Lamb Read online

  Advance Praise for Bonnie Nadzam’s LAMB

  • • •

  “Nadzam has a crisp, fluid writing style, and her dialogue is reminiscent of Sam Shepard’s … [This is] storytelling as accomplished as it is unsettling.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Lamb is a wonder of a novel. Bonnie Nadzam has offered an exploration of interpersonal and sexual manipulation and power that left me reeling. This is a novel about responsibility, complicity, blame, neglect, and finally love.”

  —PERCIVAL EVERETT, author of

  I Am Not Sidney Poitier and Erasure

  “Every sentence in Bonnie Nadzam’s Lamb teaches us about love, necessity, and the mysteries of the heart. I am haunted by her two protagonists, and by the journey they take together. This utterly compelling novel has launched a major new voice in American fiction.”

  —DAVID MASON, author of Ludlow

  “Bonnie Nadzam’s debut is gripping, gorgeous, and utterly original. The disturbing story resists easy categorization, challenging what we think we know about childhood, adulthood, pain, beauty, and love. This book will jolt you awake.”

  —ANNA NORTH, author of America Pacifica

  Copyright © 2011 Bonnie Nadzam

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or

  by any information storage and retrieval system, without written

  permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief

  quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or

  broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC,

  2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition

  as follows:

  Nadzam, Bonnie.

  Lamb : a novel / Bonnie Nadzam.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-438-2

  1. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 2. Divorced

  men—Fiction. 3. Teenage girls—Fiction. 4. Teenagers and

  adults—Fiction. 5. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction.

  6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3614.A39L36 2011

  813′.6—dc22

  2011013263

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used

  fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  For Carrie, Chrissie, Mom, and Dad

  Darkness is light; do not see it as light.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  First Page

  Acknowledgments

  • • • • •

  We’ll say this all began just outside of Chicago, in late summer on a residential street dead-ending in a wall. It was the kind of wall meant to hide freeways from view, and for miles in each direction parallel streets ended at the same concrete meridian. No trees on the lawn, no birds on wires. Northern shrikes gone, little gray-bellied wrens gone. Evening grosbeaks and elm trees and most of the oaks and all the silver brooms of tall grass and bunch flowers and sweetfern and phlox gone. Heartsease gone. About the tops of upturned trash bins, black flies scripted the air.

  Imagine the corner house made of white brick and aluminum siding the color of yellow mud. Inside an old man sat in a dim-lit television room, tipped back in his La-Z-Boy, a box of microwaved chicken balanced on his sunken chest. He had shuffled into the yellow kitchen and taken a vacuum-packed meal from the freezer out of habit, microwaved and carried it with a sour dishrag into the TV room out of habit. It wasn’t until he sat down and smelled it that he remembered he’d intended not to eat. He let it cool and he picked at it with his fingers. Tried not to breathe. Again and again he held his breath until some will that was not his own reclaimed it.

  The front door opened and the old man started. A thin spot of saliva glistened at the corner of his mouth.

  “Dad.” The door shut and David Lamb walked into the kitchen and set his keys on the table. “Christ, Dad. It stinks in here.” He paused for a moment in the kitchen doorway. A trail of ants ran beneath his shoe like a liquid crack in the filthy linoleum.

  The old man looked down at his cold, rubbery lunch in its cardboard dish. David Lamb opened the collar of his fine baby blue shirt and stepped into the TV room. He picked up the box off the old man’s chest and set it down on the table. “Didn’t I call to have someone clean this place up last week? Didn’t she come?”

  The old man reached for the remote and squinted across the room at the television screen.

  “You sleeping down here, Dad?”

  “Stairs are giving me a pain in the ass.”

  “You should have called me. We could move a bed downstairs.”

  “I don’t want any goddamned bed in here.”

  “What about that twin bed?”

  The old man straightened and raised his voice, ropy with mucus. “Where’s Cathy? She gone? Did you get fired?”

  “No, I didn’t get fired.”

  “She dead?”

  “No, Cathy isn’t dead.”

  The old man held himself erect, then sank back in his chair and waved a ragged hand in Lamb’s direction. “I’m going to die watching TV.”

  “Let’s go see a movie. Or get some burgers at Cy’s. You want to?”

  “Leave me alone. You don’t want to take me out. I can tell.”

  “Don’t you want something decent to eat, Dad? You have something in the freezer?”

  “What are you doing here? You get fired?”

  “No, Dad.”

  “Your wife die too? What was she, drunk driving?”

  “Cathy is fine. Let’s eat something.”

  “You never wanted to make me dinner. I could tell.”

  “Always made you dinner, Dad.”

  “Thirty-five years ago last week she died. You didn’t even notice the day.”

  “Sure I did.”

  “September third.”

  “I know it, Dad.”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “I know.”

  “Like hell you do.”

  David turned away. Out the window the last of the grimy daylight glanced off passing cars in the street. “Back of her white blouse as she steps down the front stairs and out to her car. One little suitcase in her hand.”

