Strange but True (12 page)

And then that black-haired, Cleopatra-banged runt of a woman, the one who had all but wished her coworker dead just so she could get a promotion, thinks she is being funny and starts to clap. The rest of the crowd quickly joins in the applause, and one of the bald guys even shouts, “Bravo!”

Philip tells himself to smile and take the joke, to bend down and pick up the broken glass. But he can't do any of those things. He feels frozen in place as he stares out at the people clapping, at Deb standing by the coffee machine with a smirk on her face, at the bartender who is already making a duplicate round of drinks, and at Walter, who is not yet saying anything but will definitely start screaming the second they're in the kitchen. That's when he hears Gumaro's weeks of questions rattle off in his mind:

Que es lo que pasa contigo?
What's the matter with you?

Por qué tiene que trabajar aquí si no tiene qué trabajar?
Why do you work here if you don't have to?

It is during this frozen moment that Philip's mind goes back to this time last year when his brother came home and announced that he had bought a used Mercedes on the credit card their father had given him. The card was intended for emergency use only, so their parents were furious. But after a lot of yelling and screaming, they let Ronnie keep the car. Philip has an identical Visa card in his wallet right now, though he has never once used it. All because he has this notion about making his own way in the world, a notion that seems ridiculous, downright idiotic for the first time this instant.

“Well, are you going to just stand there?” Walter asks when the applause dies down. “Or are you going to at least tell Gumbo back there to get the mop?”

Philip doesn't answer.

He turns and walks through the door into the kitchen, where he punches his time card and looks down at the tiny purple stamp: five-thirty-seven, the world's shortest shift. He heads back through the maze of shelves, loaded with olive oil and minced garlic, and the oversize pots and pans hanging on the wall, until he sees Gumaro. He doesn't mention the mop. Instead, he pats his bulky shoulder and says,
“Adios, amigo.”

“Adios,”
Gumaro says as he slides a dish rack into the machine and slams down the lever. His voice is so casual that it's obvious he doesn't get that this is good-bye for good.

Philip keeps going out the door anyway.

The moments that follow feel automatic:

He gets in his car.

He starts the engine.

He takes off out of the parking lot.

For the first five minutes, he drives along Lancaster Avenue with no particular destination in mind. What is surprising even to Philip is that he is not thinking about the restaurant or what he's just done. As odd as it may seem, his mind is focused again on that week at the Cape when he felt trapped by the same sort of endlessly gloomy aching he feels now. He remembers that every shop his grandparents took Philip and Ronnie into, they would ask the person behind the counter for the weather report. It became a kind of game to them, racing to the register to see who could blurt the question first. Everyone gave the same answer: rain for the rest of the week. Finally, their grandmother took them both by the arm and snapped, “Would you two stop this nonsense already? No one is going to tell you anything different. Face facts: the bad weather is here to stay. We'll just have to make the best of it.” But neither Philip nor Ronnie wanted to make the best of it—if it wasn't going to get sunny, then they simply wanted to leave.

At the next red light, Philip turns on the radio and flips through the stations in an effort to distract himself from all the things he really should be thinking about. Nothing is on but talk radio and rap music, so he switches it off. When the light turns green, he begins moving again and soon finds himself on a commercial strip, which looks like the same congested stretch of road that can be found in most states these days. He passes a Home Depot with a crowded parking lot, a Wal*Mart, a TGI Fridays, a 7-Eleven, a Subway, a Dunkin' Donuts, a Target, a Burger King, a Wendy's, a Mailboxes Etc., and etc. and etc. and etc.

He keeps on driving, his thoughts returning to that day Jilda Horowitz read her truck poem to the class, as he resumes the mission to gauge the validity of Conorton's comments. After he complimented Jilda, Philip remembers that the hairdresser, who wrote mostly about rainbows and dolphins, said she liked the poem too. But then she added that it might be stronger if Jilda didn't use the word
bastard
so much.

“I feel like it's hitting me on the head. It's like I tell my clients when I'm giving them highlights,” she said while doodling what looked to Philip like a unicorn at the top of the page. “Sometimes less is more.”

