My Brother’s Apartment
by Dan Pope

In the fall of 1978 my brother brought home a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. That’s what my mother called her. She called her other names. A trollop. A gold digger. A white trash hussy. This went on for a month or so. Then late one night my mother caught the girl and my brother half-clothed in the basement, and she went rushing down the stairs with a broom, trying to shoo the girl out the back door. But Albert wanted to keep seeing her, so the next day he found an apartment a couple of miles away and packed some clothes and left.

This happened in the suburbs outside Hartford. Albert was nineteen, two years older than me. He’d dropped out of college--a music major, he played classical piano--and was working the graveyard shift three nights a week at Hamilton Standard, making parts for windmill propellers. That’s where he met the girl, on the assembly line.

She was a year older than him and she’d never finished high school. Her name was Laurel. She had straight brown hair, cut in bangs across her forehead, and pockmarks speckling her cheeks. She wasn’t pretty but she wore tight jeans, and guys in cars honked and whistled and called out names when she crossed the street. Her father was a prison guard and her mother was gone someplace, she didn’t say where.

The apartment was located on a quiet street of big old houses, most of which had been converted into apartments or duplexes. My brother rented the third story of a tree-shaded Victorian, a narrow corridor of three rooms with a sloping roof. He paid $145 per month, which included use of the furniture: double bed, dresser, couch, coffee table and a fold-out card table where he had his meals.

An Indian man rented the other half of the third floor. My brother never learned the man’s name, so he called him The Hindu. He was about forty years old, an engineer who lived alone. To reach his rooms, The Hindu had to climb an exterior staircase that opened into my brother’s kitchen. Every night around 5:00 p.m. the man opened the door, walked silently through the kitchen, unlocked the door that led to his rooms, and disappeared inside.

The Hindu was quiet. He never left the house except to come and go from work, but he cooked in his rooms every night. The smell of curry wafted over to my brother’s side--thick, pungent, ever-present. It permeated his clothes, the bedsheets, everything. My brother carried the scent with him wherever he went. When he came over to our house to pick up some items he needed--records, a trunk filled with sweaters, work boots--my mother said, “Goodness, what’s that stink? Don’t you wash your clothes? Is that what that girl’s taught you, to live like a vagrant?”

My brother didn’t respond. He refused to speak to her, ever since the night she shooed Laurel out the back door with the broom. 

I helped him load the stuff into his car. “You need anything else?” I asked. 

“Nah. I’ll let you know if I do,” he said.

“You can have my Brando poster, if you want.”

“Thanks. I’ll get it next time.” He got in the car and revved the motor. “Tell her that’s curry she’s smelling,” he said. “That’s a spice from India, if she doesn’t know.”

We were white-bread kids, weaned on bologna and cheese sandwiches, meat loaf, peanut butter and jelly. His apartment smelled like curry in the morning, late at night, always. Once you got used to it, you didn’t even notice.
 
 

I had a key to the apartment. My brother told me to come over any time I pleased. My high school was only two blocks away, so I often skipped my last class and walked over to the apartment, kicking leaves and throwing acorns at trees and petting dogs that ran into the street to sniff me.

Usually my brother--he got off the graveyard shift at 7:00 a.m.--was still sleeping at two in the afternoon when I showed up. He was six feet five, and he sprawled across the mattress sideways, his feet hanging over the side. I’d wake him and we’d have lunch together--grilled cheese sandwiches I fried in his skillet. Waiting for his food, he’d tap his fingers against the surface of the card table, as if striking keys--a habit he had. Sometimes he did it consciously, humming along; other times his hands seemed to act on their own, moving to whatever music was playing in his head.

There was a stack of Playboys on the coffee table. I’d flip through the pages, wiping my fingers so as not to get the pictures greasy. “Take a look at her,” I’d say, holding the magazine toward my brother, but he wasn’t interested. He’d already gone through them; he said all the girls looked the same after a while.

