Ten Penny
The Pinch
Volume 28, Issue 2, Fall 2008
Nominated for the 2011 Emerging Writers Network National Short Story Month
M. used to come to me late at night, when he was stinking from the bar, all the alcohol and cigarettes and the heavy smell of desperation on his skin—he was like me and hated going home alone.
He would ring my bell, and I would let him in—his smile and those teeth as white and hard as picket; I’d never not let him in. I’d fix bourbon and roll a joint and climb up to the window seat with him, and we’d blow our smoke out at the city, my back against his chest. The window seat in my small apartment saved me. The window seat kept M. coming back, along with the promise of whiskey on fresh ice and mild narcotics and sticky sex on my low bed, though I think it was the view that held him. Looking onto the city buildings at night, he said to me what he was trying for: the same thing as a high-rise—keeping his lights on and reaching toward the sky. I’d push my face into his shoulder and hold my head there until I found it, under all that sweat and smoke, the smell of wood.
***
M. was a finish carpenter, though he could also frame. I admired his hands, which were long and slim and splintery and could feel out all the imperfections. There, at my elbow, the rough patch of scar from a decade-ago cycling accident—I remember sun and the dirt road and the deep drop down at my left, and then suddenly I was flying, and then suddenly I was stopped. M. knew nothing about how I laid on the road and bled, how I cried and cried at the falling, how I threw the bicycle into the ditch and walked into the little town nearby, how I never rode again, but he ran his finger around the ruined part of skin like he was a healer. He found the place on the back of my thigh, a puncture wound I got one day when metal collapsed around me; he touched the tiny dent above my eye, a fall onto a concrete step. He held my hand where it is crooked, outlined the asymmetrical ear.
These were the every time things. He couldn’t stop himself from lingering around the broken places. M. was a man who built from scratch, who fit wood into wood without a seam.
One night he came, and it was no different, as we got stoned and he recapped his life since the last time I saw him. I gave him my own summary, and we sat in quiet for a few minutes, watching the traffic and the streetlamps. I knew more about him than he’d like to admit—can’t kid a kidder, that’s what someone said to me once. I had some of the dirty things inside of me too, like M. I could see how his eyes wouldn’t clear, how he sometimes lost a beat between words. I imagined him working, getting every line perfectly straight, angling the nails in to not show. Right here, I wanted to tell him, right up my side. You can’t feel it, you can’t see it, but there’s a row of steel.
***
I met M. on the street. Just walking by. He was. I was. I saw him coming, there at dusk. I stopped for him, his long legs, his hands jammed in his pockets, head tipped down to the pavement.
He stopped and said, “Hey.”
I said, “Hello,” and we walked along for a while, like we were already friends, like we were going the same way but not saying anything.
He said, “Are you following me?”
And I said, “Maybe.”
“Good,” he said. We kept going, and he added, “Follow me a little longer, and I’ll buy you a drink.”
I said, “Okay,” and that was it. We walked around until it got too cold, and then we got trashed and went to my place. It was a good day, that one.
***
At first, M. was always coming around. I mean, I was inviting him and he was inviting himself and we liked it that way. I took him out, and once we took a little weekend trip up north, and we really did fuck a lot. I liked him because he got up early in the morning. I would make coffee, and M. would come rolling out of bed and into the kitchen. He claimed one of my cups, and we’d go to the window with the steaming coffee and drink it, and he would drink it to the bottom. I always threw the rest of mine out into the street, because M. had the window open, dragging on a rolly and having his morning space out. He was a remarkable beauty then, shirtless and still hot with sleep, stumbling on everything inside of him. I always wanted to lace my fingers into his and lead him back to bed and make him fit his body around mine, tongue in groove. Sometimes I did. And sometimes we’d just sit there until our cups were too cold to even pretend that we weren’t done yet, and M.’s cigarette was smooshed out.
