Outlet
It was because on the fourth day of fifth grade I came home to find ma with her ear pressed against the kitchen outlet. It was because she’d taken off the plastic cover that had been there since I was born, and because, being ten years old and uneasy around electricity, I feared that lightning might spring forth from the socket and fry her brains like the polenta in the baking tray. It was because I’d been mocked at school for my inability to produce the soft th sound, and so realised that I could not anglicise my name without calling myself Feodore. It was because when Ma had heard enough she shook her head and said three words, and because the only one I could make out was puta. It was because I knew what this meant.
These are the reasons why, on the fourth evening of fifth grade, I cried in the bathroom upstairs.
Things were better when Pa was around. I don’t remember that time so well until right near the end. I do remember the time he took me for a drive around Toronto after dark. He didn’t explain why. Just appeared in the doorframe jangling keys. At first a quiet thrill had bubbled up in me. This didn’t last long. In the car he smelled like smoke but not like the good smoke of a campfire, rather a gummed-up sickly smoke-smell. The thrill passed and I grew tired— why was I there?
We stopped by an overpass off Bloor Street. There was nothing special about it, just a concrete arc covered with graffiti. In later years Ma would call structures like this atrocità, saying the city council wouldn’t be happy until they poured cement end to end over the earth and there wasn’t a green or a peaceful place left. But that night Pa pulled us over to the shoulder and stared up at the thing.
“I built that,” he said. “Worked on it, anyway. You know that?”
I didn’t show it, but in truth I was surprised. Of course, I knew he worked construction, but I had never imagined him interacting with real physical structures. What had I imagined? Something more like a classroom, perhaps, where the workers sat in rows scribbling designs in their notebooks and girders floated from the sky like manna.
Pa took a deep breath. “I’ll show you another, how about that? Just around the block here.” And just around the block there was a tenement, Ontario housing, cheap brown brick like corkboard with two windows smashed out. A bald-headed man sat on the front steps, smoking a cigarette and holding a leash with no dog at its end. Still Pa looked on with something like pride.
“This one,” he said. “This is the one I almost fell off. Almost fell three floors and only just caught the scaffolding with my off hand. Think of that, your old man dangling from the ledge like it’s some action flick, right by those there windows.”
“Wow.” Not the classroom I’d imagined by far.
“Gave the guys a right spook, I did. I had my moments. Yessir, I had my moments.”
There were others. A parking garage, an elementary school, even part of a marina. He always stopped to tell stories with that same proud look, however slipshod or dingy they might appear. As if they were masterworks. Or as if he’d left a little of himself behind in each.
He fought with Ma, when we got home, because we were out an hour past my bedtime. The fight kept me up for another three. It was a month later that he died of pneumonia. I still can’t say why he took me on that drive. He couldn’t have known; the disease came quickly and left him bedridden and blue-knuckled within days. Maybe it was coincidence. An item he’d long wanted to cross off his bucket list. Or maybe he’d felt something was coming, deep in his bones. There were times when he seemed capable of that sort of intuition. Reaching out to grab the scaffolding as he fell.
At first, Ma was careful that I didn’t catch her with her ear against the outlet. A quiet would fall on the kitchen when she was cooking, and when I went to check on her she’d be leaning against the cupboard, small dark eyes narrowed, asking why I was sneaking up on her. And so I learned to creep up on her, coming around from the other side so that I’d catch her before she noticed me. Eventually she stopped trying to hide it from me at all, she’d just insist I be quiet, tapping a wooden spoon against the cupboards if I made too much noise.
“They aren’t good people, Teo,” she said to me once. “Cattivo. I have to look out for you, you know, I have to look out for you. Who else will?” I hadn’t asked her to explain herself. I’d just stared.
Before fifth grade I’d known hardly anything about the people who lived on the other side. There was a short fat man and a tall skinny man and a strong-looking woman and a girl even smaller than I was; maybe they formed a family but I wasn’t sure. They had darker skin than Ma and Pa but not by much. I was afraid of the younger man, who had a nest of dark curls and a thin patchy beard and who sometimes wore leather jackets. I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe it was the way he walked. The older woman was also frightening, but in a different way; I feared her as one fears death and not as one fears a bear. About the other two I felt nothing.
This changed about a week before the start of fifth grade. I had biked home, leaving the few friends I had behind because Ma insisted I be home by sundown. Just as I was coming around the back, the door to the other flat opened and something brown and football-sized flew out. It sounded like a cracked egg when it hit the tarmac. Then, screaming from inside the door, two voices, the man and the woman, the words Odioso and Bitch. I had just a moment to see what was thrown: a sculpture of a man, formed from brown clay and greatly distorted. The head was cashew-shaped and one leg was like an elephant’s and there was a large, slightly cork-screwed penis, half of which had snapped off from the impact. Was this how they were meant to look? And then the short fat man with the short grey beard was out on the pavement, cradling the sculpture against his chest like an infant as he scooped up the pieces.
