The People I Know by Nancy Zafris

Author:Nancy Zafris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2009-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The afternoon faded into dark without his ever getting up from the chair to turn on the light. On the TV he heard a mother talking about her schizophrenic son. She showed some of her son’s artwork and began to point out clues. She turned the pictures upside down and sideways. Embedded in the dark heavy textures, like spiders in a forest, were scratches and black wiggles. “These are the clues,” the mother said. Clues to what? he wanted to know. He didn’t understand.

Most of the shows concerned themselves with marriage in one form or another. So far none of the forms matched the form his own marriage had taken. If what the TV had to tell him was correct, he was one of those people who should have never married in the first place. He almost hadn’t. And Filene almost had. Another second here, a forward or back step there … Things would have been much different.

“That’s enough,” Filene said. She walked into the room and turned off the TV. “My friends want to know what’s wrong with you.”

“Can’t they understand?”

“For heaven’s sake. That was months ago!”

“I still think about it. Even when I’m watching something like this …” His arm raised limply toward the blank screen. “It reminds me. It has nothing to do with … I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“You’ve got to get out,” Filene said.

“Maybe I should get my job back at the health club.”

“If it comes to that, I guess so. My friends want to know why you’re behaving this way. Lorne? What am I supposed to tell them?”

He shook his head. Filene’s friends had charged to the rescue, introducing him to several widows. It seemed there were widows all over the place. He had no idea men usually died off so quickly. Now Filene was insisting upon introducing him to someone else at the public meeting of the Trustees of the Library. She said this woman was very special. Not like the other one, she promised. He had spent an evening in the apartment of a woman introduced to him, and she had sat at a TV tray and written thank-you notes while he watched the TV channel devoted to a closed-circuit surveillance of her apartment lobby. He got to meet several more women, at least from a distance, as they went in and out the lobby door. A couple of days later he received a thank-you card in the mail.

He didn’t want any more of that. He could see what Filene and her friends thought of him by the type of women selected for these introductions. Even his sister misunderstood him. He would have to move to an entirely new city if people were going to look at him in a different light. There had been too many embarrassments with Fredericka. He looked over at the figurine of the old man and woman lifting up their kimonos and remembered the wedding of their niece. He hadn’t hiked up his kimono, but what he’d done was almost as bad.

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