The one good thing about Mr. Christamesta going off on those tangents was it got Nancy laughing so hard she was shaking. She pushed her head against my shoulder and hugged around me to hold my other shoulder with her hands. For balance. And I could smell her hair, and her hair smelled like apples and girl, which is exactly what I would’ve imagined it smelled like in my daydreams of “Yes,” if I was smart enough to imagine smell in the first place. I don’t think I have the ability to imagine smell. I never tried, but I bet I can only do sound and sight.
An unfortunate thing about Nancy’s laughing was how it drew her mom in from the living room. She’s real serious, Mrs. Christamesta. So serious it messes with her physically. She’s an attractive woman, like Nancy twenty years later and shorter-haired — see her through a window or drive by her in the car, it’s easy to tell. If you’re eating dinner with her, though, or at church, and she knows she’s being looked at, the seriousness covers up the beauty. It’s like she doesn’t have a face, just her eyebrows like a V and all the decisions she made about her hairstyle. My whole life, I’ve seen Mrs. Christamesta laugh at three or two jokes, and I’ve never heard her crack a one,
“You, young lady,” she said, “and you, too,” to Tina, “have to quit smoking those drugs.”
That got Nancy so hysterical that I had to force myself to think about the grapefruits again, about that guy coming home with no grapefruits and acting like he just forgot or, even worse, him going back to the store and getting more grapefruits and then, when he got home, making this big ceremony around cutting them or peeling them, whatever his family did with them. I had to think about that so I wouldn’t start laughing with Nancy. If I laughed, it would look like I was laughing at Mrs. Christamesta. And maybe I would be.
“It’s because you give them beer,” she said to her husband.
“Is it you want a beer, honey?” he said to her.
She bit her lip, but took a seat.
He got up real close to her and said it again. “Is all you want is a beer?” He crouched down in front of her chair so his shirt rode up and I saw his lower back. His lower back was white as tits, and not hairy at all, which surprised me. He held her neck, and touched those paddles to her ears. “Is it you want a grapefruit?” he said. “I’ll cut you a grapefruit. I’ll peel you a grapefruit. I’ll pulp it in the juicer. I’ll juice it in the pulper. Grapefruit in segments, in slices, or liquefied. And beer. All or any. Any combination. All for you. Am I not your husband? Am I not a good husband? Am I not a husband to prepare you citrus on a sunny weekend in the Windy City? Have I ever denied you love in any form? Have I ever let your gorgeous face go too long unkissed? How could I? What a brute,” he said. “What a drunken misanthrope. What a cruel, cruel man,” he said. “I’ll zest the peel with the zester and cook salmon on the grill for you. I’ll sprinkle pinches of zest for you. On top of the salmon.” Then he kissed her face. Thirty, twenty times.
That was the fourth time I ever saw Mrs. Christamesta laugh. Or the third. And thank God, because I was done feeling sorry for that nodding guy. I lost it so hard that when the laughter was finished with me I was holding Nancy’s hand and she was tugging on the front of my shirt and I didn’t remember how we got that way.
I made a violent face at her, all teeth and nostrils. For comedy. Then she pinched me on my side and I jumped back fast, squealing like a little girl.
“Fucken girl,” Cojo whispered. But he didn’t mean it how it sounded. It was nice of him to say to me. Brotherly.
Mr. Christamesta threw a key at me. “You okay to drive?” he said. “You’re okay,” he said. He kissed his wife’s neck and we went out the back door. To the garage.
The Christamestas have two cars. Both of them are Lincolns and both Lincolns are blue. I tried the key on the one on the left. It was the right choice.
Cojo called shotgun, but he was kidding. I held the shotgun door open for Nancy and Cojo tackled Tina into the backseat.
We stopped at the Jewel for some patties and nacho chips, and then we were on our way.
I forgot to mention it was furniture day. Two Sundays a year, Chicago’s got furniture day. You put your old furniture in the alley in the morning, and scavengers in vans take it to their houses and junk shops. If no one wants it, the garbage trucks come in the afternoon and they bring it to the dump. That’s what makes it furniture day — how the garbage trucks come. That’s why there were garbage trucks on a Sunday.
One of them had balloons tied to its grille with ribbon. We got stopped at a light facing it. Grand and Oakley. We were going south on Oakley. That light takes forever. Grand’s a main artery. It’s dominant. Grand vs. Oakley? Oakley gets stomped.
There were white balloons and blue ones and some yellows. I don’t know what color the ribbon was, but I knew it wasn’t string because it shined.
Nancy said, “Do you think it’s a desperate form of graffiti, Jack?”
Jack. I checked the rearview. Tina had her feet in Joe’s lap. Joe was pretending to look out his window, but what he was doing was looking at the window. It was tinted, and he was looking at Tina’s legs, reflected. Tina has good legs. You notice them. You feel elderly.
I said to Nancy, “It’s probably the driver had a baby.”
She said, “I think maybe some tagger got his markers and his spraycans taken, and he was sitting on the curb out front of his house, watching all the trucks making pickups and feeling worthless because he couldn’t do anything about it. He didn’t want to write ‘wash me’ with his finger in the dirt along the body since there’s nothing original about that, and he didn’t want to brick the windshield because he wasn’t someone who wanted to harm things, but still he found himself reaching down into the weeds of the alley to grasp something heavy. He needed to let the world know he existed, and without paint or markers, bricking a windshield was the only way he could think to do it. Except then, right then, right when he gets hold of the brick — and it’s the perfect brick, a cement quarter-cinderblock with gripping holes for his fingers, it fits right in his hand — he hears his little sister, inside the house. She’s singing through the open window of her bedroom, above him. She’s happy because yesterday was her birthday and she got all the toys she wanted, and it reminds the boy of the party they had for her, how he decorated the house all morning and his sister didn’t even care because all she really wanted was to unwrap her presents — the party meant nothing to her, not even the cake, much less the decorations — and so this boy races inside, to the hallway in his mom’s house, and tears a balloon-cluster from the banister he tied it to, then races back out front, decorates the grille of the garbage truck.”
Finally, the light turned green. If you’re Oakley, you get about seven seconds before Grand starts kicking your ass again.
I said, “It could be the driver got married.”
Nancy said, “And maybe it wasn’t even today. Maybe it was sometime last week. Maybe those balloons have been there for nine, ten days because the driver thinks it’s pretty. Because he understands what it means, you know? Or maybe because he doesn’t understand what it means, because it’s a conundrum, but it’s a nice conundrum, something he wants to figure out.”
“It could be his son,” I said. “It could be it was his son got married or had a baby,” I said.
Nancy said, “Oh.” And I knew I shouldn’t have said what I said. She was trying to start something with me and I kept ending it. She wanted me to tell her a fantasy story. I’m a meathead. A misinterpreter. Like hot pink? For years I thought it was regular pink that looked sexy on whoever was wearing it. And that Bob Marley song? I thought he was saying that as long as you stayed away from women, you wouldn’t cry. Even after I figured it out, it’s still the first thing I think when it comes on the radio. It’s like when I’m wrong for long enough, I can’t get right. I had a fantasy story in my head, but I didn’t say it. And why not?