Michael Lowenthal
Marge had long blond ringlets and eyes like poached eggs. He only
ever wanted to be a housewife: the slippers, the curlers in his hair.
Plus I think he maybe craved an accent. He talked like he was trying
to keep from downing a bite of mush.
His mother had won the lottery years back and bought a building with
ten rental units Marge could manage. Pronto he hired a crew, turned
the ten into twenty-five—so measly, folks said, that if you sneezed
in one apartment, everyone God-blessed you in the next.
Marge rented to pimps and prostitutes. The first of the month he slippered
through the halls: Pay-up time, would come his porridge voice. The
pimps rarely paid. They beat him up. He loved it.
He left his door open so the guys who loathed his type could stomp
in and fuck with all his stuff: light his stove, melt his plastic plates.
Next day he’d chip the melted plastic from the stove and bustle
right down to the five-and-dime, where he’d buy a new set of
pink plates. Ah, he’d say, the landlady’s life!
He also adored the young boys. Eleven, twelve, thirteen. (Marge himself
was always not quite turning thirty.) The whores and I would sit downstairs
and watch the kids go in, then watch them come out twenty minutes later.
If a boy left with a chocolate kiss in addition to his cash, it meant
that he’d been very, very good. A tangerine or a gumball, only
so-so.
I want to die smiling, Marge said. Boys make me happy.
Sometimes a boy gave me his tangerine as he left. Maybe he knew he’d
been a disappointment. He would ask if that dude’s name was really
Marge. Someone would say sure, of course it was. It might not have
been the name that Marge got from his mother. How much of the truth
do our mothers ever give?
I lived with mine in the building next door. Mostly I stayed home alone.
Who cared? Mom worked for one of the guys who clobbered Marge on rent
day. My father was dead, or might have been.
One day I was cutting school, ants were in my pants. Hotter than it
should have been for June. Crank a hydrant, maybe? Suck some ice? I
went down to the street in my boxers, nothing else. Sunlight sharp
and dogged as an itch. There was Marge, lounging on his stoop, next
to ours: flimsy housedress, hair pulled back and tied. It made his
face look bigger, flexed like muscle.
Out from Marge’s robe came a leg as long as lightning. Now I
saw the bowl, the shaving cream. He used a Lady Schick, just like Mom’s.
Stroke, stroke—one leg, then the next—stroke, like harvesting
a crop. His skin got pearly, catching all the light. I peered into
the rinse bowl: bits of hair sprinkled, all those zillion tiny twists
of fate. It felt like the legs he stroked were mine.
I’d shave you, too, he said. His voice made me sizzle. But your
thing’s more a toe than a leg, ain’t it?
He pointed down. It poked clear through my fly.
I ran inside, locked the door, and panted prayers to God. I begged
him not to let me be like Marge.
The old neighborhood, two decades on, is getting chic. Bargain hunters
troll the streets with ponytailed Realtors who talk about upswing, vested
interest. Switchblading open their silvery cell phones, they call
their mortgage brokers and say, Buy. Way back then we could have used
those cells. One day Ma Bell came and yanked the public phones—stripped
for coins too often to be worth it. Mom couldn’t afford a private
number. How was she supposed to call for help?
We were natives waiting for our continent to be found. Street signs
said no standing, so we sat. Best seats in the house for Marge’s
show. At last, would Marge discover true love?
Merge was what I dubbed him in my mind: part one thing, part another,
all mixed up. But the pimps always called him Marge of Dimes, grand marshal
of the freak parade.
He joked about the colors of his bruises, naming them with catalog-type
terms. Strife, he called a certain purple shade just shy of black.
Yellow tinged with blue: Mottled Remorse. Beneath the flippancy, was
that his mood?
Looking back, I think of him as Marginalia. His commentating made life
almost graspable. Prodigious! he might say of a scorching August noon.
Hot as the hole of an overtime ho! He evangelized his own low-down
church. Jesus and the Holy Rolling three-way, he once barked at a B-boy
who wouldn’t mind his paws. I’ll whup your ass to dingleberry
jam!
Most everything reminded Marge of food. The moles on a pre-teen Puerto
Rican kid’s cheek were currants in a bowl of oatmeal. A cholo’s
backside was his hot cross bun. (Best to lick it, Marge assured us,
during Lent.) Once, fifteen yards before I turned onto our block, I
heard him call someone’s face tragically shapeless.
God must’ve forgot, he said, to pre-heat his griddle before he
poured in that bit of batter. From the way that he cackled
when I cornered into view, I figured he was talking about me.
