The bric-a-brac in Dirk’s room as soon as the door opened was a dropkick of his essence right to the solar plexus. Highlights: comic books, graphic novels, an open Neil Gaiman book on the bed, Fornite t-shirt, an empty Lucky Charms box on the floor, Air Pods on the desk, tiny computer keypad, huge monitor, much laundry, blue carpet, his meds in six or seven pills bottles on the dresser. Twenty-seven, he’d been twenty-seven.
“Do you see anything you’d like to have,” asked Mrs. Mackel, in the doorway behind my shoulder. She was a purveyor of painful, priceless memories; these were the most precious of her wares; her voice was soft and expectant in the way believers are in the face of the sacrosanct. Know how I love these things, how hard it is for me to part with even one, know others have convinced me this is the right step to take. Just pledge you will love it like I do.
I couldn’t do otherwise. “I would love to have this. If that’s ok.”
It was a red elephant figurine, fashioned out of quartz or volcanic glass somehow colored this shade of scarlett, and was about the size of a catcher’s mitt.
She gave a nod. Her eyes rolled back into remembering, and the left one returned bearing one long tear. “Oh,” she said, “how he loved that.”
We hugged goodbye on the front porch. I tried to be mindful not sympathize down to her, to commune for a few seconds with her desolation. I carried a fragment of it with me, along with the elephant tucked under my arm, toting both up the sidewalk, under the overhanging elm trees, walked past a ten or eleven year old gymnast doing cartwheels over an Alsatian sprawled in the yard, past a good-looking Dad carrying his toddler daughter on his shoulder and shooting me a nod as he went by that was sheer preoccupied friendliness.
I called Hamnet from a park bench after I stopped by a convenience store. I got a double Snickers bar. And a blue Powerade. And a Smart Water. And a scratch-off (four dollars).
“It went ok,” I replied. “Hard. But I was a bubble floating through the whole ordeal and didn’t pop.” I glanced back the way I’d come. “Kinda wish I had.”
“Not sure,” I said. Hamnet is very easy to talk to. He speaks mainly in questions that are boilerplate; his words might as well all be articles. I tore into a hunk of nougat. “Actually I was considering going to see my mom.” One year, seven months we’ve been together and I still haven’t dropped the personal possessive when talking about familial things, household items I have purchased, my classes, my work. Mom couldn’t be generalized, personified for him, the same way we didn’t wear one another’s sweaters. Hamnet had a mom of his own. “Mother,” he calls her, like the youngest son still in the closet who writes a Christmas newsletter to the thriving siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews scattered across the coolest cities in America while he and “Mother” still fill her prescription in Wophanger Falls and watch Murder She Wrote in syndication.
The proximity to the poignant thistles of Dirk’s memorabilia was casting Hamnet in a bad light; it was unfair to him. “I can come home now if you want.”
Idling in the chit and the chat, I parried his questions – boilerplate, I tell you – and thought about trolley cars. Towns like this used to have them; it’s a shame they were pulled from service. I suspect it was a cabal of Henry Ford, Lee Iacocca, the GM people. I stood at the threshold of Croton’s historic district and could see the roundabout, the island of green grass in its center anchored around a statue of some Union General. A bright red trolley car with brass grillwork would have looked lovely cantering down the blocks, town folks holding their shopping bags. I’m a sucker for those framed black-and-white photographs you see in diners, showing the old barbershops, filling stations, the pre-World War II world, the movie house sporting its marquee, the curbsides bereft of parking meters, thin traffic made up of sedans, Roadster pickups, an occasional mule. Of course I recognize the sepia days were in fact hellscapes of bigotry and repression and hair pomade, but the yearn for an unreclaimable past lies in the gullet of every feeling person, if only because their own days keep leafing left in life’s big photo album.
“Yeah, I’m going to go. I can catch the 3:20 and have dinner with them.” “No, I want to surprise her.” “You too, bye.”
The elephant’s name now I’d decided would be Dolly, and on the train up to Hastings on the Hudson she rode beside me in an empty seat. Her reared trunk was an S tottering above a distended bottom lip. Actually she was quite ugly but with a reach that towards beauty so that it became twice as beguiling to the eyes as any conventionally beautiful thing would be. Dolly had a nice low-center of gravity, maintained uprightness as the train came into station and all the way in the back seat of the Uber that took us to mom’s house. Insane that she lives here now. Mom had managed to best skyrocketing property values in these satellite towns compassing New York City by nabbing a second husband just in the nick of time, right before he took his sizable podiatrist income and flushed it down the toilet one some mid-fifties folly like restoring vintage Corvettes. She took immediate charge of his capital and at forty-nine years of age displayed an impressive aptitude for flipping houses. Our childhood place in Croton had been no great shakes growing up, though with my lush of a father the poor place was dragging around a serious handicap, as were the rest of us. For two decades-plus she’d been mired in the hopelessness. When at last she cut the tether from his barge she sailed well away. Myself, I’d expected her blossoming would come along eventually. Dolly and I rode up the lane of restored Victorians and pulled to a stop in front of her place, hers the finest of the bunch, in my opinion.