He said to me once, “Babe, I think I’m going to die.” And I said, “I think you’re wrong.” I think for a minute he believed me, because then he said, “Fuck. That sucks,” and we didn’t really talk about his premonition anymore.
***
I woke up, and it was dark, as dark as stink, as dark as polished walnut. M. was there, but he was somewhere else too, curled up into himself and coughing, a cough that came right up from the bottom of him. He sounded like he would vomit or choke, but he didn’t. He just kept hacking away at it; I think it wasn’t even the cigarettes, that it was something else, some dead thing inside of him that wanted out. I put my hand on the small of his back, and he was still for a second before the coughing started again. I knew he was crying, because I swear I could smell the salt, and I wanted to run him a bath or press myself against him or say something sweet and profound that would make him stop, but I didn’t. I laid in the dark with my hand there and M. shaking, and I whispered to him, “Shhh,” like he was a child, but he didn’t shush. Measure twice,cut once, I thought.
If only.
***
Sometimes in those days I got so tired, I could feel everything inside of me—blood vibrating along, my lungs empty and full and empty again. If I squinted my eyes, I could see M. coming toward me, his lank and his cuticles, as ragged as torn paper. And I really needed the sleep. I pulled myself up into a ball, and I arranged my blankets carefully around me. I thought nothing but perfect, serene thoughts, but it wouldn’t touch me. It was the curse I had built for myself: a little house filled with nothing but a waking life. When all the joints were plum and the rows neat, I wanted my eyes open to admire my own handiwork, to wait for M.’s fingers through the dark, to feel every kind of air on my skin. In those times I got up and went to the window and let the traffic sounds buzz through me, I made tea or sipped orange juice, and I didn’t get angry about it. I thought if my worst problem was the red in my eyes, I was doing pretty good. I thought if M. were braver, he would have just fallen in love with me, and if I were braver, I’d have reminded him to be brave.
I thought of him with a handsaw and a hunk of oak. I thought of him with a brown bag of tenpenny nails, with the bottom broken out and sharp silvers falling through the holes, leaving a trail so I could find him in the forest. And when I got there, where he was, in a clearing he had made, he’d be out there with a band saw and a stack of wet pine, beveling boards. I felt like I was late, because he’d already finished with the planer. There was a chain saw cooling on a stump, and he was sweating. I said, “Whatcha building, M.?” and he looked at the paper sack, soggy and empty at his feet, and said, “Hey.”
He said, “How many nails did you find?”
I opened my palms to him, splotched crimson and white from the cold and from clutching so tight as to not drop even one. It was like my hands were platters, they’d grown so big, offering that chrome. M. studied the nails for a minute. He counted them, he picked through the pile, and threw out ones that were inexplicably bent, another that was missing a head. His machines were too quiet. I saw the long, orange extension cords, snaking to a power source that was out beyond the trees. He appraised me, he appraised the boards. He appraised the soft ground we were on and the part of his boot where the sole was tearing loose. “You tell me,” he said, looking at the pile of wood he’d ripped through without planning. “You tell me.”
***
M. and I got up one morning, an after-the-bar morning, and it was not two minutes before I saw there was something different.
“How’d you sleep?” I asked.
“Good,” he said, but he was fidgeting and eyeing the coffee pot, which was percolating at the usual pace.
“Really,” I said.
M. didn’t answer me, he just keep watching the black drip into the glass, so I told him.
“You don’t have to wait,” I said. “It’s okay.”
He got up, and I wasn’t surprised. He already had some saggy jeans on, and he managed to rustle up his filthy T-shirt and his jacket, jam a stocking cap on his head, and start getting gone out my door. I didn’t kiss him good-bye, but I did turn off the coffee and go take a shower, and when I was sudsing my hair up with the lavender shampoo, I realized that I was sad that he left that way. It was the first time I wasn’t sure if M. would be coming back.
