The Brutal Language of Love (14 page)

As each of the movies ended that night, Penny shut down the projectors, then covered them with sheets of protective plastic. In her private bathroom, she inserted her diaphragm, though she didn't always need it. On her way downstairs she passed Fritz coming up. While they didn't acknowledge each other, Penny noted the videotape in his hand. The booth was also equipped with video projectors, and sometimes, for a change, Fritz brought movies from home. His favorites were old black-and-white productions from the Eastern bloc in which sullen girls with dyed blond hair and runny eyeliner search for romance in postwar Europe. Often Penny wondered if Fritz didn't wish he had lived back then, meeting the raggedy girls of his dreams and whispering to them in a brutal language of love.

In Auditorium 2, Penny picked the aisle seat of a middle row, which would afford them extra room for maneuvering. As she waited for Fritz, her phantom pains began: sharp pricks in the area of her biopsy. The surgeon said it was nothing serious, and to remember that she had, after all, undergone an invasive procedure; such wounds could take up to three months to heal. Meanwhile, Penny thought of the pains as nagging, bratty children who wanted more attention than they deserved, and she reveled in her ability to ignore them.

Slowly the lights dimmed. Penny had an urge to look back at Fritz and wave, but knew he wouldn't like that, so she stayed put. She waited now for an image of a smoking factory; a barren winter landscape; a set of dirty, feminine fingertips lighting an unfiltered cigarette before exhaling a combination of smoke and frost from between chapped lips. Instead, she saw her father.

He was a bulky, gray-haired man getting out of a late-model Saab. He carried with him a bag of groceries and a briefcase as he approached the front door of a large, colonial-looking home. Penny heard Leonard's voice next, though she couldn't actually see him: “Excuse me, sir, but is it true you won't pay for your daughter's biopsy? Sir?” Her father turned around then, looking irritated without having to change his natural expression. “Sir,” Leonard persisted, “is it true your daughter may have cancer and you don't even care?” A boom microphone dipped briefly in front of her father's face, and he slapped it away. It fell to the ground and Leonard's friend Max appeared quickly, retrieving it. “I'm calling the police and I have a handgun,” Penny's father warned, turning his back on the camera and letting himself into the house.

Now, in the theater, Penny could hear the jingle of Fritz's belt buckle behind her. She would not be able to see the screen when he took his position in front of her, so she quickly got up and moved forward, picking a new seat at the center of the second row.

Meanwhile, a shot of a pool party in her father's backyard was materializing. Many adults, some of whom Penny recognized, lounged around in their bathing suits, while her father stood at a gas grill passing out hamburgers to their kids. The camera zoomed in on the pool, the grill, patio furniture, rubber rafts, snorkel equipment, and a weimaraner her father had recently acquired. Each of these shots was accompanied by Leonard's somber voice quoting dollar values: the grill was a thousand, the snorkel equipment a hundred, the puppy—which Leonard guessed to be a purebred—four-fifty. A clump of foliage in the bottom right corner of the frame indicated to Penny that Leonard had shot this footage secretly, in the thick hedge lining her father's property. At one point a young boy who was angry with his mother came to pout directly in front of the camera, prompting Leonard to value his hamburger at fifty cents.

Interspersed with all this was Penny discussing her lump, Penny crying, Penny glowing from the cast of warm lights upon her face. It was disorienting to her now that this story should make any sense, and she immediately stood up, scanning the rows behind her for Fritz. “Where did you get this?” she called out. It was the first time she had spoken to him in weeks, and for a second she thought it could not possibly have been her. “Hello!” she yelled, more to test her vocal equipment than anything else. “Fritz!”

She saw him then, scrunched down in the seat she had vacated earlier, his clip tie undone and dangling from one side of his collar. The credits began to roll on Leonard's video as Penny filed out of her row and started up the aisle. “Where did you get this?” she repeated, for Fritz had still not answered. She stopped beside his chair and looked down at him.

“That guy Leonard dropped it off,” he said finally. “He came in with some girl and dropped it off.”