I was already too old for his taste, maybe. My upper lip was fuzzed
with hair like lint. I was a tall drink of juice, he told me once.
In two years I grew thirteen luckless inches.
I was a good enough cheater to just get by. I studied boys: how they
strutted, pop-’n’-locked; the way they picked their hair
but not too much. I cribbed moves and epithets, snuck peeks.
The juice was in my privates. Did Marge know?
I learned people like all sorts of things. There was the bald guy who
forked over two crisp Franklins weekly for Mom to twiddle her thumbs
up in his ass. Another man—she called him Reagan, rich and over-tanned—wanted
lead fishing weights hung from his nipples. All manner of noises came
from next door. People craved. People paid. There was no shame.
Except for me. My itch for Marge? I couldn’t.
Where did he find the guys who would? The Y, maybe. The chop shop by
the river. I envied their brassy finders-keepers view of pleasure,
their bootleg happiness.
In some other neighborhood, or some other city, people like Marge marched
and waved flags. They’d have hated him more than they hated the
guys who beat him. Every time that Marge smiled at a fist, he set them
back. The last thing Marge wanted was toleration.
The plate melters asked me along once. Damon, whose crackerjack moonwalk
I’d tried to copy. Pedro, whose track pants always bulged. It
was Halloween. The air reeked of dried-up country stuff. The smell
of plastic jack-o’-lanterns melting.
Shaving cream was part of the night’s plan, and rotten eggs.
A can of Crisco, too—who knew why? This would be my chance, I
thought, to look at Marge’s life. My chance to prove what I didn’t
want.
I’d been in his building a bunch of times before, but now it
felt a shade of unfamiliar. The light was like a stain on normal light.
Behind a hollow door someone’s hand slapped someone’s something.
I heard: Feels good. And: No the fuck you don’t.
SWAT-style, we slithered up the stairs, down the hall, rotten-egg grenades
set for launching. As per legend, Marge had surely left the door unlocked,
but Damon karate-kicked it anyway. In we blitzed, screaming skinned-alive.
And when we slowed enough to see past our own bluster, there was Marge,
in his bathtub, knitting. His creation, pink and cabled, looked to
be a baby blanket. He might have had a niece we didn’t know.
The room was all lace and fake flowers. Flesh-colored candles like
dildos on every shelf. Foil-wrapped kisses in a pink plastic bowl.
You know how, when you’re sick, puking actually feels better?
I wanted to spit up my whole self.
Trick or treat, Damon said, with goblin eyes.
Nah, corrected Pedro. Dickless freak! He hawked hard, spat into the
bath.
Marge just kept on knitting. He locked his jaw.
Faggot, Damon said. You a man, or what the fuck? Stand the fuck up,
show us what you got.
Yeah, I said, wanting the guys to know that I was with them. Plus because
I hoped to catch a glimpse.
Damon cocked his fist. Hear me? Up!
Marge grimaced. Knit one, purl two.
The bath soap smelled like killing us with kindness.
Let’s fuckin’ stomp him, Pedro said.
Damon’s arm stayed cocked but didn’t move. Above his elbow’s
hinge a tiny pulse showed. It fluttered. He wasn’t yet fifteen.
Fuck ’im, he said. Her. Whatever the fuck: it. I hate the way
it won’t quit lookin’ at me.
We’re just giving it its jollies, added Pedro.
They scrammed, spurting foam across the walls and on the bed. Damon
hurled the Crisco at a lightbulb-bordered mirror. Two bulbs popped
like back talk: yap, yap.
Ready . . . aim . . . , yelled Pedro.
On fire they launched their eggs. I chucked mine, too, a wicked
sidearm fling.
The way you see a lightning bolt before you hear the crack, at first
I watched the yolk ooze down in streaks. All three scored: the jaw,
above each eye. Pretty in a certain way, like drippy abstract art.
Then boom! came the thunder of the smell. A death stink. Abortions,
gangrene.
Get the fuck— Marge yelled, then caught himself.
Egg yellow clashed on the pink of baby blanket. Red, then: blood above
his brow. I guess his skin wasn’t all that thick.
The other guys hoofed out to the hall, and I followed. But when I hit
the threshold, I stopped short. My brain was a coal that Marge was
fanning.
I turned back and found one of Marge’s bath towels, as soft as
my grandmother’s cheek. (Bull! I never met my grandmothers.)
I stepped up and handed it to him.
