A Gesture Life Read online

  “Hey!” Officer Como spoke briskly. “Don’t be running off. I haven’t said anything about our being done, have I? We haven’t finished our conversation.”

  Sunny stepped in front of the seat and straddled her bike, not answering the policewoman. There was a peculiar hint of innocence to the stance, despite how grave her expression was, as if she were simply asking the local officer for directions. She was on her bike because I hadn’t allowed her to get her driver’s permit and license, for I was deathly afraid of where she might end up if she had a car. After many weeks of intense arguments she finally gave up and took to riding the bicycle all around town. So much so, in fact, that it was a customary sight for everyone to see Sunny Hata pedaling on her powder-blue twelve-speed, here and there and at all hours of the day and night.

  “Why don’t you ask me again what I know about you?” Officer Como said. “Because I’ll let you know.”

  “Sure,” Sunny replied severely, sounding like herself again. “Go ahead.”

  I was at the door to the shop and as there were no customers on that unusually warm afternoon I couldn’t help but head toward them. Officer Como’s back was turned, but Sunny could well see me. She didn’t give any indication that I was within earshot. She just glared defiantly at the officer without the least expression.

  “I hear you’re over at Jimmy Gizzi’s house a lot these days.”

  Sunny didn’t answer.

  “Jimmy Gizzi. Now there’s a nice young man,” Officer Como said thickly. “Someone worth befriending. Let’s see. What, he’s twenty-five, a high-school dropout, and he’s never had a real job? He used to beat up his mother every once in a while, before God blessed her and she had a heart attack and died. We had to go to the house and break things up. I know he’s been selling pot and speed out of the garage, but I guess these days he’s also scoring coke for rich kids at Bedley High.”

  “I guess you know everything,” Sunny said.

  “I sure do,” the policewoman answered quickly, stepping closer to her. “I know you’ve been spending some weekend nights there, at his house, for example.”

  Sunny glanced at me, as if she were actually uncomfortable with my hearing the disclosure. I hadn’t known for certain where she was spending those weekend nights, though I was confident that it was always with one of her girlfriends in the city. She’d go for trips to Jones Beach or for shopping or just “hanging out” in the downtown Bohemian neighborhoods, and if she was getting into trouble there, too, I hoped it was in the spirit of joyful rebellion and independence and enjoyment with her own set of comrades, which I should be glad to tolerate and understand. But to hear that she was staying in town, with a dubious young man whom she didn’t seem to care to defend, was alarming to me, and even hurtful.

  “I know a lot of the people who hang out at Gizzi’s,” Officer Como went on. “I hope you know that some of them are serious felons. They’re not like you. They’re not just there to have fun. It’s life to them.”

  “Who says I’m there for fun?” Sunny said sharply. “You think I want fun? You think I’m having fun right now?”

  Officer Como seemed surprised by her response, as was I. But the policewoman quickly took back her ground. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again. Don’t ever raise your voice. Do you hear me? I’ll make things miserable for you, I promise. I don’t have to care about you. I can write you off like any other good-for-nothing slut who’s pissing her life away. Your father deserves better. I hear the stories about the parties, from Jimmy himself, actually. He was run in yesterday, as you probably know. He’s out but we’ll get him soon. He’s a little punk who’s in over his head with those brothers from the city. But he had a lot of colorful things to say about you especially. How generous you are to all the guys. What a good sport you are. He said you never get tired.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Officer Como lunged at Sunny, grabbing the handlebars and pulling them down to the sidewalk. Sunny fell over the bicycle, landing hard on her knee and forearm. Officer Como shouted, “Fuck me? Is that what you said? Little bitch!”

  “Stop it!” I cried, barely able to keep myself from assaulting the officer. She’d turned just in time and by training had automatically unsnapped her holster. The sight of her reaction enraged me. “You cannot speak to my daughter that way. How dare you make such horrible accusations? This is slanderous. A public servant should not exhibit such unbecoming conduct.”

  “Doc—”

  “I must ask you to leave her alone! If she’s not done something illegal, you should move on and pursue your duties elsewhere. There are many other young people who are in fact committing crimes in this district, vandalizing and loitering. Why don’t you berate and intimidate them? My daughter does sometimes go to the city with her friends, and what a felon says to you has no weight at all. None at all. Now please let us end this, Officer. You and I have a good relationship and I don’t wish to see it ruined.”

  The officer nodded to me and stepped back from Sunny. With anyone else, certainly, Officer Como would have set in her heels, leaned in and returned to me what I deserved, but in deference (and respectful gratitude for my past efforts on her behalf) she grabbed her lunch bag from the roof of the cruiser and went around to the driver’s side.

  “I’m truly sorry, Doc, that I upset you,” she said, opening her door. “I am. I wish you hadn’t seen me just now. But I think you know better, too, about the real truth of things. Your daughter is this close to getting into some serious trouble, the kind you can’t ignore or forget once it happens. I don’t mean to upset you, but you’re a good man and so I’m telling you just as I see it. I’m sorry that I am, but there’s nothing else I can do. I don’t really like your daughter and maybe I don’t even care about her, but I owe you too much and so I won’t lie. I’m sorry, again. You can call the station and ask for me whenever you want.”