The prior tenant had left the magazines behind. My brother found them in the bottom drawer of the dresser, along with some old clothes and a cellophane baggie filled with pot. Albert tossed out the clothes--all but a tie-dyed T-shirt that he wore almost every day that fall--and left the bag of pot where he found it, unopened.

Neither of us used drugs. We’d made a pact with my father. He allowed us to get drunk in the basement, along with any buddies we wanted to invite over; he stocked the refrigerator with Pabst Blue Ribbon and Carling’s Black Label and one time, when the package store had a surplus, Billy Beer (ten cases at half-price); he even joined us some nights, drinking Scotch and telling war stories that didn’t resemble anything we’d learned from Combat or McHale’s Navy or Hogan’s Heroes. My father disliked pot smokers, whom he associated with draft dodging, so he expected us to stay away from drugs. I kept up my end of the bargain, and my brother did too, so I’d never held a bag of pot in my hands until my brother showed it to me.

“We should sell it,” I said. Most of the kids at my high school got high, and they held joints toward me at parties as a matter of courtesy, even though I just passed them on to the next person. “I know a couple guys who’d want it.”

Albert shook his head. “Nah. Let’s just leave it. I’ll break it out if I throw a party someday.”

But he was too busy working nights to throw any parties. So the bag stayed in the drawer, and I liked knowing it was there--something forbidden and alluring, like the Playboys, like Laurel, like the apartment itself. 
 
 

One afternoon I walked in and caught them in the bedroom. They were stuck together like spoons, my brother behind. I stood in the doorway, dazed by her pale skin, the swell of her breasts. She pulled up the sheet and Albert threw his shoe at me. “Take a picture, why don’t you?” said Laurel.

I went into the other room. A couple of minutes later, she came out and sat next to me on the couch. She was wearing a long T-shirt and nothing else. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.

“Not right now,” I said. I couldn’t look her in the eyes for long, not without blushing.

Laurel picked a Playboy off the coffee table. “You think she’s pretty?” she asked.

A blonde girl was on the cover, running a silver comb through her hair. I looked for the little rabbit--they hid the logo somewhere on the cover every month--and spotted it, in the locket hanging between her breasts. “I guess,” I said.

“Where would you take her,” she asked, “if she was your bride?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go on your honeymoon?”

“India,” I said. The smell of curry gave me the idea.

Laurel smiled. “You hear that?” she called to my brother. “India. Isn’t that romantic?”

I liked the way she teased me. She looked me straight in the eye, didn’t giggle. I didn’t know any other girls her age. I hardly knew any my own age. I’d never had a girlfriend. All I knew of girls was kissing and rubbing during basement parties, behind bushes at overnight camp, and slow-dancing to the last song of the night (“Stairway to Heaven,” always). Their sweet smell, hot breath. The way their lips felt against mine. The next day it always seemed like something I’d made up.

“Maybe you should get a tattoo,” Laurel suggested. “An eagle or a sword. Girls like tattoos on a guy. You got nice arms so it would look good.”

I said, “I’m not sure my mother would like that.” Only workmen and my father’s army buddies had tattoos, so far as I knew. My mother said it was low-class.

Laurel wrinkled her nose. “What does it matter what she likes? You do everything your mother tells you?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go right now,” said Laurel. “I know a place that’s got a whole book of pictures to look through. You can get a tattoo that says Mom. That’s the one for you. I love Mom. Right across your heart.”

My brother laughed, standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She turned on him. “What’s so funny? You should get the same tattoo. You do everything she tells you, so you might as well.”

“Not likely,” he said.

“Then why don’t you tell her? You got to tell her sometime.”

“Tell her what?” I said. I looked at my brother. Laurel did too, waiting for him to speak, but he turned and went back into the bedroom.

“We’re getting engaged,” Laurel told me.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Is that all right with you?” She acted like someone challenging me to a fight, that same daring expression.

“I didn’t know.”

“Well now you know.” She tossed the Playboy into my lap and went into the bedroom.
 