She appeared in the glass of the nine-light front door, finger in a book on macro dieting. Her hazel eyes had a spark upon seeing me but some ingrained habit of worry notched a place above the bridge of her nose.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Just wanted to surprise you. I was visiting Croton earlier today.”
“Why on earth,” she said. “Come on back to the kitchen. I’m trying to finally get the better of this Bok Choy.”
The slaughtered soldiers of her vegetable garden arrayed out on the quartz countertops. She picked up her paring knife; she brandishes sharp and blunt instruments alike as if she’s about to kill an informant. “So tell me about it. You didn’t have a hankering to visit the old house, did you? I’m sure they’ve torn that heap down by now.”
“I was visiting Mrs. Mackel. Dirk’s mom. Mother.”
“Oh,” she said. “Tragic about him. I’ll never understand why anyone does something like that. I’ve been low, you’ve been low, everybody gets low. But that’s no excuse to do something like that.”
I grazed my lips with my thumbnail, a common gesture of mine. “The word you mean is ‘reason’, not ‘excuse’. Most of us think they know what low really means, except for certain people our worst day would be their best.”
She put down her knife, kissed me on the cheek and patted my shoulder. “I’m sorry, honey. I know he once meant a lot to you.”
This was the loaded, unspoken thing. She’d never asked directly about him and me, fully what our relationship had consisted of. I didn’t come out to anybody except strangers and Dirk until I was in college; afterward per usual I learned that my my closet had been made out of glass and everyone had always seen me anyway. Mom was supportive, my sisters were supportive, aunts, friends of family, everyone really. But there was never to be any acknowledgement of how the news altered the past reality. It was all fine to forge toward the future with my identity finally unmasked; any awkwardness came only when we talked over our times growing up, and the subject of Dirk, or my passion for using a hairbrush as a microphone, would come up, and then Mom and Sarah and Sally would clam, suddenly going don’t ask/don’t tell on me. When anything is proved to have ben consciously disguised in a family’s chronicle it will always have a touch of squeamishness attached to it, feel a little like a con. Here my mom was referencing a basically known fact, and deliberately evading it as well. I forgive.
He was known as my friend, my best friend for along while. Prematurely tall, stringy in build, stringy dark hair, wrists the size of half dollars. He’d come up to my bedroom and for the first time I realized that the frame of my childhood bed was loose and would squeak in a rhythm that had to be unmistakeable to anyone who overheard, we’d fumble at sex. Weekend nights were spent driving around and listening to early Rhianna the Gorillaz’ Demon Days, his choice which he played to a repetitive frequency that bordered on OCD. One time we spent forty dollars on a baggie of baby aspirin, believing it to be something else – I can’t remember exactly what. We cruised the circle waiting for it to kick in, at periodic intervals fooling ourselves into believing it had.
I remember him over at dinner at our house. Our tabletop was always loaded over with household junk, an old Dell computer that sat there along with bunches of mysterious files in manilla folders. And my sisters’ toys, unfolded laundry. Every night we ate at the table we’d clean it off; afterwards, we’d put the stuff back again. An only child, and starkly an only child with his habits of slurping his iced tea, Dirk burped aloud and gazed around in wonder and a kind of fear at our teeming family unit. Missing usually was my father, who worked third shift at a shipping depot. We’d hear him enter in the wee hours, coming in as the sun was coming up, clopping up the stairs and expelling the rumbles he carried deep in his chest, the aural definition of dissatisfaction. He and Dirk met maybe two or three times; my unease at each encounter was intense. I don’t know what I thought would happen, and nothing ever did, but I’d convinced myself my father alone suspected the secret of my sexuality. In retrospect, I don’t believe he had. That would have required a certain amount of attentiveness, none of which he had to share. Dirk was a twice-a-week fixture otherwise, and we’d watch TV for awhile in the den, then retreat upstairs to do homework and would never do homework.
Never were we caught, no questions were asked. Maybe inattentiveness just permeated the walls of that house, like cigarette smoke or traces of asbestos.
“You haven’t asked about the elephant,” I said.
