nonfiction

In Memory of Troy Bernardo

Portrait image of a man smiling into the camera.

The Tampa Review editorial team was saddened to hear of the passing of Troy Bernardo, a recent Tampa Review contributor. Troy’s obituary can be found here. We wanted to express our heartfelt condolences and share Troy Bernardo’s nonfiction piece, “Raw,” published in Tampa Review 63/64.

Raw

Troy Bernardo

When you first start eating raw oysters, you can’t taste any difference between them. The Penn Cove Selects, Belons, Olys, Kumos, they all taste the same to newcomers and casual eaters. People say it’s like learning to taste wine, in the fact that you need to learn the subtle nuances over years through hard, dedicated drinking. But I’ve been drinking wine since I was sixteen and I still can’t tell the difference between a Cab from a cardboard box and a twenty-five-dollar glass of Malbec from The Golden Steer. Oysters though? They make sense to me. Some are briny, others are kind of crunchy, some are the color of pennies, and sometimes they’re clean and crisp.

Ordering them is like a low-stakes Russian Roulette. Every so often, I’ll get half a dozen, and it’s like eating straight out of a chum bucket. Other times though, when I’m at the beach on a sunny afternoon, drinking a beer, and dressing one up with horseradish and cocktail sauce, before I slurp it out of the shell, I know it’s worth the potential Hepatitis. That all changed though on New Year’s Eve, 2018.

That year my wife and I had a lot to celebrate. We had moved to San Diego, a lifetime goal for both of us, my younger brother had just gotten married days before, and I had published my first novel. We were back in my hometown of Port Orange, Florida, and spending nights at the pool halls I grew up sneaking into and relaxing with family to wrap up an exciting year. That night we were going to my favorite restaurant, Our Deck. It’s a stereotypical beach bar and grill that looks like a large shack underneath the Dunlawton Bridge. The draw for kids is you can throw your leftovers into the mouths of dozens of catfish in the intercoastal that splash over each other for scraps. As I got older, I found it morbid that we were feeding our uneaten fish sandwiches to living fish, but when I got even older than that, I realized that’s all they really eat.

To celebrate, my wife and I decided to get a few necessities for the evening. The first item on our list was to get some good champagne. We’re not fancy, so when I say, “good,” I mean not Andre. That along with a bag of BBQ Fritos (a chip the Midwest and the West Coast don’t get for some reason) and some sweet tea. But, the pièce de résistance, and what we really wanted, were my wife’s new favorite delicacy: raw oysters. She had grown fond of them out in California where I had convinced her to try some months before. Ever since that day, whenever we saw a raw bar or we were at a nice seafood restaurant, Laura would ask if we could split a dozen. I usually ate most of them, but I didn’t mind. 

By late afternoon, we had picked up most of our supplies, but we were still missing the oysters. On the way home from the liquor store we stopped at Gaff’s, the local butcher. I went in alone, knowing my wife wouldn’t appreciate the smell. Gaff’s is, what I would call, more of the blue-collar butcher in my small town. The meat is high quality and reasonably priced, but the stink of drained blood and the stench of dozens of kinds of meat can be overwhelming, especially to a city girl.

Truthfully, I felt intimidated grabbing a number and waiting there by the glass case of meats. Sure, I had bought steaks before and even some pork chops from Gaff’s but I had never bought oysters from anywhere other than a restaurant. Doing something for the first time in front of a crowd makes me feel nervous. I’m worried I’ll say the wrong thing or make an ass out of myself, even when that thing is as simple as buying oysters.

“Number seventy-six,” the meat guy said.  

I walked up to the counter, the other men buying their steaks were watching me, waiting to see what I would get. They were judging me. I was sure of it. I tried to ignore them and stared at the three types of oysters they had. Living on the West Coast, I had been buying Baja and Pacific Northwest oysters, but now, I didn’t recognize any of these gulf ones. 

“I-uhhh,” I paused. My hands got sweaty, and I shifted my weight from side to side. 

The meat man became instantly impatient, crossing his arms and glaring at me. My eyes darted to the closest ones. I pointed and said, “Half dozen of the Gulf Coast Oysters, please.”  

The meat man counted them out and put them into a plastic bag. He slapped a sticker on it and said, “Refrigerate these right when you get home, ok?” He talked condescendingly to me, and it made me mad. But I deserved it. I had no idea what I was doing, “and” he emphasized, “make sure you keep the bag open so they can breathe. Got it?”

“Of course,” I said, like he was the idiot. But I knew absolutely nothing of what he was talking about.

When I got back to the car, I put the bag of oysters in between Laura and me. While inside the store, even over the strong smell of the other meats, that stench of raw fish overpowered everything. Inside the car, it was stronger, so I tried to open the windows to help. Laura immediately noticed, and picked up the bag, peering inside. 

“Can we close this?” she asked. “It smells like fish in here.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because they need to breathe,” I said, full of confidence. 

There was an awkward pause. Even though I was watching the road, I could tell Laura was staring at me. 

“Wait, but they’re dead, right?” she asked.

“I mean, I think so. Oysters live in the water. They can’t breathe air.”

Laura reached into her purse, and out of the corner of my eye I could see her frantically Googling. When I got to a stoplight I glanced over and saw what she was looking up. “Can oysters breathe air?” and “When we eat oysters are they alive?”

Laura isn’t a vegetarian. But her love for animals has become more serious as we’ve grown older. She stopped her car in the middle of the road to be with a squirrel in its dying moments after some heartless driver had struck it and kept going. She befriended a mouse in our walls, naming him Mickey, and refusing to set up traps to catch him even after he had chewed through several bags of chips. She has picked up alley cats and cooed them gently in her arms when the streets were dark and quiet after a long night of drinking. 

“Ah!” she gasped. “This website says they’re alive when you eat them!”

“I feel like after you shuck them open though, they’re probably dead.”

She kept scrolling and gasping and scrolling and gasping over and over. 

“Some websites say that they’re dead after you open them up, but other ones say they don’t know and there’s no way to prove they’re dead after you shuck them.”

After ten minutes of more dramatic gasping, I was turning down the road my parents live on. I finally got a chance to look at Laura. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were misty, and she was rattled by the fact that she may have been eating animals alive. For me, this wasn’t a big deal. I’m not a hunter, but I am an avid outdoorsman, and I do fish. While I respect animals, I understand the reality of the situation. The lamb chops in the grocery store don’t grow on trees, and unless I get meat by three in the afternoon, I feel sluggish and I can’t concentrate. 

“What do you want me to do?” I asked her, pulling into the driveway. “They won’t take the oysters back.”

“We have to do something,” she said, pleading with me. 

We sat there for a minute, both of us thinking of something to say. After a while, I got out and grabbed the champagne and the bag of oysters, before heading inside. I put it all in the fridge, where the meatman had recommended they go right away, and opened up a beer. Laura continued to search the internet, scouring for anything that would let us know when the oysters were actually, truly dead.

“Wait,” Laura said, a lightbulb going off, “what kind of oysters are they?”

“Gulf Coast Oysters,” I said, in between sips of Jai Alai. 

“Like the Gulf of Mexico?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Isn’t that where we are now?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The Gulf of Mexico is next to Florida, isn’t it?”

“The Gulf is on the west side, hun,” I said. “We’re on the Atlantic side.”

“But the Gulf Stream goes by here.”

My parents, realizing we were home, came out into the kitchen with us. They could tell Laura was upset, but didn’t know about what.

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“I’m saying, let’s release them.”

“How?”

“We’re going to Our Deck tonight, right? That’s on the water. Let’s take the oysters and set them free.”

It wouldn’t be the ocean per se. It was under the Daytona Beach Bridge, and it was the intercoastal where the water was murky and dirty. 

“Hun, they’ll probably die if we throw them in there,” I said.   

“Well, they’ll definitely die if we eat them.”

My parents were starting to realize what was happening, and while they weren’t making fun of Laura, they exchanged confused glances. My dad had already started laughing.

“So,” Dad said, “you’re going to throw the oysters you just bought into the water during dinner?”

“Well, we don’t have to do that,” Laura said. “Troy could still eat the oysters if he wants to.”

Laura and I hadn’t been married that long, but I knew better than to fall for this trap. 

“No, that’s ok,” I said. “You’ve kind of killed the overall experience anyways.”

Later that night, we pulled into the restaurant under the bridge. It’s just a gravel parking lot that has a short, old fishing dock next to a marina. Laura, me, my parents, and my youngest brother, all walked down the dock together. The moon was a small waning crescent, but the lights on the bridge and from across the intercoastal made the water glint with both artificial and natural light. The only sounds were catfish jumping and passing cars overhead. 

Laura reached into the bag first and picked one of the oysters out. She looked at it, examining its curves in the near dark. “Do you think they’ll really die?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I really don’t know.”

