With or Without You Page 15

  Edie shook my arm and whispered my name a couple of times. I didn’t budge. She shut off the TV, pulled the afghan from the back of the couch, and blanketed my body before spooning in behind me with her arm around my waist. She smelled sort of musty, like she’d been in a sauna, but her body felt warm against my back. I’d never slept that tangled up in anyone before, not even Blair who couldn’t fall asleep unless she was flat on her stomach, so I was surprised when I drifted off and woke up hours later with four inches of snow in the backyard and Edie’s arms around me.

  I AM SUPPOSED TO GROW TOMATOES. Big red bulbs that make the community famous. Instead I spend my mornings pulling uniforms, underwear, socks and sheets and linens and towels from the dryer and shaking them out the way I’ve been taught. One clean crack before sliding them under the massive iron cylinder. You almost can’t believe a machine like this exists outside of someone’s imagination. So big it could steamroll, say, Stella, who’s never without one eye on me as she moves the wrung-out laundry from washer to dryer, and leave her flat as a character in a Saturday morning cartoon; so hot the stuff falling off the other end needs a few minutes to cool before folding. A steak shoved under the barrel would brown, one side at a time, although it’d be paper thin and carry the taste of metal and fabric softener.

  Chandon catches the linens on the other side and puts them in a pile. She is a folder, too. When the load is through I come around and help her. She doesn’t look up. “My window was all fogged this morning,” she says.

  “It’s almost Thanksgiving.”

  “Maybe we should cook up a turkey.”

  “We can brown it on the iron.”

  “It’ll stick like crazy to that thing,” Chandon laughs.

  “Spray some Pam, add vegetables. So they’ll be a little flat.”

  She smiles and grabs a starchy white sheet by the corners.

  I take the other side and together we fold it over once, pulling tightly to smooth the creases. We fold again, moving a couple steps toward each other, the sheet drooping between us like the diagram of fallopian tubes I remember from health class. Angel’s baby never screamed when they sliced him out of her stomach. She said she couldn’t push anymore so they had to do a cesarean. Then they stapled her skin back together like a term paper. Before they carried off the silent child she named him Alejandro.

  Chandon grabs my ends, I take the bottom, and we step again. It’s a good method, ours, and in the last few weeks we’ve narrowed it down to a science. Apart from the heat and skanky air, working in the laundry’s not so bad. The machines are noisy, but in a strange way it’s peaceful down here. We’re the inner sanctum. Clothes come in dirty and leave clean, like blood circulating through the heart, but not in Angel’s baby because his heart has the virus.

  “You seen her yesterday?” Chandon breaks a few minutes of silence. I nod yes and hope that’s all to the conversation. She senses my discomfort. “She don’t look so good’s all I’m saying.”

  I nod again. “Yeah, I know.”

  We finish the last sheet and move on to the pillowcases, each of us standing at one side of the table. At home Nancy had kingsized pillowcases. Blair’s were silk. By the end of the night my cheek had always slipped down to the very edge.

  “You scared?” Chandon says, without looking up.

  “Scared?”

  “She got it, you know.”

  “Maybe she’s just the carrier. It can happen like that.”

  “She knew all the time.”

  “It takes two, it could have been the father.”

  “Sorry, Long Island.” She finally looks up, her eyes injected with sadness. “That just ain’t the way it goes with this thing.”

  Our faces lock a second, long enough to feel the weight of Angel’s destiny, and then, quietly, we return to the folding. The way Chandon works her fingertips over the pillowcases they could be bound for the fanciest hotel in the world. Bedding so crisp and pure I want to mess it up the way somebody messed up Angel with a contaminated prick or needle.

  But I can’t think about that now. Not when I have pillowcases to fold. A job to do. At home I never had chores. Jack was against them on principle. He’d grown up helping out his mother and hating every minute of it. As soon as they could, he and Nancy paid people to do the laundry, mow the lawn, clean the cars, put the right amount of chlorine in the pool at our summer house. Everything always sparkled. Not an item out of place. The couches and chairs looked like people never sat in them. Another memory: After Blair left, I’d begged and begged for a cat, and Nancy said, “Where did you get that idea? This isn’t that kind of house. A cat would be miserable here.” I took my case to Jack who said cats gave him hives but it was up to my mother. I asked one more time, promising to feed it and let it out to pee, the way Blair had done it with the girls. But Nancy wouldn’t budge. “Do you have any idea what cats do to couches?” she said, and I remembered the frayed coverings on Blair’s bed, the pulls in her rug, those scratches on the coffee table. Cats’ll mess up anything, they don’t care. It was my mother who would have been miserable.

