“May I come in for a minute? I have to talk to you. It’ll only take a second. I just couldn’t do it over the phone.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Brenda Bagley said. “But it’s kind of a mess in here. So it’s not a good time for visiting impromptu like you’re doing. Well, come in anyway.”
She opened the door, and Patsy followed her, carrying Emmy inside her left arm. Her daughter seemed to be getting heavier by the minute and reactively cried out with grief or shock, once she was inside, from the effect of the stale cigarette smoke and the squalor. On the other side of the living area, a gigantic television set facing the doorway enjoyed a regal presence, except that a dinner plate with crusted food rested on its uppermost flat surface, reducing its dignity. The TV had a screen that was too large for the home’s interior, and its volume had been set so high that it was hard to hear or even to see anything else in proximity to it. The chairs and side tables and lamps appeared to be dwarfed by the huge electronic apparatus. Patsy wondered how they had managed to get the TV in here. Its size seemed so gargantuan that it could not have been squeezed through the doorway — the enormous television set in the tiny living room had the visual effect of a clipper ship assembled piece by piece inside a glass bottle. Patsy had the momentary feeling that the smoky room was airless, or the air so thoroughly consumed that it would not sustain life. The television set had used up most of the oxygen, and the remaining air had acquired a blue smoky tint from Brenda Bagley’s cigarettes. It was positively industrial. Bunched-up pieces of facial tissue littered the floor. Had the woman been crying, alone, in the evenings, with the TV set on, thinking of Gordy Himmelman?
Just to the left of the door was a sofa on whose cushion a white cat slept nestled against a plain plastic box.
“I’ll turn that off,” Brenda Bagley said, reaching for the remote. She pressed a button, and the screen at once went dark with an angry static crackling, as if the beast had been told to start hibernating or had been hit with a stun gun. “I can tell what you’re thinking — you think it’s a big TV. That’s what everyone thinks. And you’re right. It is big. I won it at the State Fair, is why.”
“You won it?”
“I guessed at the number of marbles in a jar. They had this little booth for an appliance store, and I’ve always been good at guessing things like that ever since I was a girl. I’ve won staplers and telephones. This time, the prize was that thing. They couldn’t downscale it, they said. That was the one they had to give away because they advertised that particular model. They had to take the door frame off my house to get it in here.” She seemed to lose her train of thought. “I should’ve traded it for a smaller one. It’s a mess in here,” she said, glancing up in a vague manner. What appeared to be coffee stains dotted the ceiling tile. Perhaps the coffee had spilled upward. Perhaps the laws of gravity did not operate successfully here.
“It isn’t a mess in here at all,” Patsy said evasively, to be polite. She looked toward the television set and saw herself reflected in its dark, blank, sleeping screen.
“Nice of you to say,” Brenda noted. “Please sit down, won’t you? You must be tired out carrying that little one around.”
Patsy lowered herself and the still-crying Emmy onto the sofa on the opposite side from the white cat and the box. The cat, annoyed by the child’s noise, jumped off and away toward the kitchen. Emmy needed a diaper change and was being fussy. Patsy plugged her mouth with a pacifier.
Patsy could feel the words she wished to say making their way up her throat, but they seemed to stop before they could quite get out. While she waited, she studied a picture on the wall near the doorway to the kitchen where the cat had retreated, and she bounced Emmy in her lap. The photograph was a studio portrait of some man and Gordy: sitting in the man’s lap, Gordy was much younger, just a toddler in the picture, not that much older than Emmy was now, and he smiled a toothy, dimwitted smile. Emmy continued to fuss and to reach for Patsy’s breast, but Patsy had stopped breastfeeding and, in any case, wouldn’t have opened her bra to Emmy’s mouth in front of Brenda Bagley if the world had depended on it. Some free-floating malice in this room wouldn’t permit that physical openness, some starveling bitterness that permeated the walls and the air.
“Brenda,” Patsy said. “I just talked to somebody I know. Knew. Well, it doesn’t matter when I knew her. She said that people — you know, parents — are starting to blame Saul and me for Gordy’s death, and they’re blaming us for Sam Cole’s death, too, and now this Himmel craze that the middle schoolers have taken up.”
“Oh, yeah. Everybody’s trying to look like Gordy. Isn’t that something? He’s a star.”
“That’s right. And she said I should talk to you.”
“Why?”
“She said people are blaming us. Saul and me.”
“Oh, are they? For what?”
“I don’t know. That’s the thing. For Gordy? For Sam? Why would they blame us?”
“You’re asking me? What would I have to do with it?”
“Well,” Patsy said, “she said I should ask you. She said we had unfinished business with you. She said I should come here right away.”
“I just go to work, and then I come home, Patsy. I’m a waitress, you know, at the Fleetwood. It’s not like I circulate.”
“I know.”
“All I do is sometimes talk to the customers. Look at him over there,” Brenda Bagley said, aiming her face at the photograph. “There he is, Gordy, with his dad. Only picture the two of them ever took together.”
“It must have been hard, trying to be his mother and dad, just you alone with him here.”
“Yeah, well,” Brenda Bagley said.
“What was his name?” Patsy asked. “The father?”
“Rufus. Rufus Himmelman. I thought you knew. People called him Rowdy for a while. Then they called him Ray. He had aliases. Names didn’t stick to him. Ray, Rick, Rob — he went through a lot of the R names. He could have been anything, I guess.” She waited. “But what he really was, was a con,” she said quickly. “He needed different names in his lines of work.”
“How come you took over the care of Gordy?” Patsy asked.
“It’s a long story. With the mother dead in that fire, somebody had to do it.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Patsy said suddenly. “His father leaving and not coming back or asking about him. Disappearing like that. Then you, being Gordy’s guardian.”
“Oh, you think it doesn’t make sense?” Brenda Bagley stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and promptly lit another one. She gave Patsy a broad and very angry smile. Patsy waited for the Big Speech that usually follows the angry smile in the movies. But often there is no Big Speech and no explanation, just the angry smile, which then subsides as the cigarette rises to the mouth, and smoke is inhaled and exhaled. Not everyone had the resources of instant articulation. Once again, Patsy saw herself and her daughter and Brenda Bagley reflected on the blank TV screen, though they didn’t look like people on TV but like themselves: a toddler needing a diaper change, a frazzled woman with a cigarette, and an anxious and pregnant young mother. Then Brenda Bagley said, “Men leave their children all the time for parts unknown, you know, and they don’t come back for years, if they come back. Well, I don’t care. Maybe it don’t make any sense, but I took over the boy’s raising anyway. Nobody and nothing was offering to marry me. Didn’t have a boyfriend back then, or now either, and no children of my own to attend to, so I thought: he’s the only one I’ll ever get. Gordy will be mine. You see this face?”