The Best American Short Stories 2013 (29 page)

“You can’t exactly say no to a naked lady on your doorstep, can you?” Hil asked rhetorically at the meeting. She glanced at the smiling older man holding the leash of his helper animal. There ought always to be a blind man grinning encouragingly, receptively, at meetings, she thought. The dog lay panting at his feet, its head held a little unnaturally high by the leash. The man’s genial countenance was generic—through every story, no matter how unpleasant, he smiled benignly beneath his lovely hair, wavy and white like meringue. He had, Hil thought, become like a dog himself, unable to judge.

“My roommate had never met my neighbor before, so I introduced them.” How strange to see a clothed person shake hands with a naked one; it was like the meeting of two utterly different tribes.
Bergeron Love, this is Janine
.

“Nice to meet you,” Janine said, averting her eyes.

“Janine is getting her degree at the U.,” Hil offered. “In social work,” she added, since Janine was shy.

“Ha!” Bergeron Love said, raising her toothbrush. “You can consider this visit a piece of immersion homework! What the hell is that?” she asked, aiming the brush at the paused image on the television.

“A bullet puncturing somebody’s heart in slow motion,” Janine said. On the screen, a few perfect circles: bullet, organ, splatter. “Not
actually
,” she added.

“Well, obviously not actually,” Bergeron said. “One of those true-crime shows? I love those, but my boyfriend, Boyd, can’t take it. He literally can’t watch gore. Isn’t that just typical?” Boyfriend Boyd was a mousy man who hid behind a pair of giant square glasses and a push-broom mustache. Every school day morning he donned an orange vest and stood blowing into a whistle on the corner of Westheimer and Taft, waving his arms to help the children across. Only with that vivid vest and shrill whistle did he seem to have much confidence. Then, or after a few stiff drinks.

“You want a robe, Bergeron?” Hil asked. The woman was going to either sit or fall down, and the nearest chair was the one Hil’s fifteen-year-old son usually used.

“Why would I want a robe?” Bergeron demanded. “You got a problem with the human body? You’re watching that shit on TV and you can’t look at
me?
”

“I just didn’t want her naked butt on the chair where my son liked to sit,” Hil explained to the A.A. meeting. “But she kind of collapses in his chair anyway and starts to ramble on about her fucked-up life. Sorry, Jim,” Hil added. The blind man had flinched; his single admission, in all the time that he’d occupied his position as accepting group focal point, was that the word
fuck
hurt his feelings. He nodded now, recovered, absolving.

“Friday night,” Bergeron Love had said. “I’m walking buck fucking naked up and down the street, and I can’t even get arrested!”

“That’s partly your fault, you know, Berge,” Hil said, explaining to Janine that Bergeron, years earlier, had been almost solely responsible for rousting a homeless shelter and the homeless who lived there from the neighborhood. “Remember all those drunk bums?” Hil said.

“Pissing in our yards,” Bergeron recalled. “Leaving all their Sudafed trash in the park. You don’t know the half of what I kept off this street. And then they wanted to turn that flophouse into an
AIDS
clinic. No, ma’am, said I.”

Civic duty had once been a Love family hallmark; there were bridges and schools and state parks commemorating the name. But the more recent generations had had to spend their money on lawyers instead: fighting class-action suits over working conditions at their oil refineries or covering up the scandalous dalliances of other Loves.

“But, Berge, if those homeless guys were still around, there’d have been more action out there tonight. They would have been ecstatic to see you coming,” Hil said. And Bergeron laughed appreciatively, conceding the point, then wondered aloud what a person had to do to get a drink around here. “I had an open container until just a little bit ago,” she explained. “There might be some broken glass out on your walkway—sorry about that.”

Janine jumped at the chance to leave the room to make drinks.

“
That
is a
big
old gal,” Bergeron Love whispered.

Hil couldn’t disagree; Janine was three times her own size, a woman who must have had to eat most of the day to maintain her weight, and yet Hil had never seen her do it. Janine had her own shelves in the fridge and cupboards, plastic grocery bags came and went, and still Hil had never shared a meal with her.

“You’re lucky
she’s
not the nudie here,” Bergeron said, then added, in her normal voice, “Where’s your son? Out on a date? Raising some high school hell?”