 

All that fall my mother kept up her tirade against Laurel. She held the girl responsible for what she perceived were my brother’s troubles. He’d gone to Hartt School of Music on a scholarship, commuting from home, making straight-A grades. But he choked during his year-end piano recital, a Beethoven sonata. Halfway through the piece, he began speeding up the tempo and stomping his foot like a banjo player, hitting so many clinkers it sounded like a cat got loose inside the piano. In the auditorium people started to fidget and snicker. After that night he didn’t want to be a concert pianist anymore, and he stopped going to classes. He hadn’t even met Laurel at that time, but my mother considered her the reason he didn’t re-enroll.

My mother drove by the apartment and didn’t like what she saw: shutters askew, grass overgrown, five or six cars parked in the driveway. She called it a den of iniquity. She refused to set foot in the place, even after my brother swallowed his pride and invited her over. Instead she came to me with her questions.

“Is there enough heat?” she asked one night while I was watching TV. “Is it winterized?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s plenty warm.” Actually the rooms were drafty, the floors creaked, and mice ran around the kitchen when you turned out the lights.

“What’s he eating?” she asked.

“He’s got a skillet and he makes fried eggs and bacon,” I said.

“That’s a good breakfast at least. Is that girl hanging around?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“Tell the truth. It’s because of her that he’s acting this way. She’s got him all twisted around, that selfish bitch.”

I’d never heard her use that type of language; she always told us to speak kindly of others--kindly or not at all. But Laurel--or the idea of her and my brother together--had gotten under my mother’s skin, like the scabies I caught at camp one summer, a constant itch, worse at night when you had nothing else to think about. She even threatened to put a private eye after the girl.

I said, “He’s going to take classes in the spring. He’s got it all planned out.”

“Is he?”

“Yes. He’s been practicing on his kitchen table, just like a regular keyboard. Scales and everything.”

It was what my mother wanted to hear, and I hoped the prospect of listening to him play the piano again--it gathered dust in our living room, the lid closed--would make her see Laurel and him in a better light. He’d taken lessons since he was eight years old. My mother loved to listen to the music, and so did I. People would stop in the street outside our house, hearing the strains of Beethoven coming out the open windows. She disliked the idea of him working the assembly line, what might happen to his hands around that machinery.

But, in truth, he had no desire to take classes. He’d put in for more hours at Hamilton Standard, trying to get a union card. He needed money to pay his rent.
 
 

“It goes pretty quick,” he told me one Sunday morning. We were raking leaves for his landlord, earning some extra cash. We’d made big piles all over the lawn. Albert held open the trash bag and I dumped in the leaves, handful after handful. “Laurel had a birthday last week,” he said. “I bought her earrings. Took her to dinner at Carbones. They’ll cost you a fortune, women.”

I said, “Why don’t you ask Dad for money? He’d give it to you.” My father didn’t care what kind of girl Albert brought home. Girls were girls, in his book. He allowed Albert and me to do pretty much whatever we liked, even if my mother thought otherwise. 

“You know why not,” he said. “She’d find out, and I’d never hear the end of it.”

“Then ask Laurel to move in with you,” I said. “You’d save money that way, split the expenses.” I glanced up to read his expression. “I mean, you guys are getting engaged, right?”

He smiled. “Oh yeah. That would go over real well. Mom would just love that. Can you picture me telling her that?” He pushed some leaves down into the bag, shaking his head. “Besides,” he said, “Laurel’s father wouldn’t let her. She’s got to be home by midnight on weekends. He’s pretty strict about that curfew.”

“Curfew doesn’t matter so long as you got the afternoons to fool around.”

“Is that what you call it, fooling around?”

“Screw. Fuck. Whatever. She’s good, isn’t she?” I’d had her image in my mind since the day I walked in on them. Laurel’s head thrown back, her breasts bulging.

