Lucky

I have a nice shop—men’s clothes, all of them classic. No young kids bother to come in for whatever’s latest because they know they won’t find it here. I don’t mind, I’ve known most of my regular customers for years—the second anyone walks through the door I can remember his collar size, sleeve length, you name it. I’ve always been the fellow who tucks everyone nicely into suits and pants and shirts, and I know more than measurements, I know what my customer doesn’t want to see in the three-way mirror: usually it’s the bald spot, the paunch or the neck wattle, so I divert attention to the shoulder pads, the cuffs, the snappy angle of a lapel.

Maybe I know my customers too well, because when old age settled in and they started dying I took it hard, right from the moment I heard the first bad news. I remember I was standing behind the register, enjoying the look of the long row of suits against the wall—I liked to think they were waiting patiently in line for something, maybe opening night at some big Broadway play, and they were all happy to have tickets. Joe Baxter walked in—the fellow who always goes through the tie racks three times before making up his mind. I was already thinking, Hat size: 7 ^3/4, when he said, “Hey Pete, guess what?”

He was holding back a nervous grin and I knew I was about to hear some awful surprise—that’s just the way he was. He’d done this to me before, once when Sadat was shot, another time when the space shuttle blew up. But Joe stopped smiling when he finally said, “Tiny Martin died—his heart. He just fell down on his way to breakfast.”

I leaned back against the counter and could only manage a weak, “No—Tiny? That’s terrible.” I liked Tiny and always felt sorry for him, beginning with his nickname—he was almost too big for the largest size in the shop. And the poor guy was afraid of the dressing room—he never tried on anything before buying. “No thanks,” he said to me the first time he ever stopped by, “I don’t need to go in there.” So I rearranged the cufflink display while he stood in front of the mirror and held shirts under his chin; after he picked out something, he told some little joke at the register, almost like he was thanking me for leaving him alone. Later, I heard talk that he’d seen real trouble back in the Korean War, squeezed inside some narrow prison cell.

Harriet and I went to his wake—a room full of flowers with nothing cheery about them—and poor Tiny looked awfully cramped in that coffin. The morticians had done a terrible job dressing him—the collar could barely contain his neck, and the knot of his tie was pulled off to one side, just like my brother Jamie’s tie at his own funeral so long ago. I hadn’t thought of it in years—I was nine, maybe ten, at the time—though I could clearly recall waiting in line for the viewing, nervous even though I knew there was barely a scratch on him—only internal injuries from his fall while chasing me up a tree. Jamie was dressed in a suit—something I’m sure he never wore when he was alive—with a thick blue tie knotted funny and twisted almost sideways. He looked so unlike himself that I leaned up close to his peaceful face, even though I was still afraid: sometimes at night he used to turn on the light by my bed and I’d wake to see his face inches from me, twisted up in some vile and gruesome way until I started crying.

Then there I was, standing beside Tiny’s coffin, tears pouring down, and Harriet whispered behind me, “C’mon, honey, people are waiting.”

I was so spooked that we left, too early to be polite. After that I avoided wakes and saved my respects for the funeral service, where Harriet and I sat in a pew in the back with the ushers and the less popular relatives. Because there were more funerals to go to—Jack Banes, a lover of cardigans, wasted away from cancer; and Paul Markowitz, a tie clip collector, died of kidney failure. Worse, more funerals were on the way. One afternoon I got a call from Gloria, Larry Johnson’s wife, and she said, “Pete, Larry needs a shirt for my niece’s wedding tomorrow, but he can’t, um, come by today. Could you pick something out for him and drop it by later?”

“Sure, I know his size, and you’re on my way home,” I said, a little surprised, but her tone of voice said, Don’t ask questions.

I brought along a nice selection, but Larry was in no condition to choose. He was sitting in the den beside a record player and listening to this scratchy Benny Goodman tune—when the clarinet hit its stride and went in loops around the beat, Larry’s face opened up like he was hearing it for the first time. Then he flipped the needle to the beginning so he could hear it for the first time again, and he gave that spinning record a silly grin. This was not at all the same man who rattled off baseball statistics while I chalked cuff lines on his pants. Gloria had a terrible look on her face, like she was a convict counting the minutes before parole, and I knew Larry’d been doing this all day, at least. God knows what was on my face, but she leaned in close to me and whispered fiercely. “You think he’s bad? Tom Peterson is some big fan of Sesame Street—he watches letters and numbers dance and sing all day long. Poor Ann.”

