Backwardness — Garielle Lutz

By that point I was already hoping to see my life not exactly as a blank slate but as a slate that somebody had been fooling around with, maybe with nothing more than a stick of sidewalk chalk, the instant my back was turned.  The people who in no time got themselves pictured on the slate were no doubt just some tenants (transients and imperpetuals, mostly) of the building where I lived. I got to know three or four women and one thoughtfully spiteful man.  The man must have seen me as a danger to his nature.  No matter what he cooked, he made the food look small. He had a grimy smile.  I’d first had him figured for just one of those people who ask you prying question after prying question when all they’re really doing is warming up to talk about themselves. But when he got around to talking, he was just like a talk-radio caller, getting straight to the hogwash. No, that is not exactly true, either.  In the course of a few thoughtless weeks, he let me in on his sorrows, his soots, all the leftover hooey of his love life.  He later moved to a third-floor apartment in a much smaller building, the one with an arpeggiating fire escape–one I’d often walked past in tears or on patrol.  I bought sissifying groceries at a market not exactly far from there.

Of the women, one was perkily despondent and chesty, with hair pinned heavenward, and everything about her (she was just a dab of a woman, baleful and frail) was ruthlessly convenient. But what if the eye of the beholder was a troubled eye?  She had been hollowed out by divorce.  Some people get like that.  They divert themselves from certain colorful sufferings to a wayside tendency to let things just slide.  She had two sisters, but all three had filed out of the family a long time ago.  Nobody talked.  Her apartment (one bedroom) was full of husky furniture, collections, and a couple of stepladders.  Her half of the conversation was always heavier on vows and pledges than on details of any completed deed.  In those days, I always took people at their boosted self-estimation, so I believed her when she said there was still plenty of time for her to go back to school. (It would have been just high school.)  Our late lunches started grading into early dinners during our days at the buffet.  (The price went up at three-thirty; show up a little before then, pay the lunch price, and nobody on staff will raise an eyebrow half an hour later when you help yourself to the carved meats, the desserts with better decorations.) For some reason, she liked being glimpsed when running a forefinger over her front teeth. It’s true that you look at a person like that and see how life cooks things right out of you.  She told me I was meek and dribbly in my sleep.

I must mention that I was then in my early thirties, throwing curtains, thick drapes, over everything in my life. At work, I had been promoted just high enough to fall down on the job. I would wake up on the floor among pages wrung luridly from a phone book, with certain numbers gloried with a highlighter; an expanse of handkerchief whose folds and wrinklings gave it the pathos of landscape. The plan was to lose entire sweeps of my past. I wanted all women to look alike.  I pretended I couldn’t even tell which waitress was mine when it came time to ask for more rolls.  But the woman I should have been worrying about  was, to get it out of the way, a druggard and a petite.  The night I met her, she was eating pretzel twists in the lobby.  Words just kept havocking out of her, first toward the others sitting in the chairs down there, then to me alone.  (I’d been fetching my mail.)  There were oddened tilts and tonings to her voice. You could tell she had been around a little too long in her own heart. She followed me toward the elevator and up to my apartment and, once inside, having settled herself on the floor, made the honest mistake of asking after my “partner.” For a couple of years now, people had been asking about whether I had “someone of my own.” My stock answer was that, why, only the night before, I’d had my car parked stoutly in the moonlight only a block or two from where the graves all started.  I’d ask them, “How are your own holding up?” I’d want to grill them about how much can be taken to heart and how much has to get itself dragged there, kicking and screaming.  But this woman, this new one: her face looked graven onto the world as a warning or a dare.  She had reached the age of twenty-seven without benchmarks, reference points, enclosing circumstances of any sort.  She was about as unencircled as a woman could be.  She was a yearner with no discernible pitch or skew to the yearnings.  I’d feel more comfortable describing her eyes than her mouth, but I’ll say only that her breasts had been nipped in the bud and that her body seemed practically spirally, especially with the blackwashed gyre of her hair.  The legs were a touchy subject, yet her skirts were all short and plaid and schoolgirlishly pleated.  She caught me looking at her and snapped, “You’re not so complete yourself.”  In truth, I had felt for her the same bashful envy I felt for any vital, underhanded loveliness wherever it arose, even in the unsampled personalities I walked past at bus stops or sat only a table or two away from at the corner place where I ate the specials.  (My own body had never been so quick to sensationalize itself.)  I can at least say she slept graciously, though we were neither of us ever nestled.  We’d already shared a towel, it turned out.  Another night, she all of a sudden said it was time to buy some belongings, and we walked out together–marched, practically–into the solid clarities of the town. It was a broadened, untowering town known for thick-bottomed pierogies.  Commonwealth buildings huddled on one side of the river.  At the store, she chose just about every variety and potency of toothpaste they sold, and a couple of toothbrushes of militantly thick bristle. Then for a week she abruptly had a job (she wouldn’t tell me where, she wouldn’t tell me doing what) and was picking up extra hours, filling in for others.  She had never let me see her apartment.  I’d been assuming she did not even have a phone.  The last night I ever saw her, she showed up at my door with some hopeful misprints she’d found in the classifieds.  She did not want me going along.

