Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation Read online

  The photographer whistled to the store manager, who jumped up in his elevated booth like a startled hen. He seemed to be half asleep and shaking off a nightmare. Straightening his smock and bow tie, he grabbed the microphone and announced over the PA: “Meat Department—bird, ten pound, frozen, up front, picture.” Later, in third grade, I thought back to that sentence when we were learning about verbs.

  My mother squeezed my shoulders.

  “Isn’t this exciting? Out of all the kids, he picked you!”

  Poor Joyce. So swept up in the moment that she’d lost all sense of reality and forgotten who she was dealing with. Or maybe she thought if she could distract me long enough, I wouldn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.

  “Did you hear the Keeners got a Chow Chow?” she asked. “What was the name of their old dog again? The one with the little wheels on his back legs?”

  “I’m not doing it,” I said, casting the monster magazine into the shopping cart. “I want to wait in the car.”

  She took a deep breath and knelt down, stroking my hair in a funny direction so it remained messy.

  “It’s just a picture, sweetie. It’ll be over in two seconds.”

  I resented the patronizing logic. I wasn’t four years old anymore and this wasn’t a tetanus shot. Certainly she had to be aware by now of my astonishing power to foresee every conceivable downside to a situation. And this little caper—which I would never consent to under any circumstance—wasn’t going to vanish in a flash of magnesium. The fallout would be long and grisly:

  “Hey, Adam, saw your picture in the paper.”

  “There he is! Mr. Picture in the Paper!”

  “That was a heck of a turkey you were holding in that picture, in the paper.”

  “Lemme ask ya, kid, what was the point of the money in your mouth?”

  No thank you. Give me tetanus, give me diphtheria, give me that weird disease that turns kids into old people, but I wanted no part of this jackpot.

  The photographer sensed something was off. He asked my mother if there was a problem. She responded with a shy parlor laugh like a Tennessee Williams character.

  “No, just a silly little boy is all. They can be positively willful at this age. Ha-ha.”

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me aside.

  “Not everything is about you,” she hissed. “This man is being very nice and he was probably in the war and the least you can do is be cooperative!”

  I was nothing if not diplomatic. I told her the guy was welcome to take my picture as long as it didn’t involve a turkey, the American flag, or soiled currency in my mouth. Additionally, it could not appear in the newspaper or any other publication. A look of unbridled fury came over her. She plucked Famous Monsters of Filmland from the shopping cart and flung it back toward the magazine rack, where it fluttered like a bat before dying behind the stamp machine. “What makes you think you deserve that book? What makes you think you deserve anything! I do so much for you, and this one time, all I ask for is—”

  She quickly composed herself and tried a different approach—offering to take me to the hobby shop to buy the Invisible Man model I wanted so badly. I responded favorably to the suggestion . . . with the caveat that it wouldn’t require me to pose for a picture that appeared in the newspaper or any other publication. She did a “slow burn”—or as I recognized it, the face Moe makes right before he throttles Curly.

  A pudgy little man with the face of a dull child arrived clutching a frozen turkey. His white apron was mottled with blood the same color as his name tag, which was blank. He shuffled over to the manager’s booth and held the turkey high in the air. The manager snapped, “Don’t give it to me, you moron! Give it to the kid!” The little man walked the turkey over to me, but I turned away, refusing it. Then he carted it back to his boss, reporting in a weepy voice, “But he don’t want it neither.” The annoyed manager looked up from his clipboard and replied, “What do you mean, He don’t want it neither? Of course he wants it!” “I tried to give it to him,” the little man explained, “but he won’t put his hands or arms out or nothin’.”

  The photographer was growing concerned. He glanced at my mother and simply said, “Ma’am?” Joyce looked like she wanted to crawl under the display of Campfire marshmallows and die. Finally, she mumbled, “He said he doesn’t want to do it.”

  “Doesn’t want to do it? Doesn’t want to do what?” He seemed genuinely baffled. Who in their right mind would refuse an opportunity like this?

  The manager grunted and stomped down the four steps from his roost, emerging through a low swinging door. He grabbed the turkey from the little man—scaring him half to death—and marched over to me. His eyes softened and he concocted a smile.

