Homesick for Another World(34)
In the silence, he felt the girl’s gaze shift across his narrow torso, the crepey, spotted skin on his thin arms. She was assessing him, he knew. He cleared his throat and brought his hands together, clapped them twice as though he’d just finished a difficult task. He corrected his slumped posture. “Our houses are mirror images, you know,” he said. He held up his palms side by side in front of him. “La destra. And la sinistra, that’s me. I know a little Italian,” he added. “I took a class once, years and years ago.” Then his voice took on a bright, folksy twang as he said, as if the girl had prompted him to, “Well, come on over sometime if you get lonesome. Have a cup of coffee with your old next-door neighbor. You’re welcome anytime.”
“Are you southern?” the girl asked, ignoring his invitation. She looked snooty. She looked distrustful.
“I’m an Alabama boy,” Jeb answered. “But I’ve lived here forever. Too long. Seven presidents, if you can believe that,” he said, laughing at the repeated joke as though to cheer her with his senility. When he smiled he exposed the deep rot of his clawlike teeth. They were nearly black along the gums. “Nice to meet you,” he said. He put out his hand to mime a handshake through the chain link. The girl sniggered.
“We can shake E.T. style,” she said and extended her index finger through the fence. Jeb met the tip of it with his. He marked the moment in his mind, the feel of her finger—hot, dry, resilient. “Bye,” she said.
Jeb watched her round bouncing calves, brown from summer and flecked with mud, as she crossed the yard and went up her steps. “If you ever need a hand,” he began, but the girl didn’t hear him. Her silhouette passed behind the gray screens of the back porch, and then she was inside and her kitchen door was shut and her radio was on. She’d had the radio on a lot, Jeb had noticed, since the boy had left her. Jeb could hear almost everything that went on in her house, he’d figured out, if he listened carefully from his basement window.
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That night, Jeb ate his dinner in the basement, listening to the sounds the girl made alone in her house. Her radio was tuned to old folk singers. Women’s music, Jeb thought, spearing his food with a heavy silver fork. He chewed thoroughly, gagging now and then on the tough, pan-fried steak, the few raw strands of carrot and green bell pepper. He thought that drinking while you ate diluted the stomach’s acids, so he rarely drank more than his morning coffee and an occasional tumbler of Kenny May whiskey when he had something to celebrate or mourn. Otherwise he was dumb to the pleasures of consumption. He did, however, enjoy the thrill of frugality in stocking large quantities of meat, purchased on sale, in his storage freezer, which he now used as a dinner table in the basement. He liked to buy his vegetables at a discount, too, usually off the sale rack in the supermarket. He’d been doing it for so long that the very sight of that neon orange discount sticker could make his mouth water.
He was glad the girl didn’t try to emulate the singer’s flourishes when she song along. He would have been embarrassed to hear that. She sang a sad song—clearly she knew all the words—and in the rests he thought he detected the faint swish of a magazine. He imagined her sitting on a colorful quilt, yellow lamplight glazing her bare arms and glinting off the vertebrae of her neck as she peered down at the pictures of everything she coveted. He felt that he was getting to know the girl by the sounds she made—her foul mouth on the phone with her girlfriends, the violent slams of her bureau drawers as she dressed, her quick steps up and down the stairs in the morning, her slow steps up and down at night. Jeb had even heard her passing gas a few times, and he hoped one day to tell her so. “And yet my affection for you did not diminish,” he imagined saying. “In fact, it only endeared you to me more.”
Before Trevor left, Jeb hadn’t liked to listen very closely. The two were always yelling at each other. “Where’re my shoes?” “Ready?” “What?” “Babe?” And then there was “Babe, come talk to me” and “Babe, look at this” and “Babe, get down here.” And the worst, “I love you, babe.” Babe. No one in Jeb’s life had ever called him that. “Jeb” was as sweet a name as he’d ever gone by, and still it had an ugly, rubbery ring to it, like a name for dishwashing detergent or soap used to mop prison floors. Jeb. It was short for Jebediah. But nobody ever asked him to explain it. Nobody could bear to look at him, he thought, much less sit and listen to him talk.
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Sunday morning, Jeb’s nephew parked his black sedan in the driveway and threw his cigarette butt at the parched dirt yard. Jeb fried some eggs and bacon, made toast, poured coffee, peeled the waxed paper off a fresh stick of butter. He’d spent the past hour listening to the girl plodding around her house, scrubbing the floors, filling buckets of water with the nozzle from the kitchen sink, hammering nails into the walls. The occasional cry of “shit” or “ouch” or “motherfucker” punctuated the radio news broadcast that blathered on from her kitchen. There were protesters in Egypt getting killed. There were scientists discovering new planets. There were fires in a national park, a flood in India, a spree of robberies across the river. Poor people and immigrants liked the president. A storm was coming. High winds, they warned. Keep your pets safe inside. “Whatever,” the girl muttered, and turned the dial to jazz.