Drown

The unnamed narrator of this story works as a deliveryman for a department store. He performs his deliveries with a co-worker named Wayne. The narrator opens the story by telling us that the first time he and Wayne try to deliver a Gold Crown pool table to a particular house, all the lights are on inside, but no one answers the door. While they attempt to be let in, the narrator has the feeling that someone is inside, laughing at them. Wayne grows increasingly agitated and the narrator remarks that Wayne is the one who takes his job too seriously. While Wayne continues to bang on the home’s windows, carefully walking around freshly-planted rosebushes, the narrator sarcastically remarks that he takes a more “philosophical approach”: he smokes and watches “a mama duck and her three ducklings scavenge the grassy bank and then float downstream like they’re on the same string” (121). He remarks that the scene is beautiful, but Wayne does not hear him because he is banging on the door with a staple gun.

The next day, Wayne picks up the narrator at nine in the showroom. The narrator already has their delivery route planned out. He intimates that he can surmise all of the unspoken details of every delivery that appear on his list: “If someone is just getting a fifty-two-inch card table delivered then you know they aren’t going to give you too much of a hassle but they also aren’t going to tip. Those are your Spotswood, Sayreville and Perth Amboy deliveries. The pool tables go north to the rich suburbs—Livingston, Ridgewood, Bedminster” (122).

He remarks that many of their affluent customers are a sight to behold. They are “Doctors, diplomats, surgeons, presidents of universities, ladies in slacks and silk tops who sport thin watches you could trade in for a car, who wear comfortable leather shoes” (122). Many of these customers prepare for his arrival by putting copies of The Washington Post down on the floor, but the narrator makes them pick them all up, threatening property damage as the probable result of them slipping on the paper. He remarks that this invocation of property damage “puts the chip-chop in their step” (122). The narrator’s favorite customers leave Wayne and himself alone until the bill has to be signed. Every now and then, they are offered water in paper cups. One lone customer, a dentist from Ghana, once gave them a six-pack of Heineken while they worked.

He intimates that the few customers who have to run errands while they are working have done so suspiciously and gingerly, after he jokes with them about stealing their things. Once they are gone, though, the narrator takes a break from his duties and explores the homes, pilfering small items such as cookies and razors. Marveling at the properties, some of which have twenty or thirty rooms, the narrator muses about how much loot it would take to fill such homes on the ride back to the warehouse. He intimates that if he is ever caught wandering, he never jumps, and that he instead tells the owner he was looking for the bathroom: a plausible excuse that always works for him.

The narrator takes us through more of his ritual. After the paperwork has been signed, he determines his next steps. If the customer has been good and tipped well, he leaves well enough alone. However, if the customer has been less than polite—perhaps yelling or letting children be rude to them—the narrator asks for the bathroom. Wayne will look the other way while the narrator is guided to the bathroom by either the homeowner or the maid. Once there, he steals bubble bath drops, throws wads of toilet paper in the toilet, or “[takes] a dump and [leaves] that for them” (123).

The narrator tells us that he and Wayne work well together, for the most part: Wayne is the driver and in charge of the money, while the narrator does the heavy lifting and handles the ill-tempered customers. Tonight, they are on their way to Lawrenceville and Wayne wants to talk about “Charlene, one of the showroom girls, the one with the blow-job lips” (124). The narrator confesses that he hasn’t wanted to talk about women since “the girlfriend” (124).

Wayne expresses his desire to have sex with Charlene, saying that he’d even like to do it on top of a Madison pool table. The narrator chastises him, saying, “Don’t you have a wife or something?” (124). Wayne reacts defensively, tacitly acknowledging that he does indeed have a wife, but that he’d still like to have sex with Charlene. The narrator reveals that Wayne has already cheated on his wife twice, and the narrator heard all about it and the aftermath. The first time, Wayne’s wife nearly kicked him out. The narrator quietly sides with Wayne’s wife, whom he deems “good people”, saying that neither of the women Wayne cheated with seemed worth it to him (124). However, he still entertains Wayne, asking if Charlene has given him any signals that she too is interested. Wayne says that she has given “signals like you wouldn’t believe” (124).