Then one night the fire alarms went off yet again.  I had already been set out on the floor, expecting nothing more to be had from the day, but I got up and walked out of the building like everybody else.  In the stairwell I passed a woman smoking: female material in the frame of a girl, drapey hair and gall in the eyes.  After everybody was allowed back in, I walked for some reason all the way up to the topmost floor, where I got to talking with a woman who was complaining of having already turned gray where it was hidden but nevertheless hurt the most.  I don’t know why, but I was instantly convinced that this empty-voiced woman was full of unelicited splendors, that she was on the brink of some personal zenith that could mean some sort of good fortune for us both, though I hated that old phone of hers, the sievelike mouthpiece I had to keep letting what I said go all the way through, even when all I was doing was ordering the food to be delivered, the pizza she needed, pizza with rural touches. Life had stretched this woman out to the point that her life could have gone poking off into just about any direction, but she was soon saying she liked having me around in the evenings, liked having my fingers make their way into her smush. The shelves of her bathroom were stocked with syrupy toners, little jars of froth, tubes of activators and resolvers.  The later it got, the more she felt she had to fall back on stories of her upbringing. It had been agreed she was to remain the baby of the family even after the brother came along. The brother grew up to be swainish around everybody. Anyone invited to look at the surviving photos of him would let the touched-up things coerce them straight to the conclusion that here was somebody who must have provoked morale even in people without a spark of anything left.  But here is what I have since learned about tears:  There is no such thing as the fake kind, not even when you’re given every reason to swear otherwise.  All tears are for real, untinkered with, identical to the touch.

Also, around this time there was a new woman at work, and she had somehow gotten herself out of God’s hands.  She had no real worldview, no education beyond a freshman year of gen ed. She was in some kind of disciplined flight from herself.  She wanted to feel the lashings of a heart not hers.  I still ruck the line of my lips a little differently, I hope, when I keep telling myself I wish I weren’t telling the truth.  She and I were together only long enough for us to emboss our lonelinesses on each other.  The minutes barely pooled into an hour. 

Most of the small appliances I owned had started getting a little undevout in their functions. I’d be eating staling flakes of something oaten out of a bag, then boxfuls of blunt-bottomed cookies of coal-black chocolate.  Everything was at my side on the floor.  The shoes I’d kicked off, their mouths open wide, would start looking yawny but watchful.  

I would have preferred work that kept me on my hands and knees, but in an office you naturally had to sit in a chair most of the time and coincide with other people.  I was craterous of face and at meetings had a muffly way of speaking my mind.

Then more trouble with a client, and the director wanted to hear my side.  I didn’t have one.    

You had to go from one waiting list to another.  Some of them were just a warmup, apparently.

I started going to just about any movie, just to emerge afterward to a day that had advanced another couple of turns.

There were times when I must have come close to my life, but I never seemed to get taken all the way in.  I signed up for a night class at an outpost of the local college.  Introduction to Paralegalism, it was called.  The class met two nights a week in what had once been a glass factory.  At the outset, the prof said he would be calling us “tuitionees” because the word “student” almost never applied anymore.  I always sat next to a young woman, and by the third class meeting, she had begun tossing her head toward me.  The hair on it was thick and untamed. Her arms were smudged darkly.  She was sharp-nosed and participatory.  She was forever raising her hand to answer the prof’s nagging questions.  She was even more pedantic than he was.  That third night she kept paging through a math notebook. She halted at a page of lonesome-looking problems done up in plum-purple ink.  The look of aggrandized arithmetic set out like that on paper always made me feel that somebody had to be pulling my leg–numbers could never be that clever or have that much privilege, that much clout. She got up and left the classroom.  She came back about ten minutes later smelling spritzed.  After class, we left in separate cars but met at a shopping-center parking lot.  We took her car from there.  She drove us past where she worked, where she’d gone to high school.  She was loaded down with parents–“brats, but forgivers,” she called them.  She drove us past their house. She said she’d had two friends, but then the two friends went and got themselves jammed into a marriage to each other.  There was a gaunt sufficiency to this unmothered-looking woman behind the wheel. What she knew of people, what she knew already of me! Her stock reply to almost everything I said–about myself, about women elsewhere in the local world–was “To what avail?,” though she said it in a nice way.  I think it was her way of saying, “Tell me more.”  We were only that soon into it, and already there was no place clearable to put what we felt onto each other. She drove us to Denny’s.  She ordered a steak dinner.  I watched her eat the meal through.  I had my place mat torn on all four sides.  I’d given it the ragged contours of a state in the Northeast.  

I remember—who doesn’t?—the feeling you get right after welcoming somebody home from rehab: the tender suspicions. How soon would she backslide this time? Was she already thinking of who else to take down? 

The first thing she did was buy that shower curtain with a map of France on it.

I don’t mind it when people put on an act.  Was it an act when I claimed that I liked knowing the names of things?  I bought visual dictionaries and books with titles like What’s What, but they almost never gave me the words I most needed, so I had to resort to making things up, and that must have been an act, too.

A man who for a while was writing to me described his voice as “snotty and crisp.”  I never got to hear it.  I hadn’t set foot in a supermarket for almost a month.  I was buying my bottles of soda in drugstores and my bags of candy at an odd-lots place.  Then I did something I instantly wished I hadn’t. The one time I opened up about it, she showed me no sympathy.  But I could almost see the sympathy she wasn’t showing me.  It was there, just withheld.  

Something to know about this one was that she claimed her body itself was a misrepresentation: it kept bepicturing somebody else.  She could wry her face into mine, start speaking straight from me.

She was a devoted smoker.  Smoking was something holy for her, something to make her sacred. I could see the big hurry she was in to get out of my life.  

After she left, an ashtray stayed full of her ashes and butts for months.  I must have thought, “I could save all of this.”  But it was just one of many glory-ridden things I eventually tossed–things of mine that people had touched, I mean, and given a different, glorious composition to.

A friend was always complaining that he was living a double life, but the way he described it, it didn’t even come close to sounding like a double life.  It’s possible that he just never learned that people lie about everything.

