The Trouble with Bliss
“I’ll tell Morris,” Stefani shouts, stomping out of Mr. Charlies with a pack of Basic filterless cigarettes and no change from the twenty Morris gave her. Evening’s settled in swift and softly. “I’ll tell Morris and he’ll…” She can think of nothing he could do. “I’ll tell all my friends,” she yells, “and they’ll tell their friends, until no one in New York shops here.”
Striding north on First Avenue, she furiously tears the package’s wrapper, pulls out a cigarette. “That asshole will pay,” she says, then calls to the couple ahead of her, “Hey. Hey listen.” She sidles up to them, touches the man on the arm. “Listen to me. That Mr. Charlies place, don’t shop there. Don’t shop at that place back there.”
“No, none thanks,” the man says. In his hand is a Slumming through Manhattan guidebook. The couple pick up their pace, trying to move ahead of Stefani.
“Serious, you know,” Stefani says, “don’t buy anything from that guy.” She struggles to keep up with them, her large purse banging her side. “I’m telling you,” Stefani says, “listen, this Charlies guy, he steals, and the place reeks, like he’s got some health code violation going on, you know? And,” she says, unable to think of anything else, “he steals.”
“None, none, none,” the man says, tightly holding his girlfriend's hand, “none, thanks.” They escape by crossing against the light, hopping through the traffic.
Pausing for breath, Stefani wedges a cigarette in her lips. “What’s wrong with you?” Stefani yells at them, then turns to an approaching woman and says, “Hey, you know that Indian or Mexican store down there, Mr. Charlies?”
The woman has a ferret on her shoulder. Dressed in a tiny pink and blue knit sweater, the ferret tentatively sniffs the air, its head bobbing like a Styrofoam cup in the East River. “Jesus,” Stefani says, seeing the animal, “like, what is that, an opossum? And why’s it wearing that stupid little cape? Can I touch it?”
“Ariel’s a ferret,” the woman answers. She has the worn, life-weary look of an ex-drug addict or born-again Christian, and smells of nervous sweat masked by Right Guard. Around her neck hangs a large crystal on a chain, a cracked geode the size of a racketball. “That’s a sweater she’s wearing, to keep warm. She very susceptible to chills. And no,” she says, “you can’t touch Ariel. I’ve just had her chakras aligned.” The woman walks off, the ferret clawed to her shoulder.
“Just remember, don’t shop at Mr. Charlies’,” Stefani calls after the woman, then gives up the errand. Pulling the rubber band from her hair, she redoes her horse’s tail, pushes a few stray strands of hair behind her ear. “Well,” she says, “I won’t shop there, and Morris won’t shop there. I’ll make certain of that.”
Setting her purse to the pavement, she opens it and digs around for matches or a lighter. “I won’t shop there because I know better,” she says, rifling through the contents of her bag. The size of a small suitcase, the purse is packed: barrettes; a bottle of Sweet-on-Him perfume; a Tower Records receipt with some boy’s phone number written on the back; Kleenex in floral prints; a half eaten donut from this morning; a letter from her school counselor, asking to meet with her parents; root beer and choco-berry and cherry favored lip glosses; a small Pearson Mason English boar bristle hairbrush that she stole from Anderson’s Drugstore; a large plastic brush with missing bristles; aspirin; a broken purple Swatch; a grape Blow Pop; a lucky rabbit’s foot her father gave her for her tenth birthday; two make-up compacts, the mirror cracked in both; a small, leather bound photo album; and, at the bottom, a scattering of Skittles and pennies and pennies and pennies.
Pulling out the photo album, she looks at a four-year-old picture of her and her parents at South Street Seaport, their faces shining with forced smiles like they’re out to prove they’re having fun. She’s an only child, lives on East Thirteenth Street above a Laundromat that belches out a warm, chemical fragrance of flowers and baby powder fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. It’s a ten-minute walk from Morris’s place and a world away.