My mom turned from the wok. “Didn’t I? Ok,” she said, wiping her hands on the dishtowel hanging from her waistband. “What’s the story with that?”
“It’s a her, I think. A she. Her name is Dolly, as of about an hour ago.”
“Ok, honey. That explains nothing.”
“It’s a keepsake. Belonged to Dirk. Ms Mackel gave it to me.”
“Well that was sweet. It must be hard to part with anything – even that. If anything every happened to one of you I would keep everything, every scrap of paper, every old toy, the button off every shirt. All the boxes are in the attic.”
“My understanding is she was advised to do it. I’m thinking a support group or a therapist. It was almost four months ago.”
“Never, I tell you.”
Eventually her husband – my stepfather on a technicality – came home and we had dinner. The risotto was good. He asked about the elephant.
Dolly didn’t look quite right in the apartment. She couldn’t acclimate to any of the Ikea. I tried her on the coffee table, a sideboard, on the nightstand on my side of the bed. On the microwave shelf, on window sills. She fit in nowhere, and while I’d have been fine with her ill-fit, Hamnet always eyed her dubiously, whatever the location. He’s a fastidious man and while not one of strong opinions when it comes to decor, or anything I suppose, he has a difficulty letting go of incongruity. Once we spent the better part of a Saturday trying to properly caulk the baseboards in the bathroom. To me they’d looked fine, and we were renting. But his covert annoyance over the elephant triggered my more explicit annoyance, and this annoyance led me to one day take the her to class with me. I’m going for Graduate degree in education psychology at Hunter’ College after five year hiatus from academics, and first had to get a couple more credits, a math and then I chose Modern European History. My twenty eight years vs the classroom norm of twenty-three is noticeable. I sit in the front, I take notes. Furthermore, when I was just out of my teens I began losing my hair, in the most unfortunate patterning possible. It went sketchy on the crown first; the abjectness of the day I noticed the thinning patch in the side mirror of a hotel bathroom was unlike any I’d felt before. Already my case was advanced. Over the next year as I began to accept my state the siege continued; my dome encroached my ears, the front of my scalp began to look tufty. It was with a heavy heart when a couple of years later I shaved clean my whole head. Frankly my cranium isn’t the right shape for baldness, doesn’t have the clean contours. There are bumps and divots, there are muscular wedge-shaped ridges, like the outcrop of a hillside.
In addition, I was thickening up. This is a process. As so often happens my metabolism didn’t fully wake up till ten years after puberty. I went from being a lanky scarecrow to a pudding factory in no time. My love for processed foods is pure and without regret, and when people around me begin to rail about the American diet I turn indignant and won’t hear a word against my Taki chips or Zebra Cakes. I actually do workout, but mostly with free weights as my cardio regimen is for shit, and enjoy it, but it has given me that mass indeterminate between bulk and bloat. In pictures I look like an out-of-work bouncer.
Dolly on my desk made me stand out more. But that’s ok; there’s nothing wrong with a talisman of good luck. Her form looks to be made out of the basically the same substance as crystals, the kind kept under pillows, and only half the world’s populations think those are crazy.
Dolly attracted some looks but not an excessive amount. Our professor is a woman of aristocratic bearing who hailed from some former Eastern European nation that was now a region, or maybe vice versa. Seven weeks into the semester and she still attracted the bumper crop of attention from the students, what with her habit of acting out with her entire body how the Soviet tanks rolled through Prague. I was acing the class despite the fact that her accent was indecipherable to me. I did the reading and her tests had far less drama than her lectures. She also did not notice the elephant.
Courtney is my best friend and bi-weekly we tend to meet up, for some kind of midday dessert. She breezes in fresh from some yoga, pilates, Zumba or spin class. She is always cold and wears jackets in July and has a gluten allergy.
“So now you carry this thing everywhere.”
“I object here to the word ‘thing’. Dolly is a she.”
“Dolly is a paperweight. But I love eccentricity and love you, so of course I approve. But give me the why of it all. It belonged to this boy, Dirk? Was he your first love?”
This was tricky territory, and truth be told I hadn’t often considered the question before. He was my first best friend and first lay – the “I love you” words never escaped my lips. Love is an action they say; I suppose in that sense I loved him, but I didn’t have enough experience at that time to know if the sensation was bona-fide. What to compare it to? I didn’t lose sleep if he didn’t call, didn’t get jealous. Actually those facets didn’t apply. He never had to call because he was always there. I was never jealous because no one else ever took to him. Even as peers, there was a lot of sympathy larded into my feeling for him. And that terrible last night, coming after some time in which he’d sensed I was pulling away, he broke into sobs and shook when I told him that for the last summer before I went off to school I wanted to be single. The three words then escaped his lips, the ones never uttered between us before, coming in a gasp through mucus and the tears coursing into his mouth. And I had nothing to say, except he’d been my best friend. Been. The past tense of that word broke him completely, and he fell into a pile. I was stricken, at first could barely go to him, and when I did, he sensed the pity. But as there was nothing left otherwise to hold onto, he clutched and held to that, the mantle of chaste compassion I wore around my shoulders.
