For what felt like a very long time, his mother didn’t speak or even seem to able to. She touched, very briefly, the drapes, rubbed the material between her fingers, and then walked to the bed and sat down on one side of it, purse still in her lap. She stared straight ahead. She looked as if she had received either the best or the worst news she ever had in her life.
“This, all of this. It’s exactly the same,” she said. “Everything. I think it’s the same brown cover on the bed. And look—Magic Fingers.” He had missed it: there was a small black box against the wall: MAGIC FINGERS RELAXATION SERVICE. ONLY 25 CENTS. “Where do you see that anymore? Only a quarter.” Pause, memory, smile. “Roy had three.”
Bronfman sat down on the edge of the bed beside her, on the bed where he was invented by this woman and a near-stranger’s supposedly lazy sperm. Maybe that explained Bronfman’s character, to some degree, his record-setting slow-blooming nature. Maybe Bronfman just didn’t have what it takes. Maybe it was in his genes.
His mother was silent, watching the show going on in her head, the old movie she starred in thirty-four-plus years ago, eyes open but completely blank and flat. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning, either. Outside, he could hear the traffic go by, someone in a room nearby shouting.
Finally, she turned to her son with warm, watery eyes. “See, Edsel? I hadn’t planned on any of this. Who ever knew that one night with a nice man would end up producing a thousand peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches?” A statement that, had anybody overheard her, would have seemed completely insane. Only Bronfman knew that this was the sanest thing she could have said.
THREE
From 1991 through 1995, mid-August, just before school began, Bronfman and his mother would prepare his lunch for the upcoming year. With her son in tow, she drove to the A&P way on the other side of town. The Piggly Wiggly was much closer to home, but she objected to the name, which she felt was vaguely offensive. She cast a deep-blue egalitarian eye on this old southern world, and occasionally that would get her into some trouble, which she loved. “It will be a cold day in hell before I darken the door of the Piggly Wiggly!” she said, as if she had been personally offended by Mr. Wiggly himself and wanted him to know it. Bronfman wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that the Piggly Wiggly was the first supermarket in town to enforce a no-smoking rule. Once (when Bronfman was nine) she was asked to leave the store when she refused to put out her Salem as she waited for the butcher to bring her a pot roast.
No matter. They drove three miles to the A&P, where he would grab one metal cart and she would grab another. Bronfman’s job was to fill his cart with loaf after loaf of white bread, the whitest bread there ever was, bread as white as chalk, bread you can’t legally buy anymore because its color comes from a bleach known to kill household pests. But Bronfman loved it. The bread was so soft and moist that he could roll an entire slice of it into a ball the size of a marble. He got the bread, while his mother was in charge of the peanut butter and jelly. She bought twenty-five jars of each. It took them half an hour to check out.
At home, the bread was laid out piece by piece across the kitchen counters—slabs of white clones edged with a ribbon of brown. Bronfman thought that meant the bread was baked in an actual oven, but later decided that it was probably just a breadlike substance made to look that way. Sometimes he ate that part first, but not now, not during the manufacturing process. Their kitchen wasn’t very large. There was just enough room for fifty slices of bread to be laid out at a time, twenty-five sandwiches—approximately one month of lunches.
And in this way his lunch was made, every lunch was made, one for every day of the week, September to June, sandwich after sandwich, all day long.
As his mother slathered on the jelly and he carefully applied his coating of sludgy brown peanut butter (always smooth, never crunchy), she talked with him about the thing he knew least: himself. Every August there seemed to be a theme. This August, because he was a rising high-school freshman, the theme was girls. It was as uncomfortable to talk about them then as it was now.
“What do you think?” she said.
“Think?”
“Do you see yourself, you know, dating, getting into it all?”
“‘Getting into it all’?”
“Girls,” she said. “Not romance, per se. Just those initial exploratory maneuvers kids get into.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on.” She winked. “You’re among friends.”
He didn’t know what she was talking about. Was he supposed to? Did not having a father around to tell him these things place him at a disadvantage?
“Exploratory maneuvers,” she said. “Like ‘Hi, how are you? What’s up?’ Then boom—you’re on your way to first base.”
“Mom.”
“Second—”
“Mom.”
“The crowd is on its feet—he’s stealing third!”
“Mom.”
She laughed her spritely cackle (she sounded like a fun-loving witch back then) and sipped on her wine—small, delicate sips that didn’t appear to subtract a teaspoon from its total volume but then was gone. Pinot Grigio. Bronfman knew that it was Pinot Grigio because every day at around five o’clock she’d sing a little song: “What do you know, what do you know, it’s time for my Pinot Grigio!” Then she’d dance to the refrigerator and remove the bottle she’d been drinking from the day before, the mysterious green bottle, corked, standing beside the stodgy carton of skim milk. He liked to watch her sip, the way the thin edge of the wineglass slipped between her lips, the way it fit there, her lower lip bigger, fuller than the upper one; the way her hair (brown, almost comically straight) was cut to fall to her shoulders, and rippled when she laughed. And the beauty mark. Was seeing his mother in this way—as an object of beauty—normal for a boy? Was there some kind of psychological trauma that came from an idealization of this magnitude?