Class rules forbid the writer to speak during the critique session following a reading, but Philip knew exactly what Jilda was thinking, that she'd like to run the hairdresser over with a monster truck and leave her carcass behind for Animal Control to shovel up.

And that's when Philip remembers that Conorton chimed in with this noncommittal assessment: “Jilda, I think it must be wonderfully cathartic for you to get your rage out on the page.” He stopped and chuckled, coughed a hacking cough. “Listen to me. Rage out on the page. I guess I really am a poet. Rhyme schemes flow from my mouth like a fountain. Okay, next poem.”

As Philip drives on, he wonders if Conorton really did mean what he said about “Sharp Crossing” after all. Finally, he decides to stop thinking about it, since at the moment he has more important things to worry about, like where he is going and what he is going to do now that he just walked out of his job. Since he doesn't want to go home yet and face his mother, he decides to wait until later when she's asleep and he can tiptoe up the stairs to his room. But then what? Tomorrow morning, he'll wake up and have to face her again.

When he focuses on the road ahead, Philip sees the entrance ramp to Route 476. Without signaling, he turns at the last possible second. After paying the toll, he tries to merge with the other cars on the highway. They are all moving faster than the speed limit, zipping by his old Subaru in a steady whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. Philip steps on the gas in an effort to keep up. Soon he is going sixty, then sixty-five, then seventy. Each time he glances down at the speedometer, the police report from his brother's accident flashes in his mind:
Based on the damage to the vehicle, it is estimated that the limousine was traveling at a speed of seventy miles per hour in a thirty-five-miles-per-hour zone at the moment of impact
. Normally, that memory makes him slow down. But he presses his foot harder on the gas, going faster still: seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-five… When the car reaches eighty, the steering wheel begins to shake in Philip's hands. He sees a sign for 276, which leads to the Jersey Turnpike, then on to New York City. This time, he signals before turning. Once he is on 276, Philip glances in the rearview mirror, where there is a car with piercing bluetinted headlights, following too closely. He lets his mind wander, thinking of all the things he is leaving behind him:

There is Walter, barking, “You're late… Get your ass on the floor.”

Gumaro, asking,
“Que es lo que pasa contigo?”

Deb Shishimanian and her shiny lips, saying, “Maybe if you came out of the closet and had a relationship of your own, you'd stop being so judgmental.”

And then there is gray-haired Dr. Conorton, seated at his wooden desk in his office crammed with too many books, telling Philip, “I think you stand a chance of publishing this piece, young man. I really do.”

The faster he drives, the faster Philip's mind ricochets among all these memories and more, some as far back as high school. There is Jedd Kusam knocking Philip's books to the floor, slamming him up against a locker, and saying, “Repeat after me: My name is Dickless Fairy.” There is his father, only a few months ago, standing before Philip in the family room, explaining, “I've already told your mother, so now I need to tell you. I've met someone else. Her name is Holly. She was working as a stand-up comedian, of all things, at the medical convention I attended in Vegas. I'm moving out right away. I'll give you my phone number, and you still have that emergency credit card if you need anything.” There is that shoe salesman at the Payless store in the King of Prussia Mall whose eyes linger on Philip's longer than most men's do, a look that leads to them sitting in the man's Miata in a dark corner of the parking lot, both their pants down at their knees. There is Philip crinkling up his number afterward and tossing it out the window the way he has done so many times before.

Among this swirl of memories, there is one that keeps bubbling to the surface, no matter how much Philip struggles to force it down. He sees his mother standing at the top of the stairs in her nightgown earlier today. She is screaming at Philip, after having chased him from Ronnie's room, where he was looking for a clean T-shirt, since all of his were dirty. “No one does laundry in this house anymore, so what the hell do you expect?” Philip yells back at her. And then she silences him with a single statement. “Too bad the wrong son died!” she yells in a bloodcurdling voice as Philip steps out the front door of the house with his apron in hand. “Do you hear me? It's too bad the wrong son died!”

Philip feels as though he could drive on forever.

And still the memory of those words would not be far enough behind.