***
There was this other problem—I mean besides M. and besides the sleep. I called it Danger On Stairs, but it could happen anywhere. Sometimes it was like the floor had been pulled out from underneath me or a chair suddenly tipped forward, but I hadn’t moved and neither had the ground. I would plunge for a moment but without the weightless bliss. Usually, I was fine. The spin stopped, and I looked up, I looked around, and no one would have seen I’ve been pitching. Only once, while I was in the kitchen, did I really fall; I was making pilaf, washing the rice and washing it again, while butter sizzled in a pan. I heard brass in my ear, all the way inside—trumpet, flügelhorn, I’m not sure—and the tap water smashing against the drain, and then I was on the linoleum. M. found the bruise on the back of my head, raised and probably purple, touched it like a jewel, just around the edges. Where was your level? I thought. Your chalky blue string. M. traced the tender spot through my hair and said nothing. He let his hand rest at my neck. He smelled like cedar, curlicued shavings. Really, what I wanted then was to get away from the window and lay down in the dark and have him take the cat’s claw and pull out all the nails patching me together. I wanted to be rebuilt, holes puttied over and sanded smooth, but I didn’t know how M. could do it, and he wasn’t in restoration work anyway.
Instead I said, “Want another whisky?”
And he said, “Please. No ice this time.”
I brought him a clean glass part filled with a double shot, and he drank it immediately. He asked me if I would take off my shirt, and I did and stood before him, birch skin. When I stood before him, I gleamed white. I wondered if he knew that he was the wet one, the green one, the one who hadn’t cracked yet.
He said, “Stand still,” and I said, “I am still.” Sometimes I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was him seeing double or it was the world or I really was swaying to something. Like always, I just waited for it to go away, and just after I knew I was complete static, he said, “Better, girl, better.”
***
After that morning when M. left me, I waited. I waited through one weekend and then another, and my bell was silent. I checked my telephone constantly, but he didn’t call. I rang him up a couple of times, but there was no answer. I stopped leaving messages. I was sure he was home, and I was sure my voice on the machine cut through the quiet of his apartment like a saw. I spent a lot of time at the window, trying to see what M. had seen in the buildings. It was all a lot of glass to me. I was not impressed with the crossbeams or the height or the pattern made by the lights left on, the missing and broken teeth of the lights left out.
One night I went out with some girlfriends. I wasn’t really looking for M., but I wouldn’t have been opposed to running into him. In fact, I was a little surprised that I didn’t, and I realized I had this idea that he was everywhere all the time, when of course he couldn’t be. He was in one place, and I was in another. I swear I was wearing so much mascara, I could hardly keep my eyes open. At one point I tried to take some of it off in the bathroom but managed mostly to only pull out some eyelashes and smear black around my lids. Later, when my friends abandoned me or I them, I went home with a guy who was taller than even M. and very, very funny but sort of dopey and paunchy in a way I understood I didn’t like, and I found that I couldn’t even screw, because I was so dry. Packed full of sawdust, probably.
***
He didn’t return. Ever. One day, though, I woke up, and I found I had actually woken up, instead of just groggily rolling to the side and opening my eyes. I hadn’t solved much, the dizziness or what happened to M., but the break from insomnia was one damn, precious blessing. I think how M. used to say that I wasn’t much of an optimist, that I was definitely a glass-is-half-empty kind of gal, but he was wrong about me there. The difference between us was not how we understood halves. Maybe people who can build relate to it differently, something about their spatial thinking skills or something, but I think I didn’t tell M. that what he didn’t seem to be catching on to was the glass thing isn’t real. The glass thing is supposed to trick us into believing half could be enough. I would like to tell him now. I would like to tell him, I hope your back stays strong, and the light is good when you work; I would like to tell him, I dream you, and usually I’m not even asleep. Mostly, though, I want to tell him that my optimism is not in question. I want to tell him that I understand the impulse to run, and I want to tell him, No, really, don’t believe that line about the glass—take a full one or nothing at all.