*

So one day I finished my lunch break sandwich, glanced over at the rows of suits, and they looked like they were all lined up to view the deceased. Next thing you know, I might start seeing ghosts poking through shelves of sweaters or avoiding the dressing room. What’s needed here is a change of scene, a walk to the park, I told myself, and I tucked the local paper under my arm and closed up shop for the rest of the hour.

I sat on a bench and watched the children playing their games in the sandbox for a while, then I opened up the paper and worked my way into the international news, all that faraway trouble. The national news followed—the usual sleazy dealings in Washington—and then I came to our town’s police blotter, the minor local fires, the major sales in the mall. Finally I turned a page and there were the obituaries.

I closed the paper and let it flap in the wind a little bit—after all, I’d come to the park to avoid this sort of thing. But what if someone I knew was in there—was I going to let Joe Baxter surprise me again with another awful grin?

All the names were unfamiliar. How could this upset me? So I read on. Everyone was survived by somebody: a wife or husband, brothers or sisters, kids grown up and scattered in different towns or states and their kids grown up and scattered. A job was listed too, just like another next-of-kin, and so was the time of death, down to the minute: 12:05 P.M. or 8:34 A.M. or whatever. I thought back to the day before and I tried to remember what I’d been doing at those times: maybe squeezing a tube of toothpaste, or finishing off a tuna sandwich.

That afternoon, when no one was in the shop, I stopped in the middle of arranging a shipment of socks in bins, checked my watch, whispered, “Good-bye and good luck,” and wondered if I’d just given a friendly send-off to someone I knew. The next day I read the obits to see how I’d done: no one there was even an acquaintance, and I hadn’t even come close to any time of death. But I kept up this little game for weeks, and I began to seem strange to myself.

I started thinking that when I retired—just a few years off, really—Harriet and I should move far, far away, where we didn’t know anybody, where the obits wouldn’t have one familiar name: I didn’t want to wait for Tom Peterson or Larry Johnson or anyone else to die.

*

Usually when Harriet made breakfast, I watched sleepily and thought about how lucky I was—she could have done a lot better than me, that’s for sure. But one morning I finally had to say, “Why don’t we move when I retire?”

She kept stirring those scrambled eggs and wouldn’t turn around, so I knew I had to speak carefully. Harriet was always the quiet one, and over the years I had learned to read her whole collection of quiets. I even had a favorite, her Out-of-the-Body quiet: I liked watching her knit, hands on automatic while her face took on this kind of faraway peace, like she could see something really wonderful that was miles off.

But the way she was slowly stirring those eggs I knew she was into her I-Wish-You-Hadn’t-Said-That quiet.

“Say we move south,” I said to the back of her head. Her hair was up in its usual bun, with a wisp loose here and there—I still loved it when she let it down. “Think of all that sun. And there’d be no snow. If we moved we could have a yard sale and sell the snow shovel and ice scraper, we could donate our boots and gloves and coats to the Salvation Army.” I hoped this might soften her up—Harriet could never get warm enough in the winter.

“What about the children?” she asked.

“I don’t know, what about them? They can learn to send their postcards to a new address, dial a different area code, I guess.”

Harriet was suddenly real busy dishing out the eggs and about to settle into her If-You’re-not-Going-to-Be-Serious-I’m-not- Going-to-Listen quiet, and she was right. We’d raised two fine kids—a girl and boy—and our worrying over each scraped knee, every chickenpox scar, and all the other marks the world made on them was not something to joke about. So I added, “Look, honey, if we lived in Florida we’d be closer to Elizabeth and the boys. And Jimmy can afford to travel a little farther.”

“What about my bingo?” she said.

Harriet was quite the popular bingo caller, in demand at the Legion and the Moose Lodge, Am Vets, Elks, and even the Catholic church, but I can’t say I much approved of her hobby. In those days even a lottery ticket was too much of the gambling world for me. So I said, though gently, “What, you think this is the only town where people play bingo? You can do that anywhere.”

By then Harriet was looking out the window, filled with her I’ll- Consider-It quiet, so I let the subject drop and considered myself lucky: I knew if I had to tell Harriet my secret reason for leaving she’d laugh, might even talk me out of it. But I didn’t want to be laughed at, and I didn’t want to be talked out of anything.

