A Request

by Jerilynn Aquino

At twenty-six, I worked customer service for ScoopSavior, “The World’s First Cat Toilet.” Animated videos made the system look as simple as a textbook illustration of Earth’s water cycle, natural. The toilet often clogged, and in worst cases, flooded entire bathrooms. On slow nights, I’d smoke in the parking lot and take calls through a headset, ripping the bong I’d fashioned from a cat toilet drain hose and a T-adapter. To customers, I was an authority figure, the one with the answers. If I’d been honest, I would have told them to go back to litter boxes. 

I lived in a studio apartment in Germantown with my boyfriend, Jon. The iron bars on our windows had been cast to resemble garden gates, a detail I’d once found charming. Jon rode the train to Center City for his deli job, and I drove forty-five minutes out to Phoenixville for ScoopSavior. 

On my commute home I’d tune in to  Delilah, a radio syndicate I’d listened to since high school, around the time my mother left for a weekend trip to Atlantic City and never returned . A bartender at Pete’s, she entertained with Jersey-accented quips until a regular who loved her convinced her to leave. My father was an electrician and a rigid conservative. After Mom left, his social skills lasted only as long as his work shifts.

One night my father and I were watching America’s Funniest Home Videos. This fat girl, stuck in a tire swing, had him roaring in a way I’d never seen—eyes shut and mouth open, soggy chunks of Hot Fries embedded in his molars like fillings. Unable to express my despair over being stuck with him, I couldn’t help myself, I shouted, “Shut the fuck up, already!”

He came at me instantly, his bag of Hot Fries spilling to the floor and the backside of his hand aiming toward my face before he stopped and barked, “Who do you think you are?” The threat nearly made me piss myself, though he’d never hit me before. If he started hitting me then, I couldn’t run away. Unlike Mom, I’d end up alone.

After that, I kept to my room, falling asleep to  Delilah, listening to         stories of reinvented people, families reunited. 

Delilah’s voice occupied my rides home from ScoopSavior. I spoke to her in the dark, telling her I loved her. Delilah told her listeners to love one another. She asked us, “Are you listening to your partners?”

My partner and I did not listen to ea ch other. We wanted to make a home, but we  yelled, flinging objects at each other that always hit the wall or the floor, because we always aimed to miss. We didn’t want to be abusive, neglecting what happened in mid-air. If we listened to each other, we’d hear the hate-noises suspended there. Not just our loud voices, but the whimpers that often broke them. 

I would howl, calling his the worst dick I’d ever had, telling him to go back to his mother, a Kensington crackhead. He’d call me a cunt. I watched him destroy his own phone once. He threw it down and stomped on it over and over, screaming—Ahhh! Ahhh!—mouth open wide, body red and pulsating like fresh organs, as if my needs, my bullshit, had turned him inside out.

We’d met at a party five years before, drunk and deprived and confusing friendship for romance. As a partner, Jon dealt with the business that intimidated me: bills, taxes. I’d let him wake me up some nights with an erection and amorous words leftover from a dream, words he never said otherwise. 

Once, I called Delilah because I wanted to hear, “Have I Told You Lately” by Rod Stewart. Listeners needed heartfelt reasons for their requests. I appealed to her by saying, “My fiancé  is leaving for basic training tomorrow. It’s always been our song.” Delilah supported our troops.

The song didn’t air until after I got home, so I sat in the parking lot of our complex and waited. My voice sounded sweet, a divine glow in the dashboard, like I was a girl from the Main Line, affluent and faithful. I’d had to lie to get on air. Still, here was a version of me that happened, at least during that call, an assertion transmitted over Pennsylvania. Syndicated across the country.

 *

At night, Jon and I could hear the tenant above us moving from one end of the room to the other. The man must have been old, since each step was heralded by a loud groan of effort. 

I met him one weekend after another fight with Jon, calming myself with a cigarette outside our front entrance, sitting on a stool next to a muddy hill of butts. The man stepped out the double glass doors and faced our unhappy courtyard, squinting into the bright gray sky. Then he asked me for a cigarette. He said, “Thank you, sweetheart. My name’s Claude.”

“Theresa.”