It’s possible that I just haven’t been doing things first-personally enough. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, but until last night it never occurred to me to get up and walk around the apartment.  In the living room I found a couple of leftover chocolate eggs.  These eggs had seams.  The seams of things should never be visible.  You should never once have to see where the two halves of a thing come finally together.  

The signs of intelligence seem to have since been revised. People, worries, come at me rotatively. Except for four afternoons during which I had to move the contents of my old office (which I shared with a computer-science adept) to my new one (a windowless space I have all to myself), I have done nothing in the past month except lie around on the floor and listen to peculiarized music.

I got into trouble last year for denouncing a report setting forth the particulars of the new curriculum: it was tricked out with a few quotations from the masters, including four lines of T. S. Eliot’s attributed inspiredly to Robert Frost.  

The new prof in the office next door looks exactly like the old one: paunchy, bearded raggedly, his unshod, sock-free feet up on the desk. 

If there weren’t just two of us sharing the restroom down there, I would be unbothered by the drips, drops, tricklets on the rim of the seat, or by a crumpled paper towel that had not made it into the wastebasket but landed flowerlike, petalled, on the floor and lay there sometimes for days, looking designedly communicational or maybe more like an end to all communication, but I soon enough found myself down on my knees, picking up, scrubbing, until I had become a student of my co-worker’s filthiness, putting more and more tenderness into what I did, achieving a kind of put-upon benevolence.

He is a man of malcontent sociability.  A vast silence shot up between us early on.  By the end of the first year, his deportment had thickened, stiffened.  He more and more lived and practiced behind columnar formations of ego and pretentiousness. I viewed these summits more and more from afar.  There wasn’t much to be dug up about him.  

Late Friday afternoon, I was one of the last to leave campus.  The former dean was sitting in his car on the upper lot and staring away.  It looked as if he had been there for a while, as is usual for people this late in the game.

I like it when nothing comes next.  I read a lot without really reading much of it.  The pressure of my eyes on a page seems to lock everything up.

All I wanted was a job where I could sit where other people sit, but on different shifts, different timetables.  I wanted to be well along in the lives of people I had never once laid eyes on.  I wanted to be manning responsible sorrows at a remove.  

I’d know my place if I saw it, if not for all the people already there. I received a summons in the mail for jury duty and circled the errors in grammar and punctuation and sent it back.  Then one day my rearview mirror snapped right off the windshield while I was driving back to work.  To this day, I wish it would have landed on my lap, but things didn’t work out that way.  The mirror was glued back on a couple of days later by the woman to whom the worst had already happened (she had been married three times).  People talked about us for a while, of course, but after a point the talk died down.  Still, the scenery of your life eventually catches up to you.    

Must I always be thought the beseecher?  Another girl, entirely aromal, has since started a city inside the one that is already up and laid out.  She allows the streets and buildings, the parks and overpasses, to keep their original names, but it’s a different place now.  Hearts slave away at the least likely persons but at the exact same addresses.

The other one knew how to do tricks with time, shortcuts.  She could be counted on to do something to my collar, finger something away from my face.  Her dog was a tender, sloppy mix of beagle and something else.

The tempo, the timbre, of our heartbeats!  But how I hated feeling twinned!

She liked giving her name and address, seeing them taking form, coming out, in other people’s pinching longhand on paperwork she was too fed up to fill out herself. Everything she has known of people has since had cause to be untrue.

The polite thing was to find what was yours, then keep your eyes off anything else.  I hear from my ex-wife every time she has her unlisted telephone number changed yet again.  She calls to recite the digits and to hear me repeat them back to her, for confirmation.  Every time we go through this, the new phone number sounds less and less like her, and a lot further from the truth than the one right before it.   

Nights, I would be waiting for sleep the way some people wait for a bus, with a particular destination in mind, a particular kind of dream.  I was always very picky about how things were to be arranged around me in the dark.  But most nights my sleep amounted to little more than an unspacious restfulness, a grievous refreshment after the bothers of the day.

A woman from work drove us up to Erie for a weekend at the beach, and on Saturday evening there was a drizzle, so we had to resort to the mall. There was some sort of car show or raffle in the center court.  People looked anvil-faced but fortunate.  At one end of the mall was a budget steakhouse called the Brown Derby, so we decided to eat. When the waiter arrived to take our orders, I couldn’t make up my mind.  I had three different steaks under consideration, and I listed them.  I said, “What do you think?”  I had directed the question at the woman, but the waiter intercepted it and said, “Don’t look at me.”

The woman after her, a different one, was a lengthy phenomenon, a girl splintery enough in the body allotted.  There was an earliness about her in everything.  She’d gone through the marriage of two friends of hers and then let things unsettle.  I must have been drumming up her life and then drawing on it for my own. Books soon began to rise in tenemental piles on her side of the bed. She was of the opinion that there is no way you can get two bodies to look like just one.  Before me, she had lived for a long time in an enclosed porch at her aunt’s.  

We went into detail together.  I ask only that you not form a mental picture.  Any description would be wasteful and inclement.

A certain amount of my life now and then becomes available to me.  I was expected to go to a viewing, though. The day came soon enough.  The departed was the daughter of somebody I’d worked beside for years but never really knew.  This daughter was in her mid-twenties.  I’d never met her, so when I looked at her the way they had her arranged, it was the first look I’d ever had.  There was little to do except whisper, “Who goes there?”