She touches the picture, her fingers resting on the image of her father. Ever since her puberty set in at age fifteen—she was a late bloomer—her father, Jetski, has acted strange around her. He can’t adjust to this new creature, this different being. Stefani’s asked her mother what’s wrong with him, why he acts so weird. “Stress of his career,” her mother replied, referring to his job as a construction foreman.
But it’s more than that. Stefani knows it’s more, can sense it. Something has changed between her and her father. The household balance has shifted. She’s no longer her daddy’s little girl, no longer the daughter he actively seeks out. Now she’s a woman he actively avoids.
The life she once had has been breached by something corrupt and awful. Their home has been infiltrated, tainted. Stefani’s a stranger to her father. She can tell he’s disquieted by her; he won’t tuck her in at night anymore, won’t even enter her bedroom. The two of them no longer watch TV together like they used to, no longer playfully wrestle around like they once had. Jetski now locks the bathroom door and when Stefani enters a room, he finds a reason to leave.
More than once, she’s caught her father staring at her the way boys at school sometimes stare at her. I’m your daughter, she wants to remind him, feeling sick about what he’s probably thinking. I’m your little girl.
Stefani flips the album to the picture of Morris that she cut from her father’s yearbook and laughs. Morris stands tall and thin, all bone and gristle in his Men at Work muscle T-shirt. “Morris, Morris,” she says to the photo, then quietly sings, “If my father only knew about me and you. Oh, Morris, oh Morris, how he’d be stewing knowing what his best friend was doing.”
She turns back a few pages to Tom Ginkins, her first boyfriend. He’s standing by the black square sculpture at Astor Place, his eyes near closed as he squints in the bright sun. Tom had been the first boy she’d been intimate with—or near intimate. He was tall with a thick neck and overlapping teeth and had the habit of making everything he said sound like a question. Two years ago, Stefani’s freshman year, he’d asked her to a school dance and afterward, in a third floor classroom that was to have been locked but wasn’t, she had let him touch her in places she’d only touched herself. He’d been terrified but determined and wouldn’t stop repeating the Lord’s Prayer the entire time.
After, he asked if she’d be his girlfriend. She said sure, why not?
He brought her to meet his parents the following week. They dated, or what he termed dating—a movie followed by a few minutes of quiet groping then a goodnight kiss—for over three months.
But it ended when Tom’s mother walked in on him masturbating in the kitchen, Stefani’s class photo propped against a pig-shaped ceramic cookie jar.
His mother, stunned and revolted, made a sharp sound like a parrot being shot. “This is where we eat,” she said, thinking of how her son had helped her with dinner the night prior, had tossed the salad and handled the food. “Food’s served here.”
The entire house was thrown into chaos by the event. His mother wept for two days straight, yelled at her husband that it was his fault that their son was mentally tainted. “Come on, mom,” Tom repeatedly pled, embarrassed and angry. “It’s not like I killed someone.”
“No,” his mother tearfully answered, “it’s not. It’s worse.” She demanded he get professional help, see a doctor, which ended up being a dermatologist who was related to the family in some distant, difficult-to-trace manner—Tom’s mother feared the stigma of having her son go to a shrink. She forbade Tom from seeing Stefani anymore.
Tom explained to Stefani that he could no longer see her. He loved her, he said, but “outside forces, forces larger than you and me” made it impossible for him to keep seeing her. Having grown bored with Tom, Stefani was hardly hurt by the breakup, but still she acted the role of the jilted lover. In the school, when they passed, she turned her head down and ignored him. For nearly two weeks, the girls Stefani sometimes hung
out with harassed Tom, calling him “Asshole!” or “Dicklick!” in the halls between classes, slipping nasty notes into his locker. They started rumors he had Ebola or E. coli or some frightening disease you get from doing something you shouldn’t do. Loyalty and friendship to Stefani were not the wellspring of their actions. The girls taunted and berated Tom out of sheer adolescent cruelty, because there was the opportunity.