  I grab a pile of towels and white socks with black numbers scrawled on the side in indelible ink, numbers Chandon and I match together in the final stage. Folding is an orderly business. We do one section at a time; first linens, then clothing, and everything matches up in the end. Even when we lose a sock, we know who’s missing it by the number left over. I had no idea I would thrive on this kind of order, just as I never realized the necessity of keeping my space neat. Outside I never even made my bed. As long as I kept the door shut, Nancy didn’t care. I could shut myself off from the rest of the house. In here I’m on display, cleanliness a reflection of my character. I bribe a guard for bleach to scrub my toilet every other day. The first time he handed me the paper cup covered with saran wrap I opened it and took a whiff. A sourness crept up my nostrils and made me think of Mimi. Bleach was all hers. Laundry detergent and scrap metal belong to Chandon. When we break we smoke cigarettes away from the chemicals. She’s afraid we might torch the place. I think it’s impossible. Or somebody would have done it already.

  Chandon sits sideways on the windowsill, smoking, her other hand curled around a jaundiced paperback. The cover’s turned back so I can’t see the title. I could have brought something to read, I’m a big reader, anyone’ll tell you. But this is supposed to be our time together. My neck flushes, the taste of hot metal on my tongue. I move closer to Chandon to see what’s more interesting than me. She turns her shoulder further into the window. I stab my cigarette next to her on the wall, squirming behind her to get a look at the author and title on top of the frayed pages. Can’t see. Tight brown hairs pull her scalp into a part. It’s the color of those big white freckles on her face and arms. I like that she’s both light and dark. I am the same wishy-washy yellow all over. “You coulda just asked.” Chandon swings around, and I startle backwards.

  She holds out the book, her forefinger planted inside to save her place. It’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A popular book in here, mostly with black girls. I sometimes forget Chandon’s black since she hangs with Mimi and Angel. She says she’s from the West Indies so she understands Puerto Ricans, but at heart she’s as black as Stella. “This thing with Angel’s too deep,” she says. “I need something to grab onto, some direction, know what I’m saying?”

  I nod, I do. I really do.

  Chandon tells me she’s been talking to the Muslims for a while. This doesn’t mean much. In here everyone’s always talking to somebody or reading something that’s supposed to have all the answers. Prison is a philosophical supermarket. Not too different from college, I suppose. Only you don’t want to be putting Rikers on your resume. Chandon says Malcolm converted to Islam in the white man’s prison. “No offense, Long Island,” she says, “but white people got blood on their hands.”

  I nod again, although I can’t figure out what that’s got to do with Angel.

  “See, what I’m saying is, you got
to believe there’s some order to it,” she continues, “some kind of rules guiding us. Shit, if you don’t, might as well sign on here for good.”

  Her eyes wander toward Stella, who sits by the radio eating a Hershey’s bar. Privileges. “She on her way Upstate again,” Chandon says. “I heard her mother’s inside, too. Big reunion coming.”

  “Can’t say I’m sad to see her go.”

  “Why? Somebody else just gonna take her place. They come and go. You know Mimi been in three times in five years.”

  Now she’s got my full attention.

  “Think about it: On the outside, what she got? A coupla kids and some sorry-ass motherfucker draining every last cent of the white man’s handouts, when he ain’t disappeared himself. Here she got her people. She got everything taken care of, don’t gotta worry about nothing ’cept her enemies, but her people be watching her back. What she don’t know is it’s exactly what they want.”

  “What who wants?”

  “The system.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s complicated,” Chandon says, and taps her paperback against her other outstretched palm. “You gotta read the book.”