“Stay out, Calogero!” came a shout from inside. So the short fat man was the first to have a name. He shouted a reply in a dialect I could not understand, seeming not to notice me frozen there on the pavement. When he went back in, there was more shouting from behind the door. And then there was Ma, ushering me silently back inside, and for once when I felt her hand on my back it meant safety.
“I have my eye on you,” she said. “Don’t you worry, tesoro. I have my eye on you. Always.”
I knew the least about the girl. That she was quiet and walked with a slight hunch. I learned more on the fifth day of fifth grade, when she appeared in Mrs. Boucher’s classroom. She stared vacantly at the blackboard as it was explained to us that her name was Isabella, that she had previously been home-schooled, and that we had really ought to be nice to her. Whispers passed through the back row, snickering, glares. On my end there came a kind of unease, as one might feel finding cutlery in the bathroom sink. All was not in its right place.
For this reason I didn’t speak to her over lunch. I had friends at school; not many, but I wasn’t quite such a strange child as to have none. She might not even recognize me, I reasoned. After all, whenever I glanced in her direction she was staring out a window, staring so consistently that I came to think she might have understood school as a long exercise in staring—and never once back at me. So the unease faded and I accepted her as a background presence.
I forgot that she lived next door. Walking home, right where the field near the school was walled off by an array of tenements, I saw her going slowly before me. I couldn’t afford to be late— it was hot, which always put Ma in a mood. My mind set to working. I could go a few blocks around her, but I didn’t know the area very well and might get lost. Or I could cross the road and blow by her on the other side. But what if she saw me and hurried to catch up? Without realising it I came up close behind her, close enough to see the loose dark hairs on the back of her head, yet still I’d made no decision. Then I noticed she was rolling something beside her, picking it up and setting it back into motion every few steps. And for all my absurd worry, a curiosity took me. I got closer still. The thing, I saw, was a wooden yo-yo without a string.
Too close. My foot sent a pebble skidding towards her. Dread became despair as she picked up the yo-yo, turned slowly around to the source of the noise, and looked me in my eye. I hoped she might turn away.
“You live next door, right?” she said.
Now I was beyond help. Nothing to do now but saunter up beside her; of course I wouldn’t mind walking home together, why should I? “Yeah.”
She nodded. “My name’s Bella. Really it’s Isabella, but everyone calls me Bella.” Forgetting, apparently, that Mrs. Boucher had made this introduction already.
“Uh, cool.” I paused wondering if she’d ask mine; she didn’t, eyes fixed forward and low. “Mine’s Teo,” I said.
“Cool.” Another silence, longer than the first. This was worse than when we were talking, worse by far. What could I say, what did I know?
“Hey, uh, is your Dad named Calogero?” A hot embarrassment as I realised that, born tongue-tied, I hadn’t rolled the R.
She didn’t seem to notice. “Yeah. How’d you know that?”
“I guess I overheard it.” Now at least I had something. “What does he do?”
“Art, mostly. Sometimes he works at a grocery store. He’s a Dadaist.”
What was a Dadaist? Perhaps it was a word for a father who makes art. At any rate, I was too embarrassed to ask. “That’s cool.”
“What does yours do?”
“Oh. He’s dead.”
“Oh.” As if I’d said a salesman instead of dead.
A recovery had to be made. “Ma cleans houses though. I think the government gives her something now, too. I’m not really sure.”
“That’s nice of them.”
“I guess. Were you born here?”
“No. In Palermo, back in Italy. But we had to leave when I was two. Two-and-a-half.”
“Oh. Why?”
“I think we got kicked out. Or something.”
Could that happen? I wanted to ask how, and was about to when I realised we’d reached the duplex our families shared; already she was drifting towards the red door with the chipped paint. I mumbled a goodbye and she returned it without turning her head, moving slowly, moving as if through water. And I wished terribly that I’d caught up with her sooner.