Without hesitating, she cocked her arm back and threw it as far as she could into the channel. I grabbed one and did the same, and even though I asked my parents and brother if they wanted to throw one as well, they didn’t want any part of it. 

Laura threw the last one and stared out at the water until the ripples faded and only the small waves from the wind were there. I turned to my wife and she was smiling in the weak light, and she deserved to smile. She had done something that was, at least to me, very brave. That day, it was more important for her to try and do the right thing and look silly than sell out and be what everyone else expected. 

We all went to Our Deck for dinner. There were no guilt trips from Laura or teasing from my family. I did point out the irony of how we ate pounds of seafood, but that night I passed on the oysters.

Maria Ivkovic Manuccia

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BALKAN SHEEP

by Maria Ivkovic Manuccia

There are plenty of ways to feel like an outsider; for me it was that I was a Balkan girl growing up among the lily white. Not all white is white-white, which we Eastern Europeans, particularly the Balkans, understand. Growing up, I attended Catholic elementary school in a Chicago suburb. My classmates were all Catholic like me, but they were overwhelmingly Irish, with names like O’Connor or Connolly or Sullivan or Smith, and I am sure none of them had met a Balkan before.

At first they thought I was one of them. As children, our features did not vary widely. We all had cute, small noses and foreheads and craniums—important because the Balkan adult has a large, square cranium—usually a giveaway. We also dressed identically in Catholic school uniforms.

However, there were names to consider. My first name, Maria, was close enough to Mary that nobody paid much attention. But the Irish-American schoolchildren had not encountered a surname like mine, with its “-ic” ending. I tried to explain: “You pronounce the ‘i-c’ as ‘eetch,’” but they insisted on pronouncing those letters as “itch.” I knew even then that “itch” rhymed with bitch and witch, and this was not a good thing.

Adding to the difficulty, Balkan surnames have a way of pairing difficult consonants. Mine paired “v” and “k” to form Ivkovic. I explained that the “v” was practically silent, more like a quick “f” sound, resulting in “eef-ko-veetch.” Instead, they insisted on “ick-a-vitch,” which sounded like “ick I itch” or “ick a witch.”

I told my father over dinner. He sat hunched over the kitchen table eating fish. Its white flesh stuck to his fingers when he pulled it from the bone. He said, “They need to practice. Tell them to try saying ‘Na vrh brda vrba mrda.’” A tongue twister meaning, “On the top of a mountain the willow sways.”

I did not follow my dad’s advice. Instead, I lowered my eyes whenever “ick a bitch” elicited giggles and my classmates left me standing alone on the chalked-up patch of pavement where we had been playing hopscotch. Or maybe there was no hopscotch, but this is how I remember it.

Then the day came, during a time we were learning to write in cursive, that my teacher, Miss Walsh, asked the students to gather on the floor in a circle and share with the class what it was our fathers did. “Go on and sit Indian style, everyone,” she said.

Each student took his turn. They all seemed to have firefighter fathers named Bob or Tim. Straightforward professions, straightforward names. I wanted to disappear into the grey carpeting of the classroom.

“And Mary, what does your father do?” Miss Walsh said.

“My father’s a doctor,” I said with finality, and then looked at the girl sitting next to me, to indicate it was now her turn.

“What is his name?” Miss Walsh said.

I felt the blood rush to my face as I said his name softly: “Dragan.” I made sure to pronounce it as differently as possible from the fire-breathing figure familiar to my classmates.

But one of them blurted, hot-faced, “Dragon? What kind of name is that?” Giggles followed. I did not correct them this time. Instead, I said he had a dragon tattoo, hoping the class would be afraid.

“Mary, tell the class where you are from,” Miss Walsh said.

I searched my brain for the word that represented where we came from. “Yugoslavia.”

“So you are Yugo-slav-ian,” she said.

I remembered what my parents had told me, and recited: “No. I’m Croatian, but I’m from Yugoslavia.” I hoped they wouldn’t ask me what I meant. It was all so complicated.

I wondered if the children told their parents about “the girl from Yugoslavia.” Perhaps they asked their parents if such a country did in fact exist, or if this was a mythical place where dragons came from. It seemed to me that even then, before Yugoslavia became associated with concentration camps and shelled out buildings, the children treated me as someone not to be trusted.

During lunch they exchanged Fruit Roll-Up flavors with each other, but turned away from me when I reached into the crinkled skin of my paper bag. It may have been that they knew I wouldn’t have Fruit Roll-Ups. Instead I had strange meats and bread far darker than the white Wonder Bread they were used to.

After a while I convinced my mother that buying me strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups was a matter of survival, as if I could barter for trust. But the Fruit Roll-Up trick did not work. Nobody took them from me, and I didn’t enjoy how they stuck to the roof of my mouth.

 

Instead, their distrust of me deepened in the summer, when I disappeared to Yugoslavia and came back brown-skinned and shorn. During those first days back, the children would sit at their desks excitedly, the girls with their long ponytails as blonde as halo light. I would enter the classroom as late as possible, knowing it was impossible to hide my skin but wearing a hat to hide the mullet cut my Croatian Aunt Gizela had given me weeks before. The teachers would say, “Run along Mary and find a seat,” and it always seemed to take a very long time to find one, or maybe it only felt like a long time because I walked among whispers.

I remember the musky smell of Gizela and the swish of her long skirt along the floor of her salon. I sat in the black plastic swivel chair across from the mirror, watching her gather her tools. She told me that punks are cool in America. The word she used was not punk, but “punkeritsa,” which roughly translates to “little punk girl.” I couldn’t bring myself to disagree—I wouldn’t tell any adult they were wrong—and I let her snip away. As a last defense, I widened my eyes in horror as my long dark hair fell into a heap on the floor.

 

My mother—who was known in her seaside town in Yugoslavia for her wind-swept and bare beauty—was a different woman in America. It appeared that she, like me, only wanted to fit in. She mimicked the American women by wearing the same sporty outfits and lining her eyes with a blue pencil. She chewed bubblegum too.

My mother learned from a neighbor that the girls and boys in the neighborhood would sometimes sleep at each others’ homes, and that in America these social events were called “sleepovers.” Although my mother found the whole thing peculiar, she thought it would be “good for Maria” if she organized a sleepover.

We invited seven girls and three girls came. They were timid coming into the Balkan home, but our dog Targa won them over because Targa—a German Shepard with a fat neck—would let them hold up her front paws while she danced like a bear. My father played good music too; it might have been the Rolling Stones.

I thought during the sleepover how happy I was to have friends like Annie and Sue and Molly, who danced with Targa, and I didn’t want anything to ruin it. So I stole away into the kitchen and let my mother know that American children ate donuts in the morning, and if we didn’t have frosted and fried dough shaped into rings with sprinkles on top, we could forget future sleepovers.

In the morning my mother peeked her head into the room where we slept like logs along the floor. I saw from where I lay that she held a pink cardboard box, and I sprang up to give her a hug. The other girls padded behind us into the kitchen, and we chose among the colored food. The dough tasted too sweet for morning, but after a few mouthfuls I tasted the flour and oil more than the sugar and I liked it very much.

This simple pleasure did not last. My father, who was a healthful man, happened upon the kitchen and lifted the donut box, and for a second it made me think of the school priest Father Murray who lifted the Bible, but my father did not bow his head.

“Isuse Boze,” he said, and I knew that meant Jesus Christ in Croatian. He was not yelling but he was very serious. “Junk. Smeca. Garbage. What is this pizdurija? Dunkin? Junk. Junkin Jonuts. You will not eat garbage in my house.”

The girls looked at each other with pink faces and then scurried out of the room like mice. I heard them giggling “ick a witch” when they had gone out of sight.

Word spread of the “Junkin Jonuts.” It was clear that Annie and Sue and Molly were not my friends. Sometimes I would pass them in the hall, and they would cup a hand to each other’s ears and make hissing sounds. If I ever saw one of them alone I would stare at her until she looked a little ashamed.

And then the week came in gym class when we were supposed to do gymnastics. I gave my father a chance to repent for making me a laughingstock, when I asked him to teach me how to do a cartwheel. My father kept calling them zvjezde or “stars.” He had been a gymnast in Yugoslavia so I hoped I could make stars as he had.

He stood with his arms crossed as my colt-like arms reached down to the grass outside. I tried many times but my feet would not swing into a swift and graceful circle above my head. I remember seeing my father’s eyes moisten before he walked away in his sporty outfit. The gymnast blood I could have inherited from Yugoslavia—had there been a more merciful God—was not running through my veins.

When the war came to Yugoslavia and filled our television screens with rubble and ribcages, my teachers spoke of the tragedy as we all sat in a circle, Indian style. I would turn red even though I had nothing to do with it, and the other children kept more distance from me than usual. The teachers asked, “Mary, can you explain why people in Yugoslavia hate each other so?” They explained how that sort of savage bloodshed would never happen in this country, heavens no it wouldn’t, and here, thank God, we had a system that would prevent such monstrosities. I thought of monsters and dragons and how the other children probably had long ago thought of Yugoslavia as a dangerous place and that this war that was a horror to me was probably no surprise to them.