  She drove off and left the two of us there by the parking meter, Sunny picking herself up from the pavement. I made her follow me inside the shop, for onlookers had begun to gather. The skin on her elbow was raw but not broken. When I tried to examine the abrasion more closely she shook me off, her hands raised diffidently in that long-familiar gesture of hers, as if my closeness were an unbearable weight. But this time the feeling was also mine. For the first time, I felt cold to her, like an ice sheet had fallen between us, and a picture of her began entering my mind, her dark form moving through the corridors of a dingy, slovenly house, peals of surly laughter trailing after her.

  “Why must you insist on always provoking the police?” I said. “Officer Como wouldn’t have bothered you had you not been so insolent. But you gave her no choice.”

  Sunny wouldn’t answer me, instead propping her bicycle against the counter and drifting down an aisle, her back to me. When she was a young girl, she would skip along the racks and shelves, ticking the merchandise with her little fingers as she went, murmuring a made-up song. Back then I used to toy with the thought of her taking over the business when I retired, running Sunny Medical Supply as her own, even expanding it to open satellite stores across northern Westchester. I imagined her as a kind of mini-mogul who was raised in the trade, that she’d be well known in the business circles and be asked to speak before the audience at the colloquiums and conferences. Of course none of these hopes had much to do with who Sunny truly was, her personality and character, though it was my belief that she was actually well suited to the commerce of every day, for although she wasn’t overly talkative she was strangely comfortable dealing with people, whether for better or worse.

  “I’m going to ask you to stay here on the weekends from now on. I don’t want you to go down to the city anymore. You’ve gone there all summer, and with school in session you ought to be studying more on the weekends.”

  “I haven’t been going to the city,” she said, handling a pair of aluminum crutches. She started using them, pretending to favor the knee that was skinned. “So there’s nothing to change.�
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  “Are you saying that you’ve been at that man’s house, as Officer Como mentioned?”

  “There and other places,” she said. She ambled awkwardly to the far end of the store. The crutches were for a taller person, and she had to hop up slightly over the arm pads with each step. “What did you think, that she was making it up?”

  “I assumed she was making a point.”

  “She wasn’t.”

  “What are you doing there, then? Tell me, I want to know.”

  “Do you really?”

  “Yes! Now tell me!”

  She had turned back and slowly lurched forward, landing on both feet. She collected the crutches and looped them on the display hook.

  She said, “I have friends there. But Jimmy Gizzi isn’t one of them.”

  “The house is his?”

  “I guess so. He’s hardly there.”

  “Is he a dealer of drugs?”

  “I suppose so. But I don’t do them. I’ve never done them.”

  I believed her, for Sunny had never hidden anything from me, or told me untruths. It was actually mostly a matter of my confronting the issues, simply posing the questions.

  “So then what do you do there? Are there other girls with you?”

  “Some. Not always.”

  “So you’re there alone, sometimes.”

  “It happens.”

  I asked her: “Are you having intimate relations?”

  Sunny chuckled a bit and said, “What exactly do you mean?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I guess I do,” she answered. “Is that what you had with Mary Burns?”

  “Please don’t speak about her like that,” I said. “You know very well we’re not spending time together anymore. It’s disrespectful.”

  “I guess you’re not,” Sunny said, her expression souring. “I’ve been wanting to ask you about that. It’s like she never was, isn’t it? You just decided it was finished.”

  “I did nothing of the kind. The decision was mutual. But this is none of your concern.”

  “You’re right,” Sunny said. “Why should I care? What does she mean to either of us anymore, right?”

  “I’ve asked you a question, Sunny.”

  “Yes, then.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m having sex, yes,” she answered, “if that’s what you want to know.”

  I could hardly speak in the face of her bluntness. Then I said, “Are you in love with this person?”

  “What?”

  “The person you’re involving yourself with. Are you in love with him?”

  “Are you kidding?” Sunny said savagely. “What do you think I’m doing, having a love affair?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, confused by her sudden anger. “I’m trying to understand what you’re seeking. What you may want for yourself.”

  “I don’t want anything,” she said, as though saying the words harshly enough would make it so. “Nothing. I don’t want love and I don’t want your concern. I think it’s fake anyway. Maybe you don’t know it, but all you care about is your reputation in this snotty, shitty town, and how I might hurt it.”

  “This is nonsense. You’re speaking nonsense.”

  “I guess I am,” she said. “But all I’ve ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big house and this store and all the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You’re always having to be the ideal partner and colleague.”

  “And why not? Firstly, I am a Japanese! And then what is so awful about being amenable and liked?”

  “Well, no one in Bedley Run really gives a damn. You know what I overheard down at the card shop? How nice it is to have such a ‘good Charlie’ to organize the garbage and sidewalk-cleaning schedule. That’s what they really think of you. It’s become your job to be the number-one citizen.”

  “I am respected and valued in this town. I’m asked to comment at all the critical council meetings. You have little idea what my position is. People heed my words.”