That evening, Ma barely spoke to me over dinner. On its own this was not unusual. Sometimes she’d go pale and silent, staring out windows or into vents and letting the food go cold on her plate. I’d learned not to disrupt her. What was strange was that she was staring at me. Never for too long, and never if I returned her gaze, but always when she got the chance. I couldn’t place her look. It wasn’t anger with its furrowed brow and tremorous neck, nor did it share disappointment’s drooping narrow eyes. It seemed to betray something else, a conviction that I held some awful secret, checked by a fear of its discovery yet anxious with the need to drag it out all the same. A feeling of nakedness came over me, as though my skull had gone transparent and my thoughts could be read bouncing around inside. I hoped this would end with the meal. She’d start on the dishes and I could take refuge upstairs, hide away in a book. When I pushed my chair back to get up, though, she stopped it with her hand.
“Stay, tesoro. We should talk.”
“Okay,” I said. Knowing better than to say otherwise.
It felt like a long wait, listening to the sink running in the other room and the clanging of plates. In truth I doubt it was very long at all. When she came back she took up my right hand, set it on the table and cupped hers over it. “I saw you,” she said. “With that girl.”
“What girl?”
She squeezed my hand. “Don’t play dumb with me. I can see right through you, Teo, you know that. That girl next door.”
I nodded.
“You know you shouldn’t be talking with them.
Oh, Teo, you’re still so young, so innocent. It’s not fair to you, having to watch out for people like that. You can’t understand why, not yet, not by far. This is the job of a mother.I have to keep you safe.” She clutched my hand against her chest, and a tear appeared in her eye. “You’ll thank me, when you’re older.” Voice breaking.
Because she didn’t seem angry, I found some small courage. “The girl seemed okay,” I said. “Maybe it’s just the others are bad.” For a moment she was still. Considering her next move. Then she gathered herself, steadied her breathing, wiped her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it’s true, she is the youngest. Every child is born pure. Close to God, yes. The devil gets his hooks in by degrees. But—” and she lowered her voice, drew me closer— “he still gets them in, with a family like that. There’s not a one of them can escape it.”
Why all this talk of God and the Devil, I wondered, when we hadn’t been to church in months? But my courage had left me and I was silent.
“You won’t speak to her again?” Tightening her grip. “You won’t, you promise me?”
“I won’t, Ma. I promise.” Said as though some puppeteer was moving my lips.
She returned to the kitchen. I heard the sink running at first, but then came a long stretch of nothing, and I knew why. Every time I passed that evening she was bent over the counter, stomach red where it chafed against a drawer handle, ear pressed to the outlet. Mouthing words under her breath as if in prayer.
At ten years old a promise did not mean much to me, and a promise to Ma even less. I would not speak to Bella—where we might be seen. Private meetings remained tenable. That weekend I rarely left my room, knowing that to vanish for long would invite scrutiny, but back at school I went looking for Bella the first recess I could.
She was sitting alone by the fence when I found her. Above her, a section of the plastic tubing that ran along the top had fallen away, leaving the chain links rusted and sharp. I sat beside her.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She was picking at a quarter-sized scab on her knee and didn’t look up. Why hadn’t I already decided what I’d say next? Stupid, stupid. “I didn’t see you,” she continued. “Over the weekend. I thought I might.”
“Oh. Yeah, I didn’t get out much.”
She nodded. “Me neither. But my window faces the street and sometimes I like to look outside.”
Some deep unease arrived, though I couldn’t say if it was because of what I said or the way she responded.
“I usually do. Get out. It’s just, Ma freaked out a bit.”
“Does yours do that a lot?”
I considered my response. “Sometimes. Yeah.”
“What about?”
How could I tell the truth, that in this case it was her?“It depends,” I said. “I guess it’s mostly about other people.” As if that narrowed it down by much.
“Mine does too. Well, mostly, it’s my brother, really. I guess you don’t know him. He’s called Bruno.”
So the frightening leather-clad figure had a name, and for that grew less frightening. “What, like she goes off on him?”
“Yeah. Or on the girls he sneaks home.”
“He sneaks girls home?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“So he can screw them.”
“Oh.” I had only a vague sense of what this meant. Some secret, fleshy ritual. That to be screwed and to be puta were one and the same.
“Sorry,” she said, looking at the barren patch in the grass between her knees. “I maybe shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s cool.” But in truth I had gone heavy with the dread that I’d learn something I didn’t want to know, and was relieved that the subject seemed to be changing. “My Ma just gets, y’know. Judgemental, I guess. I don’t think she likes people very much.”
For the first time she looked up and a smile crossed her face. “Like Mrs. Boucher,” she said.
“Right. Yeah. Like Mrs. Boucher.” Things were going in a better direction. I grew bold. “Hey, you remember on Friday, when we were talking about your family?”
The smile receded. “Sure.”
“I was gonna ask, like, what happened in Italy? It just seemed like it might be kind of a neat story, is all.”
