Wednesday I bought a halibut steak. At home, I unwrapped the white butcher paper and lifted out fish that was heavy and hung over the edges of my hand. I broke an egg into a shallow enameled bowl and beat the egg with a fork. I put flour and cornmeal in another bowl and moved the fish from the egg to the flour.
“It’s enough to feed two,” the woman at the market said.
I’d been eating at the Salvation Army for over a week. For a week I’d been planning, thinking ahead about picking out my own meals.
The worst thing about eating at the Salvation Army isn’t the food, but the men, who won’t go away. They press up against you in line with their smell, sweat and smoke and alcohol, and make faces behind your back. They sit close and lean in over the table. They spit when they talk, these black-teethed and toothless men, and they act like there’s something wrong with you if you’re not smiling.
At home, after work, before I bought the fish, I got out my basket of unpaid bills and laid them on the table in priority order. I wrote the date each payment was due on the outside of the envelopes in red ink pen. I figured out which ones I could pay and put aside seventy-five extra cents for each to cover the cost of money orders.
Normally I have a checking account. I pay bills on time and don’t spend what I don’t have.
I cooked a lot when I lived with Matt. I had this idea that by cooking and keeping things clean, by paying bills when they were due, he’d learn by example.
Now his sister comes over and tells me it’s my fault he’s drinking and not working and living who knows where. “Men need to feel important,” she says.
“It was pretty important he get a job,” I say. “He knew that.”
Once, walking home, Matt and I found this old guy trying to pick up his wallet. The man was bending forward, leaning, then swaying and straightening up again. He couldn’t get down low enough. He rubbed his head and lead against the wall of the Greek grocery.
I picked the old man’s wallet up for him.
He looked in his wallet and said, ‘Sixty dollars! I had sixty dollars in here!” He showed us the empty inside, a cracked plastic lining.
He held on to us, one arm around each of our shoulders. We walked him to where he said he lived, a pink stucco apartment building with curly writing over the door that said, “La Casa del Reyes.”
“You have to come in,” he said. “Want you to meet somebody.”
The first thing we saw on the third floor where he lived was a saucepan with a lid on it in the hall and the old man said, ‘Shit.” He stopped, then kept going. He clawed at the door by way of knocking.
“Honey, let me in,” he said. “Baby, it’s me.”
This scratchy woman’s voice behind the door said, “Take your food and get the hell out. I’ve got a knife.”
The old guy kept up his knock. He said, “Come on, baby. Come on, let me in. I want you to meet my friends, these kids. Good kids.”
He leaned against the door, didn’t look at us. His jacket was limp on his shoulders, like he was half there.
For a while, in an attic apartment, Matt and I lived on eggs. Where we lived was near a store that sold eggs for one penny a dozen with a ten dollar store receipt. We picked receipts up off the ground in the parking lot. Beer, eggs, and honey roasted peanuts.
One night I was making eggs, scrambling eggs with onion and cabbage. The cabbage we had was brown on the outside and I peeled off the bad leaves. They were all brown, with black spots. One leaf at a time I threw the whole head away.
Our sink was full of ashtrays and moldy bottles. The stove was covered in old food. In that apartment I dreamt I was eating soup made of warm milk and cigarette butts, straining it through my teeth.
The worst thing about Matt not working was that I couldn’t keep a job with the way he was living. Four in the morning, every morning he was coming in drunk and loud and breaking things. By five he was apologizing, crying, saying it wouldn’t happen again. At first I’d sit up waiting. Sometimes I’d call around. I’d call the police, ask if anyone like him had been hit by a car, or picked up somewhere.
Everything we owned—the telephone, our chairs, the door, a radio—it was all glued, taped and tied together.
One night his friend Jerry called all night. I answered the first two times. After that I let Jerry, drunk and slurring, talk to the taped-together machine. I had to be up by six.
When Matt came home I went into the front room and sat at our table.
“Your asshole friend called.” That’s exactly what I said. “He’s been calling all night. He’s an idiot.”