“He’s here,” Hil said. Had he heard Bergeron’s arrival, from his bedroom? Declined to enter the fray? No doubt he was just listening to music on headphones, reading a philosophy book, texting with his school-hours-only girlfriend. Jeremy led a quiet, self-contained life; his peers seemed to frighten him a little. He wasn’t ready, quite yet, to go unguarded into the night. It was he who every evening checked the locks and switched off the lights. After Hil went to bed, he and Janine would play complex and violent video games into the wee hours, speaking a fascinating coded language together while adroitly operating their controllers, never taking their eyes from the divided screen. For this and other reasons, Janine was an excellent roommate to both Hil and Jeremy, her own social life nearly nonexistent. Like Hil, she went to meetings to discuss her defining, overwhelming weakness; in the kitchen now she was no doubt devouring a frozen chocolate bar in addition to mixing gin and tonics. She insisted on keeping the chocolate frozen, despite the crown she’d broken just last week. Addicts, Hil marveled: so dedicated!

At another A.A. meeting, earlier in the week, Hil had started the story of her longtime neighbor Bergeron Love at a different point. “My neighbor the busybody once reported another of our neighbors to the Child Protective Services. She said he was abusing his daughters.” This meeting was for women only; there was no friendly blind man upon whom to settle her eyes in this group. In fact, the women were a tougher audience, overall, than the mixed meetings. Less likely to forgive rambling or giggling during shares, readier to call bullshit on somebody’s tears. “She’d heard him through the bathroom window with the girls—‘Don’t, Daddy, don’t! It hurts! Please, Daddy!’—and assumed the worst. But after my neighbor reported this guy, this huge tattooed Hispanic guy, he started stalking her son.”

Bergeron’s then ten-year-old boy, Allistair. Allistair the fair and pale and earnest and brave, who’d later walked Jeremy around on Halloween, utterly unembarrassed at being seen holding a five-year-old’s hand. Reporting the alleged abuse had been a lesson in minding your own business, Hil thought. The gentle and awkward Allistair had had to be moved to another school, separated from his familiar friends. Restraining orders had been required. Bergeron Love’s front yard was egged, her car graffitied, her most beautiful live oak killed by mysterious means. She never knew what to expect when she opened her front door in the morning.

Bergeron had gone from one house to another, pleading her case, her car with its windshield covered in red spray paint parked at the curb for all to see. “Racist wore!” it said. “I know it’s him because he didn’t spray the
car!
He cares so much about cars, he couldn’t spray the metal!” It was true that the man loved his vehicles; the house and yard were shabby, but his classic sedan and truck sat sparkling and cherry in the drive. That man still lived in the neighborhood. Neither his daughters nor his wife, to this day, had said a word against him.

“Nobody else ever heard or saw anything,” Hil explained. “And Bergeron was always saying outrageous stuff. For all we knew, the kid was overreacting to soap in her eyes—‘Stop! It hurts!’ It just seemed so unfair that her boy was suffering because of her,” Hil went on to the roomful of women, most of them mothers. Little Allistair Love, studious, dutiful, always standing alongside Bergeron at the polling stations on Election Day, shirt clattering with campaign buttons. “I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say, I guess, but she came to my house the other night,
bing-bong
, most likely lonely for her boy, I’m thinking. He’s all grown up now, living over in Austin. I mean, I can imagine how it’d be, having your son move away.”

Occasionally, on a bad night in the past, she’d heard the teenage Allistair trying to negotiate with his mother and Boyd when they took their drunken disagreements to the street. With a few drinks in him, Boyd could take on a certain defensive bravado, like a person in the woods encountering a wild animal. Their issues were forgettable, at least to them, tomorrow’s amnesia—blame and counterblame, outrage shouted upon outrage, insult upon insult—but Allistair couldn’t forget them. His entreaties were always the same:
Come inside! Please get out of the street
. Heartbreaking, that pleading adenoidal voice.

“Every time she came to my door, it was, you know, ‘What fresh hell is this?’ I usually saw her when she was drunk, but I know she had some kind of wits about her because she got shit done in our neighborhood. And she seemed to bring up a pretty great kid, mostly by herself.” Bergeron the pitiful, whose only marriage, it was rumored, had not lasted more than a summer, that gold-digging, sperm-donor ex-husband who’d left her pregnant and poorer by half. Also, Bergeron the bully, who’d driven off the homeless and kept out the
AIDS
patients. Bergeron the hypocrite, who’d fought many a zoning battle from the confines of her own sagging antebellum monstrosity, in need of paint and roofing and porch repair, not to mention its proliferating cat population, inbred and unhealthy. And Bergeron the legend, débutante, socialite, donor, scion of the noble Love family, some sort of mysterious yet commanding black sheep.