He tossed some leaves into my face, and I snorted, spitting them out of my mouth. “Don’t ask stupid questions,” he said. “Go find out for yourself.”

With anyone else, I would lie. Say I’d done this and done that. But my brother knew me as well as I knew myself. It was no use telling tales to him. “There’s no one I like well enough,” I said.

“Wait until next year,” he said. “You won’t believe your eyes, those college girls.”

“I bet,” I said, but I couldn’t picture them. I only saw Laurel. The way she rushed through the door, bringing the fall air in with her. She’d drop into his lap, throw her arms around his neck. I thought about her all the time.
 
 

I wanted to help my brother with his money troubles, but I had less than a hundred dollars in my bank account. I’d earned a good paycheck the previous summer, working construction in Hartford, but I’d spent it just as fast on records and cheeseburgers and a Fisher stereo system.

I didn’t want him to lose the apartment. I liked having a place to go where no one checked up on me. I often went over there when no one was home. I’d stay for an hour or so, sitting on the couch, staring at the shadows against the sloping wall, thinking about going to college, having my own place. Or I’d take one of the Playboys into the bathroom and look at the centerfolds, all the while thinking of Laurel, the way the jeans fit her backside.

One afternoon--it was the end of October, a bright cool day that smelled of burning wood--I went over to the apartment and found the place empty, my brother’s car gone from the driveway. 

I took the baggie out of the bottom dresser drawer. I’d talked to a guy on the football team, and he said he’d pay me whatever the pot was worth--a hundred bucks, he guessed, which would go a long way toward my brother’s rent check.

I knew that sticks were a sign of lousy pot--skunk weed, my buddy called it--so I sat on the couch, opened the baggie and started removing all the sticks I could find, placing them in the crease of a centerfold. Halfway through this procedure, I heard footsteps on the exterior staircase. I waited for the door to open, for Albert or Laurel to come in, but there came a knock instead.

I got up and opened the door a crack.

He was a stocky man with a crew cut, standing on the landing. “I’m looking for my daughter,” he said. “Laurel Armington.”

I’d never seen him before, never even knew Laurel’s last name. “She’s not here,” I told him.

He pushed the door open, brushing past me. “You mind if I come in?” he said.

“This is my brother’s apartment,” I told him.

“Your brother. That would be Albert, correct?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, the words escaping my lips.

He had a large round head and a dull glaze to his eyes. Like Laurel, he had pockmarks on his cheeks. He said, “My daughter goes someplace every afternoon. She told me she got a job checking out books at the library. Is that true, or does she come here?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Laurel’s father went past me into the bedroom. I watched him from the doorway, looking at the unmade bed, the clothes hanging from the dresser drawers. 

“Hey, look--” I said. 

“I’m not in the mood for back talk, son.” He came into the kitchen, and tried the doorknob to The Hindu’s apartment. “What’s in there?” he said.

“That’s the other guy’s apartment.”

“What other guy?”

“The guy that lives next door.”

Laurel’s father pinched his nose a couple of times. He went over to the couch and picked up the Playboy. He didn’t touch the baggie, just stared at it.

“I could have the cops here in about ten minutes,” he told me.

I felt the blood drain out of my face, and I had the urge to run out the door, down the staircase, and just keep going. He seemed to know what I was thinking, and he stepped toward me.

“It’s not mine,” I said. “The guy who lived here before my brother, he left it behind.”

He puffed out of his nostrils, exhaling hard. “I work in a prison,” he said, “and every one of them boys is a liar. I’ve heard every type of lie you can imagine and every time I hear one it’s an insult, like someone calling me stupid. Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s my daughter’s underwear lying on the bed in the other room. I know that because I do the laundry around our house and she does the dishes and I mow the goddamn lawn. Now, do you know where she is?”

“I just got here ten minutes ago,” I told him.

He snickered and clapped me on the back. He wasn’t trying to hurt me but I could feel the strength in his hand, like a block of concrete. He gave me a push toward the couch, and I sat down. 

