Two Months after the Accident
MAY 1983
I take Sab’s hand, acutely aware of the soft heat of his palm. As we walk several blocks I lose myself in his nervous patter: here’s the bowling lane where he hung out as a kid, here’s his cousin’s bakery, here’s his sister’s salon, here’s the corner where he got mugged—mundane revelations that somehow leave me spellbound, the simple, enviable act of summarizing a personal history. His voice is fast, with slurred consonants and flattened vows, and a furtive, frenetic energy circles the air around him; this is someone who also has secrets, and who might be persuaded to share them.
We stop in front of a bar called Exiles, with an emerald-green facade and stained-glass windows shaped like fans. “My buddy told me that back in the olden days, in Ireland, people stored dead bodies in pubs,” he says. “The cold cellars kept the corpses in decent shape until the funeral.”
“Is that why we’re here, to view corpses?”
“Depending on how the day goes, my wallet might be a casualty.”
“If it helps any, I think I’m a cheap date.”
He holds the door open for me. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”
I step inside and think, The new me’s first time in a bar.
“Beer good with you?” Sab asks.
“It’s my favorite. Especially Coors.” I feel an odd relief at sharing another truth, a piece of myself that’s been validated and confirmed.
He slaps hands with the bartender and says something about baseball. I scan the room, wanting to remember every detail: the shiny silver tin ceiling, the posters advertising Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe, the James Joyce quote along the brick wall—I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
“I think we should toast,” I say, taking the glass. “Any ideas?”
“To mothers and good luck?”
Good culk, I think, but respond, “Perfect.”
We clink glasses and take a long sip. I tilt my head back to avoid the intensity of his gaze, as disorienting as looking directly at the sun.
“I should have asked,” I say, wiping my mouth. “What do we need luck for?”
He smiles. “Follow me.”
We head toward the far end of the bar, coming to tall, mahogany double doors inlaid with panes of frosted glass. “Welcome to the snug room,” he says. “Another relic from the old days. Once we’re inside, no one can see us.”
We enter a small smoky space that could pass for a museum of curiosities. One paneled wall is a tribute to medical oddities, including an antique poster depicting the stages of delirium tremens and a cabinet of anatomical exhibits: a model of conjoined twins attached at the chest; a mummified hand; a jar holding a pickled human heart. Two tufted booths upholstered in worn red leather are arranged on either side of a long, splintered wooden table where five men are gathered, smoking cigars and chugging beer, a deck of playing cards fanned out before them. A crimson velvet curtain circles the perimeter, adding another layer of secrecy.
“Yo, Sab,” says one of the men, with a terse nod of his head. “Who’s the guest?”
“This is Kat.” He drops his hand on my shoulder. “She’s my good-luck charm today. Kat, meet Ryan, Guy, Steve, Chinch—short for Cianciulli—and Booch, short for Bochella. And you thought my name was weird.”
Twelve eyes set upon me, and I wither under the scrutiny; the new me has never met so many strangers at once. I give a timid wave. “Hi, everyone. Hope I don’t disappoint.”
Booch shoves over to make room, and I sit on the very end. They toss bills onto the table and Guy doles out chips. Sab lines his up according to color and whispers an explanation: “We all put in a hundred dollars. Red is worth five dollars, blue is ten, green is twenty-five.”
“What kind of game is this?” I whisper back.
“Poker. Texas Hold’em. You ever played?”
“No,” I say. “Actually, maybe. I’m really not sure.”
He gives me a curious look. I’m saved by Ryan’s announcement, delivered through teeth tightly gripping his cigar: “Ante up, gentlemen.” He nods at me. “And lady? You playing?”
“Not this time,” I say, and watch everyone throw two red chips into the pot.
“Watch and learn,” Sab says. “You’ll get it.”
He squeezes my hand under the table, his fingers cold and damp from the beer. I squeeze back harder.
“Here goes,” Ryan says. He deals everyone two cards, facedown. Sab lets met peek at his: a Nine of Spades and the Seven of Clubs. “Is that good?” I ask.
Booch laughs.
“Shhh,” Sab says. “You have to keep all of your card business absolutely to yourself.”
The game works its way around the table, and I start to interpret its language. Calling the bet means matching the amount in play; raising it means greater stakes; folding means you quit that round. I learn about the order of a round, the flop and the turn and the river. Sab whispers everyone’s “tells”—see how Booch bites his lower lip, and Steve adjusts his hat?—and guesses when they’re bluffing. He wins that first round, but just barely—his two pairs beating Guy’s eights and sixes.
