The Best of Good Page 16

  Behind her, Robin was sliding a pan into the oven. “Hi, Good.” She didn’t look at me. She was busy with the oven. “Whoa! That’s hot! I don’t think the dial has any influence on the actual temperature anymore.” She closed the door to the stove and stared at it for a moment.

  “Just turn it way down and check in a few minutes,” Liz suggested.

  “I guess it will be done faster this way,” Robin said. “A gas microwave!”

  Liz deposited the ice cream in the freezer. “Here,” she said, pushing a pile of lettuce on a towel toward me. “Make yourself useful. Tear this up and put it in this bowl. It’s awfully quiet in the bathroom. I wonder what’s going on.” She left the kitchen. A few seconds later, there was a scream, all the kids at once, it sounded like, and then a lot of laughter. A few minutes after that, Maddy, Mike, and Ray came out in their pajamas. Elise was in shorts and a T-shirt. Maybe she was too old to eat dinner in her pj’s. I wouldn’t know.

  When dinner happened, it seemed that each kid was having something different. Ray had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mike had grilled cheese. Elise and Maddy had spaghetti with butter. There was a chilis rellenos casserole that Robin, Liz, and I ate. The conversation was mainly about food. “Can I have some more milk?”

  “What do you say?”

  “I’m done!”

  “Good, brought ice cream. If you want some you’re going to have to do better than that.”

  “How many bites do I have to eat to get the ice cream?”

  “Mom! I’m done!”

  And so on. No one asked me what I was up to lately. Or anything.

  I planned to stay about fifteeen to twenty minutes after dinner, just so that I didn’t seem unfriendly. But before I knew it, Elise was asking if I knew how to play Parcheesi, and Mike wanted help with, his Legos.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I could—”

  Robin said, “Kids, don’t make him play with you!” To me, she said, “I’m sorry, Good. I’m sure you didn’t count on—”

  “That’s OK,” I said, “really. I haven’t played Parcheesi in a long time. I’m way out of practice.” I sat down on the couch with them.

  Ray climbed into my lap and started sucking his thumb. To the other kids, Liz, and Robin, this was probably no big deal, something Ray did all the time. But I had never had a three-year-old in my lap before. I pictured someone who knew me well walking in right now and finding me here like this. I pictured a bouncer from The Club somehow finding me here. “Good! Man! What’s this?” I pictured myself shrugging, baffled, in response.

  I looked at Robin.

  “Well, Ray!” she said. “Nothing like making yourself comfortable!”

  Ray leaned his head back and looked up at her silently. His eyes blinked in slow motion.

  “Just give him to me, if you want,” Robin said. “He’s heavy.”

  “No!” Ray said through his thumb. He pressed his head firmly into my chest.

  “I’m OK,” I said. He was heavy, but in a nice way. He smelled like chocolate and something else I couldn’t quite place. Buttered carrots, maybe.

  “Don’t forget I got a movie, you guys,” Robin said. “Do you still want to watch it?”

  “After this,” Elise said. “I want to win!”

  “I want to win,” Mike said, joining the game. “You always win!”

  “Maybe this is your night,” I said to Mike.

  Maddy won. She concentrated hard on counting out her moves, deciding which piece to play each time. It took a long time. She didn’t make a big deal about sending another players guys back to the start. She just quietly progressed until all her men were home. Then she said, “Ta-da!” with both index fingers pointed at the ceiling.

  “Oh, man!” Mike said. “One of my guys never even got started! Lookit! He’s still in the thing!”

  “Next time!” said their mother.

  “That was a great game!” I said. One of my legs, the one with Ray on it, was asleep. “I guess I better get home and let you guys—”

  “No!” said Mike.

  “Aren’t you going to watch the movie with us?” Maddy wanted to know.

  Ray’s eyes flickered, and he gripped the front of my shirt with his fist.

