Blast | April 21, 2023

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  Though the setting and situation of Carol Ghiglieri’s “Gilligan” are 100 percent contemporary, there’s a classic feel with the touch of dramatic irony at the center of this story about a couple whose lives and sympathy collide with a more prosperous neighbor’s.

Gilligan

Carol Ghiglieri

Gilligan lived a few blocks north of us on a quiet, tree-lined street in our Brooklyn neighborhood, occupying all four stories of a beautifully renovated brownstone. He made his living in high-end meat. Not a butcher—nothing as untidy as that—but a distributor, making sure that lovingly bred beef and pork found their way into fancy restaurants and upscale grocery stores. Judging by the four magnificently restored floors where Gilligan and his family led their lives, meat paid quite handsomely. “What goes around comes around,” Gilligan liked to say. “We do right by the animals, and they do right by us.” We suspected other income streams. Good investments, family money, neither of which we had. Anita, his wife, didn’t work.

To his face we called him Peter, but privately we referred to him by his last name, as if in doing so we could reduce him to the scrawny, bumbling character from the 1960s TV show. We wanted to take him down a peg or two.

Our kids went to school together, which is how we got to know Gilligan and Anita. Our five-year-old Daisy and their five-year-old Hope couldn’t get enough of each other, so playdates at their house or ours became routine. I usually preferred to have Hope over to our place because whenever Daisy came back from Gilligan’s grand, multilevel dwelling, she would comment obliquely on the lack of verticality in our snug two-bedroom floor-through. I probed her for feelings of inferiority, envy, or malice, but thankfully those emotions belonged solely to her parents. She was simply exercising her growing powers of observation: We had no upstairs, it was true. Nor did we have our own miniature golf course, which Gilligan had installed for Hope in their basement.

It wasn’t Gilligan’s possessions or success that irritated us so much as his smugness and aggressive good cheer. Throw him a perfunctory “How goes it?” and you’d never get back a simple “Fine” or “All right” or “Not too bad.” Gilligan was always “Fantastic!” “Stellar!” “Better than ever!” Or my husband Dan’s personal favorite, “So incredibly blessed.” We always ended up feeling diminished in his rose-colored, self-satisfied presence. And here I arrive at our real gripe with Gilligan back then, his habit of making us feel that his life was about six notches better than ours, that God (who neither Dan nor I explicitly believed in but couldn’t definitively count out either) was smiling more emphatically on him than on us, or on most everyone else, for that matter. When Gilligan said, “Blessed,” we heard a subtle accusation: I’m blessed, and you, my sorry friends, are not.

As a matter of fact, in our house we did not feel particularly blessed. Not that we felt cursed, exactly. We thought of ourselves as hovering somewhere in the middle, like most people whose lives hadn’t worked out according to plan. Dan’s acting career, which had once looked so promising, had totally stalled out. Gone were the parts in TV shows and the lucrative voice-over work. The medium-sized role in the well-reviewed off-Broadway play that had looked like the beginning of his skyward ascent turned out to be something else, a brief flare in the night sky that shone brightly, then quickly went dark. In recent years, he’d had a few mediocre roles, but now that we had Daisy, stability beckoned more insistently than it once had, and he finally broke down and took a job teaching acting, a move he found depressing.

Financially we kept well enough afloat. I brought in decent money as a bookkeeper for a small design firm; I had already abandoned my big dream years before. After high school I won a coveted spot in Juilliard’s ballet program, but things did not go well. I suffered recurring ankle injuries and was frequently in pain. I started smoking to stave off weight gain, no pound of which went unremarked by my teachers. Lots of people thrived in that intense, competitive atmosphere, but I wasn’t one of them. It slowly squeezed all the love out of my dancing, the only thing I’d ever really wanted to be good at. I dropped out after my second year.