Closer, inside the smell, it wasn’t quite so bad. Nasty still,
but flowery too, perfumed. Marge had his left eye half closed like
a wink, which made him seem forgiving, even charmed. Slimy white stuff
dripped along his cheek.
Much obliged, he said in a dinner-party voice, and dabbed the towel
elegantly on his brow. Then the bubbles parted and he rose. He stood
facing me. His skin shone.
For the first time I understood that shameless wasn’t bad, but
maybe an ideal, an aspiration. Marge was so much taller than I’d
thought. His hair down there was reddish—the parts he hadn’t
shaved. His thing curved like a smirk. It looked like mine.
I’d never run so fast in all my life. I caught up with the other
guys and said the freak had grabbed me. He’s stronger than he
looks, I said. I swear.
I kept waiting for Marge to say something. One day. Another. A week.
I was mortified and hopeful and confused. What I wanted was to never
see his fuckhead face again. What I wanted was reassurance, an invitation.
The boys came and went (Marge joked: Came, came, and went). I searched
their faces. Triumph? Resignation? They had a talent or a recklessness
I lacked.
The country re-elected an old actor. I didn’t know a single soul
who’d voted. Plus there was a referendum on a new subway line,
an extension into our neighborhood. The verdict? It wouldn’t
kill us to keep walking.
Clementine season came: for a month that’s what the so-so boys
left with. One kid, with freckles and a harelip, gave me his. Sick,
I said, and threw it at his ass. He dodged into traffic. The fruit
missed.
Marge couldn’t find enough boys who were willing. He had to make
do with real men. Their moods were unstable, their knuckles harder.
New shades of bruise were soon coined. Misdemeanor (grayish). Loss
of Face.
For Christmas, Mom surprised me with a leather basketball, too nice
to dribble on blacktop. I kept it in its swanky box, unopened, like
a wish that still hasn’t not come true. Mom split for a week
with José, the guy who kept her. Reno, she said. So they could
tie the knot. (What she tied, I’d find out, was her tubes.) All
week I ate SpaghettiOs and whacked off.
My body was like a TV that someone was channel-surfing, sweat and hair
and hormones, click click click. Everything was changing,
up for grabs.
Pedro and Damon formed a gang. Which side are you on? was
now the deal. With heated pins and ballpoint ink they tattooed their
right forearms: a time bomb with a clock face that read, soon.
Marge proclaimed that tattoos were for fools. Mutilations must be mutable,
he said, and momentary, flaunting his own latest laceration. (Flaunting
and flinching sometimes look the same.)
I took Marge’s advice. I resisted. For two weeks I kept my sleeves
rolled up as living proof that my loyalties lay more with him than
with Damon.
If Marge noticed, he didn’t give a damn. I’d stood in his
room, face-to-face, seen his all. I’d almost apologized. I’d
almost begged. But that moment, so monumental to me, for him was nothing.
Battered and bare was Marge’s every night.
Chickenshit, Damon said one day, grabbing my inkless arm. He twisted
an Indian burn. Thrilling pain.
Do it, I said.
Now, I said.
I’m in.
That spring I tailed one of the chocolate-kiss boys. I’d seen
him around school but didn’t know him. He was a mutt, skin the
rust brown of the grates that barred our windows, but whetstone gray
eyes: they sharpened you.
He was probably sixteen. Me too, almost.
Leaving Marge’s, he walked with an extra fuck in his stride,
tossing his silver kiss like a coin. He had braces that yanked sunlight,
beamed come-on when he grinned. With each step, he kicked his own future.
I followed him down Washington, then behind the Laundromat into an
alley that was Bomb Squad turf. The week before, Pedro and I had bopped
a kid back there, a smart-mouth who called us fucking cretins. All
we shook loose was a pack of Camel Lights, but the heat of his cheek
on my fist was worth it. Recently we’d also lifted pints from
Sully’s Liquor. We practiced pickpocketing each other. Damon
talked big about going back to Marge’s and nailing him this time,
no retreat. My tattoo was the color of a vein.
In the alley a rat nosed a Zero bar wrapper. A broken mirror cut the
sky to bits. The kid—I couldn’t think of his name, but
he looked like a Leon—bent and fished fivers from his sock. Counting,
maybe. Maybe glorifying.
His money wasn’t what I was after. But how do you ask for what
you really want? I gunned my hand and jabbed him. Fork it over!
Leon didn’t flinch. Didn’t budge. A headband kept his curls
out of his eyes.
Now! I said. Give it up. Cocksucker.
When Leon stuffed the cash back in his sock and stood up, I felt like
someone’d swiped my cheat sheet. I was tall, but he was taller.