  “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t do this. I would get claustrophobic and antsy with all these kids and a horrible children’s movie playing. I should get out of here right away, before I start to get desperate. “Well,” I said, “Maybe I could stay for a little bit of the movie. The beginning, maybe. A couple minutes.” I shifted Ray to my other leg.

  The movie was about dinosaurs trying to escape some kind of disastrous climactic change caused by a meteor hitting the earth. I tried to pay attention, but the next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes. My mouth was open and all dried out. Robin was rewinding the video. Maddy was asleep with her head on one arm of the couch, and Mike had his head on the other. I was in the middle with Ray draped across me. Oh, my God! What was happening? It was as if I’d been drugged or hypnotized or something! Could there have been something weird in the food?

  Liz was putting the game pieces back in the box.

  “Hmm,” I said, running my tongue over my dry lips. “I fell asleep.” I couldn’t feel my feet.

  “I don’t blame you,” Elise said. “That was so boring! And I usually like dinosaur movies.”

  Robin said, “Let me take this guy off you.” She lifted Ray, who was as limp as an old bath towel, and carried him off. I shook life back into my feet and legs.

  In a few minutes Robin came back. She said, “Could you take Maddy to her room? I’ll show you where she goes.”

  I looked at her. I didn’t carry kids. I could not remember ever carrying a single child in my life.

  “I have this thing with my neck,” Robin said to her mother. She started rubbing her neck. “It’s—you know when you’re getting on the freeway and you have to look over your shoulder? My neck kills me when I do that!’

  “Maybe you should go to the doctor,” Liz said, picking up the Parcheesi box to put it somewhere.

  “Oh, sure, like I have time,” said Robin. “First door on your right,” she told me. She was picking up toys from the floor and throwing them into a basket. “I’ll clear a path. It’s the bed closest to the door.”

  I looked down at the sleeping little girl. What if she wakes up as soon as I touch her? I thought. Would she cry? What if she cried? What if I somehow lost my grip and dropped her on the floor? Robin and her mother didn’t seem to realize that picking up a kid did not come naturally to everybody. I stood there for a second. Just grab her under the armpits and start walking, I told myself. I did. She was light. But it was her shape that made it difficult, those dangling arms and legs and the length of her body. A sixty-pound ball of concrete would have been easier. I could certainly see how doing this on a regular basis could give you neck problems. I carried Maddy to her room. There were pictures of Pink on one side and unicorns, puppies, and kittens on the other. I put Maddy on the animal side and covered her with a flowery comforter. Robin was at the door. I suddenly worried that I had done this wrong, her head at the wrong end of the bed or something.

  “Could I impose on you to help me with Mike too?”

  Another one?! I was thinking. “Sure thing,” I said.

  Elise slipped by me in the hall. “Good night,” she said quietly. “Thanks for the ice cream.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. Sometimes you wish people wouldn’t be so grateful. It makes you feel so guilty for all the nice things, big and small, hundreds of them, thousands, maybe, that you haven’t done over a number of years.

  I carried Mike into the room where Ray was already sleeping. There were a lot of cars and trucks on the floor. I stepped on something with wheels that went shooting across the room.

  “Sorry,” Robin said. “It’s dangerous in here.”

  “No harm done,” I said. It had just startled me. I lowered Mike onto his bed. He let out a quiet grunt as he hit
the pillow. I pulled up a comforter with traffic signs on it. I looked over at Ray, who was sprawled on his back in the shape of a star, arms and legs spread, as if open for anything that came along.

  This got to me somehow, and I had to say something quick before my throat closed up on me. “OK,” I said. “Well.”

  “Hey, thanks for coming,” Robin said as I came out. She was on the floor now, picking up toys on her hands and knees.

  I started out.

  “Thanks for the ice cream,” said Liz when I got to the kitchen.

  “Thank you for dinner.” I headed for the door.

  “The kids love you,” Liz said over her shoulder.

  “Well, they’re making a big mistake,” I said.

  She laughed; she thought I was joking.