“What are you doing, smoking them cigarettes? You look like a little girl.” 

Claude was surprisingly tall. He exhaled rolling clouds of smoke and complained about the landscaping, his bleach white tracksuit adding the effect of glacial wisdom. Finishing his cigarette, he asked, “Will you help me up to my apartment?”

We climbed the stairs like toddlers, one step at a time, his arm around my shoulders, his cries ringing through our greasy hallways.

Claude lived in a studio with the same blueprint as mine, though his was more depressing. A dark and cluttered room with a sectional couch as brown as dried blood, tangled bed-sheets marking where he slept, a plastic bucket on the floor by his pillow.

“Come in and sit for a while.” 

“Sorry, I have to get going.”

“Oh, come on. Sit for a minute. Give me some company.”

There was power to his heaviness; I’d felt his hard edges against me as we’d climbed the stairs. He could fall, trap me under his weight. But he expected a pleasant, accommodating girl, someone to fill this bleak space with pleasantries. Back in my own apartment, it’d be another night of getting stoned and watching Jon play video games. I found a lamp and sat on the end of the couch by the door.

Claude fell back onto the couch in a surrender, the loudest shout of pain. After he caught his breath, I asked about the framed vinyls on his wall.

“You ever heard of a group called The Gold Notes?”

I told him the name sounded familiar, though it didn’t. He began crooning a soulful melody. After all that moaning and wheezing, Claude had a steady voice. He turned toward the TV and changed the channel. “I sang with them until I ran into some trouble, drugs, and all that,” he said with a lazy gesture toward the vinyls. “Bunch of dickheads, anyway.” 

“Well, shit. Very cool. How old are you?”

“Sixty-two, and already been through two strokes. I shouldn’t be smoking.”

“I’m sorry. You should have told me.”

“Then you wouldn’t have given me a cigarette.” We chuckled.

Above the TV hung a framed headshot of a woman from the eighties, all soft and backlit with neon color. She was in another picture, this time with a toddler in her arms. They both laughed at a younger Claude, who was comically shaking the palm tree next to them. Where were they now? Wherever those palm trees were, I supposed. Wishing Claude had been a good husband, a good father. Perhaps Claude wanted the same but didn’t know how, after all this time.

Claude turned on a cheesy Hallmark movie, while I imagined the relationship we’d form, the story I’d tell Delilah. I’d tell her how I’d befriended a retired singer whose stories inspired me to go out there and  take, to leave  Jon and go back to school. How Claude learned to laugh again, how I’d helped him reconnect with his son. “He saved me,” I’d tell Delilah. “I can’t thank him enough.”

Ten minutes into the movie, Claude was asleep and slack-jawed, tongue drying out on his bottom lip. I called his name and he lifted his head, looking at me like I could be anyone. “You leaving?”

He made me promise to visit again. Back in my own apartment, I told Jon about the encounter, releasing my grudge from earlier and hoping he’d open himself to me, ask me for details. “Interesting,” he told the TV.

*

I kept my promise to Claude, but each visit was the same—he caught me outside, asked for help, and we’d spend a long time getting him upstairs.  I waited for our Delilah story to unfold. When it didn’t, I went home.

In the meantime, I was receiving warnings at work.

The first one had been for lateness and leaving early. The second one was more incriminating. I got stuck with an angry customer right before we closed at midnight, and an hour later he was still ranting. No one would have found out I’d hung up on a customer if this one hadn’t heard me call him a dickhead right before the click. Two strikes.

A month later, I was greeted at the door by HR and lead to our manager’s office. Even before I saw the manager’s clasped, sorry hands and the smoking pipe I’d crafted on his desk, I understood.

“Was it the warehouse cameras?” I asked through helpless tears, tasting my own snot. “I know I have low numbers, but…”

The manager pushed a document toward me that read: “Reason For Termination: Gross Misconduct and Insubordination.” 

They felt I was a bad fit. A bad person. I signed the document. I agreed I was a bad person.

