Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen Read Free Book Online Page B

shrugged.
    â€œDid you roll around in mud this morning?” he said. “Are you some kind of pig?”
    You stood looking at your feet, seeming to make some kind of calculation. No, sir, you said.
    â€œBecause you call to mind,” he said, “with trousers like that, a pig.” Here a ripple of laughter went through the room. “You think you can track mud through my hallways?”
    No, sir .
    â€œWhat does your mother say,” he asked, “when you come home with your trousers looking like that?”
    Nothing .
    â€œNothing?” Mr. K. said, with the thrill of a man looking for a fight.
    It dries up, you said, and falls off on the way home. She doesn’t notice.
    â€œIt dries up,” said Mr. K., in his rage reduced to repeating whatever it was that you said, “and falls off.” He stood staring at you, smiling, his face gone purple, a man battling to contain himself. “And your mother doesn’t notice.” Then without another word he turned and walked out of the room, through the swinging doors, the silence holding until we could no longer hear his footsteps, and then even beyond that. When we returned to our lunches it was with the grim silence of motorists who had just passed an accident.
    What we knew, and Mr. K. didn’t, was that your mother wasn’t the type to concern herself with the condition of your pants, or her kitchen floor, or anything else relating to the duties and comforts of homemaking. Everyone knew your mother. Her name was Irma and she was older than most mothers, with a beehive hairdo and a face as craggy and oblong as a potato. She worked as a cashier at the am/pm and after school kids would go there for candy and soda, they’d empty their pockets on the counter, pushing their pennies and nickels toward her. Aside from her duties at the register your mother was responsible for dispensing slush drinks from a tank that, full of unnaturally bright fluid, pulsed behind her like a bodily organ, and there was a kind of thrill amongst kids our age, watching her fetch their drinks when their own mothers had long since stopped doing anything of the kind. Your mother’s fingers were twisted, arthritic, the knuckles swollen to the size of gumballs, and it hurt to watch her fit the plastic caps onto the drinks and scrape change from the register drawer, in fact it was painful just to stand in her presence. She never, as far as I knew, spoke a single word to a customer or looked anyone in the eye, preferring instead to stare off at one of the convex mirrors positioned in the corners of the store’s ceilings, all the traffic of the store’s life, its drudgery and its petty crimes, encircled there and reflected back to her in miniature. Your mother was known to be religious, a Catholic who attended daily mass. Sometimes while she sat at the register she fingered a rosary. People said she was brain-damaged, that your father had beaten her once to the brink of death and that ever since she had been more or less disembodied, a rumor that was easy to believe. Often she forgot to remove the paper napkin which she had tucked in the collar of her shirt during her lunch break, and she sat all afternoon at the register as though a child seated in a high chair, draped with a bib, some stain or other spotted on it. Given all of this—and also given the fact that your father was an infamous drunk, known for passing out on the floors of bars—your family was thought to be cursed. It was set aside as exceptional and delinquent, which, in a neighborhood like ours, full of drunks and derelicts and deadbeats, where the margins of acceptable behavior had been drawn with a generous hand, was saying something.
    The following year a plague of lice went through the school and we were all made to line up in the gymnasium for head inspections. You and I were among the small group brought to the nurse’s office and kept there, largely unsupervised,