She moved closer to him, in order to check on his progress. “Get the peanut butter all the way to the edge,” she said.
“I am,” he said, bristling. “Mostly.”
“Hey, they’re your sandwiches,” she said. “I’m just thinking of your future. The one without enough peanut butter in it. A disappointment waiting to happen.” She mussed his hair with her free hand. “One of many, I suppose.”
He noted how her jelly—grape, the color of red wine—perfectly covered the open plain. How did she do it? Not even a drop of jelly anywhere but on the bread.
“Maybe I’m rushing this,” she said. “Maybe you should just start by talking to them. Don’t worry about the other stuff.”
“I’m not worried,” he said. He wouldn’t look at her. “Just—”
“What would you say?”
“To who?”
“A girl.”
“Nothing.”
“Pretend I’m a girl.”
Sigh.
“Hi, Edsel!” she said, pretending to be a girl. Apparently, girls were bright and cheery and happy to see him. “How are you?”
“Please.”
“No. Say, ‘I’m fine, insert name here,’” she said. “That’s all. That’s it. You’re done. Now the ball is rolling.”
“Uphill,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said. “Unless you change that attitude of yours.”
“What attitude?”
Bronfman gazed at his mother, and heard only a part of what she said. Sometimes he shut down halfway through one of her stories. It was this view of her, that’s what he loved. Just looking. She kicked him in the leg. “You don’t have to love me so much,” she said. “I mean, it may not be a good thing in the long run. And you’re three slices behind,” she said. “Get to work.”
The production line was active for the next couple of hours. When the components were assembled—a flotilla of peanut butter here, an armada of jelly over there—they were brought together, one on top, one on bottom, like lovers. The product was inse
rted into a plastic bag, which was carefully sealed, and then they were stacked in the big freezer in the basement, over and over and over, until all 180 sandwiches were finished—180 being the average number of days in the school year. So now in the morning all she had to do was pop a red bag of mini-pretzels, a Dixie cup for the water fountain, and the sandwich into a bag—it took seconds—and it was done and he was set and she could go back to bed. The peanut butter and jelly and bread would usually defrost by lunch, but in the colder months there were always one or two icy bites.
Oh, he grew up wanting more, better, different. Less of the same. And if it was all going to be prepared at one time and frozen, why not do something different: like peanut-butter-and-jelly half the year and bologna the rest. How weird that she did this. How awful! It was so awful that he wouldn’t talk about it even with the few friends he had. No one knew, no one. He was ashamed. Was she cruel, lazy, or just overly practical and industrious? One thing for certain: out of all the days, weeks, and years he’d spent with her, he remembered this most vividly, this making of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
He did object, once. The summer before his senior year. Said he wanted a different lunch every day. Something new. Something good. Something that he could look forward to.
“Something to look forward to?” she said. “Lunch? Edsel,” she said. “Listen. If you only learn one thing from me in your whole life, learn this: Lunch is boring. Lunches are boring. Everything about a lunch is middling. It’s in the middle of the day, for one thing. It’s more of a break than it is a meal, really, isn’t it? Just a bunch of kids sitting together at table after table stuffing their mouths with nutrients so they can live until three-thirty. That’s all it is. But see? Now it’s done; we don’t have to think about lunch for the rest of the year. Our minds are free to engage in higher pursuits. We can have bigger ideas, more beautiful thoughts. That’s what I want for you, Edsel. I want you to soar. I want you to be happy. Lunch—this is what holds us back, it’s what keeps us from being happy. Not just lunch, of course, but things like lunch. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Good men, happy men—men who are content—they don’t worry about lunch. And you’re going to be a good man.”
She was wrong. Bronfman didn’t become a good man; he was more neutral than anything else. It appeared that he had taken the lesson she had tried to teach him and turned it into the exact opposite of what she had intended. All he had thought about was lunch—metaphorically, anyway, lunch the way she meant it. All he had wanted was to be held back. Until Carla D’Angelo called him, at any rate. Until he met Sheila.
FOUR
In the quiet of 2D they sat on the bed beside each other, still as wax figures. Then she took his hand and held it, tighter than he thought she could.
“Give me a minute, dear, okay?”
“Of course.”
He stood, left, drew the door closed a little more than halfway, and waited on the walkway outside. The sun warmed his cheeks, and his neck, bound so tightly by his too small collar, glistened with sweat. Heat rose in wavy sheets from the parking lot and, through them, mirage-like, he saw a police car approaching, and it parked in the space right beside his. Serena Stanton peered at him through the windshield. She looked mildly amused.
“My, my,” she said, leaving the car and approaching him, her left hand resting on her walkie-talkie. “You do get around.”
“Hi, Serena,” he said. On first names with a policewoman, something he never imagined happening in the kind of lifetime he’d planned on having. She lifted her two-way and muttered some unintelligible policespeak into it and replaced it on her belt. “We got a call from management,” she said. “Said a couple of vagrants had unlawfully taken possession of a room.”
“Vagrants?” he said. “I’m clearly not a vagrant. I’m wearing a tie!”