I winced at my own words moments after they came out. A neat story, really?
“Oh. It’s boring, really. Well, the parts that I know are. Sometimes I make up new bits in my head. I’m not sure I can tell the real bits from the made-up bits anymore.”
“That’s okay.”
“It had to do with my Dad. I know that much. He upset some people. I don’t know if it was his art or something else. I like to imagine he did a painting that got everyone cross with him, but I don’t think that’s true.”
“What d’you think is true, then?”
She shrugged. All along I had feared how she might respond, but if my questions upset her she never once showed it. “Maybe he just annoyed the wrong person. He does that with Mom sometimes, just for fun, I think. Gets in her skin.”
“What?”
“Y’know, like, he bugs her.”
“Oh. Under her skin, you mean.”
“Under her skin. Yeah. Especially when she gets on him about us missing church.”
“Does she do that a lot?”
She tore a cluster of dry grass up from the earth. “Depends how much we miss church. I dunno. She never used to.”
“Funny. Mine’s the other way ‘round.”
“Is that funny?”
“Like weird funny. Not like ha-ha funny.”
“Oh.” She seemed to shrink into herself.
In the silence I grew uncomfortable. Why, back then, was I so afraid to just sit? Failing to think of something else to say, I stood. “I’m gonna go inside.”
“Okay.” Then, just as I turned: “Teo?”
So she’d learned my name after all. “Yeah?”
“Do you wanna walk home together?”
“Oh.” Remembering Ma, the chill in her voice, her cracked hand surrounding mine. “I don’t think I
can, today.”
“Okay.” And that was that.
I wouldn’t speak to her for the rest of the week. It’s not that I didn’t see her— I did, every day, sitting in the corner of the classroom or against that section of unrimmed fence. Now and then there would rise in me a desire to go and sit beside her, even without knowing what we’d talk about, but the same thought always followed to strike it down: she’d ask me to walk home with her again, I’d have to say no, and I’d already used the only excuse I could come up with, hadn’t I? Best to avoid the issue altogether. Every afternoon, I made sure to leave for home before her. I knew I was the faster walker.
Ma seemed to be calming down as well. I noticed less and less the jitter in the vein that bulged on the left side of her neck as the week went on. She’d still press her ear against the outlet in the evenings, but in shorter intervals. I worried less about electricity arcing from the socket, about the neighbours discovering her, about all that time spent hunched over leaving her crookbacked. Things were going back to normal. As normal as they got.
It was Saturday that things changed. The third Saturday of fifth grade. There were thunderstorms on and off all day, sending echoes down the street, rattling the walls. Ma was at her calmest. She made gnocchi for lunch and let me stand by the boiling pot with a strainer, plucking up the dumplings as they rose. I never once saw her glance at the outlet.
The storms died down late in the day. Ma had the vacuum cleaner on, and while she was in the kitchen I took my chance to step outside. A greyness seemed to hang in the air. The earth had been bruised, small branches sheared and twisted in the street. I’d learn years later that there is a word for the smell I recall: petrichor. I stood breathing it in, then, turning back to the window, noticed the dim emptiness behind the blinds.
That was around when the shouting began. Calogero and his wife. In the first moments of his rant I learned her name: Agata, like the stone, rugged yet layered beyond measure. So it passed that they were all named, all human. A complete family at last. What started the argument? I have no idea. Even standing near the door it was muffled, mixing two languages and words I didn’t know from either. Maybe it was Bruno, who stormed out early and went down the street wrapping a bandana over his head. Or maybe it was Bella, who followed slinking through the half-open door, then sat serenely on the curb in her white dress.
I was there yet I was not there. Image and sound were juxtaposed: Agata’s voice rising over her husband, their daughter lily-calm nestling her chin in her hand.The roar of the vacuum cleaner still audible. A child stood in that driveway. Somehow, he went to sit beside her; somehow, he was me. And sitting there I gathered myself, not knowing what I would say, and found I didn’t have to say anything at all.
“They’re not nice people,” she said. “Not neither of them. Not even Bruno.”
A flood of questions rose in me. What started this, why did she say that about her brother, what was he really like and why does she know what he does with girls? I wouldn’t get to ask these. Not before I felt the hand clenching around my arm, jerking me to my feet and roughly towards the house. And Bella looked back. There was sadness in her eyes, I think, but not surprise.
When Ma threw me against the stairs I realised how foolish I’d really been. The shouting, the threatened spanking, the actual slap when I dared look away— these were only to be expected. I can’t even remember the words she used at the beginning, when it was all anger, all instinct. The usuals, surely: I can’t believe you’ve disobeyed me and why can I never trust you and idiot child, idiot child! It ran off me, and maybe she saw this, because even in her rage a secondary element crept in. Fear. A widening of the eyes, a dropping of the voice. And the words that followed I remember perfectly.
