American Morons Read online

  “Oh, fudder,” I mumbled, stepped straight into the room, and switched on the dresser lamp. The furniture leapt from its shadows into familiar formation, surprise! But there was nothing surprising. How was it that I remembered this so perfectly, having spent a maximum of twenty hours in here in my entire life, none of them after the age of six?

  There it all was, where it had always been: the bed with its crinoline curtain and beige sheets that always looked too heavy and scratchy to me, something to make drapes out of, not sleep in; the pink wallpaper; the row of perfect pink powder puffs laid atop closed pink clam-lids full of powder or God-knows-what, next to dark pink bottles of lotion; the silver picture frame with the side-by-side posed portraits of two men in old army uniforms. Brothers? Husbands? Sons? I’d been too young to ask. Mrs. Gold was Roz’s mother, but neither of them had ever explained about the photographs, at least not in my hearing. I’m not sure even my mother knew.

  As Martin came in behind me, the circular vent over the bed gushed frigid air. I clutched my arms tight against myself and closed my eyes and was surprised to find tears between my lashes. Just a few. Every visit to Baltimore for the first six years of my life, for one hour per day, my parents would drag chairs in here and plop us down by this bed to chat with Mrs. Gold. That was my mother’s word for it. Mostly, what we did was sit in the chairs or—when I was a baby—crawl over the carpet and make silent faces at each other while Mrs. Gold prattled endlessly, senselessly, about horses or people we didn’t know with names like Ruby and Selma, gobbling the Berger cookies we brought her and scattering crumbs all over those scratchy sheets. My mother would nod and smile and wipe the crumbs away. Mrs. Gold would nod and smile, and strands of her poofy white hair would blow in the wind from the vent. As far as I could tell, Mrs. Gold had no idea who any of us were. All those hours in here, and really, we’d never even met her.

  Martin had slipped past me, and now he touched the fold of the sheet at the head of the bed. I was amazed again. He’d done the same thing at the funeral home, stunning my mother by sticking his hand into the coffin during the visitation and gently, with one extended finger, touching my grandfather’s lapel. Not typical timid Martin behavior.

  “Remember her hands?” he said.

  Like shed snakeskin. So dry no lotion on earth, no matter how pink, would soften them

  “She seemed nice,” I said, feeling sad again. For Grandpa, mostly, not Mrs. Gold. After all, we’d never known her when she was…whoever she was. “I bet she was nice.”

  Martin took his finger off the bed and glanced at me. “Unlike the one we were actually related to.” And he walked straight past me into the hall.

  “Martin, no.” I paused only to switch out the dresser lamp. As I did, the clock in the foyer tuk-ed, and the dark seemed to pounce on the bed, the powder puffs, and the pathetic picture frame. I hurried into the hall, conscious of my clumping steps. Was I trying to wake Roz?

  Martin stood before Sophie’s door, hand out, but he hadn’t touched it. When he turned to me, he had a grin on his face I’d never seen before. “Momzer,” he drawled.

  My mouth dropped open. He sounded exactly like her. “Stop it.”

  “Come to Gehenna. Suffer with me.”

  “Martin, shut up!”

  He flinched, bumped Sophie’s door with his shoulder and then stumbled back in my direction. The door swung open, and we both held still and stared.

  Balding carpet, yellow-white where the butterfly light barely touched it. Everything else stayed shadowed. The curtains in there had been drawn completely. When was the last time light had touched this room?

  “Why did you say that?” I asked

  “It’s what she said. To Grandpa, every time he dragged himself up here. Remember?”

  “What’s momzer?”

  Martin shook his head. “Aunt Paulina slapped me once for saying it.”

  “What’s henna?”

  “Gehenna. One sixtieth of Eden.”

  Prying my eyes from Sophie’s doorway, I glared at my brother. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s like Hell. Jew Hell.”

  “Jews don’t believe in Hell. Do we?”

  “Somewhere wicked people go. They can get out, though. After they suffer enough.”

  “Can we play our game now?” I made a flipping motion with my hand, cupping it as though around a sock-ball.

  “Let’s…take one look. Pay our respects.”