  I nod, say maybe I will. Chandon smiles and shakes her head like she does whenever I make a joke, but I’m not kidding. I want to understand the system and say so. “Guess it can’t hurt,” she says, then shoves Malcolm into the back of her pant seam. I follow her to the pile of clothes we’d left before the break. Blue shirts stacked by number. Matching pants. “Executive wear,” Chandon jokes, as we fold and laugh together, but that book hangs between us like a drooping sheet, one we can’t sort by number and tuck away.

  Angel’s got the virus. No matter what kind of prophets we summon, no matter how perfectly we match the numbers or how neat we keep our cells, there’s no order in the universe that can knock the bad blood out of her.

  THAT PAPER I BOUGHT FROM SUSAN FINKELSTEIN earned me an A and more attention from Mr. Belgrave, who grilled me in class like I ought to know things; so I had to keep up with The Canterbury Tales, even when I was wasted and couldn’t understand the tangled writing and was convinced Belgrave was testing me to see if I was really Finkelstein-smart or if that paper had been a fake. I’d re-typed it before turning it in to cover my tracks. Consistency was the key to deception. Learned that earlier in the year when I’d stupidly turned in an absence note from Nancy after forging a few of my own. They called me down to the office and accused me of penning it, but when the assistant dean phoned Nancy and she said no, it was really hers, what could they do? People are such morons. I would have hauled Nancy in and demanded she account for all the previous notes, but that’s me and I don’t trust anybody.

  The hippies used to say don’t trust anyone over thirty. Makes sense, although that was almost two decades earlier which meant even the youngest hippies had hit thirty by the time I was in eleventh grade and were all walking around not trusting each other. If you ask me, that’s how Ronald Reagan became president and how former hippie Ted Belgrave with his corduroy jeans and turquoise pinkie ring ended up teaching Chaucer to a group of kids who without him might have thought Chaucer was a type of sneaker or sports car. None of us paid much attention to the book, though I did like the idea of having these different people telling their tales and together they made a village, kind of like how it happened on World. People were always repeating their own little histories and connections.

  Of course I hadn’t read “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” on that numb Tuesday in January and knew Belgrave was on to me. There was an undercurrent beneath his words, warnings transmitted from his brain to mine. Like you, he knew how to speak with his eyes. Looking at him almost hurt. I tried staring out the window but that only made things worse. It was one of those blistering sunny days that looked like winter on television, the entire world glossed to make even my faded army coat seem the most vibrant green. Or maybe that was the ganja I’d bought from the Ayatollah.

  No matter how sunny it was, Belgrave never pulled down the shades. He liked playing the shadow man, dodging streams of sun as he paced up and down the aisles. I had to tilt my head back to see him. In the sun you could make out the gray hairs around his temples, the thick lines in his forehead, and the beanbag eyes bulging into his cheeks. He must have been about Jack’s age but he looked a lot older. Sadder, too. The radiator squealed. As if it had to pump harder to keep up with the killer-hot sun outside and wasn’t thrilled about it. I wondered if Belgrave had been any happier when he was a hippie, wearing tie-dyed shirts, brown curls rolling down his shoulders.

  A few sunbeams stabbed my eyes, and my neck collapsed. I leaned against my right arm, let my hair flop over my face. School was worthless. In a couple of months I was going to the Garden to a world hunger concert, even if Edie wouldn’t come with me. I’d ordered two tickets on my credit card. You might show up, you’d mentioned it in your newsletter, Babbling ’Bout Brooke. It was our responsibility to help feed the world, you said a few weeks later at a press conference with one of the guys from Crosby, Stills & Nash. You were going to perform with them. It would be historic. Nobody knew you could sing.

  Long as you didn’t make a record. I hated when famous people thought they could do everything. But you were made for the stage. You would wear white sailor pants, cowboy boots, a sparkly halter top, hold the microphone close to your lips as the crowd called out your name … Brooke, Brooke, Brooke!

  “Lillian!” Belgrave’s voice jolted me upright, sun jammed between my eyes. I think I said, “Huh?” The class laughed.

  “Okay, settle down. I don’t hear any of you racing to tell me what the Wife of Bath sets up in her prologue. What is it? Is it Chaucer? You don’t like Chaucer? He too boring for your excitable, modern minds?”

