excerpt

Why Did I Ever

By Mary Robison

Bacis Books

ISBN: 1-58243-060-8

Chapter One

I have a dream of working a combination lock that is engraved on its back with the combination. Left 85, right 12, left 66. "Well shit, man," I say in the dream.

Hollis and I have killed this whole Saturday together. We've watched all fourteen hours of the PBS series The Civil War.

Now that it's over he turns to me and says, "That was good."

Buy Me Something

I end up at Appletree-the grocery-in the dead of the night. I'm not going to last long shopping, though, because this song was bad enough when what's-her-name sang it. And who are all these people at four A.M.? I'm making a new rule: No one is to touch me. Unless and until I feel different about things. Then, I'll call off the rule.

Three ex-husbands or whoever they were.

I'm sure they have their opinions.

I would say to them, "Peace, our timing was bad, the light was ugly, things didn't work out." I'd say, "Although you certainly were doing your all, now weren't you."

I would say, "Drink!"

Hollis is not my ex-anything and not my boyfriend. He's my friend. Maybe not the best friend I have in the world. He is, however, the only.

Daughter Mev confides in me. She says that at the Methadone clinic whenever a urine sample is required, she presents a sample of the soft drink Mellow Yellow.

"You won't get caught," I tell her.

She says, "Some folks hand over Mountain Dew."

"They won't get caught either," I say. "Not to worry."

"If they think you're hoarding your dose, though," says Mev. "You know, like you're going to save it and spit it into your thing? Because who wants to go to the clinic every day? You could never do drugs! If they think that, they go, `Say good-bye, Mev.' And they make you say good-bye."

Nowadays, I don't try to talk. I try to do the talking. So I don't talk. Or, at least, I try not to.

Here I have retrieved from beneath the refrigerator these thirty or forty fur-covered toy mice. These cost me hundreds of dollars over the years and have a street value of many hundreds of dollars. So why doesn't the cat-lying on her side there with her eyes squeezed shut-show any appreciation?

I'm sitting alone in my vehicle, on the street before my place. It's only just after dawn, yet here's Hollis, strolling up, munching from a box of Cracker Jacks.

He stoops at my window and says to me, "uh oh, I hear Marianne Faithful." He straightens, shakes his Cracker Jacks box empty, scrunches it, and lobs it into the side yard. The shirt Hollis is wearing has a pattern of skylarks, I believe they are, depicted on it.

He plants a hand on the car now and drums his fingers. He stoops again and says, "I've been reading an interesting book on John Wayne. You are what, here? Feeling neglected?"

"No," I say, turning to look at him. "No. Nor do I feel hungry for apples, Hollis." I say, "Those are two among the feelings I do not have."

The name I use is an annoying problem. Everyone wonders about it. No one doesn't ask.

My name is Money. I picked it up and kept it and now it's what I'm called.

I say I'm tired of telling how I got the name. Or that the story isn't all that great.

Still Something Missing

"I need plywood," said my son, Paulie, in his sleep. Or I heard wrong. I know it was "need" something.

That was my first day there, at his flat on St. Anne, before NYPD began hiding him.

He looked like this: in white cotton socks and frayed blue jeans, a cowhide belt and a petal-green sweater. His hands in their horrible bandage gloves must've been on his lap and I couldn't see them because he was bent over, with his plate pushed aside and his face on the dining table, and he was all-the-way asleep, with a tiny chip of emerald glinting there in the lobe of his ear.

Days went by and he still kept ignoring all the stuff I'd brought for him. Fine stuff, but Paulie couldn't get in the mood. And he was in something like pain when I finally set each thing out and presented it as though it were for sale. What, could've been wrong with me? Handkerchiefs! I told him about the quality. "Just wait'll you go to use one of these." He was three weeks out of the hospital. I should have ground the things up into bits and shreds in the garbage disposal.

A World of Love

I'm a script doctor, as far as I know this afternoon at three o'clock central time. And I'm due back at the studio according to Belinda who's the development producer or whatever is her job.

She has some hair shirt or other laid out for me.

Belinda is not warm. She's small-minded, mean, picky-petty.

Someday I will learn kickboxing and I will show up at Mercury Brothers and kickbox the stuffings out of her.

For my living room I have forged three paintings and signed them all "Robert Motherwell." The paintings aren't that successful really as I went too fast. They might fool a rich fellow who doesn't expect to see a fake if anyone like that ever comes over here.

I was spurred further to autograph and personally inscribe all my books. My handwriting in them experiences a change or two and can seem manly or decorative or as if I were rushed.

The inscription in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks reads: "Party girl. Bring back my VCR."

I'm fairly proud of the Rothko I forged for my bedroom. Whereas the blacks in the paintings at the Rothko Chapel can look a little steely and cold, my blacks are rich with the colors of hot embers and dark earth.

"Now my throat hurts from screaming at you!" I tell Hollis.

We're in my bedroom, standing before the Rothko, with our feet planted wide apart and our arms crossed.

"What's missing here is a focal point," he says. "Something for our eyes to fix on, finally, and rest upon. Something we end up gazing at."

"It's! A! Copy!" I shriek at him.

Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn't going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.

Nine West, I've never really had great luck with their shoes. They can look terrific but they have sharp arches and hard fucking soles.

Once in New York on my way to Penn Station I had to stop and remove the Nine West shoes I was wearing. I had to walk on in my stocking feet. Barrabus, I think he was called, was with me. My husband then but he wouldn't wait up, wouldn't take an extra minute out, oh no.

"Just keep going!" I called to him. "However eventually, I will meet you there."

That ex I heard was arrested for stealing food. Maybe I only dreamed it. It's what I tell people, anyway.

I call my doctor's office to ask for some Ritalin. His nurse answers and says, "This is Annabelle. According to our records, you're not due for a prescription at this time."

I say, "Annabelle, this is not what it appears."

"Oh?" she says and waits because she was trained to wait and force me to do the synopsizing.

I will take that challenge. "There was a series of mishaps," I tell her. "Some were spilled at the sink or ruined by moisture. Then a vial I use for travel got mislaid and they're gone. I'm out," I say. "Who can explain it?"

But I'm a stupid woman for asking that question. Nurse Annabelle can explain what happened to my drugs.

Without Ritalin I can sustain an evil thought or two, such as: "That there feels like cancer of the esophagus." However, I'm liable to skip over more routine kinds of thinking, such as, "Move up in line here," or "Steer."

So I'm in bed. I'm in bed unless Dr. Rex himself calls to inform me he's written new prescriptions.

More emphatically, I am in bed until.

I notice on the news when they're interviewing people, there's an attractive man in Chicago. His name goes by too fast but I'd know the guy if I saw him again.

Empty Your Pockets

I hate Bell South and so raise my voice and warn their representatives that I will take my business elsewhere.

I mention this to Hollis and tell him of the many new friends I have made-others who were present in the Bell South office, customers who overheard my threat. These are the same people who feel shamefaced, I explain, for falling behind in their phone service payments.

"Well ...," Hollis begins. Ah, but I have my eye on him.

Now he and I are watching some men with a ball. No matter the shape or size of the ball, what team or for what country the men fight. The TV is showing men with a ball so we're watching.

Continue...

Excerpted from Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison Copyright © 2001 by Mary Robison
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.