“See,” he says, and leans in. “You’re already bringing the luck.”
They play another round, and another, and Sab consults me all along, asking how much he should bet, whether he should call or fold, explaining the big blind ante and rounds of betting. I begin to understand the game, appreciate its nuances. His pile of chips grows, shrinks, grows again. Beyond the doors I hear evidence of a gathering crowd: laughter, the clink of glasses, the booming base of an unfamiliar song. Again I think of Jude, alone somewhere in a dank mansion, folding a stranger’s underwear, paying off my bills.
“One last round?” Sab asks.
“Here goes,” Ryan says, and deals everyone two cards. I glance at Sab’s hand—a ten and an ace, both hearts—and keep my face neutral. Everyone calls.
Ryan takes the top card and slides it to the side. “Burn one, turn three,” he says, and flips over the Five of Spades, the Jack of Diamonds, and the Queen of Hearts. Sab’s expression is inscrutable, the face one might make while tying shoes, and when his turn comes he throws four blue chips into the pot.
“Whoa!” Chinch says. “Someone is feeling lucky.”
“Or getting better at bluffing,” Steve says.
Ryan turns up the next card: the Jack of Hearts. Ryan, Guy, Steve, and Booch all fold. Sab tosses in another blue chip; Chinch calls. They are the only two left.
“And finally,” Ryan says, “we have the river.” Slowly, slyly, I shift my gaze to Sab’s face. When the upturned card shows the Two of Hearts, I note a nearly imperceptible twitch of his lips, quick as one falling drop of rain. I think, I am someone who can read people, even when they don’t want to be read.
“Fuck it,” Sab says. “I’m all in.” He downs the rest of his beer and pushes his pile of chips to the center.
To a chorus of whistles and applause, Chinch does the same.
“What do you got?” Sab asks. He jostles his leg under the table and I grip his knee, stilling him.
Chinch flips his cards, showing the Queen of Clubs and Queen of Spades, and drops them near the Queen of Hearts. “Three Ladies.”
“Damn,” Sab says, and drops his face to his hands, feigning defeat. “I mean, damn, I’m good!” With a flourish he spreads his cards, showing his flush. “Know when to walk away, my friend. Know when to run.”
“Don’t count your money,” Chinch says. “I’ll get you next round.”
Even though I expected Sab’s win, I can’t help myself: I let loose a strange, siren sound, somewhere between a squeal and a shriek, and flutter my hand to my mouth.
“How did I ever play without you?” he asks.
He loops an arm around the pile and pulls it in. I start sorting the chips into neat stacks. A waitress arrives with three pitchers of beer and bags of popcorn, which I taste again for the very first time. The afternoon grows hazy, soft around the edges, the outlines of people and objects dissolving, one moment absorbed by the next. I feel thrillingly adrift, isolated from everything outside this tiny room, removed, even, from the persistent haranguing of my thoughts: Where am I going, where have I been, what am I doing here? Silently I answer the last question, in two parts: I am here because I have met a cute boy who is very interested in me and therefore very nice to me. I am here trying to perform the role of “normal twenty-two-year-old,” one with memories and history intact, and he is a vital prop. He is saying the right words and doing the right things, and he makes me believe I can transform the performance into truth.
More popcorn, more beer, a rising cacophony of music and voices just beyond the door, a diminishing of light, signaling the sun’s downward shift.
“What time is it?” I ask Sab.
He checks his watch. “Just after five.”
“Just after five,” I repeat, the words plunging me into a panic. I can’t remember what time Jude said she’d be home but it must be close to now, and she is working so hard to make me whole again, while here I am drinking beer and playing cards and pretending I remember how to flirt. She is going to come home and see that I’m not there and she, too, will panic, and kill me with her dagger words; I intuit, without one memory to back it up, that anger is her first reaction, and disappointment her last. I can’t bear the thought of either emotion and I stand up, slithering my body past Sab’s, waving goodbye to them all. “I have to go,” I say. “I need to get home.”
I open the door and the cool air rushes at me; the smell of asphalt and exhaust replace the smell of sweat and beer, and I’m about to sprint when I feel a pressure on my shoulder. I turn to see Sab, his hair damp and his lips dry. He presses two hundred dollars into my hand. “Your cut of the winnings.”