  At home, I went to the kitchen and put my ear against the wall. I heard the water running and plastic clattering, toys being thrown into the basket, maybe. They weren’t talking about me or anything.

  thirty-one

  I had spent the evening at Robins again. Her mom had brought the kids dinner from McDonald’s, a special treat. There was some Happy Meal toy the kids wanted for their vast collections, some piece of plastic representing a character in a movie they hadn’t seen. The rest of us had pasta and tomato sauce. I had brought chocolate cream pie from a bakery down the street.

  Anyway, it was much later, after McDonald’s and pasta, and they were all in bed. Robins mother had just left, and I was about to get going too.

  Robin and I were in the kitchen. She was folding laundry and had just picked up a towel with a picture of Goofy on it when it happened. At first, I didn’t know what it was, didn’t see it coming, and didn’t recognize it when it arrived. In a way, it was like the sudden precipitous onset of a devastating virus. There was nothing I could do to stop it or to change its course. It simply happened to me; it came over me with a power all its own, and there was not a thing that I could do to fight it off, postpone it, or diminish its severity. It was like falling, too, like coming to the edge of something, and having just enough time to gasp or say, “Oh, shit!” before going right over the side and dropping fast in a free fall into a deep abyss. When I did finally clue in to what was happening, when I could identify it, name it with absolute certainty, I realized that this had nothing to do with any of the things I had always thought it had. It wasn’t about the size or shape of body parts. It wasn’t about faces, not even eyes. Neither voice nor mannerisms had any bearing on it either, and it wasn’t about intellect or taste in books, music, or movies. It had nothing to do with timing or life circumstances. I was under the control of something outside of myself, outside of any kind of force that I had ever heard of. I had fallen in love with Robin, my next-door neighbor.

  As Robin placed the Goofy towel on top of a neat stack, I took a breath that seemed to be the first in a long, long time. Then I reached up and took her hand. I stood, and she looked at me, surprised. She had this kind of half smile on her face, and I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. I didn’t stop to ask. I leaned forward to kiss her mouth.

  “Uh, no,” she said, stepping back into the refrigerator. “No, thank you. Sorry. No. I mean, don’t. Please.”

  “What?” I said. I was a little startled, as if waking up from a dream in a place I didn’t remember closing my eyes.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m going to be blunt. I’m not interested.” She said it softly, even patted my hand, to let me know that she didn’t mean to hurt my feelings. But, clearly, there was no uncertainty there, no softness, and no room for a change of heart.

  I said, “What do I have to do?”

  She said, “Nothing. We’re not going to get romantically involved. At all. Ever. No way.” She picked up another towel.

  “OK,” I said. “What would I have to do to change your mind?”

  She laughed.

  “Seriously. I’m not going to go away.”

  She shook her head. “No. Not happening.”

  I stood there staring at her, and it was like I saw this door to another world, and I wanted to walk through it. I Just wanted to be next to her, I don’t know, hanging up Christmas stockings and shopping for a new dishwasher, I said, “What if I marry you?”

  Immediately, she said, “Well, that would be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it?” I thought she said it unnecessarily harshly, “I just told you I’m not interested. Why would you marry someone who’s not interested in you?”

  I said, “But I’m… I’m interested in you.”

  There was a huge silence. She folded a T-shirt: Mike’s. She folded another T-shirt: Elise’s. She started on a sheet.

  “Robin?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Could you just think about it?”

  She said, “No. I couldn’t. Not even for one minute. You picked the wrong person. You have made a mistake. I forgive you. Now let’s forget about it. Pretend it never happened. Go home, Good. Please. Could you go? Now?”

  I stood there.

  “Go!” she said. She pointed to the door, the way people did with dogs.

  I went.