  “That’s because you’ve made it so everyone owes something to you. You give these gifts out, just like to that policewoman, Como. She can’t stand to cross you because you’re this nice sweet man who’s given when he didn’t have to or want to but did anyway. You burden with your generosity. So even when I’m being troublesome, they can’t bear to upset you. It was even that way with Mary Burns, wasn’t it? You made it so that she couldn’t even be angry with you.”

  “There was nothing to be angry about,” I replied, trying to remember what it was that Mary Burns had finally said to me, after I had asked for one more chance to convince her of my feelings. You always try, Franklin, but too hard, like it’s your sworn duty to love me.

  “I never gave her any cause.”

  Sunny shook her head and walked past me to leave but I caught her by the arm.

  “Let me go!”

  “I don’t want you sleeping at that house!”

  “I’ll sleep where I want,” she said bitterly.

  “Then I won’t have you living in my house anymore,” I told her, my blood rising. “I won’t allow it. It disgusts me to think of what you’re doing there. You cannot degrade yourself and expect for me to provide you with things.”

  “Whatever you want,” Sunny answered, shaking herself loose from my grip. “I’ll go right now and get my stuff from the house.”

  “You’ll also lose the allowance I give you.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, trying to open the door and walk her bicycle out at the same time. “I can get by.”

  “Sunny…”

  She turned around to face me, her eyes moist and fierce, a hundred-meter stare. “I don’t need you,” she said softly, and without remorse. “I never needed you. I don’t know why, but you needed me. But it was never the other way.”

  6

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I didn’t see Sunny. Not for nearly three weeks. One would think that in a small town, I’d catch sight of her, coming and going into a shop on the main street. But not even that. I did call the school and subtly inquire whether her attendance was satisfactory, and the school counselor told me it was. He seemed to know Sunny somewhat and spoke glowingly of her exploits last fall on the field hockey team, though he wasn’t sure if she was playing again this year. I told him she’d decided to concentrate more on the piano, that she was afraid of injuring her fingers and hands, all those players knocking the hard ball about with sticks. I could say this with confidence because I knew Sunny had in fact quit all her activities at the start of the fall, including the piano, and that really the only thing she had continued to do, strangely enough, was study, particularly her history books and world literature, piles of which always littered the surfaces and furniture of her room. She never ceased being the most avid reader, and I knew she was truly gone from the house when I got home that night weeks earlier and found the stacks removed, the shelves emptied save those books from her childhood, the ones I’d read to her when she first arrived, nursery and bedtime stories in a language she didn’t know.

  As I suspected, she was living now in the Gizzi house, on Turner Street, an unpaved dead-end road on the far east side of town, near the village line of neighboring Ebbington. I knew where it was from Officer Como, who was the only one I’d told of Sunny’s leaving the house. I didn’t want her officially listed as a runaway, as I was afraid the designation would remain indefinitely on her personal records, and I knew I could count on Officer Como to keep a watch on the place and its frequent visitors—mostly men in their twenties and thirties, many, according to her, known troublemakers and felons—and be publicly discreet about Sunny’s habitation. Of course it was fairly common knowledge that she often hung out there, but most of my fellow merchants and colleagues thought she was simply wayward and difficult and not completely gone from me. I wanted to hide the real depth of the tr
ouble, put it away not (as Sunny always contended) for the sake of my reputation or standing but so I could try to forget she was my daughter, that she had ever come to live with me and had grown up before my eyes.

  But late one Friday evening I drove the station wagon down to the main road and followed it until it crossed the river, taking a smaller, unlighted road east past the bare land of the power switching station and the scrap-metal yard, to a large older subdivision called The Orchids that had never been fully developed, where Turner Street is. The neighborhood is more like one in Ebbington than in Bedley Run, a mix of cheaper apartments and small one-story houses, and had been left the way it was to satisfy a county requirement for lower-income housing units in towns like ours. Mostly decent people live there, the few entrenched working-class of Bedley Run and new younger couples who are always fixing up the charming old cottages and the tiny treed lots they sit on. But fifteen years ago there were a number of boarded-up places with weeds and saplings overtaking the porches, the ivy growing through the broken panes of the windows, and among these were the derelict places owned by the likes of Jimmy Gizzi.

  It was already late in the evening, and I don’t think I would have found the house on my own had not the lights been on and loud music playing, various older-model pony cars parked in a bunch at the end of the dead-end street and up where the curb should have been. I knew it was the Gizzi place from the way Officer Como had described it, a squat high-ranch house with a bulging bedroom addition over the garage, the sole access to which was an exposed stairwell attached to the side of the building.

  I parked halfway down the block and walked up to the property. From the soft light of the house I could see piles of trash and bottles and things like old shoes and undershirts scattered across the filthy yard, wrecked parts of appliances and cars in a heap in front of the open door of the garage, which itself was filled with junk. There was the decrepit, mixed-up scent of engine oil and stale beer and animal spray, the waft of which always seems to overrun certain locales and neighborhoods. And yet with all the lights on and the music and the silhouetted figures behind the curtains moving around dancing, there was a strange festivity to the warm autumn air, as if the place were the site of a favorite seasonal fete, as in those old English novels of Sunny’s that I would glance at from time to time. This, of course, was no manor, but I suppose a house rife with any human activity has something over one unsettlingly spacious and silent.