It was the middle of the day. On the ride home, some DJ played soft rock when I needed Delilah most. I cried heavily, in between episodes of bizarre optimism: I had the rest of the day to make something of myself. Or I could pick up a box of wine. No one deserved a night of sober contemplation after getting fired. I could ride the Dekalb Pike until my gas ran out, pull over and start walking a road of diminishing options. I’d make survival, not success, my only responsibility.

Once home, I caught Claude laboring through our courtyard, back from the corner store with a seaweed-colored plastic bag. Maybe I could spend more time with him, run his errands. “Oh, good, you’re here,” he said, panting. “Will you help me up to my apartment?” 

We moved upstairs as we always had. Once Claude was back on his couch, I lurked by the door, wondering if I could bring myself to ask about weed. I’d recently gone dry. 

“Do you smoke bud?” I asked, trying for random curiosity, but my voice was too deliberate, a betrayal of need. 

He looked at me with a wry smile I hadn’t seen before. “Didn’t know you smoked.”

Claude’s stash was in a pill bottle rubber-banded to some brittle rolling papers. My joint was pathetic, wide and lumpy as a peapod, and I tried smoking it as Claude nodded off. 

“Claude.”

He choked on a snore, woke up, and rolled his glassy eyes toward me.

I gave up on the joint and tossed it into an ashtray. “I got fired today.” 

“Hey, now,” Claude said. “Don’t cry. You’re still young.”

“What kind of person loses a job troubleshooting litter boxes? That’s what my dad would say.” 

“Who gives a shit what people think? You’ve got to do what makes you happy.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re nicer to me than anyone.”

We watched the evening news, Claude dozing again. I stood up and said, “Gotta go.”

“Wait. Come here and give me a kiss.” Claude pushed himself up on one elbow and arched upward, entombed by the glow of the television. 

“Please?” he asked, drawing out his plea like a child. The anchorwoman read off a teleprompter about the legacy of Isaac Hayes. 

I leaned down and pressed my lips to his cold cheek, tentative. Then his hand was on my hip, whispering another request while his other hand gripped a bulge in his thin tracksuit. 

“Please suck me,” he repeated, eyes wide with begging.

I moved away so quickly I stumbled over the coffee table, knocking over a glass of curdled milk. Almost out the door, I turned back because the image of his bent fingers gripping polyester flashed in my mind, as it would, occasionally, for the rest of my life. 

“Who do you think I am, Claude?”

He settled back down on his pillow, irritated, as if I’d woken him from another nap. 

“A desperate fool,” he said, grabbing the remote. “Like me.” Claude changed the channel.

I ran down the stairs, already trying to forget and be someone new by the time I reached my apartment. But as soon as I opened the door, I told Jon everything—what the termination letter said, how I’d visited Claude and what he had just done.

“What do you expect?” Jon asked. He turned away, looking for his coffee. “Putting yourself in those situations.”

“It’s my fault?” I asked, thinking of Claude. “I made him do that?” 

Jon finally faced me. “What about the bills? How could you be so careless?”

I wanted Jon to tell me I was a good person, that we’d figure it out. To be as angry about Claude as I was. On my bedside table, there was a small rectangular tray holding loose change and bobby pins. My father had given it to me, an ugly souvenir from his vacation in Mexico, a lone gift in ten years. I picked it up, chucked it at Jon lengthways like a knife thrower, money and pins hurtling outward, juvenile shrapnel. 

He staggered backward, hands clasping his forehead, yelping, surprised. Once he lowered them I could see a welt forming already, red and swollen and shaped like a boomerang. Jon stared at me, huffing angrily, trying to restrain himself. 

“I wish you would,” I challenged. As we waited to see where our relationship would go next, Claude moved above us. We listened to the heavy thumps, the following muffled sobs.

Jon decided not to hit me. Instead, he went to the bathroom and hollered and smashed our toiletries, and remained there long after he was done. 

I sat on our bed and knew I would hit him again. I wanted to already. I wanted to hit him until he hit me back. I wanted to create enough fissures to break him open and demolish the lies that kept us from knowing ourselves. 

Jerilynn Aquino received her MFA from Temple University, where she also served as fiction editor for TINGE Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Lunch Ticket and So to Speak as finalist for the fiction contest judged by Pam Houston. She now resides in Oklahoma as a freelance writer.