To the Drunk Mr. Flunchy
This essay appears in our anthology, Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us.
We all knew you’d been drinking from the way you cake-walked toward us, following footprints and dotted lines only you could see diagrammed on the floor. Swearing and spitting, you swung on a weary commuter who’d crossed your path. The poor guy’s glasses slid across the marble.
Lanky as a Giacometti and more shabby than chic, you didn’t look the type who’d slipped through the social safety net, but I couldn’t explain you away as an over-sodden hooligan either. Had you gone off your meds? The janitor, oblivious, buffed the floor in his mini-Zamboni. But to me your rage was spellbinding; it cemented me in place, right there along the gift shop wall, where I’d plunked down with my girlfriend Ginger—and her mother. The three of us were awaiting the midnight train to Arles, and awkwardly avoiding the subject of my marital status.
Technically speaking, I was still married when the three of us embarked on that trip across France. When Ginger and I started dating, I mentioned it casually, with a giggle, as if it were a bit of stray gossip I had on myself. To my mind, divorcing “The Danish Wife” was just one trivial, outstanding task on my list of grownup things to do some day. The Danish Wife and I had been separated for five years. I’d say things like “only in the eyes of the law” and “we were kids then,” but on this trip, my old excuses weren’t cutting it.
Ginger pressed, wanting to know, for example, why I couldn’t use The Danish Wife’s name if I did not on some level still love her, preserving her in cold abstraction. The question only made it more difficult for me to use The Danish Wife’s name (it’s Maya—there, I said it), and was Maya refusing to grant me a divorce? What exactly was the holdup? What was I holding on to?
Ginger’s father (a man rarely referred to by first name) had not abandoned their family decisively, but over years of studied neglect, an infinite sorrow that could swallow in its negative space all expressions of affection the two sisters or their mother might receive from any man, recalled or anticipated. Ginger’s mother had emigrated from El Salvador to New York City in 1965 and later arranged for her beloved to join her. Eventually, he did and together they had two children within as many years—Ginger and her sister. The couple broke up shortly thereafter, but Señor Romero continued to live nearby in Brooklyn. The insult of his proximity served only to bond the three of them that much more surely, each of them committed to protecting the others from various wolves at the door.
Ginger and her sister were used to the glare of their mother’s panoramic surveillance. It united and somehow fortified them. What I called “codependent,” Ginger called “mother love.” Before she met me, Ginger had taken her mom on several trips—the kind of tribute an immigrant mother who raises two girls in a tenement apartment on her own deserves. When Ginger told her mom that “we” were going to France for two weeks, her mom naturally counted herself among that pronoun. Ginger wouldn’t dare correct the misunderstanding.
With the addition of her mom, Marina, the romantic getaway with my girlfriend began to look more like a corporate retreat with a cubicle-mate and a gnomic sexagenarian boss. The night we arrived in Avignon, as per routine, we booked a single with a cot. Guess who got the cot. Throughout our travels, Ginger maintained that because her mother had zero experience with French, she would need her daughter to translate the environment for her. Was it necessary to lay out the history and distinctions of “macarons” versus “macaroons”? It would seem so, yes. Less important, apparently, was the fact that I understood very little Spanish in general, and none of it in their Salvadoran accent and velocity.
I brought up the rear with all their shopping bags as we traipsed between stores and museums. From a scorned remove, I watched the two of them, five-foot-three Ginger towering over her mom. Occasionally, I’d try to edge my way into the conversation and offer my own mundane observations, usually to discover either that they’d already noted that particular detail or that Ginger found it unworthy of translating for her mother. The two pantomimed gleefully behind their firewall of language.
By the time we got to that train station in Avignon, Marina had already proved just how irrelevant the size of her body and her English vocabulary were to the exercise of her authority. At lunch, when her daughter got up to use the restroom, Marina wasted no time. “You’re married,” she said gently, as if to assure me, as if I were an injured animal and she a no-nonsense frontier veterinarian, soothing my brow.
“I’m married,” I repeated, surrendering with a sigh the full weight of the fact. Admitting it felt like confessing to store security after being shown a video of myself shoving lunchmeat down the front of my pants. With Marina, there was no point attempting further misdirection. I felt stripped of some important mask. I remember exactly where we were sitting: at a fast-food joint called Flunch. We’d called it “Mr. Flunchy’s” mistakenly at first, and then deliberately. A shared joke. We were bonding. The food was awful, which set the joke running: every negative experience from then on was Mr. Flunchy’s fault.
And then you loped—seemingly out of the ether—towards the three of us: Mr. Flunchy incarnate. Mr. Flunchy out of a horror movie sans music and fog. Or a rehab center. I’d been busy sulking, packaging every inconsideration, every exclusion and careless inattention I’d suffered that day into a hefty grudge that would offset the weight of my guilt over not having dealt with my marriage. Now, I gawked. You were almost seductive, the way you inhaled the vacant space between us and made me feel like I was the only person alive. Before I realized how close you were—that you were no longer somebody else’s problem, that you were mere feet from swinging at one or all of us—Marina leapt to her feet and started screaming at you as if she was scaring off a bear.
You tucked your face into your shoulder. You turned sullenly. You could barely lift your feet as you shuffled away, and a cold light drenched the crimeless scene like so much soapy water.
I divorced Maya as soon as we got home. That was twenty years ago. In the years since, whenever Marina has caught me being selfish or slipping into the well of my ego, she’s threatened to let you, Mr. Flunchy, get me. Now that Marina’s health is declining, I find myself replaying that night in the train station for reassurance that I could have, would have, protected my future second wife and mother-in-law if Marina had sat tight another two seconds. Three seconds, tops.
“These days I’m thinking about the perimeters of care, how we can believe they’re predrawn, by bloodlines, or choose to draw them ourselves, to accommodate new bonds or affinities as well as to affirm old ones.”
Last year she needed a quadruple bypass. Doctors installed tiny springs to prop open her arteries. Only recently, after she complained of fatigue, her doctor found a new clog had developed downstream from one of the springs. She’s not afraid of her death, but I am. I’m afraid of losing the shape of what I refer to most meaningfully as “we.”
These days I’m thinking about the perimeters of care, how we can believe they’re predrawn, by bloodlines, or choose to draw them ourselves, to accommodate new bonds or affinities as well as to affirm old ones. An immigrant and single parent, Marina had to draw and redraw those lines daily. Sometimes I forget even that I live in a body, and that my body is a thing in the world. Then some Flunchy comes along, challenging me to consider the bounds of my personhood, singular and plural. It’s painful to admit—now that I’m present to the fact of her mortality—that I only recently realized I’ve been on the inside of Marina’s perimeter since the day you put me there.
About the Author
Gregory Pardlo is the author of the poetry collections Totem and Digest, and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2015 for Digest, and has received fellowships from the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. He is currently the poetry editor for Virginia Quarterly Review and serves as Co-Director of the Camden Branch of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He is a Visiting Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at NYU-Abu Dhabi.
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Header photo by Jules Nehlig.