After school I would run home to my parents, who sat ashen in front of the television. They told me they would take me back to this place they now called Croatia, and we would sit in a café by the sea even if grenades fell like snow in the hills.

As my hair grew out and my skin paled, I had a sense I was losing something without knowing what. Maybe it was that I knew that something greater than abandoned hopscotch was happening to a place I almost called home. That the home, that could have felt like home, was now itself a freak: darkened, shorn, devastated by monsters.

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Maria Ivkovic ManucciaMaria Ivkovic Manuccia lives in Alexandria, VA. This is her first publication.

Rori Leigh Hoatlin

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THE CELLO PLAYER

by Rori Leigh Hoatlin

On summer nights, when I was supposed to be asleep, I sat on our back deck with my father and listened to his stories. In Michigan, June nights can be chilly, so I took the faux goose down comforter that my mother bought me in Traverse City and wrapped it around myself; I sat Indian-style across from my father in the dark as the last wisps of light and horseflies disappeared and Venus came up in the west. The smell of my father’s cigar set heavy in the cooling dusk as he settled back in his green canvas chair; he was readying for the story.

My father was an orator. Words clipped along his tongue and came out animated and full-bodied. He knew when to pause, when to cry out, when to swear. He claimed that art eluded him; he couldn’t hear the art that came from his lips.

He had an arsenal of tales, but my favorite was his version of Titanic. It was a story he told year after year, trying to flesh out the details. His central character was the cello player in the first-class band. My father always changed the name of his protagonist to Ralph or Jay or John; the name never mattered—the cello player was everyone, and my father felt a special bond to this man he didn’t know and couldn’t save. He hated that even in his story, the facts couldn’t be changed: no one in the band would survive.

*

In the summer of ’98, at age eleven, my mother and father decided it was time for me to start working at our family business, Action Vending. While my classmates spent their Junes and Julys in soccer and softball leagues, I was at the Vending, sweeping the cement floors of the back garage, cleaning coffee and sandwich machines, and sorting through the pop can returns. Going to the Vending was worse than mowing the lawn or cleaning the house for my mother—those chores had definitive beginning and ending points; you could finish them at your own pace. Chores at the Vending were perpetual. I had to be there from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., no matter what.

When I started working there, business was good. I heard rumblings that we were in an economic slump, but nothing, as far as I could see, had affected our lifestyle.

One day, after learning about class systems in school, I asked my mother, “What class are we?”

She replied, “middle class,” but I was suspicious. I knew that my father’s work at the Vending was blue-collar, but he also had a title there; he was president of the company. We lived in Hidden Lake Estates, where houses ranged from a quarter to three quarters of a million dollars in price. We went to private Christian school. We went on family vacations in the summer and the fall, and we ate out every Saturday night.

To be fair, none of our activities were extravagant. Our vacations were never more than a few hours away; we’d go to Lake Michigan, which we only ever called The Lake or up north to Cadillac. Our dinners were always at family-friendly restaurants like Bill Knapp’s or Lanings. My father liked these places because he could feed his family of six for forty dollars. But still, I knew that many people in the world weren’t as fortunate as we were. Most of my peers were not going out to dinner every week. And they lived in smaller neighborhoods that didn’t have uniform mailboxes or bylaws that required the front of each house be made of at least fifty percent brick.

This neighborhood differed from the one my father knew as a child. He’d been poor. His father immigrated from The Netherlands in the 1920s and with a third-grade education, he had worked a variety of odd jobs: carpenter, construction worker. My father would tell us how he and his brothers dug water wells by hand and how they only took one bath a week. My father told us that by the time it was his turn in the tub, the water was full of leaves and mud and a bath was hardly worth it.

We were wealthy middle class, and this fact was a point of pride for my father.

*

In the beginning, when I was young, my father told the cello player’s story in a leisurely fashion, from the perspective of man who didn’t know what was to come.

With a hint of an affected accent and his shoulders straight, my father began: “On the first morning at sea, the cello player, Ralph Milton III, relaxed in his second-class quarters with a cup of Earl Grey tea and the Liverpool newspaper, which he hadn’t had a chance to read yet. After a leisurely stroll on the deck, Ralph returned to his quarters and practiced Bach on his cello. The lovely maple instrument was heavy in his hands, but after years of carting it around to various hotels and Parisian cafés, Ralph was thrilled to find stability with the White Star Line. The bow along the strings reverberated back into his forearm. And by early lunch, Ralph, dressed in his three-piece suit with gold buttons, stood before the first-class passengers along with the other members of his band, and played the soft and tender notes of Bach and Vivaldi.”

My father puffed on his cigar and spent much of the story discussing facets of the ship: where the crew slept and how far away they were from the upper decks, how the second-class quarters were nicer than most ship lines’ first-class quarters, how there were gates separating the third-class passengers from other parts of the ship. He wanted to impress upon me the importance of the details; how lavish this ship was, how, in the presence of beauty, we are blind to our gut reactions.

I was, of course, primarily interested in the sinking. At eleven, I was fixated on James Cameron’s rendition. I loved that moment when the ship finally disappeared into the aquamarine water; I held my breath with Jack and Rose.

But, by the time my father got around to the actual sinking, he was factual and informative. “For certain, the ship broke in two; we know, because they found it,” my father told us, alluding to Robert Ballard’s late-1980s discovery of the ghostly ship on the bottom of the Atlantic. He added of the water, “It was so cold, even colder than The Lake in May.” He winked at me. He didn’t want to scare me. He didn’t want me to think about decay and destruction; he didn’t want to say “death” or “demise.”

“But what happened to the cello player?” I persisted, my comforter covering my head as I tried to keep my ears warm.

My father said, tactfully, “He didn’t make it, but as the lifeboats drifted away from the ship wreckage, there was the faint sound of a cello playing. The notes fell from the sky on those who survived.”

“He was in Heaven.” I smiled, satisfied, and looked up at the stars above us. Other than telling stories, my father and I spent a good deal of time contemplating the stars. “The Summer Triangle’s out now… Are the stars part of Heaven?” I asked.

My father didn’t question my transition; we understood that when there was death, there was an afterlife. “Yes,” he replied, and I could see the faint shadow of my father’s head nod in the dark and the glowing ember of his cigar glow as he puffed again. I knew that he was glad I didn’t insist on knowing the gruesome facts. He was glad he didn’t have to talk about the slow suffocation of drowning, or the panic when you realize that the place you thought was safe is slipping away.

*

When the doors shut on the Vending in October 2004, my feelings were mixed. The yellow and brown building across from the McKay-Jaycee soccer park had been there for over fifty years. My father, my uncles, my grandfather, they all kept moving more and more machines out of the factories. At one point, my grandfather had so many old vending machines filling the garage and parking lot that he paved over their remains just to get rid of them; the acts of desperate men.

The closure meant that I no longer had to spend my summers there, that I could move on to other jobs—scooping ice cream and selling fudge. But, I could see in my father’s eyes that the Vending was more than a business; he had spent the last thirty or more years growing this place. It was a mistake that would tumble around in his mind for years to come. The only way I could begin to understand what happened to the Vending and in turn, what happened to my father, was to go back over those years leading up to its demise.

*

My maternal grandfather, Roger Sr., and his brother, Marv, started the Vending in the early 1960s. They put a few candy and pop machines in factories and every other day went to refill them. It was a source of income during the winter months (September through March in Michigan), a break from their landscaping business. But by the seventies, a fight over money caused dissension between the brothers. In the end, Marv took the landscaping business and moved it thirty miles west to the Holland area, and my grandfather took the Vending. Because it was now his primary source of income, he expanded.

As it grew, my grandfather solicited family members to join his ranks—his two sons, my uncles, Rog Jr. and Ron respectively, my father, Leo, and my father’s brother, Howard. All of these men played a variety of parts: they were the route men who drove around town in blue and white passenger vans, filled the machines with candy and homemade sandwiches; they were the mechanics, the electricians. They were also the office men; they balanced the checkbooks, deposited money, filled out expense reports, and wrote invoices. There was no division between the blue and white collar jobs at the Vending, everyone was in it together; they all knew its faults and vulnerabilities, but they plowed ahead anyway.

*

After the new millennium, I could hear sour notes of angst in my father’s story about the cello player. My father and I again sat on the deck. I was now thirteen. Now my father stressed the cello player’s doubts, as the life my father had built began to crumble. The story went like this:

“Jay Westwood, son of Richard the miller and Marta the seamstress, was missing his family on the third day of the liner’s voyage. He’d meant to send a telegram to his parents, but with the exhausting hours on board the ship, he hadn’t had time. His fingers were worn and blistering from practice.” My father held out his hand in the darkness and rubbed the pads of his fingers against his thumb to show where Jay had been hurting. The doctor had told my father he ought to quit smoking; his hands were restless in the dark without the smoke to keep them steady.