*

Maybe the thought of moving made Harriet want to settle in more and take hold of the house as she never had before, because the next Saturday morning she started listening to this crazy radio program about how to express yourself everywhere in the home, the host’s slick voice just slipping along: “Why settle for the ugliness of commercial packaging in your home? Pour the milk you buy out of its carton and into your own brightly colored plastic containers. Think how much nicer Cheerios look in mason jars. Ladies, get rid of all that advertising, take control. After all, it’s your home and no one else’s.”

Harriet took notes at the kitchen table. I left the room, depressed that I was driving my wife to such silly behavior. But no matter where I wandered in the house I could still hear the murmur of that cheery voice, so I went out for a long stroll. I walked through the falling leaves, kicking past little piles here and there, and I headed for the used bookstore to see if I could find some light reading.

Usually there’d be a tempting book in the window display, but that morning, when I glanced at the plain black cover of Strategic Solitaire, I decided I wasn’t really interested in learning how to outwit a pack of cards. Next to this was a book of photographs about steam engines—I wouldn’t have minded a train taking me far away, but not one that didn’t exist any more. Then I looked at a book on hunting decoys, a beautiful wooden duck on the cover, and I thought about all the time and cunning it took to carve such a thing.

Finally, I turned to an anatomy book. Its cover was a drawing of a man’s head arched back a bit, eyes closed and face so peaceful, but he was dead, a cadaver. The skin of his neck was sliced open and pulled back to show a tangle of veins, muscles, and nerves, packed together like wires in a telephone cable. I couldn’t take my eyes off that cover. Behind me I heard the purr and rattle of a few cars passing by, a bicycle with baseball cards clicking the spokes, and a couple of running, rowdy kids, as if the world were saying, Keep walking, move on.

But I did go inside, though at first I picked up a book on the solar system and found myself staring at those fantastic Voyager pictures from Neptune: that dark storm spot and its clouds, the ice volcanoes on one of the big moons, the thin, wobbly rings. All the while I scratched an itch on my neck and imagined the veins inside.

I decided I might as well give the damned anatomy book a peek if I was going to keep thinking about it. Soon I was seriously staring at those drawings: the heart a collection of bloody caves, red and blue veins winding their way everywhere, nerves branching crazily all through the face, and pale intestines bunched up like thick clouds. There were even glands under the eyelids that looked like ferns, and I blinked, teary eyed, amazed that this was all just beneath my skin—even the edge of the solar system didn’t seem as strange.

I bought the book and brought it home. Harriet was out for the week’s shopping and I sat on the couch, turning the pages to lymph glands clinging to abdominal muscles. I discovered my body was a bucket of words I could barely pronounce. The tongue alone was covered with words like hylo-glossus, fibrous septum, and the sulcus terminalis, and then I came upon this: “After completing the dissection of the preceding muscles, saw through the lower jaw just external to the Symphysis. Then draw the tongue forward, and attach it, by a stitch, to the nose; then its muscles, which have thus been put on the stretch, may be examined.”

I slammed the book shut and stared at nothing until I heard Harriet park in the driveway. Before hurrying out to help her with the groceries, I hid the book under the couch. I didn’t want her to see what I’d seen.

*

Though I didn’t mention moving again to Harriet, I left the travel section of the newspaper lying open to articles like “Florida Wonderland” and “The Pleasures of Savannah.” Time had to be on my side—we were well into fall and it was getting colder every day. But Harriet just sat by the radio with her I’m-All-Ears quiet. “Buy three or four different frozen pizzas and slice them up before you store them,” that smoothie purred on, “this way you can mix and match to put together your very own combinations.” Pretty soon, whenever I opened the refrigerator or checked the cabinets I saw single scoops of ice cream sealed in baggies, bars of unwrapped butter stacked like a pyramid on a plate, split pea soup exposed in a glass jar.

On Halloween night Harriet prepared her own special sandwich bags of candy corn. But whenever the doorbell rang I felt I was carrying little piles of pulled and rotten teeth to the monsters at my front stoop. The little hands of vampires, witches, and mummies reached up to me with their bags and I held them off, even the scary skull face.