“Yes,” I said. “He was.”
“You never forget your first. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I have this to remember him by.”
She paused and considered Dolly again. “…a paperweight.”
I spooned out the last of the gelato, wishing it was Breyer’s. “Are those actual things? Why does one need a specialized object to hold down papers? Any household object over 50 grams will do. I think she was sheerly ornamental. I knew him, and I sense he was attached to this. Other than pill bottles she was the only thing in his room that didn’t smack of Comic-Con. She seemed to have a special place set aside. Like on an altar.”
“Come to think of it, she does have a quasi-religious air. Like a Hindu statue, or Buddhist, a symbol for … something.”
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t explain the desire to carry her with you everywhere you go. Unless you next join an ashram.”
“Hamnet doesn’t like her.”
She rolled her eyes. She in fact doesn’t like Hamnet. Insinuations that I should break up with him had over time turned first into suggestions, then presumptions. “When are you going to break up with him?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve yet to feel the need. He’s fine. I did one of those online questionnaires about proving whether your mate is right for you. And almost none of the negative boxes were checked, other than the one for lackluster sex.”
“You already told me. That was like six months ago. Stasis like this might stretch a lifetime.”
The bill came and it was my turn to pick it up. “Say goodbye, Dolly.” And nuzzled Courtney’s nose with her trunk.
At night of course the elephant had to be a home. Usually I left her in my satchel. At this point I’d long since stopped caring about Hamnet’s opinion on it one way or another. And it is just possible that I might have overrate is disapproval in the first case. Instead, I was protective of the little figure. So much so that I stopped leaving her in my satchel, and placed her of a night on the dresser facing our bed. It seemed inhuman for her to be tucked away in total dark night after night.
The streetlights of Cayler Avenue would seep through the curtains and capture Dolly in a glow like stardust. Her edges and quartz terrain would glean in tiny golden points and silver points. The urge to stroke her was surprisingly acute. I’ve never been a big one for pets; they weren’t a feature of my childhood. Between the ages of nine to thirteen, sometime in there, I vaguely remember a bird in a cage in our laundry room, pale yellow feathers that I wouldn’t have called a canary shade. Adapting to a bird is an unholy act; both it and you that it is a prisoner in the home rather than a participant. Dogs and cats we had none. New Yorkers with dogs are almost as bizarre a prospect – city and asphalt and glass, fur, collars and muzzles sharing the same space. The two weren’t directly contradictory, but a weird match, like a phrenologist who spray-tans or giving someone a Christmas present on Labor Day. Towards the elephant however I felt the pet owner’s chipper devotion. The light then turned her beautiful, scarlet in shadow, phosphorescent stripe of light down her back. The blackened eyes could follow you around a room like the Mona Lisa, without the wry mockery. She looked endlessly trustful, if a bit sad. Lying in bed, for just a moment I considered changing her sex to male. But it didn’t track; in any case it was irrelevant. Gender is a construct and besides, in this life, when the bell tolls, all of us are “its”. And that’s a fine thing.
I snore, and I know this. Hamnet tells me and my own nasal passages tell me. I choke myself awake once or twice a night with a sputter. I’m long overdue for a sleep study. Sleep apnea to go along with male pattern baldness and burgeoning obesity. Look at Hamnet there, pushing forty, curled on his side and still as a casket. But constricted. It’s his only outward sign of middle age. He sleeps tight, whereas my puffed shape still sprawls with limberness. His sleeping body is like a German speaking English.
The next morning I broke up with him. “No,” I said. “I just think we’re stuck and have been for awhile.” “It’s not that,” I said. “You’ve done nothing wrong. In fact, you never do anything wrong.” I said, “Stop it, no, I’m getting my own place. This is yours. I couldn’t possibly afford this on my own.” “You’re being very reasonable and adult about this,” I said. “As to be expected.” “Ok, when I know where to forward my mail I’ll let you know.” “Thank you.” “I’m going to stay with Courtney for now. I’ll just pack a bag and my tooth paste, and the elephant, and get out of your way for awhile,” I said. “Thank you,” I said.