  “Whattsa matter, Sarge? You don’t wanna hold the turkey?” I didn’t answer. “You know what—I just might let you keep that turkey.” He eyed the photographer and repeated, “I just might let him keep that son of a gun!” The photographer ran with it: “Wow. It’s a big one too. I bet a strong boy like him could hold that buzzard like it was a pack of cigarettes.” He winked at my mother, who blatantly begged, “Adam, pleeease hold the turkey.”

  The photographer squatted down and tried to look me in the eye.

  “This is going on the front page, son. Everyone’s gonna see it—your friends, your family, old grandpops . . . imagine that.” The manager reached into his smock and withdrew a wad of limp bills. He grinned broadly, pointed to the money, then to his mouth, and finally at me, miming some magnificent concept he felt I wasn’t grasping. I responded by gazing down at an ancient produce sticker that appeared fused to the linoleum, marveling at how it survived all these years.

  “He’s just so willful,” my dazed mother said to no one in particular.

  The photographer sighed and spoke to the back of my head. “Are you sure about this, son? Don’t you want to make Mom happy?”

  Del Monte Quality Banano de Costa Rica.

  “Son, are you listening?”

  Moments later I was trailing behind my mother as she finished her shopping. She was walking unusually fast and my corduroys were swooshing like a wind turbine. Every box, jar, and sack was viciously hurled into the cart, and I noticed the back of her neck looked sunburned. All the cute shit, like calling me her “number one helper” or “the best tomato-picker-outer in the world,” was absent, replaced by dead air and an icy disregard. I wisely kept my mouth shut. I think it pissed her off more.

  My brother Rick found us. Five years older than me, he was allowed to wander around the shopping center alone and even play pinball at the bowling alley across the street. Now he was irritated, wanting to go home and wondering why my mother hadn’t checked out yet. “Why don’t you ask your brother?” she suggested, ratting me out. I gave up nothing, of course, so it was her pleasure to unburden herself of the details. Naturally, I was portrayed as the bad guy, but her retelling of the events was needlessly emotional and riddled with inaccuracies. For one thing, at no point had I “thrown a fit” and I certainly wasn’t “tossing magazines around like a crazy person.” She’s the one who threw the magazine.

  “You stupid idiot!” Rick screamed in my face. “You could’ve been in the paper! That money was yours to keep! Who cares if it was in your mouth? It was probably hundreds of dollars!” As usual, he had it all figured out.

  Ever the opportunist, Rick rushed off to find the photographer. This was a kid who craved the spotlight. Whether it was at school, Little League, or the Blue Mountain chapter of the Good Deed Bandits, he was constantly looking for a way to put himself out there. This time, though, he came up empty. The photographer was at Woolworth’s, still on the prowl for a cute kid with a dirty face, when Rick tracked him down. My brother did everything he could to charm and bullshit his way into the gig, rattling off one good deed after another, but he was just too old. He wasn’t “right.” The photographer wanted me. There was just one problem: He couldn’t have me. Not for all the fame and fortu
ne he could ram down my throat. And why? Because I didn’t do things like that.

  On the ride home, Joyce and Rick talked in the front seat like they were the only people in the car.

  “He’s got problems,” Rick told her. “He doesn’t even have any friends. Do you know how many friends I had at his age? Remember the time I got everyone to sign up for the bike rodeo? Best year ever. Remember the picture they put up—me giving the coffee can to the March of Dimes guy?”

  “He has a good heart,” my mother said. “He just gets in his own way sometimes.”

  “Kids hate kids like him. I would hate him. It’s only a matter of time before he gets beat up.”

  Thanksgiving morning, the newspaper banged against the screen door. Rick ran out to get it. On the front page was a picture of Walter DeCanto holding a frozen turkey. There were a few wrinkled bills lodged between his nubby teeth. The caption below said something about “Thanksgiving Savings.” Walter was a grade ahead of me. I didn’t really know him, but my mother always claimed that his mother “acted entitled.” So that added a nice little patina to things.

  Dinner that evening was quiet for a Resnick Thanksgiving. No screaming, no violence—even my father was unusually sedate. There was an unspoken feeling in the dining room that we had lost out on something, and would continue to lose out. We would never be front-pagers. And that was just fine with me. I was the invisible man.