At the women’s meeting, Hil didn’t mention what had happened that very morning: the ambulance and fire truck that had roused the block at daybreak, pulling into place on either side of Bergeron’s front walk, half a dozen uniformed people leaping into action, neighbors stepping out in their sweatpants and bathrobes and mussed hair, arms crossed over their chests, curious as to what the mercurial Bergeron Love had set in motion now.

On that earlier naked night, after Janine came back from the kitchen, Hil had excused herself briefly. In the hall, she was grateful for her son’s resolutely closed door. She dialed her neighbor’s number, making her way to the study, the window of which looked out toward the Love house, where Hil could see, through the tall front window, the shape of Boyd watching television. He didn’t answer the phone on the first call. “Oh, hell no,” Hil murmured, dialing the number again. She could almost hear it ringing over there. Could almost hear Boyd’s reluctant sigh as he rose, this time, and picked up. “Hello?” he said hopefully, as if he hadn’t already seen who it was on caller ID. As if he had no idea what he was going to be told. He was a chinless man who routinely let himself be bossed around, made small. Bergeron wouldn’t marry him (“Fool me once, shame on you,” she’d said on the subject of marriage. “Fool me twice? No, ma’am”), wouldn’t let him be anything other than her aging, laughably labeled
boyfriend
. “You maybe want to come retrieve Bergeron?” Hil said to him.

“She told me she was setting out to get arrested.”

“That hasn’t come to pass just yet. I guess I could call the cops, if you really think she needs all that drama.” Thanks to her family, Bergeron rarely feared authority. “But it takes so long when there are uniforms involved. The paperwork.”

Five minutes later, Boyd stood wearily at the door, fully clothed, Hil was grateful to see. But instead of taking Bergeron home, Boyd sat down in the second of the blue chairs. “Want a drink?” Janine asked him, probably hoping to sneak another chocolate bar.

Now that there seemed to be a party going on, it was no longer possible for Jeremy to ignore the sounds coming from the living room. He greeted Boyd first, Boyd who’d ferried him many a time across the busy lanes of traffic to his elementary school, whistle shrieking, a protective hand on his back. Then Jeremy spotted Bergeron Love, naked in his favorite chair. He immediately turned away, blushing, a gesture Bergeron pounced upon.

“You can’t be shocked!” she declared. “Give me a break! I betcha you’ve been all over the Internet looking at porn!”

Boyd provided Jeremy with a grimacing shrug; Bergeron Love, in her hat, on the chair, was nothing like Internet porn.

“What are you, on drugs?” Bergeron demanded when Jeremy was silent. “Are you high?”

“No, ma’am,” Jeremy said, now directing at her his sober, scornful glare. Telling her, in his way, that he was fully aware that he was the only unintoxicated person in the room. He next fixed his eyes on the television screen, where the bullet through the heart remained, like a new piece of art on the wall, a mesmerizing solar system of bloody mayhem.

“Oh, don’t get all saintly,” Bergeron said, smiling suddenly at Jeremy’s indignation. “Be patient with your elders. Cut us some slack. You’re just like Allistair,” she added fondly. “All serious and all. You remember my son, Allistair?”

Jeremy said that he did.

“He didn’t like to be put on the spot, either, didn’t like a direct question, didn’t like a big to-do. Played things pretty close to the vest. He was embarrassed by his mom too.”

“He’s not embarrassed by me,” Hil said. Jeremy glanced at her with what she hoped was agreement. After all, Hil wasn’t the one who routinely got drunk and was then driven to getting things off her chest to anybody who’d listen. Hil had not, tonight, decided to parade around naked in public. Jeremy went to Al-Anon meetings because his father had made it a condition of their custody arrangement. “They’re okay,” he’d reported to his mother of those meetings. “Lots of hugging. A little too much God talk, for me. I don’t say I’m an atheist anymore, though.”

“That’s a good lesson, wherever you learn it,” she’d said.

“Allistair was embarrassed, but he loved me,” Bergeron went on. “He’d have done anything for me. Not like Boyd here. Boyd doesn’t love me. The people who love me are all gone, except Allistair. Mother and Daddy, my brother George Jr., but not that son of a bitch Allistair, my brother Allistair—that’s Allistair the first. Everybody dead and gone, except Allistair the second.”