Volume 28, Issue 2, Fall 2008
Nominated for the 2011 Emerging Writers Network National Short Story Month
M. used to come to me late at night, when he was stinking from the bar, all the alcohol and cigarettes and the heavy smell of desperation on his skin—he was like me and hated going home alone.
He would ring my bell, and I would let him in—his smile and those teeth as white and hard as picket; I’d never not let him in. I’d fix bourbon and roll a joint and climb up to the window seat with him, and we’d blow our smoke out at the city, my back against his chest. The window seat in my small apartment saved me. The window seat kept M. coming back, along with the promise of whiskey on fresh ice and mild narcotics and sticky sex on my low bed, though I think it was the view that held him. Looking onto the city buildings at night, he said to me what he was trying for: the same thing as a high-rise—keeping his lights on and reaching toward the sky. I’d push my face into his shoulder and hold my head there until I found it, under all that sweat and smoke, the smell of wood.
***
M. was a finish carpenter, though he could also frame. I admired his hands, which were long and slim and splintery and could feel out all the imperfections. There, at my elbow, the rough patch of scar from a decade-ago cycling accident—I remember sun and the dirt road and the deep drop down at my left, and then suddenly I was flying, and then suddenly I was stopped. M. knew nothing about how I laid on the road and bled, how I cried and cried at the falling, how I threw the bicycle into the ditch and walked into the little town nearby, how I never rode again, but he ran his finger around the ruined part of skin like he was a healer. He found the place on the back of my thigh, a puncture wound I got one day when metal collapsed around me; he touched the tiny dent above my eye, a fall onto a concrete step. He held my hand where it is crooked, outlined the asymmetrical ear.
These were the every time things. He couldn’t stop himself from lingering around the broken places. M. was a man who built from scratch, who fit wood into wood without a seam.
One night he came, and it was no different, as we got stoned and he recapped his life since the last time I saw him. I gave him my own summary, and we sat in quiet for a few minutes, watching the traffic and the streetlamps. I knew more about him than he’d like to admit—can’t kid a kidder, that’s what someone said to me once. I had some of the dirty things inside of me too, like M. I could see how his eyes wouldn’t clear, how he sometimes lost a beat between words. I imagined him working, getting every line perfectly straight, angling the nails in to not show. Right here, I wanted to tell him, right up my side. You can’t feel it, you can’t see it, but there’s a row of steel.
***
I met M. on the street. Just walking by. He was. I was. I saw him coming, there at dusk. I stopped for him, his long legs, his hands jammed in his pockets, head tipped down to the pavement.
He stopped and said, “Hey.”
I said, “Hello,” and we walked along for a while, like we were already friends, like we were going the same way but not saying anything.
He said, “Are you following me?”
And I said, “Maybe.”
“Good,” he said. We kept going, and he added, “Follow me a little longer, and I’ll buy you a drink.”
I said, “Okay,” and that was it. We walked around until it got too cold, and then we got trashed and went to my place. It was a good day, that one.
***
At first, M. was always coming around. I mean, I was inviting him and he was inviting himself and we liked it that way. I took him out, and once we took a little weekend trip up north, and we really did fuck a lot. I liked him because he got up early in the morning. I would make coffee, and M. would come rolling out of bed and into the kitchen. He claimed one of my cups, and we’d go to the window with the steaming coffee and drink it, and he would drink it to the bottom. I always threw the rest of mine out into the street, because M. had the window open, dragging on a rolly and having his morning space out. He was a remarkable beauty then, shirtless and still hot with sleep, stumbling on everything inside of him. I always wanted to lace my fingers into his and lead him back to bed and make him fit his body around mine, tongue in groove. Sometimes I did. And sometimes we’d just sit there until our cups were too cold to even pretend that we weren’t done yet, and M.’s cigarette was smooshed out.