“He didn't ask to see me?”

Fritz shrugged. “I said I would take it.”

“So he did ask to see me?”

Fritz stood up then. He buckled his belt and sighed. “He said either way was fine: for me to give it to you, or for him to give it to you.” The documentary was over now as they stood there, arguing in the dark. “Look,” Fritz said, “let's just forget it.”

“I need a ride,” Penny told him.

“Of course I'll give you a ride,” he said.

In Fritz's car she felt she understood everything: why it was her father had never returned her phone calls, how he must have thought she was the mastermind behind Leonard's documentary. She had been wrong in thinking Leonard hardly knew her, but now that he knew too much, her instinct was to distract him. Maybe she would point out that he had strayed somewhat from his topic of breast cancer, or warn him of her father's litigious nature. Beyond that, Penny had a general interest in anything her father might have said off-camera, and possibly she wanted to thank Leonard, though this was only an idea she was toying with, and who even knew where he lived.

They were riding south on a strip lined with pawnshops and outdated neon signs advertising burger joints. They passed gun-and-knife stores with barred windows, an abandoned plaza, a lone doughnut shop, outside of which a baker was taking his break. This was the stuff of her affair with Fritz, Penny suddenly realized, and she held her breath until they had driven by, touched a button on her work shirt as she did when passing a hearse. “We need a phone book,” she announced when she was breathing again.

Fritz didn't answer.

“What's Leonard's last name?” she demanded. It had appeared at the end of his documentary.

Still no response.

“Fritz!” Penny insisted.

“Lobel,” he said.

“That's right,” she said. It was all coming back to her.

“You're going to be with him now?” Fritz asked.

“Pull in here,” she said, pointing to a 7-Eleven.

He parked under a well-lit self-service island and left the motor running. Inside the store, a middle-aged man in a green smock lent Penny his phone book and watched as she flipped through the residential listings. “You okay there, sugar?” he asked. He peeked out the window at Fritz.

“I'm okay,” she said, passing the directory back to him. “Could I use your phone?”

The man laughed. “Not if you're okay. If you're okay you can use the pay phone outside.”

But it was no use. Information had no listing for Leonard Lobel. He must have roommates, Penny thought. People who saw him all the time, shared his meals, trusted him enough to list his phone bill in their name.

“Any luck?” Fritz asked when she got back to the car.

She shook her head and said, “Just drive.”

He nodded and began roaming the streets surrounding the campus, slowing down in front of houses whose lights were still on, coasting by thinning parties that had spilled out onto the sidewalk. They searched for the stout blond woman and Max, too—anyone who would lead them to Leonard. “It's no use,” Penny moaned a couple of hours later. “They're regular people and they're asleep right now.”

Fritz ignored her and continued driving, keeping his eyes peeled. Eventually the slow and steady ride of the car sent Penny to sleep. There she dreamed combinations of numbers that might connect her to Leonard, followed by a word jazz of street names she feared did not really exist: Hatchback, Mayonnaise, Eyelash.

When she awoke the car was stopped, parked in front of a large, windowless university building. Fritz was still awake, humming an old polka under his breath.

“What's this?” Penny asked, looking up at the cement structure.

“The Communications Building,” he told her.

She nodded.

“Do you know why it doesn't have any windows?” he asked.

She reseated herself so that she faced him more, taking some of the pressure off her rear, which was sore. “Why?” she said.

“Because it's filled with studios. When you shoot in a studio, you need complete control of the lights.”

“Oh right,” Penny said.

“I took a film class once,” he said.

At eight o'clock the students began arriving. They looked different from her and Fritz, Penny thought, with their colorful clothing, and the halos of frizz above their slept-on heads. They carried backpacks, shoulder bags, and half-eaten fruit. When they spoke, it was in earnest over newly adopted theories, or the political ideologies that had begun to rule their lives. When they walked alone, their lips moved.

At a little after eleven Leonard finally appeared, wearing shorts and sandals as he had the day of the interview. He carried a battered leather satchel on his shoulder and was no longer with the blond woman.