I was waiting for her to emerge from her building. She was about as naturally undamaging as a person could be, her mind could situate itself into practically anything, the only thing she had ever worn twice was a pinkish raincoat with a few little stains (coffee?), so I was never bothered by the wait. There was no glee in the love I was in with her. She barely even knew about it. The love was about as unbending and immaterial as anything else. I started watching a hundred or so ants in the vicinity of a discarded piece of pastry.  I bent down.  Most of the ants weren’t converging on the pastry at all (they just kept bumping into each other and getting nowhere nearer), but a few others seemed to know what they were supposed to be up to.  Two or three were carrying off tiny crumbs into a crack in some concrete, and one was somehow hoisting a crumb at least three times as large as itself. None of this was any of my business. I never would have paid any attention to anything like this when I was younger. The day already felt out of order with the other days in the week. It wasn’t the kind of day you could stub out with one nap after another.  Other days would just mass up behind it. A weird feeling came over me, a feeling that I had already started my departure from the world.   

Little seems to have been written about the way I have lately started to read.  I can’t be the only one now doing this. You start anywhere in a book and challenge the wording, take it on.  You get on top of the lines instead of reading between them.  You press them deeper and deeper into the writer’s thoughts or practically slide them all loose.  You substitute something else for every word the writer put there just to trip you up.  You write over the writer.  Don’t do that here.

Things can dawn on people, then go dark all over again.  E.g., a mother has children, a father has witnesses. The girl herself was an intranquil pushover with a head full of loosings from infinitude. 

My family, my folks: there was only one joke, one riddle.  The joke was that my mother untied the apron strings just so I could don the apron. The riddle wasn’t even a riddle. It was only offered as one, with singsong and mock puzzlement: Are you sure you won’t be happier someplace else?   

I wasn’t in my own mind, or at least not always at home in it.  It scares me when people say they’ve been thinking about me, because whenever I find myself starting to think about people, it usually involves tugging them this way and that, making them feel the curt slope of the earth underneath them, bringing them around to seeing that nothing ever comes next. Marriage is only the half of it.

I never got around to getting the phone disconnected.  There was one person who still called almost every day. These were still the days of long-distance charges. The caller was an old friend from college who for some time had been living stalwartly in Connecticut.  My memories of her and her ornaments had pretty much thinned out by now.  She’d say, “Listen to these three anecdotes about why I no longer have reason to believe a single thing that comes out of my son's mouth.”  I’d be paging through a newspaper, turning the pages as quietly as I could.   She said her son did not want to be told he had his father’s eyes, because he did not want to have to see the things his father saw. I did not like to think about my own father’s body, either, and about how much of me might be implied in its folds, in its every hirsute crease.  But I always made a point of being polite to people on the phone.  That way I could desert myself for hours.

But this is not so much a story that happened to me as it is a matter of my having once been standing next to a man who was talking.  He was talking about a sound his daughter had made.  It was a sound he wished he could get to go right back into her mouth.  A call had come from somebody at her school.  “Come and get your Elona,” the caller had said. “She’ll be waiting for you in the principal’s office.”  In the car on the drive home, the daughter had cried, “I’m after everybody, and the teacher knows it.”  The man had said, “After everybody how?”  And then his daughter made the sound. It was the first he had heard it.  He convinced himself that the sound alone proved nothing.  To convince himself even further, he figured out how to make the exact same sound. It wasn’t that difficult to reproduce. 

The man no longer lived with his wife.  His wife still lived in the same local-calling area but made it a point not to call every day or even every other day.  She staggered the days of the calls and even the times of the day.  She kept track of the days between calls on a memo pad she kept on top of the TV.  She put hyphens after every two digits so that to any busybody the notations might as well be mistaken for just about anything else–even lottery numbers, come to think of it.

Elona was in the seventh grade.  The town itself, the backdrop of blood relatives and what little was worth being ashamed of, the names of the local papers and long-living thin-faced politicians, the regional main courses, what it was like to keep ordering from the same menu yet expect something different every time–none of this made much of a difference to Elona, though if you asked her, she would tell you that life was increasingly just “informational.”  After another year, she would never see her mother again.  “And vice versa,” she would tell any first friend she might then someday eventually finally make.

I knew about myself early.  My heart was already full of people who had never once been stopped.  In high school I drummed in the marching band.  (Please don’t keep asking me how.)  This band needed to raise money to charter a bus so we could march in a parade in some far-off snowy state capital on inauguration day. The band director was the high cockalorum of the school district.  He said that for the band to afford the trip we would have to sell a hoagie to every man, woman, and child in town.  I tried to picture every man, woman, and child.  I pictured them each with a ridiculous need to keep knowing what they already knew.  The man I pictured in just one pair of pants, pleated more amply than most.  I pictured the woman as the type who showered herself, her life, onto everything and everybody, the type who would one day take a train to where trains still went, then wake up in a hotel room and interest herself first in what had made it into the wastebasket and then in everything that had not.  I pictured the child as somebody already laying things out to happen much later, rehearsing how to one day claim, “My body doesn’t close over me right.”  

The hoagies were to be slapped together in basements.  Nothing less than hoagies of the classically Italian type were to be expected of us.  

The band somehow got the money together, mostly through under-the-table donations.  On the way to the parade, the bus stopped at a restaurant where everything had been ordered for everybody in advance.  Everybody got the same thing: veal cutlet with tomato sauce, macaroni and cheese, fruit cobbler–nothing I ever ate.  I didn’t touch a thing on my plate.  I would be lying if I said that I spoke to the waitress in anything other than ten-dollar words.  This waitress was a high-and-mighty type herself.  There was something braggartly about the way her arms lofted so many plates at once on her way to so many tables, so many booths. She was dressed awfully bossily for a waitress.  Her uniform looked like something you would expect to find on somebody high up in some indigent country’s air force.  I would go so far as to say she looked like the origin and entire duration of something yet to come, something that alone could take over entire floors, buildings, streets, wards.  There was ice water for me to sip from a tumbler, and sip it I did, not with a straw but with my lips on the lip of the glass.  I called for refill after refill.  The waitress would return to the table again and again and again.  This went on for fifteen, twenty minutes while the others kept cleaning their plates.  The water had a taste I couldn’t quite place at first but then in no time I imagined it must have tasted precisely and entirely of her inwards, her brine.  By this point I must have already been privy to scrupledly gushed glandulose gallons of her.  On the bus afterward (my seatmate was a lean-ribbed boy with his nose stuck in a book), all I could think was:  Who am I to have been this existable?  