“Let me tell you what’s going on,” he said. “That might help you to come up with some better lies. Okay?”

“I’m not lying to you.” My voice came out thin and nasal.

He went to the window and stared out, a strip of sunlight running down his face. He said, “This morning I got a call from your mother. I never met your mother in my life, but she got my number out of the phone book and called me. She told me some things I didn’t like hearing, and she doesn’t hold back her words. She thinks my daughter’s wrong for your brother, and not many boys will go against their mothers on that account.”

“He moved out of the house for her,” I told him. “That’s why he got this apartment.” I almost told him that they were getting engaged, that I heard them discussing plans, but it seemed wrong to speak for my brother. 

“You telling me they’re in love? That the way you see it?”

I nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me. “Laurel’s a grown girl,” he told me, “and she does what she wants, but that doesn’t mean I want her taken advantage of. Her mother is gone. It’s just her and me now, so it’s my job to look out for her, just like your mother looks out for you boys. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Good.” He sat down next to me on the couch and picked up the Playboy. Some of the little sticks fell onto his lap, and he brushed them onto the floor. He started turning pages. Legs, breasts, buttocks--the images flashed in my direction.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Wait for your brother,” he told me. “See what he has to say for himself.”

He read the magazine for some time. When he was done, he picked up another. After a while he seemed to forget I was there, sitting next to him.

I thought about how much trouble I was in, how he could have the cops on the scene in ten minutes. Laurel’s father didn’t like me--didn’t like my brother, this apartment, none of it--and it was because my mother had talked down to him, I knew. My mother always talked down to people she considered her “lessers”--waiters, workmen, clerks. There was a certain tone of voice she used, prim and proper, like a teacher with grade schoolers. Some people need to be put in their place, she liked to say.

Even then, I admired her for how neatly she’d arranged it. A single phone call, and this man had appeared at my brother’s door, doing her bidding. She nearly always got what she wanted where my brother and I were concerned. She knew what was best, even if we didn’t; that’s what she always told us.
 
 

An hour passed. The afternoon sun started to glare against the window. Mr. Armington checked his watch a few times. His stomach grumbled, but he stayed put. I tried to imagine some way to warn my brother. I went to the window and looked out, hoping to see him coming up the stairs or parking his car in the driveway. Then I thought he might recognize Laurel’s father’s car--parked out on the street--and realize something was wrong.

But he came up the exterior staircase and through the door unaware, he and Laurel smiling and holding each other’s hand. She looked toward us, and I watched her expression change. “Daddy,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

My brother said, “What’s going on?” He stopped talking when he saw the baggie on the coffee table. Laurel’s father followed his gaze. He raised the baggie and some leaves fell to the floor, so he turned it over, emptying the rest. The pile collected at his feet. “Did you know these boys are potheads?” he said. “Just like the last son of a bitch you brought home?”

“That’s not true,” said Laurel, and she turned to Albert.

He said, “My brother doesn’t do drugs, and neither do I. That’s just some stuff we found in the dresser.”

“That’s a lie,” said Laurel’s father, “just like the tales you’ve been telling my daughter. You and your pothead brother are a pair of liars.”

“Mr. Armington, this has nothing to do with my brother.”

“That’s true. That’s the first true thing I heard today.” He got off the couch and stepped in front of Albert.

Laurel said, “Daddy, don’t--”

But he held up his hand, silencing her. He said to my brother, “Your mother tells me you wouldn’t marry my daughter in a million years. She said my daughter is your plaything. That’s the word she used. Plaything.”

I watched the confidence drain from Albert’s face. “You talked to my mother?” he said, stumbling over the words. 

“She called me, yes she did. At seven o’clock this morning.”

“Oh, fuck her. Fuck her,” said Laurel. Her features contorted with rage. “Albert, don’t you see? She’s trying to fuck us up?”

Mr. Armington kept his eyes fixed on my brother. “No father likes to hear that said about his daughter. Now tell me, boy. Is my daughter your plaything?”