  “Ana didn’t bring any goddamned suitcase with her. What. Like she knew what was going to happen? Her grocery bag. Maybe she had her grocery bag but she sure as hell didn’t have any suitcase.”

  “In her blue jeans. Black hair shining down her back. Drives off in the car I bought her. Leaves the bracelet I bought her in London.”

  “London? London? Let me tell you about getting old. I’ll tell you about getting old.”

  “There she goes, chin up. Off to find some other, decent man.”

  “She was an angel, David. She was an angel.”

  “Dad.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, would you leave me alone.”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “Bullshit you do.”

  “Father to son.”

  “Leave me alone. I got no answers.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Lamb stood. “Let me make you some dinner. You have anything decent around here?” He went back to the kitchen, opened the freezer.

  “I don’t want anything decent. If
I wanted anything decent I’d want meat loaf. And I don’t have any ground meat in there.”

  “Sure you do, Dad.”

  “All I want is a little meat loaf. And a little gin. Is that too much to ask? For a miserable man who’s dying all alone?”

  “Have anything green? Green peas? How’s that?”

  “Leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m dying?”

  “Peas it is.”

  “Get the hell out of my house.”

  David Lamb shut the freezer, picked up a gold can of beer from a half-empty box on the counter, and sat at the kitchen table.

  “Peas,” his father said. “Who eats peas.”

  “I guess we never did.” He opened the beer.

  “Nobody to buy us fucking peas.”

  David stared out the dirty glass window. “No,” he said, “there sure wasn’t.”

  • • •

  And we’ll say it was that same early evening and fifteen miles away in one dingy bedroom of a concrete apartment building by the freeway where the girl cut the neck, shoulders, and sleeves off a ratty purple shirt, held it up to her chest to assess herself in the mirror leaning against the wall, and cut five inches from the bottom. She was turning side to side in faded floral underwear and the wrecked T-shirt when the door opened. She snatched at her jeans on the floor and held them up to cover herself. The man stood in the entryway and looked at her and snorted. “What’s that supposed to be?”

  The girl was silent.

  “When I was a kid, an adult asked me a question, I answered.”

  “A shirt.” Her voice was grainy and low.

  “A shirt.” The man nodded. “It doesn’t look like much of a shirt.”

  “I’m getting dressed.”

  He stepped back into the hall and pulled the door with him. “That’s not going to stay up on you.” He talked through the flimsy wooden divide.

  “I know that.” She held her pants over her underwear and bare legs and the remnant of purple shirt slipped down her narrow freckled body. Her limbs were pale and wiry, and she had a little belly on her, and no waist, cage of her ribs jammed close to her hips. Pointy elbows, pointy knees. “Where’s my mom?”

  “Late.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Cap’n Crunch.”

  “I don’t want cereal for dinner.”

  “Yeah, well, neither do I.”

  The girl looked at her desk, her orange backpack.

  “I have homework.”

  “Bullshit you’re doing homework. Put on a real shirt and come out here.”

  “When is she coming home?”

  “Later.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on. You gotta eat.” She could hear his heavy footfalls on the mashed, gravy-colored carpet as he went back toward the kitchen. Her back to the door, she stepped out of the shirt, retrieved a pink stapler from her desk drawer, and stapled the inside seams and uneven hems.

  • • • • •

  At the funeral, Lamb watched alone as they lowered a sealed casket into a deep, empty rectangle framed by artificial turf. It seemed to him there was neither father nor burial involved. Afterward he parked his truck in the lot between a liquor barn and a dollar store and stood by the bus-stop bench in his black suit and dead father’s Cubs hat, an unlit cigarette between his lips. He scanned the horizon and the ground for something green, for a place where he could press his cheek against warm grass or dirt, for anything like a loophole, a chink, a way out. Nothing before him but the filthy street and bright signs announcing the limits of his world: Transmission Masters and Drive Time Financing and Drive-Thru Liquors and Courtesy Loans and Office Depot and a Freeway Inn and a Luxury Inn and a Holiday Inn. If there was something beneath, something behind, it was hidden from him. Even his father had been hemmed in, jarred off, sewn up. They’d sewn his lips together.

  In the story that was his life even just a summer ago—God—a thing can get only so big before it dismantles itself, as if in accord with some inarticulable law of the universe everyone knows but unwittingly forgets. Even in places as small and clean as a newly remodeled kitchen in eggshell white and stainless steel, it was true. Granite counter-tops, beveled glass gilded from the outside by light at the end of day; two fingers of gin in a tumbler; newspapers and mail piling up on the island in the kitchen; Cathy in gold eyeglasses trimming the tapered ends of French green beans; Elizabeth Draper’s blue necklace of tiny glass beads in his silk-lined pants pocket; Linnie ringing his cell phone; his cuff links flashing every time he lifts his glass; a fax coming in from Wilson; nightly news from the flat-screen in the sunken living room; John Draper grinning sheepishly at the door wanting him out on the driveway or in the garage for a beer; Cathy’s sister bleary-eyed and wrinkled pulling up in her Volvo: hi, David. All of that, and what was there now to hold him up?