HOLLY IS IN THE MIDDLE OF HER MORNING WORKOUT WHEN THE
phone rings. Normally, she wouldn't stop to answer it, but instead of her usual combination Pilates-yoga routine, today she is trying a DVD she borrowed from her friend Marley called
Facercises: Stretch Your Way to a Natural Face-lift
. On the screen, a baby-faced brunette who can't be a day older than eighteen is poking her tongue against the inside of her cheek, creating a bulge that looks positively obscene. For thirty minutes now, Holly has been struggling to follow along with the various moves, but she feels as though she is in training to become a pornographic mime rather than working off her wrinkles and sagging skin. Either way, she welcomes the interruption of the phone, at least until she presses the On button and hears the voice on the other end of the line.

“Hello.”

“Salutations, Holly. Is your darling husband at home?”

Charlene. She has not called in weeks, but whenever she does, it never fails to put Richard in a bad mood. Holly once saw a Lifetime movie starring Meredith Baxter Birney as a jilted wife who left angry, ranting messages on her ex-husband's machine until she finally showed up during the night and shot him and his new wife while they were asleep. That's what Holly is thinking of when she musters her perkiest voice and says, “Uh, hi. Salutations to you too, Charlene. How are you?”

“Never better. Listen, it's been great catching up with you. Now put Richard on the phone.”

On the television, the girl with the baby face is saying, “This next exercise works wonders to keep away my frown lines. Just open your mouth big and wide. Make it big. Make it wide. Bigger. Wider. Bigger. Wider. Bigger. Wider. Okay, now thrust out your tongue like you're trying to lick a melting ice-cream cone. Go on, ladies. Don't be shy. Lick it up!” Holly doesn't want to give Charlene any more ammo, so she grabs the remote and presses Pause, freezing that girl with her mouth open so wide it looks as though she is about to vomit. “He's asleep,” she says.

“Still?”

“Yes, still. We were out late last night at a benefit for a hospital up near Vero Beach. Richard has been doing some consulting for them.” Holly doesn't know why she feels the need to offer an explanation, but talking to Charlene always makes her nervous. She finds herself blurting things she wouldn't with anyone else.

“Oh, that's right,” Charlene says. “How could I have possibly forgotten that I've just called the home of Mr. and Mrs. Palm Beach? Well, I'm sure going to all those glamorous black-tie events on Richard's arm must beat your days working on the Strip before you launched Operation: Steal Someone's Rich Husband.”

Holly closes her eyes and sees the scene from that Lifetime movie, the dead couple in bed with a spray of bullet holes in their backs. As absurd as it sounds, that image has been one of the main things that's kept her from retaliating against Charlene's insults all these years. Today, though, for whatever reason, when she opens her eyes, Holly thinks, Fuck it. “I did not steal your husband, Charlene.” Her voice is tentative at first but quickly becomes sterner. It is the tone she used to take with hecklers in the audience back in Vegas. Since it was always the men who got drunk and shouted at her, Holly used to stop her act midsentence and say in the same sort of deadly serious voice, “If you're such a big man in need of so much attention, why don't you get up here and show us all your big dick? Come on. Don't be afraid.” Sometimes she'd even ask the person in the lighting booth to shine a spotlight on the idiot's crotch. That never failed to shut him up. Now, to Charlene, Holly says, “And you know what else? I don't have to sit here and take this crap from you. In fact, I don't know why I ever did. I'll have Richard call you when he wakes up. Good-bye.”

Her thumb is a half second away from hitting the Off button when Charlene's voice comes roaring through the receiver. “Oh, no, you don't. Because I'm going to tell you what you'll do. You are going to wake up that poor excuse for a father. Get his sorry ass out of bed. Then put him on the phone. And you're going to do it this second. Understood?”

Now that Holly has finally begun to fight back, she can't stop herself. “Fuck you, Charlene. You can pull your crazy act on Richard and Philip. But like I said, I don't have to take it. I'm sure this month's deposit will post into your account at Main Line Bank any day now. And since that's all you seem to care about, then I think whatever it is you want can wait.”