doesn't matter what side you come from just so long as your timing is right, and the finish line is near.
My brother is pushing his body around the track so I have to run to keep up with him. We run side by side. He pants. He wears tiny shorts, checks his watch to see what kind of time we're making here. The ground moves beneath us in a way I can't quite trust, but I figure I can work with it, this is good, this is how things get done.
"It's about our mother," I say.
"She's a bad person."
"Sure, but she always made sure we were clean. She'd never let one of us leave the car without our hair combed. And if there was a hole in our clothes she'd sew it up."
"She was good with a needle all right."
"It was always important to her that we looked like presentable," I say. "It was always important that we smelled decent and appeared normal and I don't know, maybe if you'd just think about that for awhile you'd see."
His pace quickens.
"Look," I say, "she didn't mean to let those things happen to us."
"But she knew. She knew they were happening, right?"
"Probably not. Maybe."
"She knew."
"That's true," I admit. "She did."
Then he stops and stoops down and takes from his shoe a five dollar bill damp with sweat. He always put things there for safekeeping, because it seemed like the thing to do. I know he's just helping me so I'll leave, but I take it anyway. And then what happens next, I don't know, I just—there's this girl running by us and she could be me because she's mean but she isn't me because she's in another body, one that's blurred in its advancing legs, one that's beaded in its cruel perspiration. From a face all swollen with her mouth she gives my brother news: he sucks. And so I'm running up beside her and realizing that no, she can't be me because to myself I'd only whisper. "You talk like a trap squeaking out," I tell her. "You've got knuckle significance," I say. So of course, she hits me first. She has all the grace of soap in a sock but her hands don't clean me, she just lays me down, she lays me all to splattery and my eyes, they're outbleared by some sting she's put there, thick as signature. And I choose only to lie there, because when you're the one who gets hit first you can lie about anything.
The principal sits me down in her office. I sit with a bag of ice and watch the water sneak onto her desk. She's the voice of reason if the voice of reason is a wanting to make things right, and she gives me the kind of smile that asks for my side of the story.
I want to tell her that, ethically, I'm looking for something in the way of loving-kindness. Somewhere, I want to tell her, somewhere I'm a virgin without loopholes, an inch of well-meaning nature, a tremble on the brink.
Instead, I apologize for my actions, which is really the same thing.
"It doesn't really matter who started it," she says. "I know you're new here, but the suspension's the same. You'll have to go home now. Take some time to think."
"I can always use some time to think," I admit.
She pats me on the hand.
"It's hard to be new isn't it?" she says.
The ice has leaked away. My eye isn't swollen anymore but now my nipples are sticking out, and so I fold as much of myself as I can. Over and into, where no one can see what should be leaving. I don't know how to talk to her. In talking to women who are strangers I lose half my weight, most of it in flesh, but some of it in bone too.
"I need to notify your guardian." She hands me the phone. "Please dial."
I'm thinking of my grandparents making the shapes of old people beneath their sheets and I just don't feel like interrupting their gazes bootward. So I dial another number instead, one that I'm not even sure is good anymore.
On the telephone, the principal says that I need to be picked up immediately because I'm somewhat injured and in need of familial comfort. She listens to the parental concerns on the other side and assuages them somewhat. She looks puzzled for a moment, but then she gives directions to the school and repeats them twice. Just so there can be no mistakes.
Some twenty minutes later, some thirty, double that, sixty minutes later, a man walks in. This is my father. He's as small as he ever was, but I don't notice how much I've grown now, standing at his shoulder. We both stare at his shoes. I don't know why he doesn't want to look at me but I figure it might have something to do with my face. He can probably tell that while people touched me I had to think of something else, and so I thought of him, and I didn't know what he was like so I made it all up, I thought of him going to the movies, I thought of him crying during the sad parts and his tears were always as I wanted them, they were fat and tremulous and quick at the downfall. They were piteous and salty and well-groomed. Mostly, they were for my mother.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from the ILLUSTRATED VERSION of THINGS by AFFINITY KONAR Copyright © 2009 by Affinity Konar. Excerpted by permission of FC2. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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