Slob - Ellen Potter [39]
We watched to the end of the movie, although I really don’t know why we bothered. They always end the same way. Just when you think all hope is lost, everything turns out great. The beautiful woman and the handsome guy get married while the bad guy gets punished.
“Let me ask you something, Nima,” I said as the credits rolled. Nima was watching the credits with as much interest as he watched the movie. I’m telling you, he’s a maniac when it comes to this stuff.
“Hmm?” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“Do things ever turn out differently in these movies? Like the handsome guy gets killed, the beautiful woman gets depressed and gains two hundred pounds, and the bad guy never gets caught and lives happily ever after?”
“No, no, I don’t think so,” he said.
“Well, they should!” I said. “It’s like false advertising or something. Real life is full of unhappy endings.”
Nima nodded. “There is the saying, of course, life is not fair.”
“It’s not just a saying,” I insisted glumly. “It’s true.”
“But in Buddhist belief, the bad guy always be punished. If not in this life, then in the next life.”
“That’s not soon enough,” I grumbled.
Nima looked at me thoughtfully. Then he took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shook one out, and went to the window. He opened the window wide and sat on the sill while he smoked, careful to blow the smoke out into the cool early evening air. We were quiet for a while. I was deciding if I should tell him the truth about me, and I suspect he was simply waiting for me to decide.
“My parents owned a deli on Broadway and Eighty-fifth Street. It’s a shoe store now,” I said.
Nima turned away from the view outside the window and looked at me, his cigarette hand poised outside the window.
“They had really good knishes,” I said. “You know what knishes are?”
“Like potato dumpling?” Nima said.
“Yeah, something like that. Anyway, it was just them, running the whole thing, and a guy who helped out on the weekends. They worked a lot. They didn’t want to hand us over to a babysitter every night, so they fixed up a room for us in the deli’s basement. Nothing fancy. Just an old sofa and a table for us to do our homework at, a TV, and two little cots. We liked it. It was sort of a clubhouse.” It was so strange to be talking about this. My old life seemed to bloom before my eyes as I spoke. I could see that basement room so clearly—the cinder block walls, with each cinder block painted some crazy bright kid color. The shelf full of board games. The old yellow tent that we set up in the corner.
“Most nights Mom would take us home around eight and Dad would close up, but once a month Mom would stay late so she could take everything out of the coolers and wipe down the shelves. That night she was cleaning, so we were there late. Jeremy was sleeping already, but I was just lying down on my cot, thinking. Suddenly I heard yelling upstairs. I sat up in bed and listened. Sometimes homeless people would wander in the store, and some of them were sort of nutty, but my dad was really good at calming people down, giving them a little something to eat and sending them away. But this sounded different. The yelling came in short spurts. And it didn’t stop. I looked over at Jeremy. She had the covers pulled up over her head and she was sound asleep. If she’d been awake, she would have run upstairs, I know she would have, but I didn’t know what to do. The yelling grew louder and then I heard my mother yell back and then I heard a gunshot. Still, I just sat there. I was too scared to go up, too scared to move. Jeremy didn’t wake up and I just sat there, I sat there like a rock, like a boulder. I sat there and let it all happen. Then there was another gunshot, and this time Jeremy woke up. She sat