“It's exciting,” Fritz said suddenly, turning to Penny, and she was compelled to let him touch her hair before getting out of the car.

Grandpa put bricks beneath either end of a wooden
plank, creating a sort of table so that Tensie, the dog, would not have to bend down while he ate. Tensie ate out back on the cement porch, or else in the kitchen, beside the stove. He wasn't allowed in the living room with the rest of the family and he wasn't allowed upstairs. On cold nights, when he stayed home, he lay on the kitchen side of the doorway leading into the living room, his two front paws extended just across the threshold. “Tensie!” Grandpa yelled, sensitive to any peripheral infraction, and the dog quickly retreated. I think Tensie wanted not to come in but, rather, to be noticed by Grandpa. Had he just been lying there, following all the rules, his chances might not have been so good.

Grandma hated the dog, and resented the fact that Tensie liked her despite this. “Animals stick to me like glue,” she complained when Tensie fell asleep at her feet, his pointy, brown-spotted nose resting lightly on her magnificent bunions. “I have no idea why.”

“Because you ignore them,” my mother told her. “The same reason
I
like you.”

“Don't you talk therapy to me,” Grandma warned, and then they got into it, about how Grandma equated going to therapy with climbing to the top of a tall building and throwing twenty-dollar bills off of it, while Mom felt she was finally learning to love herself.

“Love yourself?” Grandma said. “Love yourself? I never saw anyone love herself more! If I had loved myself half as much as you do, you and Dalton would have grown up with Grammy Sue!” Grammy Sue was Grandma's mother, who had been known for hating children.

“I can't go to graduate school and take care of two kids!” Mom yelled.

“So give them to their father!” Grandma yelled back. Then Mom started crying, since the last time we stayed with our father he beat us up pretty good. “Oh never mind,” Grandma said, and she gave Mom a tissue. Though I often eavesdropped on these conversations, they never once hurt my feelings. I knew Grandma loved me way more than Mom and almost as much as Dalton, and that her hurtful comments were only designed to get Mom out of the house faster. I admired Grandma for this, as I wanted Mom to leave, too. Until she was gone, I always worried that she would try to take us home with her.

Mom came to see me and my little brother, Cliff, on weekends. She lived in the city, half an hour away, where she was studying to be a special-education teacher. She wanted to help blind, deaf, and retarded kids who needed her, she said. I thought of telling her I needed her, too, but it wasn't true. We had a better family with Grandma and Grandpa. There were a lot of rules you had to follow, and I thought this was an interesting way to live. I didn't like to eat what I wanted or pick my own bedtime, which were things we did with Mom. Instead, I preferred to do the same things, the same way, over and over again. I knew that one day we would return to Mom and her looser way of life, though naturally I hoped she would forget all about us.

My grandparents lived on a couple of acres in the country. When you stepped outside the back door and onto the cement porch, your eye followed a hill down to a wooden fence, where Grandma had pitched her clothesline. It was the square metal kind, hung with plastic cording that made it look like one of the God's-eyes we assembled in art class. Grandma hung clothes out to dry even in winter, which seemed like it wouldn't work, but it did. If you put them on too soon after she brought them in, you would shake all day from the chill.

No matter the season, you could always smell the septic tank. It was located in a marshy area off to the side of the house that you were advised not to step in while you were playing outdoors. Everyone complained about the odor, including me, but secretly I loved it. As obvious as the signs were, it simply did not occur to me that this was shit.

On gym days, I tried to wear dresses to school so
that I could leave my tights on when I changed into my shorts. This prevented the other girls from seeing my yellow underpants, which offended them and prompted them to sing songs about how I had urinated on myself. I had other problems. Earlier that year, I had skipped from the second grade, where I had been very popular, to the third, where I was thought to be a rat fink. When I asked my new classmates what this meant, they said, “Well, a rat is someone who tattletales and so is a fink.”

“That's redundant,” I told them, which would have impressed the second graders I used to know, but had a poor effect on the third.

