Mercy Street(14)
THERE WERE OTHER BOYFRIENDS, BUT GARY IS THE ONE CLAUDIA remembers—silent Gary from the body shop, who spoke only in jokes; a tall, gawky man with orangutan arms and bushy sideburns that stretched nearly to his jaw. When and how he and Deb got together, Claudia has no idea. She simply woke one night with an urge to pee and found Gary standing in their bathroom in boxer shorts—dick out, pissing with tremendous force.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Don’t you people knock?”
It’s my house, Claudia thought—but didn’t say, because she was twelve and dumbstruck, physically unable to speak to a grown man with his dick in his hand.
Everyone says that kids are adaptable. If that’s true, it’s because they have no choice. Claudia was already used to fosters coming and going—most recently Erica, who’d been picked up by the caseworker one Saturday morning and was never heard from again. Gary’s arrival was no different. She came home from school one day to find a hose running from the bathroom to Deb’s bedroom, Gary filling his waterbed. This was how she learned he’d moved into the trailer. Like a new foster, he was just suddenly there.
There is an extreme intimacy to living in a trailer. Claudia fell asleep each night to the sloshing of the waterbed, low voices behind her mother’s bedroom door. Gary was a big man, so tall he had to duck to clear the doorjamb. His work boots were the size of cinder blocks, and nearly as heavy; at least once a day Claudia tripped over them on her way out the door. Even after he’d left for work, he filled the trailer with his presence: blond stubble in the sink, fine as sugar; a cigarette butt floating in the toilet, urine dribbled at the rim.
That winter was endless, the three of them shut up in the trailer like the rabbits her grandfather kept. Actually, the rabbits had it better: to prevent endless litters of babies, they were at least separated by sex. The skinny jumpy male got his own private cage, with a mesh floor so that his droppings fell to the ground and nobody had to clean up after him.
But even in Maine, the snow melts eventually. In the spring, Gary built a carport behind the trailer and spent most of his time there, working on his motorcycles. He owned two, a Kawasaki he actually rode and a beautiful old Vespa that wouldn’t start. He spent months trying to get it to run—a complicated proposition in rural Maine, where parts were impossible to get.
Every once in a while, he took Claudia for a ride.
When she thinks of that summer, this is what she remembers: sitting on the back of the Kawasaki wearing Gary’s helmet, her arms around his waist. She took to it instantly. Unlike her mother, who’d nearly toppled them over the one time Gary took her riding, she knew instinctively how to shift her weight when they turned a corner.
Claudia, you’re a natural.
She can still remember where they were standing when he said this—behind the carport, Gary squinting into the noonday sun. The words were thrilling. She had no experience receiving compliments of any kind.
When Claudia told Justine about the motorcycle, she squealed in disgust. “You touched him?”
The question was confusing. Did you touch a chair when you sat on it? To Claudia, Gary’s body was just furniture. The ride was the point.
“He’s such a loser,” Justine said, perplexingly. (Who, in Clayburn, could be called a winner?) Her dislike of Gary seemed excessive, which was probably Claudia’s fault. She’d been complaining about him for months, beginning with his first appearance at the trailer, standing at the toilet with his dick out. Seen in this light, Justine’s antipathy was understandable. It affected the way you thought of a person, if you were told immediately about his dick.
Claudia shut up about the motorcycle. She was sorry she’d mentioned it at all, because now when she climbed onto the seat she was aware of Gary’s long back, his rib cage expanding, blond hairs curling at the nape of his neck. He wore an old flannel shirt, washed in the same detergent her mother used, but there was a different smell underneath, Old Spice and alcohol and something like potting soil, a rainy earth smell Claudia couldn’t identify.
She’d gotten used to having him around. Once you got past his physical presence, he was easy to ignore. In the evenings they watched TV together, Gary and Deb cuddled up on the couch—orange-and-brown plaid, a sagging hand-me-down from Claudia’s grandparents. Claudia sat in a beanbag chair that leaked tiny Styrofoam pellets onto the floor. From her low vantage point, she experienced a strange parallax: with Gary’s long arm draped over her shoulder, Deb seemed to disappear entirely. Only her head was visible. Until then, Claudia had never thought of her mother as small.
Another thing that happened that summer: in July or August, during a rare heat wave, Gary brought home a secondhand air conditioner. The project seemed doomed from the outset. Trailer windows are tiny, and Deb had never managed to find a unit that fit. This one didn’t either, but in Gary’s eyes it wasn’t a problem. Mother and daughter watched, dumbstruck, as he sawed a neat hole in the living room wall.
Most people have their qualities, and even after what happened later, installing the air conditioner was a testament to Gary’s. It was a magnificent gesture. If you’ve ever spent a summer in a single-wide trailer, you understand that it was like giving sight to the blind.
GARY WAS THERE, AND THEN HE WASN’T. ONE MONDAY AFTERNOON in late September, Claudia came out of school at the final bell and saw the Falcon idling in the parking lot. The windows were down, the radio blasting. She recognized the long orangutan arm hanging out the window, the green mermaid at the biceps.