He said to me once, “Babe, I think I’m going to die.” And I said, “I think you’re wrong.” I think for a minute he believed me, because then he said, “Fuck. That sucks,” and we didn’t really talk about his premonition anymore.
***
I woke up, and it was dark, as dark as stink, as dark as polished walnut. M. was there, but he was somewhere else too, curled up into himself and coughing, a cough that came right up from the bottom of him. He sounded like he would vomit or choke, but he didn’t. He just kept hacking away at it; I think it wasn’t even the cigarettes, that it was something else, some dead thing inside of him that wanted out. I put my hand on the small of his back, and he was still for a second before the coughing started again. I knew he was crying, because I swear I could smell the salt, and I wanted to run him a bath or press myself against him or say something sweet and profound that would make him stop, but I didn’t. I laid in the dark with my hand there and M. shaking, and I whispered to him, “Shhh,” like he was a child, but he didn’t shush. Measure twice,cut once, I thought.
If only.
***
Sometimes in those days I got so tired, I could feel everything inside of me—blood vibrating along, my lungs empty and full and empty again. If I squinted my eyes, I could see M. coming toward me, his lank and his cuticles, as ragged as torn paper. And I really needed the sleep. I pulled myself up into a ball, and I arranged my blankets carefully around me. I thought nothing but perfect, serene thoughts, but it wouldn’t touch me. It was the curse I had built for myself: a little house filled with nothing but a waking life. When all the joints were plum and the rows neat, I wanted my eyes open to admire my own handiwork, to wait for M.’s fingers through the dark, to feel every kind of air on my skin. In those times I got up and went to the window and let the traffic sounds buzz through me, I made tea or sipped orange juice, and I didn’t get angry about it. I thought if my worst problem was the red in my eyes, I was doing pretty good. I thought if M. were braver, he would have just fallen in love with me, and if I were braver, I’d have reminded him to be brave.
I thought of him with a handsaw and a hunk of oak. I thought of him with a brown bag of tenpenny nails, with the bottom broken out and sharp silvers falling through the holes, leaving a trail so I could find him in the forest. And when I got there, where he was, in a clearing he had made, he’d be out there with a band saw and a stack of wet pine, beveling boards. I felt like I was late, because he’d already finished with the planer. There was a chain saw cooling on a stump, and he was sweating. I said, “Whatcha building, M.?” and he looked at the paper sack, soggy and empty at his feet, and said, “Hey.”
He said, “How many nails did you find?”
I opened my palms to him, splotched crimson and white from the cold and from clutching so tight as to not drop even one. It was like my hands were platters, they’d grown so big, offering that chrome. M. studied the nails for a minute. He counted them, he picked through the pile, and threw out ones that were inexplicably bent, another that was missing a head. His machines were too quiet. I saw the long, orange extension cords, snaking to a power source that was out beyond the trees. He appraised me, he appraised the boards. He appraised the soft ground we were on and the part of his boot where the sole was tearing loose. “You tell me,” he said, looking at the pile of wood he’d ripped through without planning. “You tell me.”
***
M. and I got up one morning, an after-the-bar morning, and it was not two minutes before I saw there was something different.
“How’d you sleep?” I asked.
“Good,” he said, but he was fidgeting and eyeing the coffee pot, which was percolating at the usual pace.
“Really,” I said.
M. didn’t answer me, he just keep watching the black drip into the glass, so I told him.
“You don’t have to wait,” I said. “It’s okay.”
He got up, and I wasn’t surprised. He already had some saggy jeans on, and he managed to rustle up his filthy T-shirt and his jacket, jam a stocking cap on his head, and start getting gone out my door. I didn’t kiss him good-bye, but I did turn off the coffee and go take a shower, and when I was sudsing my hair up with the lavender shampoo, I realized that I was sad that he left that way. It was the first time I wasn’t sure if M. would be coming back.
