Sentimental Education

The building was called The Lenape, which must have been some kind of joke. The glass door was cracked and piss shone in the vestibule. Spanish voices, Spanish spices, in the halls. The landlord was a heavy Hasidic man with shiny forehead and curls. His pants were too big, and he kept having to pull them up as he talked. “Here’s the kitchen,” he said, and pulled up his pants. “Here’s the toilet.” We wrote him a check standing in the door.

For work, I stood on the street and said “bail reform” to passing faces. They hated me. I sympathized. When they didn’t answer him, Carlos, my boss, said, “go fuck your mother.” When they didn’t answer me, I apologized.

We took up a new cause each week. Bail reform, police union fundraising, Autism Speaks. I rang bells, knocked doors, swung knockers in the shapes of lions, and asked bitter, wrinkled faces if they were “aware of cerebral palsy.” I memorized my pitch in the van, then vomited it onto their doormats. Screen doors, clogged with dead flies, slammed rejection in my face. My numbers were terrible. When instead of speaking I just stood there, stuttering, contorting my hands, twisting my face until saliva rolled from my mouth, they improved.

“Is there room for promotion?” asked my father.

We ate packed lunches against shuttered storefronts while sneakers, hung from traffic lights, swayed.

Our apartment was as concise as a well-told joke. The TV fogged up when we showered. Our bedroom wall abutted our neighbors’ toilet, and I fell asleep to the slow soft sighs of defecation, the bright ring of piss on ivory, coughs and retches and dripping taps, the hiss and grumble of pipes like the bowel movements of the building itself.

Our neighbor had been a fireman. Then he fell through an air shaft, shattered his kneecaps, and was condemned to sit in front of the TV, a forest of cans by his feet, recovering. They lived off his broken leg. His wife was a withered, gray woman with hair she’d for some reason dyed purple. We followed their fights like daytime TV. “Listen,” Ann would say, and put a finger over her lips. We’d get glasses from the cupboard, and kneel on the unmade bed, glasses to the wall, ears to the glass, listening.

They spoke as we spit, curling their lips, gathering strength from their sinuses, hatred from their throats; they hawked words like phlegm. Plates flew. Curses shattered. Voices rose to a delirious, shrieking height, and then, just as quickly, fell silent. We put back the glasses. We lay down in bed. When I passed the man in the hall, stinking black bags gripped in our fists, I turned away, ashamed.

Then we stopped listening. While they fought we made our bed, watched TV, sewed, read, slept. As if their shouts expressed our silence. All the things we hoped to say. Ann changed the channels to a rhythm that had nothing to do with their content. An ad for a laxative, black woman laughing, a corpse on a slab. I stared at the same paragraph for three hours. I looked through the cupboards, found what was missing, circled the block six times to get it. When he hit her she swallowed her screams, so as not to hurt his reputation.

Then the woman had a heart attack. I heard the EMTs in the hall. Firm full footsteps. We watched from the door as they brought her out on a stretcher. Her feet, in sky blue socks, with white clouds like lambs, stuck out from the end of the blanket. The blanket flapped. The husband followed behind, shuffling, muttering, holding her hand though she was already dead.

Ann turned away. I went down the stairs. The ambulance waited, the air throbbed with color, and a slow, silent rain spread circles in the red and white puddles. The husband stood by the curb. I went up to him, reached for his shoulder, and felt the urge to ask, “A dollar today for our boys in blue?” Then an EMT pushed me aside and said, “Come on.”

The excitement was over, the small-talk used up, doors were sighing shut, and a heavy, black silence was descending on the halls like the earth over a grave. I found Ann in bed, weeping. Her back heaved. Her sobs shouted. The bedsheets, gripped in her fists, oozed between her white knuckles. I stood at a loss at the foot of the bed. The sound of the springs pained me as I sat. I laid my hand on her shoulder. She let it rest.

“If I’ve done something…” I said. And she wept.

“If I’ve done something it’s not fair not to tell me.” And she wept.

“It’s really not fair not to communicate.” And she wept.

“What have I done?” I asked. “What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?”


Dean Jamieson’s work has appeared in the Masters Review, Heavy Traffic Magazine, and the Coachella Review. He lives and writes in New York City.