Chapter Twenty-Three #3
At a Sohio station, he tanks up, buys a map.
Walks to the phone booth at the corner of the lot and turns to the S’s.
Easy as pie, there she is, in between Salstrom and Saltaris: Salt, Margaret.
He writes the address on his hand with the Bic he always keeps in his pocket, gets back into his car, consults the map.
By the time he gets to her street and is slowly rolling past her apartment building for the third time, it’s fully dark.
He peers at every person on the sidewalk, but it’s too hard to see.
He parks around the corner. Pisses into an empty Ingleton’s bottle in his car.
Combs his hair in the rearview mirror, then gets out and makes his way around the corner.
He can’t tell if her building is fancy or not; he doesn’t see a guy in a uniform opening the door or anything like that, but there are columns on either side of the front steps.
He sees his last name on the buzzer. He has to work up to it.
He has to walk around a little, get his blood moving.
He hasn’t smoked cigarettes since college, but he buys a pack of Viceroys at a newsstand and walks around smoking one after another, like his father.
He’s ready for every woman he passes to be her, but none of them are.
He walks by her building again. “Bridge over Troubled Water,” the song that won’t go away, is coming out of one of the curtained front windows.
Is that his mother, sitting at home on a Thursday night listening to Simon last night’s clouds have moved on.
The door to her building opens, and opens again. Not her. Sometime later, it opens and she comes down the steps to the sidewalk.
He wasn’t sure he would recognize her—what if she’s gone brunette?
Or gray, even? But her hair is almost the same red as his, cut shoulder-length and styled in a That Girl bob.
She’s wearing a long light-blue coat with a matching belt.
A yellow scarf. Bright red heels. In her early fifties now, he guesses.
She doesn’t look up or over, doesn’t see him.
She starts down the sidewalk, and he stands and walks on the median in the same direction.
When traffic breaks, he crosses and walks behind her, stays back at least half a block.
He feels like a private eye, or a creep.
His heart vibrates against the back of his ribs.
She waits with several other people at a bus stop.
He busies himself with a cigarette. On one of her heels, he notices, sticking up above the bright red of her shoe, is a Band-Aid.
The bus arrives, she boards, and he sees through the windows that she walks almost all the way to the back before sitting on the opposite side.
He fishes change out of his pocket, steps on, and sits as close to the front as he can, near the window.
From the window of a bus, Columbus looks a lot like Toledo.
More people, maybe. They hop off in a hurry, climb on looking, to him, mildly inconvenienced.
When the bus catches a light and they pick up speed, it all goes sideways past his windows and the details are smeared away, but his focus is inside the bus.
He doesn’t want to turn around, doesn’t want her to see him this way, so he faces forward and waits.
When she walks past him, he stalls for as long as he can, then exits the bus.
He spots her from behind, up ahead on the sidewalk. Follows her.
This must be downtown. The streets are wider, the buildings taller, the fronts all businesses.
He maneuvers among the foot traffic along High Street, watching the back of her head.
He wonders how often she does this: wakes up, puts on nice clothes, ventures out to stroll the downtown district of her wonderful city.
Is she meeting a friend? Clothes shopping?
She passes store after store. Looks into a window now and then but doesn’t stop.
At the corner she steps under a wide silver overhang and is snatched from his view by a revolving door.
He has to back up a little on the sidewalk to see what she’s entered.
The name Lazarus stands out from the corner of the building in vertically stacked letters.
A department store, it turns out, and the place is huge.
People and mannequins scattered throughout, and as he walks in, he thinks he sees her stepping into an elevator.
Then he thinks he sees her at the top of the escalator, so he takes that, but at the top there’s no redheaded woman in sight, so he rides the escalator back down.
Voices and piped-in music thread through the air, more voices come over a loudspeaker announcing a sale.
He could wander the floors of this store for hours and never find her.
He imagines himself doing that, then imagines finding his way back to her neighborhood, instead, and waiting for her to come home.
He also imagines getting into his car and driving back to Toledo.
But there she is.