I stood in the doorway and watched them retreat into the dark street, recounting to myself the sutures of the skull—the sagittal and squamo-parietal. Then I returned to my chair in the living room and imagined my own Halloween costumes inside me: the ligaments of my hands mummy bandages, the banded muscles on my face like that Freddy Krueger. I was my own House of Horrors, with too many secret passageways. Soon I dreaded the thought of the doorbell ringing again.

Even at work I’d get cranked up like this, and no busy fooling with the cufflink rack or flipping through my order slips could keep me from imagining the curve of the spine down the back of a mannequin. One day, just after I’d noted the time and whispered “au revoir” to whoever, Danny Williams came in and I was happy to see him, I waited for him to start his routine. Danny liked to finger his way through practically everything in the store until suddenly he’d march over to the one place he hadn’t poked through—say, the tie clasps—and pick out something in two minutes.

But that afternoon he was collecting shirts, three or four nicely tailored ones, and for once the usual worry was wiped from his face. At the register he said, “I hit the lottery big this week, Pete—a thousand bucks, my best yet.”

“Congratulations,” I said, but Danny wasn’t listening, and though he was staring right at me, he wasn’t seeing me—he was already in another shop, picking whatever he liked off the shelves.

That was just the sort of distraction I needed—whiling away the hours toting up the prize money I might win. And why not me? “Miracles can happen,” my mother used to tell me, at least until Jamie died, until she was hunched over on the couch and sobbing over the brother who never did anything but beat me up or frighten me whenever he had the chance. When my father shouted, “Playing? You’re lucky to be alive!” his voice might as well have been miles away—I was still scrambling up that tree, away from all the terrible things Jamie said he was going to do when he caught me, and just when I was sure he’d grab my ankle there were no more threats, only the sound of branches snapping, and when I looked below me he was lying on his back on the ground.

So I was lucky. Still, when I bought that first lottery ticket I didn’t tell Harriet—she knew I thought her bingo nights were a little silly. But this was different—every time I thought of the veins crisscrossing my hand like a bloody glove, I’d finger the ticket in my pocket and it was more than a slip of paper, it was really five, ten, fifteen million dollars, whatever. All I had to do was close my eyes and it became a trip around the world, or a yacht, and I could even afford not to learn how to sail—I’d hire someone to navigate me wherever I’d like. I’d set up a fat wad for the kids and grandkids, buy a big new house far away from here and retire early.

I waited for each weekly announcement on the local news, but when the numbers flashed I lost my imagined fortune and I was holding just a little piece of colored paper in my hands. Then I moped around, waiting for Harriet to leave on an errand so I could leaf through the anatomy book like some kid with his porno magazine. But I suppose I just gave off misery—Harriet didn’t like to leave me alone and I had to settle for hiding behind the paper and reading the obits. How could I explain my trouble? Whenever I thought of confessing to Harriet, I imagined my tongue pulled out and stitched to my nose.

One Friday evening I trudged up the steps home, barely able to face another weekend with that book I couldn’t throw away, and Harriet was waiting for me at the door, deep into her It’s-Time-to-Put-a-Stop-to-Whatever-This-Is quiet. “Let’s go to the diner tonight,” she said.

This surprised me—Friday was usually one of her bingo nights, but I didn’t hesitate long enough to start Harriet’s Don’t-Argue quiet. Sometimes we like to eat at the diner and listen to the people in the booths next to us—there’s something about a booth that makes people believe they’re all alone and nobody’s eavesdropping. So I said, “Sure thing.”

We stood at the entrance and smelled the country ham, listened to the crack and bubble of fries cooking in oil, and we scanned the booths. Slim pickings: a family of squawling kids, a couple of loners reading newspapers and shoveling food. Then Harriet gave me a little sideways glance, nodded her head at a young couple leaning into each other, and we were ready for whispered love talk.

We sat down and spread open the menus, thumbing the smooth laminated pages. I ordered Salisbury steak with that sweet, thick gravy, Harriet ordered the fried chicken, on special. Next door the couple was cooing, and even an overheard “Pass the salt” gave me gooseflesh. Harriet looked out over the long counter, the long sizzling grill behind it, and she wore just the tiniest smile, her We-Shouldn’t-Be-Doing-This quiet slowly turning into her Isn’t-This-Wonderful quiet. She reached out for my hand, I squeezed back, and we were young again. When dinner came it tasted better than it should have: Harriet sliced through the crispy skin of her chicken, I scooped up forkfuls of mashed potatoes.