I freeze; this is an unfathomable amount of money. It feels rough and itchy against my palm.
“I can’t take this,” I tell him. “I didn’t contribute anything.”
“You contributed plenty.” He folds my fingers over the bills, rubbing my skin with his thumb. I search his eyes and find a glint of something desperate, as though accepting the money would be for his benefit rather than mine.
“I have to go, they’re waiting,” he says. “But I wish I didn’t.” He kisses my cheek, lingering this time, and waves goodbye from the door.
Tucked inside the bills, I find a slip of paper covered in blunt strokes: his phone number and the words Let’s play again soon.
On the way back I feel a strange mix of guilt and elation. I am almost embarrassed by my own foolish giddiness; it seems out of place, sitting like a wispy meringue atop my layers of loss and fear. But in the moment I don’t care. Sab’s phone number is hidden deep inside my purse, physical proof that I can relate to people other than Jude, that my old life—whatever it entailed—will yield seamlessly to the new. Today I was a normal person doing normal things, and somehow the experience rings true.
I stop by Corropolese, tap the bench where I met Sab, and order a tomato pie; if Jude is home, I’ll tell her I took a short walk to get dinner. It turns out to be entirely different from pizza, served at room temperature and topped with a sweet tomato sauce and just a dusting of cheese. I wonder if I’ve ever tasted it before, and hope that Jude likes it.
I’m home by five thirty, relieved to find the apartment empty. I set the table, even lighting a candle and putting two glasses in the freezer to ensure our beer is extra cold. In our bedroom, I remove the two hundred dollars and Sab’s note, wondering where to hide them. As I hear footsteps on the stairs, I lift the fraying area carpet that spans the width of our bedroom and shove the money and the paper as far as I can reach. When I win enough, maybe one thousand dollars or so, I will confess my gambling excursions and give it all to her. For now, at least, I decide to keep Sab a secret, too; I want just a bit of time to savor the promise of him alone.
I am a person who likes to keep parts of herself hidden.
The door creaks open. “Hello!” Jude calls. I hear the crash of her bucket on the floor.
“You sound like you need a beer.” I pour one and hand it to her. Closing her eyes, she drinks half of it without coming up for air. “You have no idea how good that tastes right now. Do you know what I did today? Among other humiliating things, I dusted taxidermy!”
I run the word through my head, hoping I recognize it. Jude reads my face.
“Taxidermy,” she says. “Stuffed animals. Real stuffed animals. Deer heads, bison heads, bear heads. This one house in Ardmore had an entire room devoted to it. I thought they were going to dismount and eat me alive.”
“When I start working with you, I promise to do that room. I’m kind of curious to see it.”
“You would be,” Jude says, “and I mean that in the best way.” She spots my setup at the table. “Awesome. Let’s eat.”
For ten minutes I let Jude talk without interruption, describing each house she cleaned. Aside from Taxidermy House, there was Widow House (an enormous shrine of photographs and a needlepoint that reads GONE TOO SOON), Smoke House (every room reeked of cigarettes), and Porn Palace (a bedside table crammed with issues of Playboy). Our ultimate goal, she says, is twenty clients total, two or three houses per day, with a salary of $3.25 an hour, all cash.
I think of the two hundred dollars hidden beneath the rug and how many houses Jude would have to clean to earn that much. She’ll have it soon enough, I tell myself, and change the subject, asking for another memory.
She takes an enormous bite of pie and holds up a hand while she chews. “Yes,” she says through the last bite of dough. “I’ve been thinking all day of things to tell you. It’s like all our memories are shouting at me, waving their hands, begging to be called on first.”
“My questions have been doing the same,” I tell her.
“Let me decide this time,” she says, licking her fingers. “You always loved when I told you stories. We had a rhythm to it. I was the protagonist, and you were the plot twist. I would pick the setting and theme, and you made interesting things happen. Your ideas didn’t always make sense, but they definitely made me want to know how it ended.”
She leaps up and starts thrashing around in the hall closet, returning with a thick envelope. “Before I start this round of show-and-tell, I want you to promise me something.”
“What is it?” I ask, reaching for the envelope.
She yanks it away. “Promise first.”
“Moprise,” I say, and she understands our secret word.
“We can talk about our past as much as you want. I want you to relearn everything you forgot. But I also don’t want you to get stuck doing it. Moving forward is just as important as looking back. Get it?”