“You don’t understand. Foolish boy. What, is your brain made of wax? What shall I do with you? Fine, fine. We will do what we must.” She took me again by the arm, now to the kitchen. All had gone quiet. I could hear nothing but her breath, harsh and uneven.
“I did not want this,” she said. “I wanted to spare you. You are too young, too young. But you have forced my hand. You defy me openly, make a mockery of your mother. Like I am some ridiculous thing. But you do not understand.” She leaned over the counter, tugging on my arm, but more gently now. “Come. Climb.”
Hesitant, I clambered up. There was a wrongness in planting my feet on that smooth surface, in seeing the kitchen from above like some vain regent. And Ma leaned over. She did not need to stand on the counter for her ear to reach the outlet. This I knew well.
She mouthed one word. Listen. Staring as if seeing the divine. I knelt, placing my head beside hers. At first I did not bring my ear all the way to the outlet, but gradually, almost without my willing it, we both drew closer. Hot breath on my right temple. And then, contact: cold metal against my earlobe, the imagined lightning rising once more.
From the other side there was silence.
“Wait,” whispered Ma. The softest, tiniest word I’d ever hear escape her lips. And I waited. Even when my knees ached from the contact, even as the crick in my neck grew steadily worse. I dared not move. “They are there. I know they are there.” Still a whisper, but a little louder, a little bolder. I heard Ma shuffling, rubbing two fingers against each other, but still nothing from the other side. Nothing but silence and silence and then at last a woman’s voice:
“You can’t hear anything over there today!”
So it was that all at once both houses became small. Full of trivialities, each documented meticulously by the occupants of the other as if they were the affairs of royalty. I lifted my head from the counter, looked Ma in the eye. Watched her go white in the face and then red. And I dropped from the counter and without saying a word I laughed and laughed, laughed even when she took the polenta paddle from the cupboard and bent me over her knee and wouldn’t let go until she had laid three quick hard welts across my backside, and even then I was laughing on the inside for all the pain.
That evening, from upstairs, I heard her weeping. She would never admit it, but— for a time— she understood what had happened.
It would be best if I could write that, after this, all was resolved. That Ma abandoned her worst tendencies and became an ordinary parent, that Bella and I began a fruitful friendship. But that is not how these things go. Ma remained Ma, and— however my perspective changed—I remained myself. Sure, the paddle would come out every few months, naked reality asserting itself once more, but most of the time both Ma and I preferred to avoid this. We had our scripts, which were familiar and comfortable, and most days we followed them scrupulously. I’d like to claim that I begrudged doing so, staking out small rebellions all the while. But the truth is that mostly I did not.
None of this would have ruled out a kind of friendship with Bella, had I pursued one. I could have found a tactful way to explain Ma’s attitude, limiting our interactions to the schoolyard and cautious walks home. What really happened was far more straightforward. I simply stopped approaching her; she simply stopped approaching me. We spoke from time to time but never as more than acquaintances. Was this cowardice, on my end? I say no. Whatever drew me to her had been driven out. Having finally grown tall enough to look out a window, I found it had really been a mirror all along. What could be less interesting than that?
And yet no change is ever complete. I would learn this much later— almost at the end of fifth grade, in fact, when it was so hot that the fans couldn’t keep up and uselessly circled hot air around the house. Ma was asleep upstairs, feet in a bucket of ice. She never could stand the heat. I was reading a book I had brought home from the school library, intending to race through it before the school year ended. But, nearing the conclusion, I had found that the last ten or so pages were torn out, the plot fizzling unresolved mid-sentence. So I found myself with more time, and more liberty, than I was used to.
Early in the afternoon a fight broke out next door. Calogero, Agata, a third voice that must have been Bruno. Usually the noise would draw Ma downstairs, but this time it didn’t. She must have been asleep. When it became clear she wasn’t coming, I noticed the noise of the argument in a way I hadn’t before. I was used to ignoring these sounds, yet hearing them without impediment or distraction, a desire began to form in me, faint at first but growing. To gaze indolently into the lives of others, like a god or like a child with a doll’s house. Watching the small wooden people shuffled by rope and lever from position to position, each determined by the prior. Seeing the wires that held them together and all that their blank button-eyes missed. How long did I resist it? Not long. I went to the kitchen. I clambered up onto the counter. I pressed my ear against the outlet.
And what I heard I will not tell.
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out from Unsplash
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