Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [132]
One Saturday before my weight workout with Sam, I walked into Liz’s empty dorm room and saw a thin manuscript on her bed. The room smelled like shampoo, and she had probably just gotten dressed and was getting something to eat down in the dining hall. I sat on the mattress and picked up four or five stapled pages. It was a new story by Joe. My fingertips went numb. It was as if I’d found a love letter from him to her, an irrational thought, I knew. I turned the title page over and began to read.
The words were simple, clear and concrete, and soon I was no longer aware I was reading sentences written by Joe; instead, I became the story’s protagonist, a teenage boy working as a dishwasher in a diner in a small town like Haverhill. I knew these things from the details, the abandoned mill building on the other side of the alley, the flickering light of the streetlamp over the broken sidewalk, the cigarette smoke of the boy’s boss behind the counter. It’s two or three in the morning and the boy is mopping the floor when two middle-aged prostitutes walk in from the cold. They’re wearing too much makeup and not enough clothes and before they can even sit down the boy’s boss yells at them to leave, yells that they’re closed and he doesn’t serve whores anyway. The women go without much of a fight, and the story ends with the boy mopping the floor, shaking his head and thinking, That’s not right, that’s just not right.
I laid the story back down on the bed. I sat there awhile. I wasn’t thinking of Joe or Liz or me. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was seeing that boy in that diner and even feeling what it might be like to be him in that moment when the world pulled him up against his own conscience, though this word was not yet in my head. It was like hearing a good song on the radio, that place it puts you where you weren’t before. Or the movies, how they did that, too. And now Joe’s story.
I wanted to read another one. I wanted to read whatever he’d written. But I was running late for my workout with Sam, and as I left Liz’s room and walked down the worn carpet of Academy Hall, dorm room doors open and ten different albums playing on ten different record players, talk and laughter and a vacuum cleaner running somewhere, I felt more here, like water leaking from an ear you hadn’t known was blocked, and then something warm and wet is on your skin and now you can hear.
THE GOLDEN Gloves were three weeks away. It was a weeknight, probably Wednesday, and all day long Jeb and Randy and I had hung Sheetrock in the rooms we’d built in the widow’s house overlooking the water. The ceilings came first. The day before, we’d started nailing spruce strapping into the joists sixteen inches on center and while Jeb finished that, Randy and I were hauling sheets of plaster board off the truck and stacking them against a wall in each of the three rooms. By coffee break, all the Sheetrock was unloaded and Jeb had finished the strapping. He was faster with measurements and cuts and handling the screw gun, so it fell to Randy and me to do most of the grunt work. We’d squat and lift a full sheet, carry it under where it would go, then we’d count off, “One, two, lift,” and yank the sheet up from our sides and flat onto our heads, our fingertips on its smooth surface to keep it from buckling and cracking. We’d each step up onto a stool or lidded joint compound bucket, and together we’d press the four-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long sheet up against the ceiling strapping and there’d be the electric whine of the screw gun as Jeb went to work sinking black screws through plasterboard into spruce till we could let go and drop our arms and step down to do it again and again.
Now the day was over, and I was in my small apartment in Lynn pulling on sweats. The