“What the hell does that mean, turkey?” they said, and then they pushed me in the sandbox. Some of the kids from second grade who were on the playground at the time saw this and looked away, not wanting to believe what had become of me.

Eventually I became friends with a small group of boys who tortured the class gerbil, Henri, and later, me. To win their favor, I brought in an old Fisher-Price snowmobile with little round holes in which to set the accompanying figurines. “You still play with this crap?” a boy named Corbin asked me.

“God no,” I told him. “My brother does and I kick his ass for it!” We stuffed the gerbil in the snowmobile and pushed him around the table until he hopped out and started running. He fell off the edge of the table and the whole class crowded around as he landed on the floor and continued walking, dragging a limp, broken leg behind him. “Henri is injured!” Mrs. Walpin cried. “Who has injured Henri?”

The boys who were my friends pointed to me and—not wanting to be a rat fink—I bravely stepped forward. Mrs. Walpin called Grandma then, who came to collect me and Henri and take us to Tensie's vet. He suggested we put Henri to sleep, which sounded good until Grandma informed me he wouldn't be waking up, at which point I began to cry like a baby. “Oh for godssakes,” Grandma said, handing me a tissue from her embroidered purse. “What else have you got?” she asked the vet.

“Well,” he said, picking Henri up by his tail and placing him in the palm of his hand, “here's an idea.” In the end, Grandma paid forty dollars to have Henri's little leg shaved and wrapped in white surgical tape, which he chewed through by the time we got back to school. All the kids gathered around to watch as he attempted to use the exercise wheel in his Habitrail, then tumbled off it onto a pile of fetid wood chips. Mrs. Walpin set her jaw and asked if I had learned my lesson. I said I had. “Well,” she said, “what is it?”

“Hold up,” Grandma said. “Patty wasn't the only one involved here.”

“Is that so?” Mrs. Walpin asked Grandma. She was snotty, like a bank teller or a saleslady in a department store.

“Tell her, Patty,” Grandma said, and I had to, or else Grandma said I would owe her forty dollars, which I knew I wouldn't have for several years.

“Corbin, Jared, and Arthur,” I told Mrs. Walpin.

Mrs. Walpin paused, then said, “Would the boys Patty Potocki just named please stand up?”

They stood.

“Is Patty Potocki telling the truth?” she asked them. Two nodded and one shook his head but, when he saw the other boys, changed his no to a yes.

“All right then,” Mrs. Walpin sighed, “off to the principal's office.”

As they shuffled out, someone hissed, “Rat fink,” and I realized they were probably right.

Dalton, my mother's brother, had been born when
Grandma was forty. No one had to tell him he was an accident, and he seemed to live his life as if he were making up for this, rarely troubling others for attention or favors. He was self-sufficient, like Grandma, and the two of them got along easily, with an instinctual appreciation for the other's low expectations. Dalton was in high school and had his own room filled with cat skulls, dressmaking mannequins, and stuffed game. When you sat on his bed, a radio turned on. All Dalton's shirts were soft and frayed and reminded me of pajama tops, while on the bottom he always wore Wrangler jeans. If he ever gave you anything from his room, you treasured it, even if it was just an old Andy Capp comic he no longer found funny. All of Dalton's things seemed valuable because they had been kept long enough to give off his musk.

Cliff and I shared a room with Grandma across the hall, while Grandpa slept downstairs in a niche off the living room. The reason given was that he snored, and I believed it. On those cold nights when Tensie slept in the kitchen, I imagined he and Grandpa yearned for each other, regretting the forbidden territory that lay between them.

Tensie was really Dalton's dog, but Grandpa had stolen him away with heated dinners of Purina mixed with leftovers from the fridge. Sometimes they held contests beneath the dome of the huge weeping willow beside the barn, standing several feet apart and each calling Tensie's name to see who he would run to. More often than not, the dog simply lay down beside the tree's massive trunk, whimpering. “You see that?” Grandpa told Dalton. “He doesn't want to hurt your feelings,” to which Dalton would reply, “He's probably just scared you'll whup him.”