Awfully thick.
I hadn’t really thought it through this far. Follow him, and
watch, and then what?
I know where you’ve been, I sort of croaked.
He snorted and said, You don’t know shit. Half of his mouth smiled,
and the other half stayed mean. His braces looked made of razor wire.
Laundry steam hovered like something consequential. I thought about
bolting, but I couldn’t. How does it feel? I might have
asked.
He grabbed my arm, his thumb on the double O of soon, and
pressed like he was digging clear to China—to the opposite of
wherever he lived now. I remembered that his father coached the basketball
team at school, and his name wasn’t Leon, it was Darrell. Darrell
was the youngest but the best varsity player. A power forward. All-city.
Eyed by scouts.
I want, he said —then paused long enough for me to wonder —to
hear it come out of your mouth.
What?
That you don’t know shit.
You’re right, I said. I don’t. Let me go.
He tippytoed nearer, his mouth up in my face. I saw a smear of Hershey’s
on his teeth. His breath was like the Y locker room at closing time:
bleach trying to hide a human stink. I made a guess about what he had
swallowed.
Say what? made a breeze that kissed my chin.
I don’t. Don’t know anything. C’mon.
The rage in his eyes was so fierce I almost heard it, the shick, shick of
steel being edged.
I’m not, he said, still pressing, even stronger than before,
what you think I am, or what you maybe are. I’m gonna be huge.
I’m gettin’ outta here. Is anyone gonna try and mess with
that?
I could feel my flesh giving under the pressure of his thumb. What
would I name the bruise’s hue?
No one, I said.
He knocked me to the ground.
Friday: a few of us loafing on the stoop, tiddlywinking beer bottle
caps. Mom was there, bra cups stuffed with cash, painted smile. Alley
drafts tickling our ears.
Thank God for the weekend, said José. He cracked his knuckles.
Thank God there ain’t no God, said Mom. Otherwise I’d
meet you shits in hell!
Laughter all around. High-five smacks.
Damon and Pedro had some Bomb Squad mischief planned: a rooftop, a
case of beer, some girls. I wanted time to shower, clean my teeth.
Just when I stood up, I saw him leaving: flash of silver fang, scissor
stride. Darrell, headband skewed, making tracks from Marge’s
building. Darrell, both hands empty at his sides.
That one of Marge’s boys? asked Mom.
Dud, I guess, José said. Where’s his chocolate?
Mom said how you never knew, it might be in his pocket. Boys hide lots
of treasures in their pants.
They chuckled, but I couldn’t. Already I was scrambling—into
Marge’s building, up the stairs. The door was open. Fruity smells
leaked out.
I stepped inside. I blinked hard. Then I looked.
It’s been twenty years, but I still see it. I see that scene
more clearly than my high school graduation, the first diploma in my
family. More clearly than the day I finished Rutgers. It’s sharper
than my wedding, six years later, to Samantha, whose hair, when it’s
damp, curls like Marge’s. Sometimes when we’re making love,
I twist some on my finger, and Sam has no idea what I’m thinking.
It’s clearer to me than this now, today.
Shards of pink plastic bowl were scattered on the floor, half a dozen
chocolates smeared around. Centered in the midst of it lay Marge: long
blond ringlets free like sunlight in fast water, cotton robe bunched
around his hips.
His mouth, stretched past normal, was crammed with chocolate kisses.
Two dozen? Three? Maybe more. Most still in their foil, some smushed
out.
I checked for breath and pulse. Nothing doing. Already his skin was
going gray. Then I saw the thumbprints on his neck.
On cop shows they’re always saying not to move the body. Don’t
touch a thing. Call 911.
It’s not as if cops would have rushed for Marge.
I straightened out the robe so his legs were mostly covered. I spread
his ringlets nice around his face. Then, with my finger, I dug into
his mouth to clear away the mushy, melting chocolate. At first it felt
nasty—scooping giblets from a chicken—but then it felt
okay, then almost good.
When all of the kisses I could reach were emptied out, I saw his mouth
had fallen to a smile. I tried to smile at him but couldn’t.
I faced a long lifetime of restraint. Backing away, stumbling, I sucked
my messy finger. It’s still the sweetest thing I’ve ever
tasted.
Michael Lowenthal is the author of three novels: Charity Girl, Avoidance, and The Same Embrace. His stories have appeared in the Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and in many anthologies, including Best New American Voices 2005 and Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge. For more information, please visit www.MichaelLowenthal.com.