  “Why?”

  Martin looked at the floor, and his arms gave one of their half-flaps. “Grandpa did. Every day she was alive, no matter what she called him. If we don’t, no one ever will again.”

  He strode forward, pushed the door all the way back, and actually stepped partway over the threshold. The shadows leaned toward him, and I made myself move, thinking I might need to catch him if he fainted. With a flick of his wrist, Martin switched on the lights.

  For a second, I thought the bulbs had blown, because the shadows glowed rather than dissipated, and the plain, boxy bed in there seemed to take slow shape, as though reassembling itself. Then I remembered. Sophie’s room wasn’t blue because of wallpaper or bed coverings or curtain fabric. She’d liked dark blue light, barely enough to see by, just enough to read if you were right under the lamp. She’d lain in that light all day, curled beneath her covers with just her thin, knife-shaped head sticking out like a moray eel’s.

  Martin’s hand had found mine, and after a few seconds, his touch distracted me enough to glance away, momentarily, from the bed, the bare dresser, the otherwise utterly empty room. I stared down at our palms. “Your brother’s only going to love a few people,” my mother had told me once, after he’d slammed the door to his room in my face for the thousandth time so he could do experiments with his chemistry set or read Ovid aloud to himself without me bothering him. “You’ll be one of them.”

  “How’d they die?” I asked.

  Martin seemed transfixed by the room, or his memories of it, which had to be more defined than mine. Our parents had never made us come in here. But Martin had accompanied Grandpa, at least some of the time. When Sophie wasn’t screaming, or calling everyone names. He took a long time answering. “They were old.”

  “Yeah. But didn’t they, like, die on the same day or something?”

  “Same week, I think. Dad says that happens a lot to old people. They’re barely still in their bodies, you know? Then someone they love goes, and it’s like unbuckling the last straps holding them in. They just slip out.”

  “But Sophie and Mrs. Gold hated each other.”

  Martin shook his head. “Mrs. Gold didn’t even know who Sophie was, I bet. And Sophie hated everything. You know, Mom says she was a really good person until she got sick. Super smart, too. She used to give lectures at the synagogue.”

  “Lectures about what?”

  “Hey,” said Martin, let go of my hand, and took two shuffling steps into Sophie’s room. Blue light washed across his shoulders, darkening him. On the far wall, something twitched. Then it rose off the plaster. I gasped, lunged forward to grab Martin, and a second something joined the first, and I understood.

  “No one’s been in here,” I whispered. The air was not cold, although the circular vent I could just make out over the bed coughed right as I said that. Another thought wriggled behind my eyes, but I shook it away. “Martin, the mirror.”

  Glancing up, he saw what I meant. The glass on Sophie’s wall—the wall facing the hall, not the bed, she’d never wanted to see herself—stood unsoaped, pulling the dimness in rather than reflecting it, like a black hole. In that light, we were just shapes, our faces featureless. Even for Grandpa’s shiva, no one had bothered to prepare this room.

  Martin turned from our reflections to me, his pointy nose and glasses familiar and reassuring, but only until he spoke.

  “Miriam, look at this.”

  Along the left-hand wall ran a long closet with sliding wooden doors. The farthest door had been pulled almost all the
way open and tipped off its runners, so that it hung half-sideways like a dangling tooth.

  “Remember the dresses?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about now. I also couldn’t resist another glance in the mirror, but then quickly pulled my eyes away. There were no pictures on Sophie’s bureau, just a heavy, wooden gavel. My grandfather’s, of course. He must have given it to her when he retired.

  “This whole closet used to be stuffed with them. Fifty, sixty, maybe more, in plastic cleaner’s bags. I don’t think she ever wore them after she moved here. I can’t even remember her getting dressed.”

  “She never left the room,” I muttered.

  “Except to sneak into Mrs. Gold’s.”

  I closed my eyes as the clock tuk-ed and the vent rasped.