In the jewelry department. Talking to a man in a suit who seems to be trying to sell her something.
But when Tom gets closer, he sees that it’s the opposite—the man is standing in front of the glass counter, and his mother is standing behind it.
He keeps himself blocked by various mannequins and display racks as he gets even closer, until he’s less than twenty feet away and is mostly on the other side of a wide round column.
He can’t hear what his mother is saying, but the man’s voice carries, and now it’s clearer what’s going on.
He’s not shouting, just loud, and he’s telling her not to be late again.
She says something, eyes lowered, and he walks away.
As Tom moves around to the other side of the column, a voice comes over the loudspeaker saying there’s a sale on soccer equipment in the sports department. He pivots until she’s in view again, now occupied with a customer. An older woman, peering into the case.
His mother is still beautiful, he sees. But not young beautiful, as he remembers her.
Even from this distance, he can see she has some lines on her forehead—two short ones, not quite parallel, above the middle of her brow.
Her eyes are lively, but the skin that holds them in place looks like it might be tired of doing so.
He watches a series of expressions flash steadily on her face, like slides projected from a slide carousel: pleasant, inquisitive, intrigued, amused.
When the older woman walks away without buying anything, and she thinks no one’s looking, Tom sees a different slide: disconsolate.
The carousel lingers on that one. She looks at her watch, which she wears backward, on the inside of her wrist. She picks at something on the glass countertop with her thumb.
Straightens her arms and rests the heels of both hands on the glass with her fingers elevated to keep from making prints, looks out at the department and the departments beyond.
Just when he thinks she’s spotted him—not that he expects her to recognize him—she sticks her lower lip out and blows air up over her face, then turns to check her hair in the mirror.
Someone else approaches. The carousel clicks.
He sees that she’s not okay. He can’t say she’s unhappy, but she’s not okay.
With her life. With some part of it. She needs too many faces, relies too often on the flat one.
When a customer approaches, she transforms. He can distinguish her voice now from the other sounds, and that’s familiar too.
She chuckles at something. Mm-hmms at something.
Indicates with a discreet motion of her index finger, her nails wet-looking, some other department, and the man thanks her and walks away.
Tom remembers the Band-Aid on her heel. The reprimand. Her brisk walk: she was late for work.
Opening its own track through the din of department store sounds, a part of his brain—or heart—tells him there’s nothing to be gotten from her.
He runs through all the possible things he can imagine her saying to him, and suddenly he doesn’t want to hear any of them.
Doesn’t need to hear any of them. And doesn’t need to tell her anything, either.
Why tell her about Skip, and the rest of it?
To watch her face? To be consoled? Apologized to?
He’s just come from the Land of Apologies.
You know who apologizes? People who need to, for their own sake.
People who are trying to do themselves a favor.
He turns, follows the linoleum path back to the exit, and pushes out into the bright, busy morning.
—
He’ll drive back to Toledo feeling mean and sad and self-righteous and angry.
Mostly angry. Despite his moment of clarity about how so many people, like Vincent (for God’s sake, like Skip and Theo), had it far worse than he did, he’ll spend days thinking of himself as an extremely fucked-over individual.
Then he’ll hear the news, on the afternoon of May 4, of four college students, at a rally just like the ones he helps organize and participates in, getting gunned down by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, 130 miles away from the bed he’s sulking in.
The world will always bring you back into perspective, if you only bother to let it.
Still, he will go back to Bonhomie less and less over the next couple of years, and he’ll call home less often, and he’ll share less of his life with Felix and none of it with the Jenkinses.
This will spark the occasional heated conversation with his father, which will help nothing.
Ultimately, it will be Tom who stops returning calls.
In this way, he’ll deny himself to the people who denied him the truth and a half brother for so many years.
The anger and resentment he feels toward all of them won’t go away anytime soon—not only because he feels entitled to it, but because he cares for and tends to it like he would any other part of himself.
By 1975, he’ll be twenty-nine, working as a programmer at WGTE-FM, and he won’t have spoken to Felix for more than a year.