  The Sensodyne Lady

  The Kid wanted to play the piano. I tried to wise her to the facts: no Resnick had ever been able to play a musical instrument, or, for that matter, to draw, sing, or produce anything of beauty. I mapped it all out for her—how she’d dread the lessons, get frustrated by her lack of ability, and inevitably quit. No Resnick, I reiterated, will ever, ever be able to play the piano. That’s how much I loved this little girl. But she was seven. She was a kid. And kids live in lollipop land.

  I had the same pipe dream when I was about her age. I wanted to pound out that old-time jazzy stuff I heard in black-and-white cartoons—songs like “Let’s Do It,” “Hard-to-Get Gertie,” and “No Wonder She’s a Blushing Bride.” It took only one piano lesson to knock me in line. “Certainly you didn’t expect to just sit down and be able to play, did you?” asked the baffled piano teacher. Well, as a matter of fact, yes I did, honey. I’d seen mice, ducks, and even a porcupine do it, why the fuck not me? Now I had to protect my daughter from the same wake-up call. Or maybe, subconsciously, I wanted to prevent her from succeeding at something I had failed at. That’s not such a bad thing, right? Just human nature.

  Ultimately, though, there was a larger issue—I didn’t want a piano in the apartment. They’re big ugly things, those pianos. Dust catchers. And unlike rabbits or tropical fish, they never die. Your family dies around it. The piano always gets the last laugh. My wife, Lorrie, the normal one, told me to take a deep breath. We didn’t have to get a real piano, she explained, just one of those digital keyboards. They’re only a few hundred bucks and you can shove it under the bed.

  I’m not an unreasonable man. I could live with that. And maybe the Kid needed to learn about failure. She’d had an easy ride up to this point.

  We bought the fake piano, but the piano teacher didn’t like fake pianos. Something about the keys not being weighted.What we needed, she told us—in front of the Kid—was a real piano. Thanks for having my back, Hot Asian Girl. I guess all that giggling at my witty asides wasn’t you being flirty after all. It was out of my hands. Like finding yourself in the path of a freight train or a junked-up mistress with a straight razor, I was outmaneuvered by destiny. I left the piano shopping to Lorrie, requesting only that it not be one of those nursing home models.

  It wasn’t long before she had “amazing” news: a woman in the building was selling her piano and wanted only a hundred dollars for it. The porters had already checked it out and said it would be easy to move. It was all too perfect and too fast. I wanted to know more. First, who was the seller?

  “The lady on eight,” Lorrie said. “She’s got black frizzy hair. The one with the blind schnauzer?” I made it my business not to look at or interact with anyone in the building, so this triggered nothing.

  “You know, she was in the Sensodyne commercial.”

  I was still blindfolded and the piñata was across the street.

  “Remember her husband—the really nice man with the cane, the one who died? He was on chemo? You hated the way he was always whistling?”

  That vaguely rang a bell. I moved on to the important issue: What did this piano look like?

  It was an upright, she said, not the coolest-looking thing in the world, but not awful. It was the right size and would do the job. Plus, the Kid liked it. I detected a bit of salesmanship in her voice. The whole thing seemed to just fall out of the sky. I insisted on seeing it.

  She was bony, with firm, stringy muscles, and had no business wearing a tank top. Her Bellevue eyes complemented the wild salt-and-pepper hair that was straight out of a fright-wig catalog, or perhaps one of Darwin’s early sketchbooks. She appeared to be in her late fifties and was a quintessential New York loon—one of those classic Upper West Side ladies who smiled too much, had intergalactic notions about the existence of man, yet fiercely observed the High Holidays. I looked around the apartment. It was all there—the clutter, the framed Metropolitan Opera print, the brigade of Solgar vitamin bottles, and the funk of vegan pork. How this woman ever wound up in a toothpaste commercial must have been quite a story, one I had absolutely no interest in.

  Her first words were to Lorrie and they were weighted with disappointment: “Oh, this is your husband?” Obviously she’d seen me around the building and wasn’t a fan. Perhaps I had insulted her somewhere along the line. Maybe she accidentally pushed the wrong floor on the elevator once and heard me exhale obnoxiously—a response I often produce for screwheads who waste three seconds of my valuable time. It didn’t matter. I was there on business, not to mend fences.