  It had only happened once while we were in the house. But Grandpa said she did it all the time. Whenever Sophie got bored of accusing her son of kidnapping her from her own house and penning her up here, or whenever her ravaged, rotting lungs allowed her enough breath, she’d rouse herself from this bed, inch out the door in her bare feet with the blue veins popping out of the tops like rooster crests, and sneak into Mrs. Gold’s room. There she’d sit, murmuring God knew what, until Mrs. Gold started screaming.

  “It always creeped me out,” Martin said. “I never liked looking over at this closet. But the dresses blocked that.”

  “Blocked wh—” I started, and my breath caught in my teeth. Waist-high on the back inside closet wall, all but covered by a rough square of wood that had been leaned against it rather than fitted over it, there was an opening. A door. “Martin, if Roz catches us in here—”

  Hostility flared in his voice like a lick of flame. “Roz hardly ever catches us playing the balcony ball game right outside her room. Anyway, in case you haven’t noticed, she never comes in here.”

  “What’s with you?” I snapped. Nothing about my brother made sense tonight.

  “What? Nothing. It’s just…Grandpa brings Roz’s mother here, even though she needs constant care, can’t even feed herself unless she’s eating Berger cookies, probably has no idea where she is. Grandpa takes care of her, like he took care of everyone. But when it comes to his mother, Roz won’t even bring food in here. She makes him do everything. And after they die, Roz leaves her own mother’s room exactly like it was, but she cleans out every trace of Sophie, right down to the closet.”

  “Sophie was mean.”

  “She was sick. And ninety-two.”

  “And mean.”

  “I’m going in there,” Martin said, gesturing or flapping, I couldn’t tell which. “I want to see Grandpa’s stuff. Don’t you? I bet it’s all stored in there.”

  “I’m going to bed. Good night, Martin.”

  In an instant, the hostility left him, and his expression turned small, almost panicked.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said again.

  “You don’t want to see Grandpa?”

  This time, the violence in my own voice surprised me. “Not in there.” I was thinking of the way he’d looked in his coffin. His dead face had barely even resembled his real one. His living one. His whole head had been transformed by the embalming into a shiny, vaguely Grandpa-shaped bulge balanced atop his bulgy, overweight body, like the top of a snowman.

  “Please,” Martin said, and something moved downstairs.

  “Shit,” I mouthed, going completely still.

  Clock tick. Clock tick. Footsteps. Had I left the lights on in Mrs. Gold’s room? I couldn’t remember. If Roz wasn’t looking, she might not see Sophie’s blue light from downstairs. Somehow, I knew she didn’t want us in here.

  I couldn’t help glancing behind me, and then my shoulders clenched. The door had swung almost all the way shut.

  Which wasn’t so strange, was it? How far had we even opened it?

  Footsteps. Clock tick. Clock tick. Clock tick. Clock tick. When I turned back to Martin, he was on his hands and knees, scuttling for the closet.

  “Martin, no,” I hissed. Then I was on my knees too, hurrying after him. When I drew up alongside him, our heads just inside the closet, he looked my way and grinned, tentatively.

  “Sssh,” he whispered.

  “What do you think you’ll find in there?”

  The grin slid from his face. “Him.” With a nod, he pulled the square of wood off the opening. Then he swore and dropped it. His right hand rose to his mouth, and I saw the sliver sticking out of the bottom of his thumb like a porcupine quill.

  Taking his wrist, I leaned over, trying to see. In that murky, useless light, the wood seemed to have stabbed straight through the webbing into his palm. It almost looked like a new ridge forming along his lifeline. “Hold still,” I murmured, grabbed the splinter as low down as I could, and yanked.

  Martin sucked in breath, staring at his hand. “Did you get it all?”

  “Come where it’s light and I’ll see.”

  “No.” He pulled his hand from me, and without another word crawled through the opening. For one moment, as his butt hovered in front of me and his torso disappeared, I had to stifle another urge to drag him out, splinters be damned. Then he was through. For a few seconds, I heard only his breathing, saw only his bare feet through the hole. The rest of him was in shadow.

  “Miriam, get in here,” he said.

  In I went. I had to shove Martin forward to get through, and I did so harder than I had to. He made no protest. I tried lifting my knees instead of sliding them, to keep the splinters off. When I straightened, I was surprised to find most of the space in front of us bathed in moonlight.