  Silence from the class. Belgrave shuffled out of the sun, moving even closer to my desk. The radiator was going haywire, hissing and squalling like a trapped animal. My stomach dropped to my knees: Something bad was about to happen, I could feel it.

  “Well, let me tell you, Chaucer is not boring. There’s more farting, burping, drinking, and screwing in here than in …” Belgrave’s voice floated into the whining radiator. Every so often I picked up a phrase … post-industrial complex … too much television … the warfare of stupidity … words I probably would sion have agreed with if I could have followed them. There was too much going on in the room with the radiator and sun at war, and all of us on edge, and Belgrave talking about the Wife of Bath like she was his favorite character on World. He said somebody had to say something or we would all have to write five pages about her that evening. “I can’t believe there’s not one person in this room who’s going to try and save you all from an essay,” he said. “Nobody? Not even you, Lillian? I thought this would be right up your alley. Come on, help out your classmates, give us something, anything, about the Wife of Bath.”

  He stared down at me, clasping his paperback copy of The Canterbury Tales to his chest, holylike. The sun shifted once more, turning its beams on the stuffy oxygen particles, and I thought I was going to pass out for lack of hydrogen, nitrogen, and whatever else freshened the air inside at my grandparents’ condo. It was missing here, in the heat. My armpits got hot. We were in for it. Belgrave was about to speak again, when a man burst into the room. “Ted! Get your class, come quick! The space shuttle blew up!”

  “What!?” Belgrave jumped. A few people gasped, whispered.

  “Just after the launch, they were, like, two thousand feet into the air and the thing exploded.” The man—a physics guy named Erlichman—circled his arms out above his head.

  “Oh my god! How?”

  “Nobody knows. They’ve got the TVs on in the auditorium. Get your class, let’s go!”

  “All right, everyone take your stuff and follow me,” Belgrave said, his face bleeding pure jaw-dropping horror, so exaggerated he seemed like a mannequin posed in shock: weak, defeated, and confused. Erlichman looked the same. It was weird being sixteen and
feeling more stable than most adults. Not that I had any recycled claims about not trusting anyone over thirty; more often I felt sorry for them. Big deal. It was just another spaceship. But I had forgotten one thing: the teacher in space. A high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire.

  Weeks later, the cleanup still in high gear, her lesson plans for space would be found floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The crew compartment would reveal that some of the astronauts had been alive during the three- to four-minute fall to sea. By then we would also know the accident had been caused by a routine booster failure and could have been prevented, which made people very mad at NASA. But on the day the space shuttle exploded there was wholesale grief and confusion as Ted Belgrave pushed open the door to the auditorium, his fingers still gripped to that copy of The Canterbury Tales.

  I ducked out of the harmonic grieving session soon after Belgrave and a few other weepy teachers took to the podium. Belgrave had said it was okay for us to mourn as we watched the shuttle burst over and over again with the sound muted, leaving commentary to the adults. A total mistake. They were wrapped up in the mythology of outer space. Ships with romantic names like Apollo, Viking, and Venus. Guys in space suits giant-stepping with the American flag long before the man on the moon became the MTV logo. The space race might have ended a decade ago, but today, if you believed the teachers, marked the end of an era. A teacher! How could NASA blow up a teacher?

  When I was a kid I’d told my third-grade class my father was an astronaut. Every morning I watched him board the silver cars of the Long Island Rail Road and pretended he was plunging into the solar system, off to explore worlds unknown. I had the coolest father in my class. Then one Saturday at the supermarket, Jack and I ran into my teacher. He said it was an honor meeting an astronaut and wondered if Jack would come and talk to the class. Stroking back a few strands of shiny black hair, his eyes like sparklers, Jack said thanks but he didn’t like public speaking, just the thought of it sent him into a cold sweat, he didn’t know how teachers did it. My teacher smiled. Flattery was Jack’s business. Later he told Nancy the story, and she laughed. My father could barely ride a bicycle without dosing himself on Dramamine. “I really like those silver suits, though,” Jack said to my mother, and she smiled, and my lie had become something funny between them. I told people he quit the space program.