  Lorrie, as it turned out, had been kind in her description of the piano. It was possibly the ugliest contrivance ever built by white men, to borrow an unpleasant phrase from Mr. Houck, my ninth-grade shop teacher. It reeked of the early sixties, with its piss-yellow wood and fancy curves. No matter where my eye wandered, it was assaulted by filigree, latticework, or “what the fuck, let’s give it a shot” ornamentation. My best theory was that it had been designed to coax orgasms out of grieving old ladies who went piano shopping after the Kennedy assassination. Simply put, it wasn’t to my taste.

  I tried to extract my wife from the apartment, but the woman had her pinned down. Her eyes grew damp as she nattered away about the piano and how all her kids learned to play on it, and she didn’t have room for it anymore because her sick mother was moving in, and how she prayed and prayed it would find a happy home. Who or what she prayed to was anyone’s guess; I pictured a metallic space crab with female breasts and a penis, wearing a yarmulke. But there was something more disturbing afoot here: She appeared to be under the impression that this was a done deal. Surely she couldn’t be that batty, I thought. “Oh, I’m so grateful!” she announced, walking past me to hug Lorrie. Her shoulder blades stuck through the back of her tank top like two oyster shells.

  Sweetie and I had a bit of a growler when we got back home. I suggested there had been a conspiracy between her and that human flat tire on the eighth floor. Calling her honesty into question, I challenged her fraudulent description of the piano by invoking the name of the late Grace McDaniels, one of the most revered sideshow freaks of the twentieth century: “She billed herself as the ‘Mule-Faced Woman,’” I ranted, “not the ‘Lady Who Ain’t the Cutest Thing in Town.’ It’s called truth in advertising! Not only that, her son was her business manager and her valet!”

  “What’s your point?” Lorrie challenged me.

  Realizing my point had skidded off the rails, I told her: “You have to go down there and tell that pterodactyl you don’t want the fucking thing.”r />
  “Fuck you. You go tell her,” she responded.

  “This was your little scheme, not mine. You knew what you were doing. I’m the victim here.”

  “You’re insane.”

  Sore spot.

  “I knew that was coming! That’s always your cheap little go-to . . . uh . . . what the fuck is it called . . . your little smart-bomb thing . . . your big scene-stealer whenever you know I’m right and you’re—”

  The front door slammed. The Kid was home from school. She ran into the living room and threw her arms around my waist.

  “Did you see the piano, Daddy? Isn’t it beautiful?”

  The day the porters wheeled the piano into my apartment, I realized this was something much more than just a large grotesque object entering my home. A gust of air smacked me in the face as it rolled by, announcing the stench of other lives: the musk of triumphs and failures, faith and doubt, shitty diapers and cremation urns. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate. But I let it go. I did it for my darling daughter. Gagging down a teaspoon of false optimism, I thought if anyone on earth could coax something new and beautiful out of that cigar crate, it would be her. Maybe the Resnick curse had skipped a generation.

  The Kid threw herself into piano lessons. The notes that initially lumbered through the apartment may have been sour and uncivilized, but at least they were loud and plentiful. As the weeks passed, my ears, admittedly untrained, could detect no improvement. To be perfectly honest, I think she was getting worse. Soon, grievances were lodged—the Kid wasn’t thrilled with the songs the Hot Asian Chick was teaching her. She didn’t give a shit about the girl with the lamb or the bridge collapse in London; she wanted to pound out the stuff she heard in the Charlie Brown cartoons. The apple don’t fall far from the tree, I proudly thought. On week eleven, she officially quit. I’ll never forget that day as long as I live: the piano teacher was wearing a halter top. Lorrie and I had a gentle talk with the Kid about the concept of patience, but she wouldn’t be swayed. She informed us she was giving up on music and sticking with television, an instrument she’d already mastered. The Resnick curse was alive and kicking. A few days later, while goofing around with friends, she knocked over a container of turtle food, scattering thousands of compressed shrimp pellets all over the piano. The tiny particles wedged themselves between the keys and resisted the best efforts of a vacuum cleaner. Subsequently, any attempt at playing the chromatic scale was accompanied by what sounded like a pepper grinder (something the digital keyboard could do in its sleep). Soon the entire apartment smelled like a dumpster behind Panda Express, and Lorrie offered little opposition when I announced the piano had to go. The turtle, which now enjoyed strolling across the keyboard, pecking for treasure, didn’t get a vote.