But suddenly those kids were arguing, their voices all screwed up with angry love. “I can’t stand it any more,” he said, though I could tell from his voice that he had miles and miles to go before he reached his limit.

“Why do you always say that?” she said, but she knew the answer, she was just giving him a chance to repeat it.

They kept bickering, but even this was romantic. Harriet and I eyed each other as we ate, remembering the kinds of arguments we used to have long ago, arguments about nothing—the kind we couldn’t even remember though we’d wake up in the morning with our throats hoarse from all that shouting, and then we’d just have to press against each other until the alarm rang.

They were finally quiet next door, except for the young fellow’s fingers tapping away anxiously on the table. The tick of his fingernail made a sad little echo inside me, and I saw the bone encased in muscle, the little pumping capillaries swirling around just beneath the skin, all of it wrapped so tightly together.

The waitress was standing by my shoulder with a full pot of coffee. “No thanks,” I said, “and no dessert, either—just the check, please.” Harriet stared at me, surprised, but I could only say, “I don’t feel so good. Must have been those string beans.” I turned away, suddenly interested in the polished curves of the revolving stools by the counter and how they distorted everything in the diner, even Harriet with her I-Thought-You-Loved-Me quiet. I did, I did, but my tongue felt so thick in my mouth.

When I lay in bed next to Harriet that night she reached out and stroked the space between my shoulder blades—that old, familiar gesture—and she whispered, “Let’s go Siamese.” But how could I? I didn’t want to think of us together as two sacks of blood and bones, our stomachs digesting against each other, the muscles contracting beneath our lips. I just had to pretend I was asleep.

So I lay there on my back, eyes closed but utterly awake as though I were a kid again, waiting in the dark for Jamie’s footsteps, hoping to catch him before he frightened me with one of his twisted faces: if all I heard was steady breathing, I’d sneak to his bedside and stare at his sleeping face. All the meanness was gone, he looked like a different brother, more like the one I wanted. I wished he’d never wake up, and when I looked down at him during his wake and knew he never would, I was afraid my nighttime wishes had caused his death.

I did not want to think about this and I rustled in bed beside Harriet’s soft breathing, but there was Jamie, tucked into a suit in a coffin where he couldn’t get at me, his face so peaceful, his powdered skin stretching and thinning until his skull shone through and grinned at me.

I bolted up in bed—after all these years Jamie had scared me again. I wanted to wake up Harriet and hold her, but what would I tell her? So instead I made faces at the dark, grimaced until my jaws ached, my eyes watered.

*

I slept late, and when I walked down the stairs to the kitchen I heard the theme music of that smooth talker on the radio. He was reeling off the usual: “Remember, nothing is too small to bear your imprint, your own special flair for organization in the home.” Harriet stood at the counter, plucking grapes from their crooked stems—the whole bunch looked like a lung she was tearing apart.

It was no hard choice to skip breakfast. I drove off to the stationery store for my lottery ticket, and as I slipped in and out of traffic I was really roaring through the bloodstream, past blood cells and antibodies, and the telephone wires and bare tree branches above were a network of nerves and ganglia. Then I knew there was no escape: the entire world was a body turned inside out, and wherever I moved it would look the same.

When I returned home Harriet had more nonsense spread out before her: carefully cut little squares of cellophane and a pile of individually wrapped grapes. I listened to the little crinkles of clear plastic and I was about to say, I’ll stay put, just please stop listening to that damned radio. But Harriet turned to me, her embarrassed face crumpled up and filled with a quiet I had never seen before, and she said, “This must be the silliest thing I’ve ever done.”

“I think I agree with you there, honey,” I replied. We stood across from each other, both so unhappy. I put my hand in my pocket and crumpled up the lottery ticket, and all day my fingers kept at the thing until it was a moist little pellet, no bigger than a spitball. I stared at a few football games, but I didn’t even know what teams were playing, and I didn’t care who won, who lost.

When Harriet slipped clothes in the dryer downstairs or ironed in the sewing room, I managed to keep myself from sneaking peeks at the circulatory system. But soon she’d be off for bingo, and I knew I’d be turning page after page if I were left alone. I’d never gone with Harriet before—my excuse was always my long day at the shop—but now I lingered at the door to the bedroom while she put up her hair, and I asked, “Mind if I come along tonight?”