“After the ship was struck by the iceberg and the water was near to Jay, he couldn’t help but question his choice to stay on the deck. He couldn’t help but think of his mother, how disappointed she would be that he missed Easter. He looked at the other men in the band. He wasn’t bonded to them; they weren’t his real family. Before this trip they were barely acquaintances, but now here they were all together on a doomed ship; they would forever be held together in history by their profession.” My father lingered for a moment, considering, I supposed, what that meant.

My father continued. “Near Jay, there was a deck chair. Maybe if he threw it overboard at the last minute he could save himself.”

*

Every morning my father rose by 5 a.m. and drove to the Vending, and once I turned fourteen I began going with him. I had been promoted. I was allowed to go on the route with my father to restock machines. In the morning, when we drove into work down 28th St. to Vineland Avenue, I sensed that I was learning about life. There was a gravity to those mornings. Just before the sun started to rise, at the very end of the night, I heard my father sigh. He was looking intently at the sky. Before he could begin a new day, he wanted to make sure there was a new day left.

After the route, we returned to the Vending. In the afternoons, my father worked studiously behind a large mahogany desk. Poring over worksheets, his straight black hair dipped into his eyes as he balanced the books and entered the numbers into the new Compaq computer, one slow finger peck at a time.

By the early 2000s most lunch rooms at the factories were smoke-free. One vice usually enabled the other—the sweetness of Mountain Dew mixed with the sharp cut of Marlboro Reds, and the sensory overload was enough to make your gums bleed. My father told me that this was one reason vending companies were struggling to make a profit. He explained, “People buy from vending machines on impulse. If you can’t take your smoke break in the lunchroom, then you won’t be compelled to buy a Milky Way.”

Not wanting to get in the way of his endless receipts and reports, I asked, “What should I do?”

Without looking up he, demoted me to my old post: “Hmm…You can probably go sweep the back garage.”

I nodded, but before I turned away I asked, “Is the Vending not doing so good?”

My father never lied to me, and in this moment, I believe he told me what he thought was true: “Well, Leaky, we’re taking on water, but I think we can still pull ourselves out.”

I left my father in a hazy and unfathomable white-collar world that neither of us understood. He didn’t elaborate on his plan to pull himself out, but within a few months the Vending had a new member in the ranks.

*

            Marcus, a financial consultant, came to the Vending in late 2002 at the behest of the senior partners of the Vending. My father had talked to Marcus on the telephone for many weeks. His fee to save the Vending was large, but my father believed in him.

Marcus was a short Polynesian man with a round stomach. He wore long-sleeved button-downs and a gold watch with a large face. His interactions with me were kind, though formal. He asked me cursory questions about whether or not I liked high school, and he never talked badly about the Vending in front of me. But I knew that behind closed doors at the Thursday meetings, undercurrents left unattended were being dredged to the surface.

For the first time in years, I saw a spark of hope in my father. Excitedly, he’d quote Einstein: “‘Insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’ We’ve been doing the same things all these years, Leaky, and expecting them to change.” My father told me this as we pulled into Roger’s Department Store in the work van. He was returning a shirt he’d received as a birthday present.

As we entered the store, the scent of perfume overwhelmed me. “Let’s see if we can find something for your mother,” my father suggested as he spotted the Clinique counter.

“What have you been doing that you shouldn’t?” I asked.

My father looked up from the counter and thought for a moment. “Your grandfather always lets everyone take cash whenever they need it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, you know how we get money from the machines and we bring it back to the Vending. All that money should go into the bank so that we can pay our bills, but Grandpa’s always told us that if we need a little extra, just to take it.”

“What? Isn’t that illegal?” I asked.

“Yes.” My father admitted, nodding his head.

“So why do it?” I asked, perplexed by my father’s admission. I wasn’t used to him admitting fault. My father was an elder. He gave ten percent of his paycheck. He had helped to buy our church a new organ. How could he falter this way?

“We never really thought of it that way. Grandpa was the one in charge, and it’s family, ya know? You just don’t really think of it as embezzling…” He paused and waved a salesgirl over. “I think it took an outsider like Marcus to point out how ridiculous our behavior was. But we’re going to stop now. We’re switching directions, taking a pay cut. All of the money is going to the Vending.” My father told me this as he handed the salesgirl a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet full of cash. My father could see his mistakes, but I wondered if it was too late for him to learn from them.

*

A year after Marcus had been with the Vending, the cello player’s story took a sharp turn:

“The worst part about the water is the panic. If you could keep your body loose, maybe you could make a swim for a boat, but in those temperatures, it seizes immediately. Your muscles congeal, your heart races, your lungs suffocate. Your internal thermometer is ticking down, plummeting in minutes.” My father was focused on the physiology of freezing.

“John thought about all of these things. He could see the panic in those around him. He had to make a plan. He had to come up with something that could save him. He was with his bandmates, determined to stay until the very end, but he also knew he’d have to try and save himself. It was then that a miraculous thought occurred: he could use his cello as a flotation device. All around him, throngs of people were grabbing deck chairs and pulling apart pieces of the ship, but no one would come after his cello. He could get away without hurting anyone else, without abandoning his team. The center of his life would be the thing to save him.”

*

By the summer of 2004, my seventeenth year, I noticed that the building on Vineland was emptier. The red shelves that were once stocked full of chips and Mars candy were dustier and empty, Sysco only delivered once a week instead of twice, and my grandfather had been relinquished of all of his duties except cleaning out the freezer and going through the pop cans. My father slipped me money on the side—cash from the machines—and I started to wonder if this was something that all the men in my family were doing: taking money before it could be counted.

When I went there, it seemed that no one could meet my eyes. My uncles walked with their heads low and their eyes darting about, as though they were deciding what to grab. There was something primal about their gait, an urgency and desperation in their movements. They were drowning and in that moment, would anyone have blamed the other for selling out?

On Thursday afternoons, I would wait outside of the main office. They still had their weekly meetings, but even I already knew that they were barreling toward bankruptcy.

I kept expecting someone to yell about the injustice, or scream for help, or blame someone else in trivial anger. I expected my father’s impassioned voice to shout out. But I never heard anyone. There was only eerie quiet behind the door, and I wondered if they were trying to make a desperate plan together, or if they’d simply given up and sat there, quietly, out of expectation and duty.

Without an ultimatum, without drastic measure, without fanfare or seething fire, my father conceded to going down with the ship—in the end, there was no cello to cling to.

*

“He just couldn’t make it. If it had been me…” My father had been starting the story this way the last few times. He wanted the cellist to survive somehow. He wanted to rewrite fate and fact. He wanted to believe that, even in the direst of circumstances, his protagonist would have been able to find a way out.

I looked at my father; he was not in the mood for this story. For the first time, I jumped in. “I think the cello player tried, and I think that’s all that matters.”

I didn’t ask my father to tell me this story anymore. From time to time, we’d talk about the Titanic, how it sunk and why, but it was important to let the cello player rest in peace.

*

Later, long after the Vending and my father had declared bankruptcy, and he had a new profession as a truck driver for Teddy’s Transport, he told me that he often thought about what he could have done differently to save the company. “There was a moment when I could have asked Uncle Howard to take out a loan. He was the only one whose credit wasn’t shot to hell. I could have asked him to work with me, and together we could have bought out the others.”

“Can you imagine still being there, though?” I asked, laughing at the thought of running routes and filling snack machines.

“Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, but sometimes I wish I would have tried.”

“You did try,” I assured him. “You only see it clearer now because it’s in the past.”

My father nodded, but I knew that this was something he would say again. The weight of an empire-crashing grows lighter with the passing years. The intersection of fact and fate becomes a malleable object in our memories. You can divert disaster with one step and the faith that you might save yourself.

============================================================================
Rori_Leigh_HeadshotRori Leigh Hoatlin is a third-year graduate student at Georgia College & State University studying creative nonfiction. She is a Teaching Fellow of English composition and literature at Georgia College and a Summer 2013 Teaching Consultant at The Lake Michigan Writing Project in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has previously appeared in Young Scholars in Writing, Prick of the Spindle and is forthcoming in Steel Toe Review and Superstition Review.

Amanda Leduc

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FREQUENT FLYERS

by Amanda Leduc

PLEASE PRESERVE MY TESTICLES FOR THE QUEEN.

The nurses get this note from the King of England just before the doctors discharge him to the street. He’s been in and out of the ward for the past two days. “Malingering,” the doctor says. To exaggerate mental or physical symptoms for attention, or other secondary gain.

He’s tall, this kid. Lean and angry. He wants to be admitted to the hospital. He lives at the YMCA. “I’m crazy!” he shouts at the doctors. “I’m the King of fucking England!” He won’t be told no—when they discharge him, he goes out to the ER waiting room, lies down on the floor, and starts screaming. The nurses bring him back.