I can’t help it.  Back when there were phone books, back when there were Yellow Pages at the back of the phone books, there were cheap little boxy ads that small businesses (plumbing outfits, stores selling vacuum-cleaner parts) could buy that put the name of the business in bigger, bolder print than they got in a regular listing and that shoved the words “Where to Call,” in both quotes and italics, right before the address and the telephone number.  The trouble is that I could never get it settled to my satisfaction whether “Where to Call” was simply referring to the address and phone number (i.e., “Okay, here’s our contact info, buddy, if you think you can’t do any better elsewhere”) or whether the phrasing was making a promise: “This is definitely the place to call!  This is where your problems will get solved!”  I would usually be eating my dry Alpha-Bits or Crispy Critters straight from the box while paging through the Yellow Pages at the kitchen table. It would be morning on a school day. I’d been taught to use deodorant. I’d been taught not to expect another set of teeth after this one.  I’d been taught that there are feelings and then there are “funny feelings.”  My one friend had already started on his coming-of-age capers.  It would be years until I’d make that other friend,  the one who would one day have to go right up to his father in his chair and snarl, “Keep your wife out of me.”      

This was to be a fresh start.  My new apartment had high ceilings but no stove.  I could walk a dozen or so blocks to a department store that had a little restaurant, but I ate there only once, and then only at the counter, and the long, slender fluorescent light bulb a waitress was trying to replace fell out of her hands and shattered on the floor.  The parking situation at this apartment house was a touch irregular. I sometimes had to park at the pay lot across the street.  One day the attendant at the lot, an old woman, said, “Are you an insurance man?”  I of course had to say no, but the answer felt incomplete.  I bought lottery tickets at a doughnut shop down the street but never looked up the winning numbers.  The tickets piled up in a drawer in the kitchen.  I assumed that the lottery authorities would hunt me down if I ever won.  But I wanted everything in my life to be different this time.  No matter what people now said to me, I’d say, “Another thing we’ve got in common!”  

“Roomer” and “rumor” sounded alike, because they were always expected to apply with renewably harshened relevance to one and the same person. The dentist, the dentist’s assistant, the receptionist, a clinically cologned colleague all keep asking the same thing: how am I?  I live out of the corner of my eye. Not too long ago, a little girl waiting with her mother outside a movie theater looked at me as I was walking past and said, “Daddy!”  The look on the mother’s face, which I commanded myself to take in one feature at a time so that the face could never once register as anything entire, was a look you could build a whole blotched world around.  But the kid was right–don’t be choosy, take the first available.