  “What window is that?” I whispered.

  “Must be on the side.”

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  “How much time have you spent on the side?”

  None, in truth. No one did. The space between my grandfather’s house and the ancient gray wooden fence that bordered his property had been overrun by spiders even when our mom was young. I’d glimpsed an old bike back there once, completely draped in webs like furniture in a dead man’s room.

  “Probably a billion spiders in here too, you know,” I said.

  But Martin wasn’t paying attention, and neither was I, really. We were too busy staring. All around us, stacked from floor to four-foot ceiling all the way down the length of the half-finished space, cardboard boxes had been stacked, sometimes atop each other, sometimes atop old white suitcases or trunks with their key-coverings dangling like the tongues on strangled things. With his shoulder, Martin nudged one of the nearest stacks, which tipped dangerously but slid back a bit. Reaching underneath a lid flap, Martin stuck his hand in the bottom-most box. I bit my cheek and held still and marveled, for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes, at my brother’s behavior. When he pulled out a Playboy, I started to laugh, and stopped because of the look on Martin’s face.

  He held the magazine open and flat across both hands, looking terrified to drop it, almost in awe of it, as though it were a Torah scroll. It would be a long time, I thought, before Martin started dating.

  “You said you wanted to see Grandpa’s stuff,” I couldn’t resist teasing.

  “This wasn’t his.”

  Now I did laugh. “Maybe it was Mrs. Gold’s.”

  I slid the magazine off his hands, and that seemed to relieve him, some. The page to which it had fallen open showed a woman with waist-length brown hair and strangely pointed feet poised naked atop the gnarled roots of an oak tree, as though she’d just climbed out of the branches. The woman wasn’t smiling, and I didn’t like the picture at all. I closed the magazine and laid it face down on the floor.

  Edging forward, Martin began to reach randomly into other boxes. I did the same. Mostly, though, I watched my brother. The moonlight seemed to pour over him in layers, coating him, so that with each passing moment he grew paler. Other than Martin’s scuttling as he moved down the row on his knees, I heard nothing, not even the clock. That should have been a comfort. But the sil
ence in that not-quite-room was worse.

  To distract myself, I began to run my fingers over the boxes on my right. Their cardboard skin had sticky damp patches, bulged outward in places but sank into itself in others. From one box, I drew an unpleasantly damp, battered, black rectangular case I thought might be for pens, but when I opened it, I found four pearls strung on a broken chain, pressed deep into their own impressions in the velvet lining like little eyes in sockets. My real grandmother’s, I realized. Roz liked showier jewelry.

  I’d never met my mother’s mother. She’d died three months before Martin was born. Dad had liked her a lot. I was still gazing at the pearls when the first gush of icy air poured over me.

  Martin grunted, and I caught his wrist. We crouched and waited for the torrent to sigh itself out. Eventually, it did. Martin started to speak, and I tightened my grasp and shut him up.

  Just at the end, as the gush had died….

  “Martin,” I whispered.

  “It’s the air-conditioning, Miriam. See?”

  “Martin, did you hear it?”

  “Duh. Look at—”

  “Martin. The vents.”

  He wasn’t listening, didn’t understand. Dazed, I let him disengage, watched him crab-walk to the next stack of boxes and begin digging. I almost started screaming at him. If I did, I now knew, the sound would pour out of the walls above our bed, and from the circular space above Mrs. Gold’s window, and from Sophie’s closet. Because these vents didn’t connect to the downstairs guest room where our parents were, like we’d always thought. They connected the upstairs rooms and this room. And so the murmuring we’d always heard—that we’d heard as recently as twenty minutes ago—hadn’t come from our parents at all. It had come from right—

  “Jackpot,” Martin muttered.

  Ahead, wedged between the last boxes and the wall, something stirred. Flapped. Plastic. Maybe.

  “Martin…”

  “Hi, Grandpa.”

  I spun so fast I almost knocked Martin over, banging my arms instead on the plaque he was wiping free of mold and dust with the sleeve of his pajamas. Frozen air roared over us again. Up ahead, whatever it was flapped some more.