“You’re the boss,” I say.
“I’m glad you remember that, at least.” She thrusts her hand into the envelope, mixing the contents around. “So here’s the setting and theme. It’s five years ago, and Mom had just died, and we were almost eighteen and had no idea what to do with ourselves. We were so sheltered and innocent and naive. We had seen and done so little. We were about to burst, not just with grief but with longing. With curiosity and hunger. We just had to get the hell out of there.”
“Excellent opening,” I say, and take a sip of beer. “Time for a plot twist?”
“Not yet.” She raises her own glass and motions to the sofa. “We need to get into proper story-time position.” Again, she lays me across her lap and slices her fingers through my hair. Staring up at her, I work myself into her brain, preparing to inhabit the memory as she recounts it.
Right after our mother’s funeral, she says, we sell the farmhouse and take our meager inheritance and run off to Europe. It’s our first time flying in an airplane. We have no itinerary, no friends, no plans, no place to stay. We’ve brought one small suitcase and two backpacks. We allot ourselves a budget of five dollars per day. We want encounters that pierce and deflate our grief. We want surprise and joy and difficulty and menace, the possibility of death, the certainty of danger. We like to think that we might not return.
Jude flips the first picture, holds it above my face. “The funicular in Lisbon,” she says. “We met this old lady who sold wine and sardines from the window of her home.”
“Do I like sardines?”
“You like all salty things.”
I think of the snug room at the bar, Sab’s hand finding my leg. “Popcorn especially?”
“How did you know?” Jude asks. She flips more pictures. In my mind, we tour a winery in Tuscany, gathering and crushing grapes with our bare feet. We visit a market in Seville, a tapas bar in Barcelona, and Cordoba’s Mezquita, that ancient magnificent hybrid of faith, half mosque, half cathedral, with its candy cane arches and gilded altar, the elements both perfectly complementary and staunchly oppositional. We play miniature golf at a water park in the Cotswolds. We run down the very street where Ernest Hemingway fled from the bulls. We see the Eiffel Tower at sunset, the Tiergarten at daybreak, the De Wallen red-light district in the middle of the night. The last picture shows a pristine strip of white beach encircled by a deep blue void.
“Crete,” Jude says. “Chania.”
“I don’t remember seeing it, obviously, but I can see it now. Not just the picture, the landscape, but us. Our favorite spot on the sand, the exact waves that crashed over us.”
Jude is quiet a moment, and then says, “Do you want to know how we got the scars on our arms?”
“I think we had an epic battle with a pirate and stole his treasure and escaped, but not before he sliced us with his sword.”
From below I see her smile, the slight upward twitch of her jaw. I wish that’s how it happened, she says, but the truth is much more mundane: We go to the beach for a scuba-diving lesson. It feels like we’ve descended into the lowest rung of hell but somehow land in heaven. The fauna beckons us with waving palms and the fish are bright orange candies coming straight for our mouths. The fish surround us and we follow them through a burst of coral reefs, which look like flower petals but are sharp as blades. I am swimming fast, my body twisting and turning, and the softest patch of my left arm, just above my wrist, glides across a pointy reef. Jude, right behind me, swipes her right arm along the same point so we remain a perfect mirror match. The skin circling the scar is discolored because the coral reef was poisonous, tainting us in a way that will never fully heal.
“The dive seems worth the injury,” I say, “even though it’s a secondhand memory.”
“It was definitely worth it. It was one of the best days of our life.”
I trace the scar, noting the faded bruise around it, an indelible mark. “So is this where we were right before my accident? Cutting ourselves up in paradise?”
“Exactly,” she says. “When we came home, we had no money left and found this cheap apartment. We’d put our car in storage and got it when we came home. The night of your accident was supposed to be our official return celebration. We were driving out to some new restaurant we’d heard about, an English pub with the same kind of food we ate in the Cotswolds.”
“I suppose I at least made it memorable, even though I can’t remember it.”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it,” she says, and rearranges the pile of pictures, leaving Crete on top, our last stop. “I wish I could forget it myself.”
“Let’s go to bed,” I say. “That trip was exhausting, even without leaving the couch.”
Our room is dark, and within moments my sister’s breathing deepens, and I hope her mind is somewhere far away, maybe back on the beach in Crete, with the wide ocean before her and me at her back. Only when I’m drifting to sleep does a curious thought occur to me: neither Jude nor I appear in any of the pictures.