THE OPEN WINDOW
Erik Wilson
Manny shaved his head when he found out his wife had been cheating on him and they decided to split up. He said it was something that men in his culture did when their wives had done them wrong, but I’d known plenty of other Mexicans, and I’d never heard that one before. Still, he said it was a way of announcing to the world that he’d been treated unfairly. After being used to seeing him with his dark hair combed straight back and hanging below his ears, it was quite a change all right. You could see that his head was a little bit crooked on one side, smashed-in, sort of, and his skull came to a kind of a point at the top. I don’t know how that announced anything to the world, exactly, but I took his word for it and didn’t question him when he said it.
Right after he’d found out, and after they made the decision to break up, he’d just gone in the bathroom and done it with a pair of scissors and a disposable razor. Then he’d come straight over to our house to cry and tell me and Alison all about it. From his garage refrigerator he brought over a twelve-pack of Coors, of which he drank eleven himself, and, to be fair, he didn’t really start crying until the eighth or ninth one.
Gloria, he kept saying, and goddamnit, and that little bastard Carl, and why. He just kept repeating those words. After listening to him for about two or three cans of Coors, Alison got up and spent the rest of his visit in the kitchen, puttering around, cleaning up, and eventually getting dinner started. She and Gloria were friends, and I wondered if maybe she hadn’t known that Gloria was cheating on Manny before he did.
For almost two years Manny had been working the swing shift down at the Freightliner plant, working on the assembly line where they built the big eighteen-wheelers that haul food and goods all over the country. He liked swing shift because it meant he could sleep late, and he made more money because of the shift differential. But apparently Gloria didn’t like him being at work when she wanted to go to bed; didn’t like him coming home at two or three in the morning, still wired and wide awake from work after she’d been ready for bed at ten or eleven. She started flirting with Carl, who lived in the house two doors down from us, and three doors down from Manny and Gloria. He had his own troubles with his wife -- they were always arguing, they never got along, in all the time we knew them -- and he liked Gloria a lot. Pretty soon she started leaving the bedroom window open in the early evening, and Carl would slip out of his house, sneak around to Manny and Gloria’s back yard and hop in the window, and they would comfort each other for a few hours every night they could get away with it.
Manny said he had been wondering why the bedroom window was always open when he got home, even on cold nights. It was that little bastard Carl all along, he said. I ought to fix his lunch good, he said, opening another can of Coors.
About the time Manny started crying, Alison began banging the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen, and I knew she was ready for him to go somewhere else. I didn’t know where he could go at that point, but I also knew Alison didn’t care, just as long as he took his crying in his beer act some place other than our living room. I tried to urge him along, to get him to start thinking in those terms. What are you going to do now, I asked him. Where are you going to stay?
He just blubbered I don’t know, I don’t know, and then started in again on why and goddamnit Gloria and that little bastard Carl. I began to think maybe he should go over to Carl’s house and drink beer and cry; I know that would have made Alison feel better. I thought maybe he should hook up with Carl’s nasty wife, let Carl and Gloria take off together and then everyone would be happy. Especially Alison.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure why he had chosen us to be the first people he told. We were friends the way neighbors are friends -- they would come over sometimes on the weekends, and we’d watch football or barbecue or something, but it wasn’t like we were really close. Alison and Gloria were a lot closer than Manny and I ever were. All I could think about while he blubbed and snurfled and moaned was how shiny his head was, how I’d never noticed the funny shape of it on the one side when he had it covered with hair. I mean, I felt bad enough for him and his situation, but I felt worse knowing that Alison would be pissed at me if he was still there when dinner was ready.
When he had drunk the last can of Coors and crushed it in his hand -- I had long since finished nursing the one I took out of the twelve-pack -- and he asked if we had any beer anywhere, I told him it was time for him to go. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here, I said, trying to lighten up the mood a little bit. That just set him off again, and he cried some more about Gloria goddamnit, goddamnit Gloria. How he’d never have a home again, because of her and that little bastard Carl.
I had to admit that I felt some sympathy for him. If the same thing had happened to me, I don’t know what I would have done. Probably not shave my head and go over to his house and cry in my beer all afternoon, but something. Having sympathy for Manny and wanting him to stay there all night crying were two different things, though, and once again I suggested that it was probably time for him to find someplace else to be miserable. Maybe he could work things out with Gloria, I suggested, but he just shook his shiny bald head and said no, no, no, it’s over, it’s all over. I just nodded and let him talk.
It took another twenty minutes of listening to him rant and sob, but I was finally able to coax him out into the night. I watched him stumble off into the darkness towards his house next door, relieved that Alison and I could have dinner in peace. Maybe he and Gloria could patch things up, despite what he had said. People say things in the heat of the moment, without thinking about them, that they don’t necessarily mean. Or maybe splitting up was the best thing for them. Who knows?
After I closed the front door, I went into the kitchen and looked at Alison, her back to me, pouring water into a pot on the stove. I thought about saying something, but instead I just walked down the hall to our bedroom to see if the window there was shut.