I visited Croton fairly often before my mom moved, but after shattering his heart I only ever saw Dirk two more times. The first time he didn’t see me; it was in a department store while I was looking for cargo shorts with a wider waistband. Dirk was in the shoe department, following his mom around. They seemed to be shopping for Dirk a pair of sneakers. She would pick up a pair and with her reading glasses on look at the tag for the size. Dirk beside her, skin so pale it looked translucent, shoulders sagged, wearing all black, hands in his pockets, eyes faraway. She’d show him a pair and he’d shrug. I stood behind a rack of Oxford shirts. I wanted to go up to him, to talk to him the way I would to any old flame or old friend, and had decided to, but by then they, apparently not finding anything suitable, were turning, walking out of the shoe department and heading towards the escalator. I could have caught them if I’d really trotted, but didn’t. For the rest of the day I was disappointed in myself, so disappointed I resolved to go knock on their door the next morning before I caught the train back to the city. When the next morning came the urge had passed, and it seemed all awkwardness and hassle and not terribly important, so I didn’t go.
A couple of years later, another visit home, and I was walking down Myer’s Street. This was during a phase when I was trying to make walking an exercise. I had not realized where I was. Then I saw the Mackel house, then I looked to the upstairs window farthest on the right. He was standing behind the lace curtains, staring down at me. He was naked I think, or at least shirtless. He was bird-breasted and his body was painfully skinny, knobby. He was not without expression; he was smiling; not a full-on smile, more a grin, but for a moment he was a dead ringer for the boy I’d kissed so many times. I smiled back and waved. Here he turned hesitant, but in a fluttering gesture raised his hand quickly, dropped it quickly.
I opened their gate and came up the walkway. The doorbell didn’t work so I knocked. And knocked. Waited and knocked. He never came to the door and when I stepped back into the yard he was no longer in the window. The lace curtains held the faintest movement in them that soon died away. I’ll never be one hundred percent certain that he recognized me.
He had never left our hometown and had never moved out of his mother’s house.
I bought the Amtrak ticket to DC and Dolly and I took our seats. Her trunk looking up at me at this moment resembled a question mark. By now we were old train partners and the trip was breezy and actually quite scenic outside the windows. The porter looked at Dolly and so did the tightass looking guy in the necktie across the aisle from us, when he tore his eyes off his laptop. I always spy what people are looking at one their screens; I don’t really care if I’m subtle about it or not. Forbes, Wall Street Journal … you know the drill.
We did not go to middle school together but I remember Dirk once telling me he’d missed the eighth grade trip to DC because he’d gotten conjunctivitis is both eyes. “I couldn’t have seen the Washington Monument anyway,” he shrugged. He was always shrugging.
I’d also in fact missed my eighth grade trip to DC after eating a takeout box of Beef Chow Mien from the fridge. It must have tasted like three kinds of ass but I finished it. Here we see the early signs of food addiction. I spent the first night on the bathroom floor, Mom having wrapped me in a quilt and a bathrobe.
These kind of shared facts and coincidence seem little dabs of magic during the early days of couple hood. We also each had a grandfather named Herbert, outy navels, and detested the ocean. I liked his smell and he said he liked mine.
For the better part of a day Dolly and I saw the sites. It was mostly exteriors; security wouldn’t let us in to the Smithsonian or the White House without I relinquished Dolly. I tried to make a weak joke involving Republicans, elephants and all, but it fell flat. Refusing us if we came in as pair, we instead went around Capitol Mall. The sun was full and the day warm without being hot. Alas, we’d just missed the cherry blossoms.
In the shadow of the obelisk I laid her in the grass, on a little slipcover I’d brought along with us. For a few minutes I sat with her, people watching. Naturally, I was feeling somewhat crazy. But private crazy is different than extroverted crazy, the kind that assaults people, screams at pedestrians for being the devil, trolls under assumed names. Private crazy can be that of the mentally muted, the irretrievably sad, the clucking old woman who talks to people who’ve been dead for years, and who does so with smiling eyes. And adults on larks like mine. What they all have in common is they are all somewhere the brand of crazy that is swirled with two parts heartache.
“Its time for me to go home now,” I said to her. I looked around. “I don’t think anyone will think you’re a bomb. If you’re lucky someone from the UN will pick you up and decorate the office with you. Or a kid finds and keeps you. That’s my main hope.”
I turned back at about a hundred paces. Sure enough, two boys, maybe eight or nine, were eyeing her. One was calling their Dad over, who had a huge camera strapped around his neck. The other boy kneeled down next to Dolly. And I turned around and kept walking, because I couldn’t bear to see either thing that would happen next.