  Lamb rubbed his temple and thought he might sit down right there in the parking lot, wait to see who’d come for him or who would ask him to move, but when he turned away from the wake of traffic to light the cigarette, he saw the girl.

  She was coming toward him in a lopsided purple tube top and baggy shorts and brass-colored sandals studded with rhinestones. She carried a huge pink patent-leather purse and was possibly the worst thing he’d seen all day. Scrawny white arms and legs stuck out of her clothes. The shorts hung around her pelvic bones and her stomach stuck out like a dirty spotted white sheet. It was grotesque. It was lovely. Freckles concentrated in bars across her cheekbones and down the tiny ridge of her nose and the slightest protruding curve of her forehead just above her eyebrows. There were huge freckles, pea sized, and smaller ones. Some faint, others dark, overlapping like burnt confetti on her bare shoulders and nose and cheeks. He stared at her. He had never seen anything like it.

  “Hi.” She had a little gap between her front teeth, and her eyes were wide set, and she had one of those noses with perfectly round nostrils. She was a pale little freckled pig with eyelashes. “I’m supposed to ask you for a cigarette.”

  Behind her, huddled near the trash can up against the brick wall of the CVS, two girls were watching in a bright little knot of bangles and short shorts and ponytails. He looked at the girl. Her chewed and ratty fingernails. Her small feet in shoes two or three sizes too big for her. Her mother’s shoes, he supposed. He felt a little sick.

  “What is this?” he said. “Some kind of dare?”

  The girl tipped her head, put her hand up to her eyes to shield the sun.

  “What grade are you in?”

  “Seventh.”

  “Don’t they teach you anything?”

  She shrugged. Behind her the girls were laughing.

  “Was this your idea?”

  Shrug.

  “Whose was it?”

  “Sid’s.”

  “Which one is she?”

  The girl turned around and her friends became suddenly still. “The one on the right,” she said.

  “The blonde.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sid like Sidney.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sid knew she was being studied. She pushed back her hair and stuck out her hip.

  “She in seventh grade too?”

  “We all are.”

  “She looks older.”

  “I know.”

  David Lamb reached into his pocket for the cigarettes. He looked up at the cameras above the CVS, cameras that were pointed at the doors and at the parking lot. He shook one out and gave it to her. She turned back toward her friends with the cigarette in her hand and giggled.

  “Well, go on,” he said. “Put it in your mouth and I’ll light it. A lady doesn’t light her own cigarette.” She put it between her lips and raised her eyebrows. “That’s it. Now steady. Don’t look at the cigarette, look at me,” he said, touching the lit end of his own cigarette to hers. “Inhale. Go on. Draw it in.” He straightened and she puffed.

  “Now,” he said, “what do I get in exchange?”

  Sh
e held the half-lit cigarette between two fingers and wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t have anything.” The girl looked uneasy. She lifted her hand, as if to offer back the cigarette.

  “No money?”

  She shook her head. “What’s in that purse?”

  She lifted it a little, remembering it. “Makeup,” she said. “Nothing.” Her eyes darted sideways, as if she knew she was in a place she shouldn’t be. Behind her the blond girl said something to the other, and they laughed. This ugly kid before Lamb obviously the brunt of their joke. Stupid. And reckless. Had they any idea who he was? Why he was standing there alone in a black suit? What kind of heart, if any, hung inside him? And how was this not a joke on him? He took a long pull on his own cigarette and put it out on the bottom of his beautiful polished shoe. The girl watched him flick out the last shreds of tobacco and put the soiled filter in his pants pocket. There was no wind, no birds, no one calling. The sky hung low and white and warm like the ghost of something.

  “Don’t you wish you’d been born sooner?” he said, looking over her head at the grease-stained asphalt. The freckled girl watched him take the cigarette from her hand, ash it, and return it to her fingers. She meant to go back now—but she leaned back a little on her heels, staring up at him.

  “Tell me something. Do your friends frequently put you up to things like this?”

  “I guess.”

  He nodded down at his suit. “I just buried my father.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ever been to a wake?”

  She scrunched up her nose at him.

  “It’s like a funeral.”

  She shook her head. He studied the part in her hair. Pink stripe of skin through hair so pale it was almost white. “Listen,” he told the girl, “your friends are laughing at you. You know that, don’t you?”

  She pulled up the sides of her purple top, one side at a time. It slipped down.

  “I’m going to give you a tip, okay? A favor.”

  She shrugged and lifted her fingers as if to say: but you already gave me the cigarette.

  “No,” he said, “this is something you’re not going to forget. I’ll give you this whole pack of cigarettes, okay?” He took them out of his pocket and made a big show of dropping them into her purse. Her friends were watching now. He had their attention. “In exchange, you let me play a trick on your friends. On Sid. Teach her a lesson.”