I was busy, yes, keeping myself busy, spooning the sugar, the cookie-topping sugar, her favorite granulate greens and reds, into the deep lax mouth of the gas tank of the smug sedan that was going to carry her off from the church as the better half of a “couple.”  For spoon it I actually, unrationingly, did, and then sent the spoon itself (it was a slender, long-natured tea spoon, a handsome one I’d saved of hers) down the tank’s throat as well.  And then all the jewelry she’d once seen to having fastened to me, as much of it as I could uncatch from myself out in public like that–the breastpins and ankle chains and upper-arm cuffs and strappings, the hooky entanglements of petite hardware, the beaded stringinesses slung around my neck–all of it, please understand, all of it was dispatched, crushedly, into the throat of that tank.  I set foot into the vestibule of the church afterward just long enough to get a confirmatory look at the backs of the two heads, the tended masses of shiny upright ceremonial hair, and I had no sooner shown myself out than I came rather brutally into the worry that in the intervening minute or two, some partisan latecomer witness would have had leisure sufficient to bring off a tit-for-tat retaliatory undoing of my own car–a car small, it’s true, of its kind.  But no: there was nothing shattered about it that I could see, no dents or even bashful scratchings from a key, tires still plump and crisp of tread, door panels unstreaked, unsmutched, by any late-coming wedding-partier’s excretionary ill-will; so I got inside, yes, started the engine, listened for splinks, pluts, cryings-out; I pulled off the side streets and onto the main outbound trafficway, rendered myself alert to anything possibly spasmic in the handling, any letting-up of the compact’s modest sovereignty of the cozy, slow-goer’s lane. There was nothing foul I could make out. But, again, doubts overset themselves with further doubts until they got tamped down into convictional hardpan from which even gaudier suspicions started shooting up and diversifying; and as I started clearing the down-counting mile-markers measuring my bloodshot progress across the wide, thorough state to the low-steeped town to which I’d had to have everything hauled, it dawned on me: What was my rush?  Why not make myself a present of two or three personal days?  Why not show the car around at some garages, have it looked at and fussed over, have it put up for diagnostics, see if the mechanics could find anything definitive? Thus it was that off the next promising exit, on the outskirts of some murky little riverless city, I found a chain garage, a brake-and-muffler clinic, where I was asked, “Will you be waiting for it?” and I gave the asker my bullying yes.  I had never been one to be without intimates in customer lounges and waiting areas anywhere.  People would look me over, and once they were sure I was noticing, they would put a little something forward of themselves, and I would take it.  I would help myself to whatever it was.  Let me get one fast example off my chest.  I was alone here with a man whose shoes were cracked, unfortifying things secured with enhancive stretches of electrical tape.  But who expects that what the world has come to on a pair of shoes can tell the whole story?  The man drew a leg back beneath his chair and let a shoe kick out into the commons of the concrete floor a sallow pillowcase, a lank, threadworn thing that swelled out just a little at the stitched-shut end.  He said the things inside were things I might not think I had any direct use for right away, but he wanted to leave them with me just the same.  All I was being asked, he said, was to take them home with me, let them keep me company, see to it that they entered fittingly into whatever I might have doing over the next week or so, after which I would ship everything back to him, yes?  I’ve always been good at making promises.  He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and from it extracted an in-case-of-emergency-please-notify “permanent ID” card that had come with the wallet (my wallet had one of those, too, but I’d never seen much point in filling it out) and handed it to me so that I could make out the hairbreadth outspelling of his name and lackluster address.  I accepted the card and then reached for the pillowcase and added the card to the meager plenty within. It was as conclusive a motion as I could manage. The man had little more to say to me.  His car was soon ready. I watched him set out for the cashier’s window, and then a mechanic of my own was suddenly by my side to deliver urbane evasions and the principled, fraught, unsatisfying verdict of “No charge.” My key was returned to me on a chainlet with my name printed on an attached scrap of oaktag.  I walked out to the car, started the engine, then drove no farther than the brink of a parking lot before I stopped to shake a few first things loose from the pillowcase. There was just a hoard of shreddy rubber bands, some snappish binder clips, some little foil stars with adhesive backing, a few stumps of hopscotch chalk.  I did not investigate any further.  I trashed the pillowcase and its caseload in a cagelike wire-mesh trash receptacle at the edge of the lot.  The next place I had the car looked at was a hundred or so timid miles farther west.  (This was after a night of eventful unrest in a motel: the finally memorizable cycle of thrumps and slooshes of the peppy overage toilet; the thundersome elbowings of round-the-clock showerers in the sheet-metal stall of the room next to mine.)  There were five or six of us waiting for our cars to be prepared, taking our ease among a couple of snack machines and a huge coffee-brewing console.  A chance yawn in one of us would come to sudden maturity and require a response, an inquiring, influential cough or throat clearance, from another. After an hour or so, the mechanic came out and said, “I’ve got it up on the rack.  I’m going to level with you.  There’s nothing too sumptuously wrong going on under that hood of yours.  A dainty malfunction almost not worth my mentioning.  A little letdown of sorts in the engine.  Something might have spoiled a bit.  A thing or two might have clammed up.  I found some spewy giblets in the oil. Some of the couplings are loose.  I could set it all right in a few hours’ worth of whistle work.  It’d be so easy I could daydream through the whole procedure.  But it would be pretty pricey.  How long would you be willing to hang around here?  In what way would you be paying?   I should ask about your intentions.  Might I ask how you drive?  Do you hug the berm?” I told him I’d grown up behind drapes, on the far side of the thickest curtainry imaginable. I’d had to walk through hanging after hanging just to reach a water fountain that still worked. I displeased my body. I had a rack of hair in the most unpleasant place. I started school later than the other kids.  In the time it took the teacher to take her eyes off me for just one minute, I got put into a completely wrong grade. There were no full skies.  My feelings reached wrong destinations.  Days passed at a baleful clip. I counted myself out of myself, wore pajama bottoms night and day. I had to make myself smaller and smaller in the pissier and pissier love I felt for people farther and farther off. I sent my voice to the backs of any people I was talking to. I was a downspread, off-sloping blonde set upon the days with a tiny breakage from a filled molar that looked like a meteorite, in earnest of early decay. I grew up to screw myself into public view. I already knew full well how everybody deserved to have been hurt.  But I let people talk.  I took what they talked and made it go elsewards.  

I was speaking in a wet, capsulizing voice that didn’t sound anything at all like the way I sound on tape.

Women—when did they get vents?  Now they had vents.

Before the lunch break, he overheard himself and a co-worker being referred to as “existing employees.”

His principal trouble was the overpalpable world. His smell wasn’t B.O. or the cooking smell that keeps coming out of some people. In the washroom at work, he would strip to his waist and spurt out palmfuls of the sickish pink soap from the dispenser, then gob it onto his chest and his arms.  It was best to skip the water.  He would put his shirt back on right over the soap.  Sometimes he would press paper towels, the stiff brown kind, right onto the soap, then button his shirt over the paper towels, patting them so they would stay flat and stiff and undetectable.

This might be where it’s fair for me to say that everything about him looked attained.  

The general practitioner at the medical clinic looked him over one day and said,  “Where were your mother and father?” The truth is that in high school the boy had played in the marching band.  The band director kept telling the members of the band that he had no interest in the “whole person.”  He was interested only in the parts of the person that made a sound come out of an instrument.  “I am a lip man and a hand man and no other kind,” the band director said one day during practice.  His baton was a milky plastic wand with a bulblike cork handle.  He was known to throw it at anybody getting a note all wrong.  In the band room on the last day of the final year of school, everyone was handed either a plaque or a certificate.  The boy was handed a certificate.  It had been photocopied onto an approximation of vellum.  It said, “In today’s search for the exceptional, those more modestly gifted are too often overlooked and underappreciated. In recognition of your dedication, [the boy’s name], please accept our warmest gratitude.”  The thing had been signed by the band director and by the drum majorette, obviously with the same pen, which the boy pictured having been passed back and forth, accruing warmth.  