*

A good crowd filled the long tables in the Am Vets basement. Cigarette smoke was everywhere—old ladies, young marrieds, and assorted fatsos were puffing that big room into cloudy skies and I thought, So this is what my wife doesn’t want to give up?

The cashier grinned through his wrinkled face and shook my hand when Harriet introduced me, and he said, “Ah, the Mystery Husband, we’re so pleased to finally meet you. You’re in for a treat tonight.”

“Y’think so? Maybe I’ll hit the jackpot?”

“Anything’s possible,” he said, handing me six bingo cards for my five dollars. Harriet walked up front and settled down beside a big glass box half-filled with white balls. Soon she was surrounded by a group making quiet happy talk and—suddenly shy—I left her alone.

I parked at one of those long tables like a kid in a school cafeteria, about to suffer overcooked peas. I read the list of the evening’s jackpots—mostly fifty to one-hundred dollars—and peeked over at the lady next to me in a large faded dress. She whispered to herself, pushing the little colored plastic panels over the numbers on her bingo cards while she fingered her stringy hair. All around her were little dolls and more than a few crucifixes—this woman was trying to attract some serious good luck. I glanced down at my own cards. They had advertising on them—for a notions shop, a funeral home. No, this just won’t do, I thought, about to sneak out for a two-hour walk somewhere, until I felt the hush in the room.

Harriet held a microphone, and in that glass case the air- cushioned balls were bouncing away. “All right, everyone, time to begin,” she said, and she grabbed one of the white balls, read it, and called out the number: “G—56 … G—five-six…”

Her voice sounded strange through the PA system—closer and farther away at the same time. I checked my cards for the number, waited for the next one, and then checked again, pushing those little plastic panels here and there. At the next table a black kid with one of those flat-top hairdos grumped, “She’s off her stride tonight.” I thought, How could anyone screw up numbers? She sounded all right to me.

I kept up fine with my six cards, and across from me a lady scanned over twenty. Everywhere heads were bent, and I suspected that some rent payments might be riding on tonight’s jackpots. Pretty soon a woman near the front shouted out “Bingo!” A checker strolled by—looked like he might double as a bouncer—and called out the woman’s numbers.

“That’s a good one,” Harriet announced.

Then we were on to a second round of straight bingo, and after that a variation, where the numbers had to form a diamond shape. The next game was the Letter X Special for a double jackpot, and when Harriet started calling out numbers again—“B—10 … B—one-zero”—the place started to buzz a little. “She’s finally warming up,” the stringy-haired woman beside me murmured.

I listened more closely to Harriet’s voice and caught a little flutter I’d never heard before. She probably knew everyone here and how badly they needed to win, and I guessed she was happy that everyone listened to her, that they couldn’t wait to hear what number she’d announce next.

She didn’t disappoint, she kept calling out numbers with just the right pause: my wife always had a way with quiet, and the sound of her voice—“I—16 … I—one-six”—was a gentle rocking. So this was what I’d missed all these years.

I sat back in my chair and looked up at her. Just by the way her head tilted slightly I could see, even from far away, that her face was filled with a funny kind of waiting, and then she was into her Out-of-the-Body quiet. But she was still calling out numbers—“O—63 … O—six-three”—and I heard something else in her voice, a kind of music more complicated than all of her quiets: those numbers had words in them, whole sentences, long speeches. Harriet was talking to herself, and all of us in that big room were only eavesdropping while she said, This could be the one, your big chance, here it comes and it’s better than money, it’s good luck, maybe even a new life, and I’ll say the number you’re waiting for, see?—I won’t keep it, I’ll give it to you, it’s yours, not mine.

Like everyone else in the room, I wanted that luck. But it wasn’t in a winning number—let somebody else shout Bingo—it was in Harriet’s voice. I wanted her to keep calling out those numbers forever so I could listen as she floated out of herself. And I wasn’t crazy, everybody around me seemed to catch the same thing I did—I swear some people were even swaying slightly. Swaying a little myself, I actually tapped my fingers on the table in time to the rhythms of her voice, and I just knew I could tap them all evening and listen to Harriet, I could come back week after week for more: I could be a regular.