“Who’re you talking about?” Matt looked in the refrigerator. I don’t know what for. Cabbage? Maybe eggs. Probably beer.
I said it was on the machine and he could waste his own time listening if he wanted. “You should just get out of here,” I said. “Quit pretending you even live here.”
He took out a butter knife, spread mustard on bread. I kept on going.
“You’re never here when I’m home, and you don’t help with anything. You’re getting older, Matt. You ought to think about that. Think about time passing.”
He didn’t interrupt but I could tell by the set of his jaw, the white patches in his skin, he heard me. I wanted to say what I wanted to say before he blew up the way he does.
I said, “You’re an idiot, Matt. You’ve got everything you need and you don’t even know what to do with it. Mister ‘I’m so in love.’ Mister ‘I’d do anything for you.’ You can go to hell for me, that’s what you can do.”
He tried to peel wax paper wrapper back on a brick of government surplus orange cheese. The cheese slipped off the counter and bounced against the floor.
This is the man who saved my life. He really did. I was getting out of the car, being helped out of a car, full of Percodan and Tequila, and I saw him on the sidewalk in front of my apartment back when it was only my apartment. He was somebody I knew and I said, “Matt, you have to come stay with me.” I said, “Just stay with me, while I sleep.”
I don’t remember much but I remember seeing him and saying that. I remember grabbing his shirt and hanging on to it.
He came in and sat in a chair near my bed and watched me sleep. He held my hair back and helped me vomit, and then he watched me sleep.
At the time that was saving my life, but that was a long time before.
Now I said, ‘It’s not working out, you and me. I don’t know what you’re thinking. What are you thinking? You haven’t even had a job last more than two weeks. You’re thinking you can just go on like this forever? What about the quality of my life? What do you think about that?” I said, “I always thought you were going to do something with yourself. I had faith in you. I really did.”
He threw his cheese sandwich at the wall and it flew in three pieces, bread, cheese, bread, in the air.
“Jesus, would you lay off?” he said, then he knocked the dishes off the drain board onto the floor. He said, “I’m sick of hearing it.”
On the way out he broke a lamp that was already glued together. He knocked it over with the back of his hand.
I put the cooked fish on a new, cobalt blue plate I’d found at the Red, White and Blue thrift store. I had a bowl that matched, and I filled the bowl with orange slices because I liked the colors, blue and orange, together. I turned on my radio that sat on the table near the open window. There wasn’t much in my apartment anymore, but all I had was in good shape. I kept the floor swept, and covered my spindly kitchen table with a deep green stretch of cloth.
I didn’t even buy the halibut in a regular store. I bought it in a market in a neighborhood across town. Everything in this market is designed to be especially nice. “All of our seafood is never frozen.” That’s what it says on a sticker on the deli case.
The meats are red and marbled with white lines of fat. Vegetables are piled in deep-green bins under blue lights and always damp with a spray of water. The fruit, most of it, is wrapped individually in pieces of colored tissue paper. Oranges, in that market, are wrapped in deep purple paper that makes their skin glow, each one a harvest moon in a night sky. They sell pears and apples imported from Japan.
Most days I walk through and taste the samples, squares of cheese and sausage. I look at everything as if I’m deciding what to buy. Nobody asks if I need help. I don’t make eye contact.
One day I asked a woman behind the counter about the fish. I asked why ahi tuna was so dark. It looked like roast beef.
“If it’s any other color,” she said, “you wouldn’t want to eat it.”
I said, “And what about the halibut?”
The halibut was laid out in fat slabs, like bodies, bare and vulnerable. The name, I know now, means “holy.” Holy fish. Top of the food chain, eaten on the Sabbath. But I didn’t know anything then. I only saw the skin so pink, nearly white, like the flesh of my own inner thigh. I saw what I didn’t have. Fingers on my wallet.
“Halibut,” the woman behind the counter smiled, “is the fillet mignon of seafood.”
BB