“I’ll fucking kill you! I’ll fucking kill you all!”

He’s been admitted to the hospital before, and it doesn’t help. So the doctors assess him, and then he’s discharged. Again. He stops in front of my reception window before he leaves the ward.

“I’ll see you in hell. Goodbye, motherfuckers.”

No one’s ever called me a motherfucker before. Not even in passing.

“He’ll be back,” the nurses tell me. “Let’s just hope it’s not today.”

*

I had not wanted to work at the hospital. I had moved home—from Scotland back to Canada, from independence back to Mum and Dad—only because my visa had expired and there was nowhere else to go. No job. No money. Not even a driver’s license. I spent six months unemployed and scrambling for work, spending money that I didn’t have on interviews in Toronto, until finally, one day my mother called me from the hospital where she worked and said, “How would you like a job?”

I held the receiver to my ear and cried, there on the other end of the line. Then I said yes.

First I worked in the Outpatient Department as a data entry clerk in the blood laboratory. Patients handed me their lab requisitions, I entered their blood work into the computer, and then I gave the labels to the nurses. It was hectic in the morning, but by the end of the day there was nothing to do, so I drafted a YA novel in those open, un-busy moments at work. It was a novel about bisexual fairies, and it was ridiculous. But for a while I thought it just might make me rich. I figured I’d self-publish it under a different name. Amanda Hocking had just started to crest on fame then, and I was desperate.

Eventually I found myself wanting to make the YA novel better than it was, though, so I stopped. I did not want to be an author of books about bisexual fairies; I just wanted to move out of my parents’ house. I wanted to write essays. I wanted to start working on another novel, one that I actually cared about. I wanted my own life back. That was all.

Toward the end of that first year at the hospital, the woman whose position I’d been covering came back from sick leave, and I found myself unemployed again. Things stayed that way for two months. When another position at the hospital came up, in the emergency psychiatry ward, I applied. I’d grown to like the money. The duties: photocopying, filing, and registering patients. Faxer and coffee girl extraordinaire. The manager spent most of the interview asking about my time in Scotland. A few weeks later, she called to say I had the job.

“It will probably be quieter than the blood lab,” she said. “Bring a book, if you want. That might help. Nothing much happens here.”

*

Facebook Boy comes to the ward halfway through the summer. He’s eighteen, but looks about twelve. He comes in with two police officers. They found him teetering on the edge of a ravine, threatening to jump. After he’s been sitting in the waiting room for half an hour or so, he politely asks me if he can use the phone. He calls his mother.

“I need you to go on the computer. Can you go on Facebook and check and see if Amber and I are still together? We had a fight.” Pause. “Please, Mom? Please? It’s really important.”

Next—I’m assuming she hangs up—he calls a friend. “Look man, Amber and I had a fight. Can you go on Faceboo—oh. Okay. Well, maybe you can call me when you’re near a computer? I’m at the hospital. Just call here, to this phone.”

Then he calls his mom again. “Mom. Please. I’m so worried. I love her! Just check for me? Right now?”

Eventually, the police officers pull him away from the phone. “Next time he asks,” they tell me, “just say no.”

He gets angry and flings the officers’ hands away. “But I love her! You don’t understand. When you love someone, you need to know if they feel the same way about you! Just let me go on Facebook! Please!”

The officers tell him to sit down. Instead, he tosses a chair at the wall.

“Please let me go on Facebook! Please!”

The nurses put him in seclusion. No Facebook there, either. He spends most of the night banging on the walls and crying. “I need to go on FACEBOOK! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!”

“Situational crisis,” says the ER physician. Eventually they send him home.

*

I trained for two weeks—the ins and outs of data entry, the intricacies of the fax machine—and then started working by myself. I pointed people in the direction of the nurses. I joked with the medical residents. Sometimes patients would walk into the ward on their own; more often than not they were sedated or strapped to stretchers, or they came in shuffling, flanked by police, their eyes focused on the floor. I photocopied things when I was asked and answered the phone when it rang. I played Scrabble on my computer. I wrote stories.

Answering the phone was the hardest part. Family members would call me and cry. They’d ask about their sons and daughters—how they were, when they’d be able to leave. Sometimes I’d get calls from parents whose children had yet to show up on the ward, terrified parents who didn’t know what to do.

“He says he wants to kill himself,” one mother whispered, after I’d been on the ward for less than a week. “What am I supposed to tell him? What am I supposed to say?”

After I’d been at the hospital for about two months, I had my first run-in with a parent. She’d brought her son into the emergency room because he’d been put on suicide watch. The ward was busy that day and her son sat with the nurses for seven hours before a doctor came in to assess him. Every twenty minutes the mother would come to my window and ask me what was going on.

“Why is it taking so long?” she said. “Don’t they realize he’s in crisis?”

I told her, “No, the assessments take a long time. The nurses are with him. He’s being taken care of. I promise.”

“But he needs to see a psychiatrist!” she snapped. “He’s on suicide watch! Don’t you know what you’re doing? I want to talk to someone who knows what’s going on!”

Eventually, the nurses heard the shouting and came out to speak with her. They called security and had her escorted from the floor. When she left, she was in tears. “But what am I supposed to do?” she wailed. “If you won’t help him, where are we supposed to go?”

Next time, the nurses told me, I was to call for security right away. “That’s emotional abuse,” they said, “and you don’t have to take it from anybody.” They were tough and brisk—so cliché, but true—and sometimes downright rude.

But rudeness in a hospital is survival, an entirely different kind of animal. I didn’t understand this when I first started working there; I understand it now. Even empathy has a timeline. Even compassion needs to be replenished.

I’m too soft for this kind of work. I worry too much about what everybody thinks when they knock on my window. If there’s no information to give them, somehow it’s my fault. I fumble for speech and come up empty. I do not know what to say here. Words mean nothing.

*

A few weeks after his first visit, Facebook Boy comes back. This time he wants to talk to his girlfriend on the phone. She called the police because he held a knife to his throat after they had a fight. The police bring him here in handcuffs. When they arrive, Facebook Boy is panicking because he’s not sure, again, if he and his girlfriend are still together. He really needs to know.

“When you love someone,” he tells the nurses, “really love them, you want to make sure that they feel the same way.”

But his girlfriend won’t pick up the phone, and so he punches a security guard. When they put him in seclusion, he pounds on the door for as long and as hard as he can. “Fuck you!” he tells the nurses. “Fucking LET ME OUT OF HERE!”

The officers are tired. They sit in reception and play Angry Birds. They can’t leave until he’s no longer a threat, and he’ll be a threat as long as he keeps pounding on the door.

“You wouldn’t believe,” one officer tells me, “how many calls we get each day because of Facebook.”

A few minutes later, the banging stops. “I’m sorry,” he tells the nurses. “I’m really sorry. I’m just so sad. Can you let me out? Can I go on the computer? Can I check Facebook? Please? I need to check Facebook. I don’t know what I’ll do if she leaves me.”

Facebook Boy’s mother tells us that he says this all the time. “I’m not worried,” she says. She is bored, nonchalant on the other side of the phone. “He wants to kill himself every day. I doubt he’ll act on it.”

Later, after the police have left and Facebook Boy has eaten his dinner, after he’s calmed down and stopped swearing, the residents go in to see him. He says he’s feeling better; he wants to go home. The residents organize his follow-up appointment. He’s allowed to use the phone. His girlfriend still loves him. He leaves happy.

The next day his family doctor calls our office, furious. Facebook Boy is there at his desk, his eyes downcast, contrite. He and his girlfriend have had another fight. “What,” says the doctor, “is your department supposed to do, exactly?”

*

My sister also works at the hospital, in another psychiatry ward. She’s a nurse. She always says, “The ‘H’ on the door doesn’t stand for hotel!” But people come back all the time. They eat the hospital dinners. They sleep in the suites. One day a patient leaves bed bugs on the mattress—the suite is blocked off, the mattress burned. A few days later he comes back, and they do it all again.

The doctors call them frequent flyers. Some people come here to get help; others come because they don’t know what else to do. They don’t take their medications, or their medications aren’t enough, or they’re frustrated at the therapy they’ve been sentenced to. “It’s just a bunch of spoiled kids in a circle,” one patient tells the nurses. “Nothing’s going to get done in here.”

Still others come because they just don’t fit in with the rest of the world. One patient, a woman in her forties, comes here at least three times a week. She’s on a first name basis with every officer in the city. She has bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, learning disabilities. She loves her cats. She’s smart enough to know that the hospital can help, but her disabilities keep her young enough to think that the disease will go away.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she tells the charge nurse. Two days earlier, the social worker had sat her down in the foyer and planned her birthday party; she’d hugged everyone on the ward; she was that excited. “I don’t want this stupid disease.”

“No one wants it.” The charge nurse is unmoved. “But lots of other people have this disease, too. They make it work. So can you.”

