Writing Exercise 7 - Kyle

The two boys went home to see to things. David took the redeye out of LAX and Walt took the Chinatown bus express from Canal Street in New York. They arrived within an hour of each other, David in the back of a black limousine and Walt on the commuter train that ran out of South Station. He had to walk the mile from the train station with his backpack high up on his shoulders and the slush wetting the toes of his canvas sneakers. The whole world gray and seamless from earth to sky. Trees likes arms, like claws.

Entering the old house through the back door, the house was full of people who hugged him and patted him on the shoulder. How are you? Have you eaten? Uncles and aunts and distant cousins. Many of the people were strangers but some he recognized from when he was a boy. People he hadn’t seen in ten years who had shaved their mustaches or grown them out, women with hair blacker than it was a decade before. Wrinkled skin and gaudy gold jewelry and the smell of perfume and aftershave so thick it made him choke. Such a change from the last time he’d entered through the back, a late night, his father sitting at the table in his bathrobe and drinking a cup of coffee. His father smoking a cigarette.

His father’s mother – the grandmother, Ruth – entered the kitchen from the living room. Walt was standing in the middle of the room with his backpack hanging in his hand and the strangers milling about. They were careful and cautious about crossing a certain boundary. But the grandmother, Ruth, she came right up to Walt and hugged him, put her old sagging arms around all of him and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She pinned his arms to his sides. He hugged her back as best he could, arms as they were, and put his chin on her shoulder. She was soft, like hugging a pillow.

“Why don’t you go on up and get settled,” Ruth said.

“Where’s David?”

“In the other room. He just arrived too.”

Walt put his backpack on the kitchen chair and walked into the living room. David was in there sitting in their father’s brown chair. He had a glass of something in his hand and he poured it into his mouth when he saw Walt. A few people stood holding their elbows in the middle of the room. Strangers maybe. They tried to look at the two brothers without looking like they were looking. Then they moved away to the corner of the room, and then they passed into the kitchen and it was just Walt and David looking at each other. No words spoken at all.

For two full days David sat in the brown chair and drank from a glass that was scotch, neat. Walt did not see his brother get up from the chair but his glass was always full. He’d placed a large jade ashtray that had also been their father’s on the round table beside the chair. He sat there with his glass of scotch and a cigarette burning between his fingers and he spoke to no one, not even Walt. Those in the house thought it was terrible taste to be smoking in the house, especially because it was cancer took the mother, but Walt thought it was nice to have someone smoking in the house again. If he had to choose between that and perfume.

And then, after the people had emptied the house, it was just David and Walt and the grandmother, Ruth. Lunch. The three of them sitting around the dining room table under the dim chandelier passing platters of bread rolls and cheese and salad scraps. Leftovers from the vanished guests. Guests. They passed the plates and took things from them to fill their plates. It was just that no one was hungry. David and Walt and the grandmother, Ruth – they had taken to calling her Ruth not long before, college-age, adult, first names indicated something – sat upright in the stiff wooden dining room chairs and looked at each other. David lit a cigarette and tapped the loose ash into his plate.

“You might think of the others in the room,” said Ruth. “The smoking, the smoking. This is a small room.”

David grinned. He was drunk, if you could call it that. Walt hadn’t seen David drink anything but scotch since he’d arrived. He wasn’t falling over or slurring but his eyes were glassed and red and he seemed to occupy his own space. The way David moved through the house as if he were the only one there. No words spoken at all. Sitting in that old brown chair for days on end. At night Walt heard David moving through the house opening cabinet doors and turning on lights. He heard the television turn on and off. A glass broke. But in the morning there was no sign of broken glass anywhere. Nothing in the trashcan either.

David set his pack of cigarettes on the tablecloth.

“Ah, Ruth,” David said. “Ruth.”

Walt looked at his brother to see if more were coming. These were the first words he’d heard from David in three days and Walt tried to imbue them with some sort of meaning. He looked for the answers in those three words.

Then David pointed the cigarette across the table. He pointed the cigarette at Walt and said, “And you, Walt. You you you. Little brother. And how is New York?”

“Fine,” said Walt.

“New York New York,” David said.

He blew smoke at the ceiling and leaned back in the stiff wooden chair their parents loved because they were wedding gifts from an old uncle, a carpenter who’d made them from the scraps of the home he’d built in upstate Vermont. The uncle now dead. Uncle Mac. Mac.

“Little brother in New York. The great disappearance.”

Walt looked at his brother’s pack of cigarettes. Blanc-3s, French cigarettes that David bought online like a truly regular douche-bag. He wanted to hate David in that moment for the words that he’d finally said out of all the myriad possibilities. Endless combinations and what he’d formed had been The great disappearance. He wanted to hate David, but instead he longed for a cigarette. Ruth, though.

“The Big Apple,” David said. “My my. The great big city.”

Ruth, the grandmother, she was looking down into her lap, but her eyes were open. Her eyes were open and she was blinking again and again into her lap.

“People go to New York to stand out.”

“And.”

“You went to blend in.”

Walt looked at the slices of chived cheese on his plate. The roll was starting to harden already, to go stale. Three days old.

His backpack was upstairs in his old bedroom. Still mostly packed except for a few things. But Walt went out the back of the old house without it. He thought of nothing but the sound of his sneakers crunching loosened snow and crusts of ice on the brick walkway. He opened the doors of the old freestanding garage and looked at the back of his father’s old Saab.

Walt got into his father’s Saab hatchback and drove all the way to Kittery before stopping. It was there in the parking lot of a Citgo station while smoking a cigarette that Walt realized where he was. The driving was a form of hypnosis. The miles of smooth gray asphalt pouring out in front of the nose of the Saab had cleared his mind of things. The radio was dead and so Walt had opened the windows even though it was March. Gray everywhere, inside and out, a cold gray like turned milk in the sky. He drove through Boston and the North Shore and then through New Hampshire and when he finally crossed the Portsmouth Bridge into Kittery and Maine he realized that he wanted to stretch his legs and it had been here, in the parking lot of a Citgo station while smoking a cigarette and bending out the tightness in his knees, that Walt realized he was a half mile from the beach and the house his father grew up in.

He coughed and stepped on the cigarette.

Then he got back into his father’s old Saab hatchback and worked the clutch. Entering the on-ramp the nose of the Saab pointed south. Again he drove through New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Just as the sun went down he made Brooklyn.

There’s something to be said for the power of ignoring.