  I had lived in my apartment alone for all these years, and I don’t remember ever being lonely until now. I had been horny. I had been bored, and I had been depressed. There was that very bad time after Diana left when all I wanted was for her to come back so that I could try to be what she wanted. This was different. This was worse, far worse. Even I could see that up to now I had existed as a kind of ghost, a stick figure, a shadowy sketch imitating a living man. Now I had had a glimpse of what it felt like to be flesh and blood, a real person. For the first time, I experienced a massive ache, a deep longing for another person, an individual, specific other person, whom I knew pretty well, and who was on the other side of my kitchen wall. All of a sudden, I felt incredibly small, microscopic, and powerless beside this huge thing that was being in love with Robin.

  How did people survive being in love? This was much too much for me to bear. I wanted to just curl up and close my eyes. I did this, made myself into a small helpless shape in one corner of my bed. But when I did, I found that a movie of Robin was playing on the backs of my eyelids. Robin was bagging groceries in her Vons uniform and her name tag that said SERVING YOU, ROBIN, SINCE 2000. Robin was loading her kids into the car. Robin had just washed her hair, hadn’t had a chance to comb it out, and was microwaving mini pancakes. Robin was laughing because of something Ray said. Robin was crying because Vic had left her after he promised to stay forever. It was a perfect, beautiful montage of Robin. I could have written a musical score for it if it weren’t for this burning, scorching, ripping pain that was shooting straight through me. I wasn’t going to make it. I was going to die of being in love with Robin.

  • • •

  I had entered a new subphase of the post-donut era, which involved Robins avoiding me. Any idiot, including me, could see that. She must have been doing her laundry in the middle of the night or even at her mom’s house, and supervising her kids from the kitchen window. She must have stopped walking with them down to the 7-Eleven to waste their allowances on candy. She must have started sending Elise out to get the mail and take out the garbage.

  OK. This was what people did when they didn’t want to see you. I knew that. I had done it myself, switching bartending shifts to avoid a waitress or a singer-songwriter who had made the mistake of developing feelings for me. I did it sometimes to Jeanette to avoid her twenty-minute stories, to keep from having to carry something for her, buy something for her, or walk her somewhere. God, I thought with shame, I had even done it to Robin, Sure, avoiding people was what people did in certain situations. But she couldn’t stay away from me forever; we lived in the same house. I had that going for me. I had that one fact on my side. I could wait. I could be very patient, if I had to be.

  • • •

  Starting a new life wasn’t just a matter of wanting one and buying new furniture. Improvements had to occur on the inside too. I
could do that. One day when I was going to the grocery store, I went up the stairs to Jeanette’s place, and I knocked on the door. Jeanette snatched back the curtain with one of her clawlike hands, as if the other hand might be clutching a crowbar. When she saw it was me, her face changed from narrow-eyed suspicion to confused welcome.

  “Good morning, Jeanette,” I said when she opened the door. As a matter of fact, it was morning. I had been getting up at seven for a whole series of days now.

  “Well, for goodness sake! It’s Good! What are you doing here? Is the house on fire? Did I leave the water running in the laundry room? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, Jeanette,” I said. “Nothing at all. I’m going to the store and I wondered if you wanted anything.”

  “Well,” she sputtered, a hand to her chest. “I… indeed I do! I’ll go and get my list.”

  Now I’m in for it, I thought. She’s going to give me a whole lecture on sizes and flavors and her digestive system. I was up for it though; I could handle anything Jeanette threw my way.

  “Are you going to Robins store, honey?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “As a matter of fact, I am. It just so happens. Coincidentally.”

  “She knows what I like. Just give her this.” She handed me a list written in shaky, loopy letters on a piece of lined paper torn out of a spiral pad.

  This was going to be easy. I didn’t even have to think up a reason to look for Robin, because Jeanette had given me one. I would simply find her and ask for her help in getting Jeanette’s things. Perfectly legitimate. She would see how nice I could be, getting groceries for an old lady. We would talk. We would make plans.

  I got to Vons at around eleven o’clock. I went to customer service and asked for Robin. The manager’s name was Alex, and he had been serving you since 1991, I saw from his name tag. “Is Robin here?” I asked him. “I need these groceries for an elderly lady who lives—”