*

On the good nights, when there’s no one on the ward, the nurses play solitaire. Or they read out loud from the communal copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and giggle. When I have nothing else to do, I get them coffee. Extra large Earl Grey, one milk. French vanilla cappuccino. Medium double-double. The girls at the coffee kiosk know me by name.

I spend long stretches of time here doing nothing. I let the Internet distract me. The Rumpus. The New Yorker. Maisonneuve. Friends at home are continually surprised by how much I’ve been reading.

“Where do you find the time?” they say.

I just shrug. “I’ll do anything to keep from writing.”

They always laugh.

But the truth is, sometimes I feel the emotions here so strongly that I don’t know what to do. No one pays attention to me; I’m just the fax girl, the data entry clerk, the coffee person. Parents sit on the other side of my window and weep because their children are falling apart. Spouses pace the halls and think about leaving. “I can’t do this anymore,” one husband said to me. “I love her, but I just can’t.”

Once, I watched a ninety-year old mother weep in our hallway chair because her daughter, who is in her sixties, had tried to hang herself in her kitchen. Had the daughter done something like this before? I’m not sure. The mother was German—her English was lilting and soft, impeccable. She sat in our hall and cried for hours—silently, without moving. Later that night, her daughter was transferred to another floor; the mother left after speaking with the nurses, tissues balled in the hollows of her fists.

*

The Barker comes to the ward a few days after Ronald Poppo has his nose chewed off in the States. The Barker sits in an interview room, again with the police, and barks nonstop for three hours. I lock the window at reception and wonder if a different man has come to us now, ill and raving like an animal, ready to gnaw at random flesh. Every now and then I check to make sure that the officers still have their noses. All I can think is, This is it, the zombie apocalypse has arrived.

The Barker is another frequent flyer, but I don’t know that until a few days later. He’s a few years older than Facebook Boy, but has the mental make-up of a child. He comes to the ward three or four times a month. His voice is higher than you’d expect from someone so tall.

Today he comes to us because he’s upset with his mother and wants to kill himself. He’s barking because he was having a panic attack in the waiting room, and one of the nurses tried to calm him down by asking him what animal noises he could make. He barks at the officers until they ignore him, and then he barks at the nurses. Eventually, he stops barking altogether, but only because he’s tired and wants to go home. The nurses bring him dinner; the ER doctor says he’s stable and ready to go. The police see him out. When the nurses bring me his discharge paperwork, they’re laughing.

“There,” they say. “Another story for your notebook.”

Three days later, he comes back. He’s in the middle of a divorce, he says. How can he live without his wife or his children? How can anyone expect him to go on?

The Barker isn’t married. He doesn’t have children, either. When the doctors remind him of this, gently, he nods and then continues on with the story. His wife is leaving him. His kids are going to grow up without a dad.

The nurses talk him down, eventually. He’s fed. He’s discharged.

The next day he takes half a bottle of Tylenol and ends up back in the ER.

*

“There’s a fine history of writers working in mental institutions.” This is what a friend’s husband said to me the first time I talked about my job. “Imagine where Ken Kesey would be if he’d never worked at Menlo Park.”

Imagine that. Ken Kesey working the night shift at a laundromat instead, or maybe the midnight shift at some greasy San Francisco diner. Getting his drugs on the street instead of as the guinea pig. Would One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest have ended up on the street then, too? Who knows? I like to think about Kesey, secure in the grip of LSD, wandering the halls and joking with the patients. Sometimes I fantasize about him sitting down to a long grey table, late at night, chicken-scratching into a notebook the way William Faulkner did, all those years ago when he worked the night shift at the factory.

You don’t really joke with the patients in Emergency Psych. Patients come here so the doctors can determine where else they need to go. They’re manic or sobbing or incandescent with fury. Sometimes they’re intoxicated. Sometimes they have their stomachs pumped in the ER before they’re brought over to the ward. They scream. They yell so loud that their voices disappear.

Still, I’m surprised at how much I laugh here. There’s another patient who visits us at least once or twice a month. He’s from Toronto, and we think he has a man-crush on one of the doctors. Every time he’s in he’ll ask me for a few sandwiches, a glass of juice.

“You don’t have any nice coffee back there, do you?” he’ll ask. As though we are Starbucks. “I’d really love some nice coffee.”

Once I got a call from the Patient Booking Department. “I just had a call from one of your patients,” the clerk said, sounding bewildered. “She’s in the ward right now, with you, but she said that the nurses have taken her purse, and she wants me to help her get it back. How did she get this number?”

When asked, the patient said she’d been calling her lawyer. Apparently she just punched a random bunch of numbers into the hospital phone. “She’ll get it back,” she muttered. “She must get it back. That’s her job. What else would I pay a lawyer for?”

*

One day a patient tries to escape from the ward. I’m carrying patient charts back to my office when she muscles past me into the hall.

“Lock the door!” the nurses shout. “Lock the door!”

But I don’t have to lock the door, because security tackles her before she gets there. They bring her down in front of my workstation—two men, tall and strong in their padded uniforms—and lean their weight against her buckled knees, her hunched and angry elbows. One man holds a hand against her head. They are gentle.

“Let’s go back into your suite,” one of the guards says. “The nurses can clean you up, and we can talk.”

“You’re hurting my arm,” she mumbles. “Get off my fucking arm!”

“If I let go,” he says, “will you try to run away?”

“This is prison,” the woman says. Her hair is broken, frizzed and grayish-yellow. The police brought her in earlier in the day because she called 911 when she was drunk. “I don’t want to be here! You have no right!”

“You’ll stay until the doctor can see you,” the nurse says, not flinching. She is young, closer to my age. We went to the same high school a few years apart. She’s normally so sweet and quiet; it feels strange to watch her now, hunched over the patient, her voice so flat and hard.

“We’re trying to help you,” the other security guard says. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but—”

“I don’t want your fucking help!” she screams. “I don’t want any of it!”

They wrestle her back to the room and lock her in. Eventually she calms down; the doctor goes in to see her and changes her meds. And then she goes home.

A few days later the police bring her back. This time she doesn’t run.

*

The nurses frightened me for a long time when I first started. They were all so brisk, so short. So frustrated as I shuffled my papers around. It took a long time for me to get their humour, to understand that you have to be tough here, that there is no room for pity. Sometimes there’s no room in the hospital either. You can be sorry for them all but that won’t do a thing.

One night a man with a great brown beard comes to my window.

“My name is Carter,” he says. “I’m hearing voices, and I want to know if I’m crazy, or if I should go to the police.”

Carter is polite, but like so many patients, does not want to wait in the ER. I direct him to the waiting room but a few minutes later he comes back.

“I don’t want to see someone if they can’t help,” he says. And then again, faster. His voice is rising, his hands cutting swiftly through the air. “Idon’twanttoseesomeoneiftheycan’thelp. Idon’twanttoseesomeoneiftheycan’thelp.”

What would you do right now, says a little voice in my head, if he pulled out a gun?

When he leaves, I think about him back out on the street with all those voices in his head, and I start crying. I cry for the rest of the night. I calm down and wash my face. Then I think of him, tall and lonely in his beard, no end to those voices in his head that no one else can hear, and I cry again.

*

I have some experience with depression. Not much. I was depressed for a few months during my third year of university, and then again just before I hit thirty, when I was living with my parents. Situational depression, brought on by stress and debt. Each time, that’s what it was.

I slept a lot. Nothing interested me. I went to school, and then later to work, only because I knew that the alternative to not going to school and not working was to lie in bed and let that crush me. I cried in the middle of campus, on the bus, and for long, uninterrupted periods in the shower. During my second bout, when my life was boxed up in my parents’ basement and I slept on the bed in the guest room, I’d wake up at night already sobbing. One night I stumbled to the kitchen and stared at the pills in my father’s medicine cabinet—he suffers terrible migraines, and that night I stood in the hollow moonlit glow of the kitchen and wondered what would happen if I took his Fioronal pills all at once. No more debt. No more anything.

But I did not take the pills, because even then, I knew that things would get better. I would get a job, and eventually I would move out, and sooner or later I’d be living on my own again and things would be okay. Eventually my verve would come back. Wasn’t that how it worked? Didn’t things always swing up, in one way or another?

The people who come to the ward—it’s different for them. This is sadness and anger and sickness twenty-four hours a day. This is a ten-year-old child, sobbing in her mother’s arms, and parents who’ve dealt with her mood since she was eight. This is the twenty-two-year-old man who’s tried to kill himself three times in the past two weeks. This is the kid with recurring psychosis who can’t hold a job and comes to the ward because the shelters don’t have room for him anymore.

“Thank you,” he says each time. To me, to the nurses, to the doctor. “Thank you for your help.”

This is the fifteen-year-old girl who comes to our ward late at night, gets discharged by the doctor, then hangs herself in her bedroom soon after she gets home. Sometimes even the doctors miss the signs.