“I’m paraphrasing. What’s going on, Bronfman?”
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“I have all day.” She set her feet about eighteen inches apart, hands on her hips, and appeared to be planted there, immovable.
“Okay. So my mother’s in the room now,” he said. “Almost exactly thirty-five years ago she had … intercourse here with a man she’d just met and never saw again. He impregnated her, and the child born through their union was me. She wanted to show me where it happened, and to revisit it herself for old times’ sake.”
Serena’s expression remained flat, unimpressed. But how often could she possibly have heard a tale like this? Many times, it appeared. “Not that long a story,” she said, and pushed her hair back and away from her face and let it rest behind her ear. “But sweet. Very sweet.” He saw a small hole in her lobe where she could be wearing an earring, and he imagined one there—something long and metallic, jeweled with amethyst—and everything about her changed, like Cinderella. He understood why she couldn’t wear it on duty: it would severely compromise her authority. Everybody would want to kiss her. He tried to suppress the guilt he felt at the core of this observation—Sheila, I’m sorry—but it wouldn’t go away. He imagined himself kissing Serena Stanton.
Had he been his father—clearly the man his mother wanted him to be—he would have brushed Serena’s hair back behind her ear himself, and gazed into her eyes and said something catchy, a good line, something that would make her smile and wonder what he was really like. But he wasn’t his father, if his father really was the father his mother said he was.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Serena said. “I’m going to talk to the manager, and you’re going to retrieve your mother and go on your way. No harm, no foul. Understood, Bronfman?”
“You sure you don’t want to take me in?” he said. Oh, my God. He did it. He accidentally did it. That was a line. Then he held out his hands, wrists together. “I’ve never seen the inside of a police car.” He felt possessed by his father’s spirit.
“Don’t tempt me,” she said and smiled, smiled as if she were just a little bit tempted. “But I should take a look first, just to make sure it’s your mother in there and you’re not up to any shenanigans.”
She gently pushed open the door and peered in and around, and then motioned for Bronfman to take a look himself. His mother was under the covers, breathing softly, bedsheets up to her shoulders, and her eyes were closed, and the bed was magically trembling.
FIVE
Muriel looked as if she could sleep forever. She lay there, still as a mummy, radiating contentment on that overused mattress and those prickly sheets. Serena must have seen it, too, because after the last cycle ended she tiptoed to the side of the bed and inserted another quarter. “Five more minutes,” she whispered to Bronfman, “but then I’m calling in the SWAT team.”
They waited together on the walkway outside the room. Serena’s walkie-talkie and Bronfman’s stomach grumbled: it was almost time for lunch. She stood there, hands on her hips, looking out toward the city like a sentry on a parapet, scouting for suspicious movement on the periphery of the kingdom.
“It’s going to be a hot one,” she said.
“It is,” he said, happy to enthusiastically affirm an observation that he might have shared himself, given another moment or two. “And the humidity!”
“I’ve never gotten used to it,” she said. “I love my uniform. I wanted to be a police officer since I was a kid, and when I thought of myself all grown up I was wearing a uniform just like this. But it gets hot under here.” Her hands, beginning at her clavicles, drew a line lightly down her torso.
“You sweat a lot,” he said.
“I perspire,” she said, and smiled.
Bronfman worked to maintain the idleness of the conversation.
“So you’re not from here?” he asked.
“Vermont,” she said. “The first ten years of my life, anyway. Then my dad was transferred to Atlanta—he was an urban planner—and I came here to school and just … stayed. Birmingham’s nice. Not too big, not too small. What a town dreams a city would be, y
ou know?”
Bronfman stuck his hands in his pocket and jingled his keys. “What a town dreams a city would be,” he said. “That’s exactly right.”
“Vulcan is a plus. And people are generally friendly. I like that.”
“Even the criminal element?” Bronfman said, pleased with the phrase he’d just pulled out of his hat. Criminal element. He’d never used those words in that order before, not in his entire life, but somehow he had it at the ready, right when he needed it. It scared him, not knowing what was inside his own head, but today it was a plus.
“I’ve arrested lots of people who apologize to me all the way to the station. Not for what they did but for making me come out on a rainy night to get them.” She laughed.
“I’m sorry,” Bronfman said.
“For what?”
“For this,” gesturing with his head toward the hotel room. “I’m sure you have better things to do.”
“I don’t,” she said. “Actually, this is the fun part of my job.”
Serena looked at him with a gentle fondness, a small smile, her eyes softly shining. Bronfman had no words, no sounds at all, to reply with, not even a friendly idle grunt. He couldn’t look away from her, but he couldn’t respond, either. Now, where was that errant phrase to be rescued from the cobwebby corner of his brain when he really and truly needed one? Why had he wasted it on criminal element when what he really wanted now was a series of words that somehow communicated to her that he recognized her partiality to him, what seemed a partiality to him, what he hoped was a partiality to him—that, in words humans used, she liked him. Because thinking that she liked him, feeling that, felt so good. Then, finally, something did come to him, and it was as magic as the fingers on the bed his mother was sleeping in. He said, “I bet you say that to all your perps.”