The narrator tells us that on the days there are no deliveries, the boss has Wayne and himself working at the showroom, “selling cards and poker chips and mankala boards” (125). On these days, Wayne flirts with the salesgirls and dusts shelves. The narrator remarks that Wayne is “a big goofy guy,” and that he can’t understand why the girls entertain him (125). On these days, the boss keeps the narrator in the front of the store, because he knows that the narrator will talk customers out of buying the cheaper, low-quality pool tables. The boss will only let the narrator assist on a sale if he needs a Spanish-speaker. While Wayne busies himself flirting, the narrator goes behind the cash register and steals, pocketing the money from sales. He reveals that it’s not rare for him to pilfer a hundred dollars, and that back when he was with his girlfriend, she’d pick him up and he’d buy her anything she wanted, including dresses, silver rings, and lingerie. Sometimes, he would spend all of his stolen money on her. Although she didn’t like that he was stealing, she acknowledged that they weren’t rich. Telling her she could have anything she wanted via the stolen money was the closest the narrator had ever felt to being rich.

Nowadays, however, the narrator takes the bus home and keeps his stolen money. He sits next to a three-hundred-pound “rock-and-roll chick who washes dishes at the Friendly’s,” and who tells him about the roaches that she kills with her water nozzle (125).

The second time they try to make the Gold Crown delivery, a woman inside the house lifts the curtain next to the door. The woman stares out at the narrator. Wayne is too busy knocking on the door to see her. The narrator says “Muñeca” to her, which means “doll” in English: “She’s black and unsmiling and then the curtain drops between us, a whisper on the glass”(126). She has on a t-shirt that says No Problem and the narrator thinks she looks more like the help than someone who owns the place. The narrator observes that she couldn’t be older than twenty, and that he pictured her thin, according to the thinness of her face: “We stared at each other for a second at the most, not enough for me to notice the shape of her ears or if her lips were chapped. I’ve fallen in love on less” (126). They leave the house and on the way back to the store, Wayne remarks that that customer is dead meat.

The narrator returns to filling in the details about his ex-girlfriend, whom he still refers to as “girlfriend.” He says that she still calls sometimes, but not often. She has a new boyfriend whom the narrator calls a zángano (English: jerk). He says, “Dan is his name and the way she says it, so painfully gringo, makes the corners of my eyes narrow” (126). He pictures Dan pulling the clothes and accessories that the narrator stole off of his ex-girlfriend’s body, and feels glad that he didn’t buy her those things with money that he actually earned through hard work. The last time he saw her in person, they were in Hoboken. She was with Dan already, but hadn’t yet told the narrator that. Dan had hurried across the street to avoid the narrator and his friends, who could sense the rage and desperation growing within the narrator: “A month before the zángano, I went to her house, a friend visiting a friend, and her parents asked me how business was, as if I balanced the books or something. Business is outstanding, I said” (127). Her father had then asked the narrator to help him mow his lawn and offered the narrator a job—a real one that he could build on. He told the narrator that working in utilities is nothing to be ashamed of.

After her parents went into the den to watch the Giants lose, she took the narrator into the bathroom. She put on makeup and told the narrator that she’d be famous if she had his eyelashes. She told him that she still loved him, and he felt embarrassed for both of them, in a similar manner to how he felt embarrassed for people who made themselves vulnerable and aired their dirty laundry on talk shows. They then had sex in the bathtub as she repeatedly insisted that she still loved him.

The narrator tells us that, each payday, he calculates how long it would take him to buy a premium pool table and all its accoutrements without stealing. He figures that it’d take him two and a half years, if he gives up buying underwear and only eats pasta. 

He remarks that most people don’t appreciate or understand how sophisticated pool tables are. While they do have bolts and nails, they’re held together mostly through precision craftsmanship and gravity. He likens them to cathedrals, Incan roads in the Andes whose cobblestones remain airtight to this day, and the sewers that the Romans built in Bath—the last of which were so good that they didn’t have to be replaced until the 1950s. He remarks that he can put together one of these pool tables with his eyes closed, and that he likes to build them without Wayne’s help, if time allows. It’s better when the customers leave them alone, and then come to marvel at the beauty of the finished product.