Then there were Gary and Greg Black. The Black brothers. She’d met Gary, the younger brother, at a Methodist youth group gathering her sophomore year. Being a Catholic, she’d gone not for the religious aspect, the community of Christ, but for the free snacks and screening of the movie Halloween. “You like Mountain Dew?” Gary asked her, seeing she’d poured a cupful. She wore tight, elastic, purple flare-bottom pants and a zippered Rocawear hoodie. “Yeah,” she answered, “and Cherry Coke. I like Cherry Coke a lot,” she told him. “And regular Coke. But not Pepsi. Tastes like sugared tree bark, you know?”
“Word,” he said, nodding in agreement. He asked if she wanted to sit next to him during the movie. She did, and grabbed his hand twice during the scary scenes.
His confidence was what Stefani liked. He said what he felt, wasn’t shy or goofy like most the boys she knew.
She handed up her virginity that night in the choir robe closet and on Monday, told Susan, a girl in her gym class, all about it. “You had sex with a black Methodist?” Susan said, crossing herself. “That’s definitely a sin.”
“His name’s Black,” Stefani corrected. “Gary Black. I met him at a Methodist youth ministry thingy,” Stefani said, but it was too late. She’d lost the rights to her own story; the tale quickly spread, getting distorted and embellished with each telling. By end of the day, word was that Stefani was fucking a black minister addicted to Methadone.
She dated Gary for seven and a half weeks, then started going out with his older brother Greg, because he had a battered, old Nissan Z28. He was cool, had all the confidence of his younger brother and half the acne. He drove her into Brooklyn to go drinking at a Polish bar that never carded, or up into Washington Heights to a Dominican bar that never carded, or out to Queens to an Albanian bar that never carded. Or he’d buy a twelve pack of beer with his fake ID and drive out to Staten Island where, parked on a quiet cul-de-sac with aluminum-sided houses, they explored each other’s bodies.
When she’d come home at midnight or one or three a.m. on a school night, her mother would explode, demand to know where she’d been. “Bowling” or “Youth group” or “Getting my nails done” she’d answer, her clothing wrinkled. She’d list about the apartment, like the floor was uneven or warped. “What have you been drinking?” her mother would demand. “Milk and milk and more milk,” Stefani would reply. “Does the body good.” She’d smell salty and fetid like she’d sprinted five miles then napped on a mound of fish sticks and mangos. Her mother would yell, all empty threats. “Okay, okay, okay,” Stefani’d say, staggering to her room to collapse on her bed.
The next night she’d be out again.
Her father did nothing, stayed clear of the fray and let the women work it out.
Stefani and Greg’s relationship stalled when Greg graduated and joined the Coast Guard. “I’ll write,” he promised her, “and visit when I’m back.” She knew he probably wouldn’t.
He didn’t.
Since then, Stefani spends most nights at home flipping through Seventeen and Elle and other magazines she finds on the street for recycling, drawing flowering doodles with Magic Marker on the faces of the models.
Taking one last look at Morris’s picture, she tosses the photo album back in her bag, then shifts about the purse’s contents, looking for matches or a lighter. Junior prom’s approaching, and thinking of Morris in a rented tuxedo and a cummerbund, she laughs to herself. “Yeah,” she says, thinking of the surprise everyone will feel when she shows up at prom with Morris. Her father will flip when he sees Morris at the door, a corsage in hand. Maybe she can get Morris to spring for a limo and dinner out at a nice place with a tablecloth and two forks at the setting.
And liquor, she thinks, lots of liquor.
She finds a battered pack of matches, strikes one. It hisses to life. The cigarette catches. Stefani, coughing violently from the smoke, grabs her bag and heads west on Eighth Street, planning on which pages in her photo album she’ll put the prom pictures. Planning which pages will be dedicated to Morris.
Chapter 5