After graduation, he went to work in the dairy where his parents, late of youths of their own, had both once worked in their turn.  He never had much trouble finding either of the restrooms with his eyes practically shut.

The one kiss he had put up with made him feel as if his mouth had been given a mildly acidic rinse.  The giver of the kiss was a woman he met on his first day on the job. She looked like someone who kept as little of her life inside herself as she could manage.  The day after the kiss, she passed him in the hallway.  She said, “Stay boxed.”

I was already clearing my clockwise forties. I kept going through drawer after drawer to see if there was anything  in there still worth throwing out.

In a book that was said to have a little bit of everything in it, I learned how to wrap an elegant block of soap in tissue paper.  I learned how a very tall person can nap comfortably on the perpendicular segments of a sectional sofa.  I learned how to walk with a clerical fleetness of step in deference to an hour getting late. There was a chapter explaining how to go about managing the retaliatory misbestowal of affections in a nuclear family. Another chapter listed occasions during which it was acceptable to say either “This shouldn’t be” or “Do you even know about me?”  The most useful parts (for me) were the ones about already being too old for friends and about getting yourself enclosed in a second marriage in which the only child fails to come out of the wife as a girl and barely improves upon you at all. 

Parental advice was to take the bad with the good and make good on the worst. My mother was in her early seventies but still walked two miles every morning to read the temperature on the flashing sign above a bank, though the day was always either warmer or cooler by the time she got back.  “Man or mouse?” was the question she always put to my father and, when I was in town, to me.  Other than that, my life was covered with notations.

Sunlight can feel awfully assessive on a face. As a boy, I one day covered myself with powder.  Not just one kind, but every kind I could find in the bathroom and then in the kitchen.  I plied the powders one at a time onto my arms and my shoulders.  The hope was that each layer would remain intact as a distinct sheet, a coat of sorts to be worn into the day ahead.  I have only the runniest of memories of anything that came next in life.  I know that at some point I was allowed to fill up on pretzels.  My father by now was too old to keep wasting opinions on me.

The things I found in our bed when I pulled back the covers were just things she’d been carrying, whatever things she’d had in her hand when she came in to make the bed. 

There was the crackpot erotica she called her godsend. There was that sheet of paper smarting from some words supposedly about me that she’d gotten pounded out upon it.   

There were thrills she had to keep putting her body through just to get it put to sleep. The thing about life is it can be wrong to think that what’s delivered to our eyes is necessarily being neglected anywhere else. 

Around then is when I’d already started getting to know a man who worked in construction.  He was upfront about the downside of the work. You had to disappoint a new house into rooms, put flooring down, scruple things out so the owners would come to feel they had never lived anywhere else but in this wrought-up neck of the woods

Most nights I roamed the marts, hoping to get mistaken for an undercover security guard or a price-memorizer. These were still my thirties. I lived uninspected.  My father called once a week, every Sunday morning at eleven o’clock on the dot. It was always over in a minute or two. “Your mum says to say hi” is what he would say before ringing off. 

When I was a boy, I’d of course thumbed through what little there was of my father’s pornography.  It might not have even been his.  Maybe he’d just brought it home to get rid of it for somebody else.  A man he worked with had just died of a heart attack on the toilet in the basement powder room of a house he’d only just bought and fixed up. The house had to be cleared out pretty quick. Everything had to be hush-hush.  But whoever had owned this pornography had spent a lot of time covering it heavily with illustrational annotations of his own. A lot of filmy underwear had been drawn over almost everything, but on the pages that were left alone, I kept waiting for something interesting to show up on the bodies.  I must have been expecting a natural wonder of some kind.  

I was fourteen, fifteen?  My parents lived a block away from something called Pilgrim College.  It looked more like a motor court than a religious school. It took up only one block.  I sometimes walked around the campus but never found a building that looked as if it might have a classroom inside.  I had only one friend at the time. We would sit around all day in his parents’ living room talking about rock bands and TV shows and worthy radio stations. By day’s end we would still be on the same furniture but each with a somewhat different prospect, each with a different isolating future ahead. 

Neither of us was the kind of kid who went out and played, but we played along. We went to summer school one summer to get a jump on the next year’s installment in the algebra sequence.

He believed in wearing tank tops to class.  There was a debate with the teacher about what should matter most in attire.  The teacher (she was usually ashiver in woolens) had a change of heart.

He was the one to start making other friends.

I was at his house only one more time after he had all these new, unforgivable people who passed their driver’s test on the first try, threw backyard parties, went to the prom.  His mother poked in on us and said “Long time no see.”  

I ran into him a couple of months later at the snack bar at a public pool.  Neither of us had ever learned to swim, but we both enjoyed the smell of chlorine.  I was eating a sno-cone with grape syrup.  I was in long pants and long sleeves even though this was August at its hottest. I was sitting on my bike, a twenty-incher.  I felt ugly, gaunt, undestined. I told him my tape recorder was broken again. I mentioned some library books I’d taken out, though I had yet to read a page. They weren’t even from the main library. They were from just a branch. He nudged the conversation through a familiar itinerary of gossip, confession, imperatives.  It was the last time I saw him before he went off to the seminary, or at least the school you had to go to before the seminary would even think about taking you in.

Much, much later, I was in my early twenties. I was spending a dishonest amount of time with a woman who insisted on paying for everything.  She liked that I knew from the start to never make eye contact with the waiters.  When I told the waiters what it was I wanted, I was to look at her instead.  

She would gather things from what I said and then set them out on the face of the earth.