Here, the narration returns back to an in medias res format. The narrator tells us that the boss became very irate over the men’s failure to deliver the Gold Crown:“The customer, an asshole named Pruitt, called up crazy, said we were delinquent. That’s how the boss put it. Delinquent. We knew that’s what the customer called us because the boss doesn’t use words like that” (129). Although the narrator insists that he and Wayne did their best to gain entry to the home, their boss will not have it, and calls them “fuckos” and “butthogs” (129). He tears into them for two minutes and then dismisses them.

The narrator, believing himself fired, spends the night drinking and fantasizing about seeing Pruitt out with the black woman he saw in the window “while [he] and his boys [are] cranked” (129). However, Wayne comes by the next morning with the Gold Crown again. They are being tasked with one more attempt at delivery, with no overtime pay. They both have hangovers. They arrive and hammer on the front door for ten minutes. When no on answers the narrator plays with the windows and the back door and swears that he hears the woman behind the patio door. The narrator then calls the boss, who calls the house. When no one answers, he tells the narrator and Wayne to complete the delivery of other items. That night, they receive a call from Pruitt. Instead of calling the two men delinquents, he asks the men to return again. He promises that his maid is sure to let them in.

While they are on their way back to deliver the Gold Crown, the narrator and Wayne muse about Pruitt’s name. Although the order form only shows his first initial—“C”—they conjecture that his first name is Clarence: “Most of our customers have names like this, court case names: Wooley, Maynard, Gass, Binder, but the people from my town, our names, you see on convicts or coupled together on boxing cards” (130). They take their time getting to the house, spending an hour at a diner and spending all the money that they have. Wayne talks about Charlene while the narrator leans his head against the glass.

When they arrive at Pruitt’s home, the narrator observes that it is in a newly-constructed neighborhood. Many of the surrounding homes are new or under construction. They get to the door and announce themselves, skeptical because they see no car in the garage. The black woman whom the narrator has previously seen opens the door: “She stands in our way, wearing black shorts and a gloss of red on her lips and I’m sweating” (131). She tells them to come in in Spanish, and the narrator asks her if she remembers him. She says no. Incredulous, the narrator demands to know if she heard them the other day. She just shrugs.

The narrator switches to a reverie/flashback. He tells us that he and Wayne have had their share of delivery trouble: “Trucks break down. Customers move and leave us with an empty house. Handguns get pointed. Slate gets dropped, a rail goes missing. The felt is the wrong color, the Dufferins get left in the warehouse” (131). He intimates that he and his ex-girlfriend used to make a game of these difficulties. He’d ask her what his days would be like in the mornings. She’d put her fingers up to her widow’s peak, and he’d observe the way that motion would shift her breasts and hair. He recounts that, no matter the season, they would never sleep under the covers. She’d say, “I see an asshole customer…unbearable traffic. Wayne’s going to work slow. And then you’ll come home to me” (132). They would then kiss hungrily, “because [that was] how [they] loved each other” (132). He recounts that that game was a part of their morning routine—a game which they only stopped playing once things started to sour between them, and he’d listen to traffic before waking her and everything started turning into a fight.

Back in the main timeline, the woman who has let the two men into the house stays in the kitchen, humming, while the narrator and Wayne work. The narrator walks into the kitchen and begins talking to her. He asks her where she is from, and she says that she is from Washington Heights. He asks her if she is a Dominicana, using the colloquial term “Quisqueyana”, which means Dominican woman. She nods. He tells her that he is also Dominican. She explains that she didn’t open the door because she wanted to piss Pruitt off. She tells him that she’ll pay him for a ride—she wants out of the house and her job. He tells her that she should have her boss bring her home, but she stares at him blankly, so he switches back to Spanish. She calls her boss a pendejo. The narrator observes that she is exactly his height, smells of liquid detergent, and has “tiny beautiful moles on her neck, an archipelago leading down into her clothes” (133).

In her room, he sees Spanish-language magazines thrown on the floor, four hangers-worth of clothes, and a dresser with only one drawer occupied by clothes. Pruitt has photographs of himself in cities all over the world in his room. The narrator sees that Pruitt is a bachelor. The narrator finds an open box of Trojan condoms in his dresser, puts one condom in his pocket, and sticks the rest under his bed. When the narrator goes back to the woman’s room, she remarks that Pruitt likes clothes. The narrator wants to say that that is a habit of money, but he can’t settle on the correct Spanish translation of the phrase, so he just agrees with her. She holds up her purse and tells him that she has everything he needs. He encourages her to bring some of her things, but she responds by saying that she doesn’t care, and that she just wants to leave.