Sometimes things do not swing up—sometimes it’s just that simple.

*

Ken Kesey, as it happened, liked his job at Menlo Park a great deal. He didn’t think that the people he spoke with were insane—he thought that they’d been pushed to the fringes of the world. If he were here in the ward with me today, I think he’d argue that we are all complicit; though we might cheer for the usurpers in movies and in books, in real life, we want what makes sense. We might root for McMurphy, but at the end of the day we want Nurse Ratched in charge.

One day at the end of my shift, a patient drinks three bottles of hand sanitizer, then smears shit all over his room. The security guards don disposable blue booties and walk into his room wearing masks. Chemical restraint, says the doctor’s order. They sedate him and transfer him back to the regular emergency area for monitoring.

He’ll come back. So many of them always do.

*

The King of England jumps off a bridge one day late in October. We hear about this the day after it happens—the hospital administrators come through and speak to the nurses, fill out all their paperwork. Everyone’s in shock.

“He was a pain in the ass,” one nurse says to me. She’s almost crying. “But I never thought he’d do something like that. He didn’t seem the type.”

He is just a name now, a jumble of letters on the page. That night, I copy flyers and make them into little booklets, then fan the booklets out in the foyer. It doesn’t take long, so I copy more. Fold and press. Fold and press. Depression, anxiety, mental health. More jumbled letters. How to Get Help.

The King of England was twenty-two when he asked to have his testicles preserved. Now he is dead.

Tomorrow someone else will come, and there will be another note. Facebook Boy. The Barker. Someone else whose face I don’t yet know. In a week’s time I’ll leave my shift and walk to the street in time to see our cat-loving patient run out in front of a car.

She’ll survive. When she comes back to the ward, the nurses will be gentle with her, like she’s the finest piece of porcelain they’ve ever seen.

 

Please note that names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals involved.

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Amanda LeducAmanda Leduc is a Canadian writer whose essays and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Crossed Genres, Big Truths, The Rumpus, ELLE Canada, PRISM International, Prairie Fire, filling Station, Existere Journal, Conclave, and other publications across Canada, the US, and the UK. Her novel, The Miracles of Ordinary Men, was published in 2013 by Toronto’s ECW Press.

Angela Palm

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AVERAGES

by Angela Palm

At The River I have a new job and a car payment I didn’t ask for. I am sixteen. I am forcibly learning “the value of a dollar” and missing out on Friday night boy-girl trips to Pizza Hut with kids who wear letterman jackets. It is 1997. I have my own checkbook with pink and blue checks and pastel flowers, checks for a baby, linked to a joint account with my mother’s name on it. On Saturday mornings I drive my car—a four-door Ford sedan fit for a family, with a sparkling champagne paint job—to the bank and deposit my paycheck, along with babysitting money, when I have some. At my new job, which is just down the road from where I live in a tiny town tucked along the bank of a dirty river, a woman named Toni is canned for giving blow jobs in the men’s bathroom. Another woman named Lonnie tells me while we’re rolling silverware that her new thing is screwing her boyfriend while he’s driving, straddling his lap and watching the road get smaller and faster behind the truck. “You have to try it. It’s a rush,” she tells me as she slips a buck from someone else’s tip into her apron. I assume she means with my own boyfriend—not hers.

At The River I bus tables, carry empty glasses, lug trash, churn the film on the salad dressings, answer the phone in a voice that sounds like my mother’s, manage the waiting list, watch the Kankakee River freeze over into big white plates of ice and snow while I wash the restaurant’s windows, keep waitresses from crying or fighting, inhale second-hand smoke, and smell like au jus. I eat whatever nobody ordered—steamed vegetables, fried cheese balls, popcorn shrimp, onion rings, and sometimes steak, if I’m lucky. I bring baskets of bread to the boyfriend who broke up with me without telling me why four months earlier when he comes in to eat with his family. They barely speak to me—only to say, Water please. More napkins. He won’t even glance at me, and I stare at him so that his cowardice doesn’t go unnoticed and so I don’t shatter from the feeling of being invisible. His family has two newly adopted Korean daughters in tow, which is alarming because there are already five children in the family, and no one introduces me. I’m also surprised because they don’t seem the adopting type; they have never exuded warmth. No one seems to remember, here in the restaurant, that I spent last Christmas with them or that they gave me an expensive porcelain doll with angel wings, which is still propped up on a metal stand on the table next to my bed. She has blonde hair as fake as mine and my same blue eyes. A doll. I am still astounded when I look at her, with her tailored, tiny golden dress, quietly mocking me. I believe this gift was chosen for me as something to aspire to. Should I want to continue dating their son, I ought to discard the resale bell bottoms and men’s polyester pants, the 1950s housedresses and the flowing gypsy skirts I’ve sewn myself, and become more like her: demure, mute, polished. She is a symbol of something I can’t yet name, but unnerving all the same. I re-tie my apron, wrapping its long black strings round and round my waist in the bathroom, and wash my hands, wash my hands, wash my hands, my mood ring a deep midnight blue, turning my middle finger green around the edges of its cheap band.

At The River I work harder and faster than anyone because it feels good to use my body and to make everything new and clean, to put everything in its proper place. I try to make a game of it by bettering my wait-time estimates and by doing so much of the work myself that I make the other bussers look lazy. And they are, mostly. In the dry storage room, which is really a narrow hallway lined with unstable metal shelves and boxes, a dishwasher named Josh catches me alone, pulling reams of white napkins from the top shelf, and puts his hand up my shirt and kisses me even though I think he’s disgusting and not at all attractive, and it doesn’t feel good. It takes me longer than it should to push him away with both hands. Still, I never say “no,” though I think it the whole time. Later, he follows me to my car when my shift ends and tries to get me to go to a party with him, and for once, I’m glad my parents are too strict for that to be a possibility.

At The River my father usually sits at the bar when I’m working, and other times, too. At home he barely speaks to me, and when he isn’t working in the yard or watching TV, he swings unpredictably between being a ghost of himself and a battle-ready brute with the vengeance of a wrecking ball. But when he’s in the bar he squeezes me close and tells everyone about my good grades and that I’ve received an honorable mention in a painting contest for the National Duck Stamp, which has something to do with hunting. We have the watercolor picture framed and hung in our hallway at home. In it, a sleek male wood duck floats in a pond, water rings spreading out from its richly colored plumage. It was easy enough to do. I copied it from a picture in a book, visually dismantling the duck into its core shapes and allowing myself to see that brown is actually comprised of grays, greens, yellows, blacks, blues, purples, and whites. Later, this painting will earn me an academic scholarship to a nearby college—the only one I ever consider in my listless search. You’re so smart, everyone insists. And it’s true enough; I have the grades to prove it, which have come with little effort. I tell them I just want to be average. In the fall, I’ll pack the duck painting in a flat cardboard box, and bring it with me to college and later to several apartments, evidence of my having crossed over from once place to another, but I’ll never hang it up and I’ll never paint again.

At The River I am seven and my babysitter walks me and my brother over to buy cigarettes with money she stole from the old water jug my parents save change in for vacation. By vacation, they mean drive to Maryland to see my father’s parents and siblings, who eat dumplings in gravy with a dozen eggs every day. They go to church and spend their days watching the dog pee because they think it’s funny. They talk and talk about church, but they never pray. They barely speak to me at all. Sometimes we get to go fishing or play cards, and that is the only time it is fun. The rest of the time I read Ramona or play Classic Football, punching all of the buttons in arbitrary patterns at arbitrary speeds until the little red lights move and beep and I score.

At The River I am sixteen, and a woman named Meg who is forty and pregnant asks me to babysit her 8-year-old son while she does drugs. She doesn’t say that’s why, but I can tell when she comes home, hours later than the time she promised, that it’s drugs. She’s gone away in the eyes and barely on her feet. She never mentions the little boy’s name, not before she leaves and not after she returns, but tells me on her way out the door that there is mac and cheese if I want. The boy is already in bed; his face twitches in the moonlight with sleep, and I’d like to hold him, name him, make him meatloaf with green beans and chocolate chip cookies for dessert. But all I do is dab my cheeks with Meg’s Cover Girl powder in the bathroom and wait, playing house in a broken home. The boy never even knows I was there, layering him with extra blankets, watching over him and thinking about how I could save him. The baby is born with Down’s syndrome, and everyone at The River loves him and touches his chubby hands when Meg brings him in, but all I can think is, What will I do with two babies? I never stop thinking about how I’ll save them, nor do I understand why I feel inclined to be held responsible.

At The River I am fifteen, and don’t yet have the car that I don’t want, but it is coming: a gift, I’m told, which is confusing because I am solely responsible for repaying the $12,000 loan it takes to get it. And so I work, which I don’t mind. I read on my work breaks, and everyone is mad because I take the full fifteen minutes. I tell them that because I don’t smoke and everyone else takes smoke breaks every hour that it’s only fair. I read books about witchcraft, the Louisiana bayous, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and the Apartheid, and books by V.C. Andrews and Stephen King and Thomas Hardy and Mary Higgins Clarke and anything by the Bronte sisters and anything Oprah says to read.