I’ve never much minded being treated like dirt.  The man has been calling me again every night, late, even on weekends.  We’re on the phone for at least an hour, sometimes longer. He makes no secret of the fact that his wife is lying right there next to him there in bed.  I often wonder whether she is asleep or just pretending.  I would like to know if he keeps a light on, but he is worried that if he reveals even that much, I’ll start to feel entitled to a description of the wall he is facing, then the other walls, the hangings, the furniture, the color of the bedsheets, the position of his wife’s arms and legs in sleep, whether her mouth usually stays open or shut. 

My father and I would be eating at yet another restaurant.  He’d say, “How’s your steak?” I’d say, “I’ll tell you afterward, outside.”

He had a scarred forehead, and his body was just a background for all the suctioning noises he kept making between bites. 

At home, my line of sight included just him, my mother, a brother, a sister, and the sister’s one peer, of whom I can say only that the things and the people of the day got themselves mustered anew and ill-used in her dreams.  Everybody always gets at least one person like that–somebody with a scrub of blond hair all over her arms, somebody with more and more obscurata in her eyes.  In the city where we lived, firstborns got married fast but flaggily. (Not everybody had the knack for all the being beholden that marriage kept requiring of you.)  It was the middle child who claimed that when he slept with women, he felt doubled but with men he felt halved.  He stuck with men.  His project was to get himself sharpened to a point.

My mother and I were in a notary public's suburban office early one evening not long after my father died.  We had to change the name on the title to his final car.  The notary asked a simple enough question about the car, and I had an answer.  My mother turned to me and said, "How would you know? You were in jail."  

I cannot think of anything I ever learned from my mother, not even how to iron a pair of pants or cook something as simple as canned soup, because her approach to tasks like that was so odd and defeatist and either full of extra, bewildering steps or missing crucial ones entirely.  But in my childhood she now and then baked something she called "slop cake."  It was unfrosted and chocolatey enough for me at that stage of my subjugations.  It is something I have never been able to find anywhere else.

I must have mentioned something or other about my once having been a drummer.  The truth is that even after the passage of decades, I might have now and then tried to pick up a pair of drumsticks off a flea-market table or the shelf of a junk shop far enough out of town. But I could never get my fingers around the sticks just right.  I couldn’t take any kind of possession or fit them into any kind of grip.  The sticks would fall right out of my hands.  They just didn’t want to be there.

When I was growing up, my mother still had some old 78-rpm records from the forties.  These were comically breakable things, and I did end up breaking them one after another.  The A side of one of them was a song called “Coquette.” I kept getting that word mixed up with “croquette.”  Chicken croquettes were always on the menu at the cramped, crummy diners where we went out to eat on Friday nights.  My mother would forbid me to order them.  She would scold me for even thinking about eating such a thing.  “They make them with whatever’s left they can’t find any other use for,” she would say.  She also claimed that hot dogs were “the worst parts of a pig.” She didn’t try to keep me away from hot dogs, though I wouldn’t start caring for them anyway until a decade or two later.  

I grew up and found a job at the other end of the state. It was the uglier end. In the frozen-food aisle of a supermarket where I often paced for half an hour or so after work (I was soon known there, by which I mean only that I was tolerated, if only because I never walked out without buying a little something, if only a Nestle bar or the very thinnest memo pad they carried), I one evening found a box of chicken croquettes. I’ve long forgotten the name of the brand, but on the front of the box (I haven’t seen its like in years; nobody out here seems to carry things like that anymore) the croquettes looked like tidily breaded tiny pyramids, though with a curvature you might not automatically expect a pyramid to ever get stuck with.  I bought the box, took it home to my apartment, threw it into the freezer. Months must have passed.  My world kept getting smaller and smaller of scale.  One Saturday afternoon a man close to my age whose arms were thumpy and slow had come close to messing himself all over me. I went out one Friday night with a young woman whose walk was knifey, stabbish.  I was trying to let life take too little of an effect.  One Sunday, late, an old friend called me in tears from Massachusetts.  He was remembering a long-ago fight with a sister about how some margarine had been forked terribly and unforgivably onto some bread.  He had always been forced to do girls’ work around the house. The sister did nothing but smoke pot in her room and listen to Grand Funk Railroad. He mentioned having one day been responsible for preparing something called “porcupine meatballs,” little spheres of ground beef with grains of rice sticking out recreationally. He got home from school later than usual that day and forgot to put the things in the oven on time and caught hell.  Like all hells, it in no time became everlasting and apt. I remember the night I finally got around to taking the box of croquettes out of the freezer.  I had a microwave by then. It was a Friday again.  I’d come home from work torn to a thread.  I was in the dirtiest of my early thirties, by which I mean only that I lived alone in the filth of my feelings for how beautiful I imagined things must have been coming along for everybody else, people who by now had learned how to dish themselves out for others, people who didn’t have to work enormous distances between what they were saying and the mouth it was coming out of.  I arranged a threesome of croquettes on a paper plate and shoved the plate into the microwave.  A few minutes later I was eating the croquettes with a plastic spoon.  I was afraid of forks, even plastic ones, because of everything they would puncture in a mouth.  (To this day I own not a single knife.) The croquettes tasted how I imagined hush puppies would probably taste, though I had never eaten any of those, either, not even at Long John Silver’s, where I was already known.  I was known a lot differently, a lot less indulgently, at Burger Chef, but that place closed down not too long after.  A paint store went up in its place.  

***
Garielle Lutz—whose books include Worsted (Short Flight/Long Drive Books) and The Complete Gary Lutz (Tyrant Books)—is working on a project, also called Backwardness, that consists of excerpts from a half-century's worth of journals, diaries, notebooks, memo books, steno pads, letters, e-mails, and faxes. The piece included here is drawn from that work-in-progress.