This idea was not so outlandish. Often Grandpa and Dalton fought, and the worst of these arguments culminated in the removal of Grandpa's belt and the lashing of Dalton's back and legs. Grandma would get between the two of them, trying to defend Dalton, then come away bruised herself. He never hit me or Cliff, though it seemed we were occasionally deserving of this, and even though he hit Dalton, whom we loved most of all, we continued to love Grandpa, too.

After Grandpa hit him, Dalton went to his room and cried. Grandpa went to the cellar, which involved stepping out onto the back porch, then descending two concrete sets of stairs that led to a wooden door. Once there, he donned a coal miner's light and sorted old nails by size into jelly jars. Back in the house, Tensie, who ultimately remained loyal to the one who had brought him to Grandpa, howled in the kitchen for as long as Dalton's sobs filtered down from the second floor. Grandma never cried. She sat at the kitchen table balancing her checkbook, which always matched her bank statement to the penny.

Grandpa used to drink, and now that he didn't, Grandma and Dalton were pretty mad at him. They were mad about a time before I was even born, when the three of them lived together in the same house where Mom lived now, in the city. The house had a long driveway, and it was Dalton's job to shovel it in winter, earning him five dollars a week. One night, when Grandpa came home from the bar to find the snow all piled up, he hauled Dalton out of bed and made him clear it right then and there, in his pajamas. Grandma tried to stop Grandpa but he pushed her into a closet. “You know what the kicker is?” Dalton asked me.

“No,” I said. “What's the kicker?”

“It had started snowing
after
I went to bed. How the hell was I supposed to know?”

We laughed and laughed about this, then reenacted the scene as it had once occurred. I played Grandma, Cliff played Dalton, and Dalton played Grandpa. When he pushed me in the closet it really hurt, but I acted like it didn't. When he grabbed Cliff and shook him, yelling about how was he going to get to work in the morning, Cliff cried like the little baby that he was.

Dalton had a lot of projects, the most important of which was his motorcycle refurbishment. It was actually more of a scooter, but out of respect for Dalton we called it a motorcycle, though sometimes Grandpa called it a moped. “At least I still have my driver's license,” Dalton would say, and the belt would come off. Still, Grandpa knew everything about engines, and when they weren't fighting, he passed this information along to Dalton. “Dad,” Dalton might say, “help me with this spark plug.” It was the only time I ever noticed him needing someone, and I was deeply jealous that it wasn't me. Another of his projects was starting a rock band. Confidently I told him, “I'll write you a hit single,” which made him laugh and say, “Sure you will.” He was right. I never wrote him a thing.

Grandma and I were balancing Mom's checkbook one evening (a two-person job), when a great roar emerged from the barn, and we understood that the motorcycle was up and running. We ran out on the back porch in time to see Dalton driving it up the hill, with Grandpa on the back, hugging Dalton's ribs. “Give me a ride!” I yelled, but they couldn't hear me above the sound of the engine. “You're not riding that thing,” Grandma said. “Yes, I am,” I told her, and we went back in the house to call Mom and see who was right.

Grandma was right, of course, but Dalton ended up giving me a ride anyway, the next time Grandma and Grandpa went to the hardware store, their favorite place to shop. Cliff stood crying in the drive as we pulled away, not because he wanted a ride but because he was afraid to be alone in the house. We assured him Tensie would baby-sit him but he didn't believe us.

“Hold on,” Dalton told me as we whizzed down Ridge Road. He had given me his only helmet to wear and his loose yellow hair whipped into my mouth as we rode, tasting of roses. I held him as Grandpa had, around the ribs, and pressed my cheek against his spine. I was hugging him tight and he didn't even know it. He probably thought I was just scared.

As we neared the school I hoped there might be some kids on the playground to see me with Dalton, but there were none. It was a gray Thursday afternoon and they were probably all at home with their nuclear families, doing homework. “See that hill?” Dalton called back to me, pointing to the incline behind the school where we went sledding over winter break.