***
There was this other problem—I mean besides M. and besides the sleep. I called it Danger On Stairs, but it could happen anywhere. Sometimes it was like the floor had been pulled out from underneath me or a chair suddenly tipped forward, but I hadn’t moved and neither had the ground. I would plunge for a moment but without the weightless bliss. Usually, I was fine. The spin stopped, and I looked up, I looked around, and no one would have seen I’ve been pitching. Only once, while I was in the kitchen, did I really fall; I was making pilaf, washing the rice and washing it again, while butter sizzled in a pan. I heard brass in my ear, all the way inside—trumpet, flügelhorn, I’m not sure—and the tap water smashing against the drain, and then I was on the linoleum. M. found the bruise on the back of my head, raised and probably purple, touched it like a jewel, just around the edges. Where was your level? I thought. Your chalky blue string. M. traced the tender spot through my hair and said nothing. He let his hand rest at my neck. He smelled like cedar, curlicued shavings. Really, what I wanted then was to get away from the window and lay down in the dark and have him take the cat’s claw and pull out all the nails patching me together. I wanted to be rebuilt, holes puttied over and sanded smooth, but I didn’t know how M. could do it, and he wasn’t in restoration work anyway.
Instead I said, “Want another whisky?”
And he said, “Please. No ice this time.”
I brought him a clean glass part filled with a double shot, and he drank it immediately. He asked me if I would take off my shirt, and I did and stood before him, birch skin. When I stood before him, I gleamed white. I wondered if he knew that he was the wet one, the green one, the one who hadn’t cracked yet.
He said, “Stand still,” and I said, “I am still.” Sometimes I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was him seeing double or it was the world or I really was swaying to something. Like always, I just waited for it to go away, and just after I knew I was complete static, he said, “Better, girl, better.”
***
After that morning when M. left me, I waited. I waited through one weekend and then another, and my bell was silent. I checked my telephone constantly, but he didn’t call. I rang him up a couple of times, but there was no answer. I stopped leaving messages. I was sure he was home, and I was sure my voice on the machine cut through the quiet of his apartment like a saw. I spent a lot of time at the window, trying to see what M. had seen in the buildings. It was all a lot of glass to me. I was not impressed with the crossbeams or the height or the pattern made by the lights left on, the missing and broken teeth of the lights left out.
One night I went out with some girlfriends. I wasn’t really looking for M., but I wouldn’t have been opposed to running into him. In fact, I was a little surprised that I didn’t, and I realized I had this idea that he was everywhere all the time, when of course he couldn’t be. He was in one place, and I was in another. I swear I was wearing so much mascara, I could hardly keep my eyes open. At one point I tried to take some of it off in the bathroom but managed mostly to only pull out some eyelashes and smear black around my lids. Later, when my friends abandoned me or I them, I went home with a guy who was taller than even M. and very, very funny but sort of dopey and paunchy in a way I understood I didn’t like, and I found that I couldn’t even screw, because I was so dry. Packed full of sawdust, probably.
***
He didn’t return. Ever. One day, though, I woke up, and I found I had actually woken up, instead of just groggily rolling to the side and opening my eyes. I hadn’t solved much, the dizziness or what happened to M., but the break from insomnia was one damn, precious blessing. I think how M. used to say that I wasn’t much of an optimist, that I was definitely a glass-is-half-empty kind of gal, but he was wrong about me there. The difference between us was not how we understood halves. Maybe people who can build relate to it differently, something about their spatial thinking skills or something, but I think I didn’t tell M. that what he didn’t seem to be catching on to was the glass thing isn’t real. The glass thing is supposed to trick us into believing half could be enough. I would like to tell him now. I would like to tell him, I hope your back stays strong, and the light is good when you work; I would like to tell him, I dream you, and usually I’m not even asleep. Mostly, though, I want to tell him that my optimism is not in question. I want to tell him that I understand the impulse to run, and I want to tell him, No, really, don’t believe that line about the glass—take a full one or nothing at all.