“That’s just my mother talking.”

“Daddy, whatever that bitch told you--I’m sorry, Albert, but she is, she’s a bitch. Whatever she told you, Daddy, it’s not true.”

“I’ll let this boy tell me what’s true and what’s not. He can settle this right now.”

My brother was seven or eight inches taller, but he looked like a skinny kid in his tie-dyed T-shirt--stooped, his hands in his pockets--standing next to Laurel’s father. 

“I want to know your intentions,” said Mr. Armington.

My brother opened his mouth, but the words didn’t come out.

“Tell him, Albert,” said Laurel. “Tell him we’re getting engaged.”

My brother wiped his mouth. “Laurel,” he said.

“This’ll be where we live, this apartment. Tell him.”

“It’s not that simple,” said my brother.

“Oh yes, it is,” said Mr. Armington. “It’s a goddamn yes or no question, and I don’t hear you saying yes.”

My brother said, “Look. This is my apartment. You can’t come in here and force me--” Then he stopped himself.

“That’s not what I want to hear,” said Laurel’s father.

I stepped forward and said, “You’re making a mistake, Mr. Armington. You’re doing just what my mother wants--”

“You stay out of it,” he said, keeping his eyes on Albert. “This isn’t your affair.”

“Please, Albert. Please say something.”

“That’s enough, Laurel,” said her father. “Don’t beg. Don’t ever beg.” He took her by the arm and pulled her gently toward the doorway.

She said, “No, Daddy, I want to stay,” but her words had nothing behind them and the rage was gone from her face.

“Come on,” said her father. “He’s not marriage material.”

She turned toward Albert before going out the door, and her eyes welled tears. She didn’t wipe them away, just let them stream down her cheeks. I ran out onto the landing, watching her go. They walked down the stairs, Laurel leaning against her father, and turned onto the driveway, heading toward the street.

“She’s leaving,” I told Albert. “Aren’t you going after her?”

My brother sat down at the card table. He said, “Shut up.”

“Look, Albert. I’m sorry. He barged in--”

“I don’t care. Just shut up for a minute.” He drummed his fingers against the card table. It didn’t sound like music, just nervous tapping.

“But he might call the cops. We gotta get rid of this stuff.” 

I got down on my hands and knees next to the coffee table and scooped the marijuana into the baggie, getting every last leaf and stick. Then I flushed the contents down the toilet. I knew Laurel’s father wouldn’t call the police. I just wanted to appear to be doing something useful.

I went over to the window and looked out. The sun was red along the horizon, half obscured. It was mid-autumn, the best time of the year to live in Connecticut. The trees colored Avon Mountain--brown, red, orange, yellow, violet, purple, beige--and shades of those colors that had no name. People came from all over to see the foliage, to see something without a name--something beautiful, coloring the mountains like paint. It doesn’t last long, a brief couple of weeks, no more.

The worst time would come later, as the chill of December settled upon us. Albert would lose the apartment and move back home. He would go around the house for weeks, his head low, losing weight. He’s moping, my mother told me, but it’ll pass. Even then, in the midst of his sorrow, I envied him for what he’d had--those afternoons under the sloping ceilings with Laurel, the sun streaming onto the bedsheets, something I wished for. She was my brother’s girlfriend, but I felt that she belonged to me too.

That day, as darkness fell, Albert sat drumming his fingers on the card table, and after a while it started to sound like music. Some lament, I imagined. Something sad and hopeless, from centuries past.

Footsteps sounded on the exterior staircase. Softly, at first, then unmistakably. Someone was coming. Albert glanced at me, then jumped up from the card table. I went over and joined him. We stood side by side, waiting for the door to open, waiting for her to rush into my brother’s arms.

Instead The Hindu walked into the room. He stopped, startled to see us standing in his path. He nodded toward us, closing his dark eyes. Then he unlocked the door to his apartment and disappeared inside, a man returning to his lonely rooms.

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