At The River I am fifteen and a boy with long hair whom I’ve never met sits down with me during my lunch break. He buys my meal at my discounted employee rate. He tells me I’m beautiful and that he’d like to sit there all day until I’m done working. “And then what?” I ask. He says take me to a real dinner. I think he might be crazy, but I also love his candor and it’s not every day that someone says I’m pretty, so I’m an easy sell. He talks me into meeting him in the parking lot on my break, where I find him sitting on the hood of a blue car with a guitar, waiting for me. He sings to me in broad daylight, puts my name into the refrain. I don’t know what to say, but I’m happy, if a little humiliated. He doesn’t tell me his name, doesn’t try to kiss or touch me. Just a smile and a goodbye. I never see him again. He is proof of something, but I’m not sure what.

At The River I am twelve and I order steak fries and Pepsi with my little brother in the bar. It is summertime, noon, and our parents are at work. A few men sit at the bar drinking amber liquid from small glasses. We use half a glass bottle of Heinz ketchup and I tell the bartender to put the bill on my dad’s tab, that he’ll be in later, I’m sure of it. And she does, and he is.

At The River I am sixteen, the youngest person on the floor staff, so people are inclined to teach me things. Betty is the head waitress, with fluffy white hair and tiny feet and red lipstick. She tells me about her sweet old husband and her sweet old Cadillac. She calls me honey and promotes me to Head Busser, a title for which there is no pay increase, just more work. She teaches me to put on lipstick the right way, which means outside the lines of my already plump lips, in order to attract a man. I note that it is not unlike the showy purple plume of the male wood duck’s crested head, that we are not far from our animal instincts, which no one but me finds to be an interesting point. One night while we’re loading empties into the glass washer, Betty tells me that AIDS exists because black women can’t keep their knees together. I tell her she’s ignorant and a bigot, and she is never kind to me again. She tries to have me fired, and nobody says I’m right. I go home in tears and in shock, and I’m too embarrassed to speak of it to anyone.

At The River my friend’s dad comes in drunk and orders prime rib. He eats the monstrous cut of meat with his bare hands and dirty nails, happily slopping it into the au jus like a puppy mauling a rawhide. He slaps the steak onto the table and tries to speak to me through his wide grin, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. His face is red and his eyes are red and he dumps the au jus all over the table and rests his face in the mess of food and falls asleep in it. I feel so sad, and nobody helps me clean it up after he’s carried out by his friends. I watch the Kankakee rushing by while I mop up the mess, wondering where all that murky water ends up, and then I call my mom and tell her what happened, crying, because it seems like the right thing to do. She calls the man’s wife, a friend of hers, to tell her where she can find her husband this time, and I hope I won’t be in trouble. This is the day that I learn there are different ways to be a drunk.

At The River I am seventeen and I stay late after my shift ends because it’s better than going home. I am no longer invited by people to go to the Pizza Hut, and anyway, I don’t want to because I feel as though I’m between worlds when I’m around them. I feel as though I’m between worlds nearly everywhere except in this bar. Instead, I sip virgin daiquiris at the employee table in the corner. “Strawberry Wine” plays on the juke box, and a man named Tim sits down across from me. He buys me French fries and smells like mouthwash. His voice is high-pitched, although he’s twenty-seven. When I was younger, I used to watch him fly by my house on a crotch rocket, tan arms with no sleeves, curly blond hair blown back by the speed. “You want to go for a drive when you’re done with that?” he asks. His truck is brand new, the spoils of his job as a carpenter. The bench seat is covered in a red and black plaid blanket made of wool. He tells me he’s separated, getting a divorce, that I’m pretty, that we could go to his house. Maybe just for a drive, I say, but we never make it out of the parking lot.

At The River I am sixteen and one day a man called Muddy, who has known me since I was ten and who comes into the bar every day, falls backward off his barstool. When I rush to help him up, he storms out in horror, the bells on the door jingling long after he’s gone. He never, ever comes back. Sometimes I wonder if he is dead on a couch somewhere, with a bottle of whiskey between his thumb and index finger, in front of a static television.

At The River a man named Dave, who has known my mother for more than twenty years, talks to me about planting and irrigation and harvest, about books, about nature, about the Presidential election, about taxes, about the Farm Bill, and about the college I’ll go to in the fall on a partial scholarship, where he used to party when he was my age. An avid reader of the Farmer’s Almanac and in possession of an MBA plus his father’s farm, he knows much about nearly everything. One day while we are talking about waterfowl that make their habitat along the marsh—blue heron, wood ducks—he tells me that only some wood ducks migrate south along the Atlantic Flyway, while some stay put through winter. And you can’t tell which are which, not by looking at them, which means that it’s in their DNA. They are programmed as one or the other—to stay or leave. Dave is very tan, year-round, from having worked outside all his life. He is always alone, always at the bar, elbows up and smiling wider as the liquor takes hold of him. Once, in the summer, I go to his house with my family for the Fourth of July and swim in his pool. I catch him looking at me a few times, and later we are alone, briefly, in his big, empty house. He has the face of boy and the mind of a wise elder. He tells me it would sure be nice if I were ten years older. And I feel like I already am. I go back to the pool and dive down to the bottom, lie on my back holding my breath, and look straight up to the sun.

At The River I am eighteen and I call divorce-in-progress Tim from the pay phone, but a woman answers and I hang up. I call Corey, my lifelong friend and one-time romantic crush, who is on trial for murdering two of our neighbors, just to prove to myself that I haven’t forgotten his number, even though I know I’ll never speak to him again. I call home to lie: they asked me to stay till close. I put more makeup on in the bathroom, and stay late at the employee table because I’m still too young to sit at the bar. The regulars, who are friends with my dad, friends with me, take turns sitting with me, and everyone tries to get the bartender to give me a drink, a real drink, but she doesn’t and I don’t want one anyway. I don’t learn until a year later how much I like to drink. Right now, I just like the company.

At The River my father celebrates his promotion to General Foreman, then later to Superintendent. He buys all the drinks for everyone, and he calls me Baby Girl when I walk in with a tray full of glasses. He orders prime rib for the two of us, and he dances with all of the women in the bar, spins them silly, and sings into their ears. He is still a stranger to me.

At The River I take dollar bills from men who are wearing guns in black holsters beneath their overshirts but over their undershirts, and I pick the music, and they smile. We listen to all the Hanks, The Stones, Stevie Nix, the Judds, Joni Mitchell, Aerosmith, Genesis, Bon Jovi, and The Eagles. I dance and sing while I’m working, with Katie and Dave and Lonnie and Tim and Harvey and by myself. The men tell stories about dogs and ex-wives and fishing and teenagers and motorcycles. The women talk about men who are farmers and steelworkers and carpenters and bricklayers and alcoholics and wife-beaters and no good and a little bit good. Between dancing, I do my work. I walk into the room-sized refrigerator to put away a tub of cottage cheese, and I linger there, watching a carton of milk go bad. It’s proof that time is change, that one thing can become another, and I can’t bear to throw it out.

At The River I’m five and nine and fifteen and eighteen and twenty and sixteen and seventeen. I talk to Kimmy, who’s now dating Dave, and she tells me all about how to ache with love. They are both alcoholics, one mostly quiet and smart, the other at the edge of unraveling, teetering between precipices of elation and melancholy. Dave talks to me less, and Kimmy never remembers what we talk about, relaying the same anecdotes of her life present and past, again and again; she gets lost in her own bubbling laughter, in the perfect harmony of a song only she can hear. And I hope that maybe I’ll grow up to be a little more fun like her, less serious, a little more disarming and open-armed and fragile, but I never do.

Kimmy comes to my high school graduation party, they all do, and they hug me and give me money and say, Good goin’, girl. They are the sum of me, divided into different kinds of pain, different kinds of happiness. Or perhaps I am the sum of them, our common denominator this river and a hard-earned history. Kimmy grips my cheeks with her long fingers and tells me that she loves me, she always has; it is her lasting memory, a compilation of many smaller, specific ones that have been lost inside a bottle, a feeling that is true. Still, she knows we have shared something important, if not the details of it. She says that she could be my aunt, she could be my sister. She tells me to stay blonde, blonde, blonde, and to marry a man with money and not to get pregnant in college.

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Angela Palm pictureAngela Palm is an editor and co-owner at the Renegade Writers’ Collective, an independent writing center in Vermont. Her work appears in Midwestern Gothic, Sundog Lit, Prick of the Spindle, ARDOR Literary Magazine, Little Fiction, Big Truths, and elsewhere. She is a nonfiction editor at The Fiddleback and the editor of the forthcoming collection, Please Do Not Remove. Her essay, “The Devolution of Cake,” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.