Plucking the moon from the Bottom of the Ocean

No one lives in my house now. You can tell because, at night, there are no lights. People should have lights on at night. Not too late at night, people have to sleep, but around dinnertime or just after, when people go to the den to watch Get Smart or something else with a laugh track, something that makes you laugh at the right time, and not the wrong time, as I do during a murder on Manix, or Secret Agent unless I don’t laugh at all, because I’m stuck doing dishes and being yelled at, or smacked around for not doing them well or fast enough. That’s no laughing matter. That’s when people should have lights on in their dens, kitchens, and living rooms, as we did back then when a thirteen-year-old was getting backhanded and kicked. Somebody walking by would have seen that with all those lights on. That’s what you’d think. But not my house, as if it was invisible, and everything that went on there that nobody saw or chose to see. And now my house stays dark all the time, is my guess.

In the Samuels’s house next door, Mr. Samuels took a Sunbeam iron (just like the one we had), and instead of pressing out the wrinkles in one of those rip-off Oxford shirts he wore with the polo player hammering his heart out with a mallet, he knocked Mrs. Samuels to the floor. Talk about what goes on inside a house. He left a pope’s hat impression where one of the high cheekbones, the left one, I think, one of them anyway, was. She had those high, razor-cut Veronica Lake cheekbones, but now that one got mashed down like it deflated, like taking all the hot air from a hot air balloon. The force of the iron moved one-half of her face, so it crossed to the other side, leaving her like a cyclops, only she still had two eyes, but them all crushed together after he’d swung that iron with the full force of his arm, his forearm, all the way back from his shoulder like it was a sideways pendulum from a Mr. E. A. Poe story. The stainless steel, ceramic-coated bottom of the iron wasn’t stainless now. At least, that’s what I saw for myself when Mr. Samuels, after he’d done it, came out of his house and took me to see what he’d done. It’s not like you’d think — that I hunkered below the kitchen window, peering in, like some kind of Kilroy-psycho-pervert, into the Samuels’s window at all those daisies decorating the backsplash behind the kitchen sink when it happened. I’m no peeping Tom.

When you’re thirteen, people either want you to go away, or if you won’t do that, they want you seen and not heard. That’s how I met up with Mr. Samuels. Mom, Lucky, Sukie, and Gerty were yelling things like “One bam!”, “Two dot!”, “Three crack!”, “You’re dead!” playing that Jewish/Chinese game, you won with special hands, like The Thirteen Orphans or Chow, Pung, or Kong of Three Dragons. Every Tuesday afternoon, the ladies bent over their tiles on the collapsible card table, their rear ends and thighs fluffed out like clouds of mashed potatoes over the sides of their folding chairs. They played in the living room; the table aligned perfectly with the room's walls and stank up the air with overly sweet old lady perfume and talcum powder. Mom played Mahjong to take her mind off the suicide-by-shotgun that killed my father a year ago. I’d been upstairs when he did it in the kitchen, barrel to mouth, Hemingway style. My bedroom was right above the kitchen, so the floor buckled with the impact of the blast. Little red/brown stains speckled the ceiling now, above the Formica-topped kitchen table like he’d planted a field of dead flowers there to remember him by. The windows rattled; the blast from that shotgun was so loud.

They were loud, too, the Mahjong ladies, and getting louder, the volume going up as the level in the frosted vodka bottle went down. And me, being sensitive to loud noises, now, how I can’t stand loud noises, now, how loud noises make me shake from the inside out, all over my body, now, came down from my room, stood right next to my mom’s left ear, and asked if she and her lady friends could “shut the FUCK UP!” She slapped me so hard I fell to the floor right on my butt.

Well, that ended the shouting at the Mahjong table. Lucky, Sukie, and Gerty stopped yelling and laughing and looked up and stared at me and Mom like the three heads of Cerberus salivating at the gates of hell.

“Now go upstairs and play with your dolls, or do your homework, or something, but leave us ladies alone,” she said, all quiet-scary, like words slipping out of a snake. “How many times do I have to tell you…”

And she went on and on like that until I couldn’t hear her anymore ‘cause I’d gotten up and stormed out, crying. The kitchen door spoke for me as the tension spring hooked through two eyelets, one on the molding and one on the door, yanked it back with such force it sounded like a gunshot. “One BAM!” I said to myself, whirled around, and held my index finger forward and my thumb up while all my other fingers lay back across my palm to make a gun aimed at my mom.

The game had gone long, so when I got outside, Mr. Samuels had just returned from work. He did something, like steam fitting, somewhere that didn’t seem worth it. He never made enough money, as I understand it, and Mrs. Samuels never let him forget it.

“Why don’t we never go nowhere? All my friends at the hair parlor go places. Out to Vincenzo’s, for instance. Betty and Rick always going out for a nice dinner. And Sally. Sally said, come Christmas, she and Bob are going to Florence! Florence, Italy! Did you hear that! Not us, though. I just go from one stinking room of this house to the other. And God only knows what the hell you do. I’m forgetting what outside looks like; it's been so long. I should have married Bob. Don’t know what he sees in that Sally. Except what every man sees in that Sally.”

Things like that, she’d say. Words to make Mr. Samuels feel inadequate, like for all the work he did — getting up so early it was still dark, coming back late, and then having to listen to that! I watched his head sink into his shoulders like in James Thurber's cartoon as he entered the side door just off his driveway, off his kitchen. Then I heard them arguing. And then a thud, like a sack of cinderblocks hitting the floor.

Moments later, the side door flung open, and Mr. Samuels stood at the threshold, heaving like someone had inserted bellows in his chest and pumped it rhythmically, in and out. His speech came in those breaths. In his right hand, he held the Sunbeam iron, its plastic housing cracked, the chord dangling and writhing like an eel.

“How much more can a man take?” Mr. Samuels said, heaving, filling the entire doorframe. “I couldn’t stand it any longer. You can see that, right? I just couldn’t take one more night. Coming home to that.”

Although I shook, and the words came out shaky, I told Mr. Samuels I understood.

We stood silently, staring at one another, until Mr. Samuels said, “Lotta noise in there.” He jerked his Kirk Douglas chin toward our house. “Don’t know how you stand it.”