When they are back downstairs, Wayne tells the narrator that the narrator cannot drive the woman back home—they have work to do. The narrator looks out one of the windows. He sees freshly-planted ginkgo plants next to the driveway. He intimates that he learned something about ginkgoes while he was in college: “Living fossils. Unchanged since their inception millions of years ago” (135). He asks Wayne if he slept with Charlene, and Wayne confirms that he has. The narrator then takes the truck keys out of the toolbox and promises to be right back.

The narrator returns to a reverie about his ex-girlfriend. He tells us that his mother still has pictures of her in her apartment. He details each of the snapshots, saying that his ex-girlfriend is the kind of person who never looks bad. He details one picture in particular. They are in Florida, and are in their bathing suits and the narrator’s ex has her knees folded up in front of her because she knew he’d be sending the photograph to his mother and she didn’t want his mother to think her a whore. In the photograph, the narrator smiles and holds her. Although his mother won’t look at the pictures or talk about her when he visits, his sister tells her that she still cries about the breakup and dreams that they are still together.

Back in the main timeline, the narrator and the woman reach the Washington Bridge without saying a word. She’s cleared out Pruitt’s cabinets and the spoils lay at her feet. She eats corn chips. The narrator is too nervous to join in. She asks him if their current route is the best way, and he answers that it is the shortest. She remarks that that is what Pruitt said when she arrived last year—she wanted to see the countryside, although there was too much rain for her to be able to do that anyway. The narrator, tempted to ask her if she loves her boss, asks her how she likes the States instead. She answers that she’s not surprised by any of it. When he asks her if she’s from the Capital and she says no, he tells her that he was born in Villa Juana. She merely nods and looks out the window. The narrator then drops his hand into her lap, palm up, with his fingers curled: “Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work” (137). She turns her head away slowly, rejecting his advance.

The narrator intimates that everything in Washington Heights is Dominican. If he were to park the truck and get out, no one would take him for the deliveryman. They’d assume he was a local: “I could be the guy who’s on the street corner selling Dominican flags. I could be on my way home to my girl. Everybody’s on the streets and the merengue’s falling out of windows like TVs” (137). He then drops the woman off and tells her to take care of herself.

As a result of his indiscretion, the narrator is almost fired. But because Wayne has convinced the boss to give the narrator a second chance, he finds himself back on the job, albeit on probation, painting the warehouse. When Wayne asks him if it was worth it, the narrator says that it wasn’t, and then lies, saying that he slept with the woman. He asks Wayne how things are going with Charlene, and when Wayne expresses doubt, the narrator pictures Wayne being kicked out by his wife.

A week later, the narrator and Wayne are back on a delivery route. The narrator has kept a copy of Pruitt’s records. When he can no longer resist his curiosity, he calls Pruitt’s home. The first time, while he and Wayne are delivering to a house in Long Island, he gets the answering machine. He and Wayne smoke a joint on the beach and the narrator throws a dead horseshoe crab into the customer’s garage. The narrator calls twice more, and Pruitt picks up each time. On the fourth call, the woman answers the phone, and the sink is running. She turns it off, and the narrator says nothing.

Wayne asks the narrator if she was there. The narrator says she was. Wayne tells him not to get angry. When the narrator responds that he is only tired, Wayne remarks that tired is the best way to be. Wayne hands the narrator a map and the narrator traces their route with his finger, saying that it looks like they are done for the day. Wayne asks him what city will be first tomorrow. Although the narrator won’t really know until they’ve gotten the paperwork, he makes guesses anyway. He calls this one of their games—it passes the time and gives them something to look forward to. The narrator remarks that although there are so many towns and cities to choose from, he has been right in his guess many times. He intimates that usually the name will come to him fast, like “the way that numbered balls pop out during lottery drawings” (140). Although there is no magic this time, the narrator sees that Wayne is still waiting. The narrator says: “Edison, I say, pressing my thumb down. Edison, New Jersey” (140).