Of course Dan and I didn’t sit around beating our breasts about all this; we were moderately happy—emphasis on moderately. We were pragmatists. We knew about compromise and limitations and falling short. We were adults. We were like most people, which is to say we were nothing like Gilligan.

***

One frigid day in early January, Hope came back to our place for a playdate after school, and at the appointed hour, her father rang the bell to collect her. Dan had been working on the computer in the bedroom, but when he heard Gilligan’s voice on the intercom, he padded out to the kitchen, unable to help himself.

Outside it was in the single digits, and Gilligan was well bundled in a down coat, thick wool scarf, and fur Cossack hat, his impeccably trim frame made puffy by his ensemble of pricey cold-weather gear. His assessment of the weather: “Exhilarating.”

“How’s the hotdog business?” Dan asked.

If Gilligan sensed Dan was being snide, he gave no hint of it. “Did you just say hotdogs?” He looked at me and guffawed. “Julie, I think we have a psychic in our midst!”

“Dan has many talents,” I said.

“It just so happens I’m handling a brand-new artisanal hotdog that’s just come to market this week. I’d say this is a very good omen.”

“What else could it be?” Dan said.

“These franks are truly something special. Everybody loves hotdogs, right? But what’s in ’em? That’s the rub. But if you knew your dog was made of the finest heritage beef, wouldn’t you pay a little more for it?”

“Heritage tube steaks, huh?”

“And here’s the real game-changer, Dan. These wieners are produced with entirely regenerative methods. That means they’re good for the ranchers, good for the land, the planet, good for everybody.”

“Well, everybody except the cows.”

“No, no, it’s good for them too!”

I went into Daisy’s room to round up Hope, and when I came out with the girls a few minutes later, Gilligan was still talking about his hotdogs, a topic about which he seemed genuinely ecstatic. But then, he generally seemed ecstatic about almost everything. Hearing the word hotdogs, Daisy and Hope both jumped up and down and declared they wanted hotdogs for dinner.

“No hotdogs in the house,” Dan informed Daisy with obvious delight. “We’re looking at heritage mac and cheese tonight, sweetie. Straight from the box.”

The next afternoon, a shipment arrived on our doorstep: two dozen packages of Gilligan’s special boutique wieners. The enclosed card informed us that the hotdogs would freeze “beautifully.” He urged us to “Enjoy!”

This act of generosity infuriated Dan. “Send them back! I don’t want those goddamn things in our refrigerator, I don’t care how good for the environment they are. That guy can’t be for real, can he? Does he not have any setting except upbeat? He must have some sinister side. Murdering kittens when he’s not out pushing dead livestock.”

Dan was in a particularly foul mood. He’d just found out that afternoon that he did not get the part in the off-off-Broadway play he’d thought he had a pretty good shot at. Not only that, but in the paper that morning, he’d read a review of a movie starring a one-time friend of his. The movie got panned, but at least the guy was working. What Dan wouldn’t have given to be ripped to shreds in the pages of the New York Times.

***

A few days later, before, I confess, I’d gotten around to calling Gilligan to thank him for his gift, we found out he’d landed in the hospital.

Dan heard it from a neighbor at a kid’s birthday party, and when he came back with Daisy, he brushed by me and whispered, “The kitten murderer got hit by a car.”

“What?” I shrieked.

“Apparently he was in a crosswalk on the Upper West Side, and wham.”

“Is he okay?”

Dan didn’t know. He said Lianne, the neighbor who gave him the info, was short on details.

“Did you even try to find out?”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Dan said. “It’s Gilligan! The guy is charmed. He’s probably closing a hotdog sale right now with the hospital cafeteria.”

I sat Daisy down in front of a video and called Lianne so I could properly interrogate her. But what Dan said was true: all Lianne knew was that Gilligan had been hit; she didn’t have specifics about his condition.

As it happened, Lianne did have the name of the hospital where Gilligan had been taken, so I called and found out he’d been admitted the same day he sent over the hotdogs. The person on the phone wouldn’t tell me much more than that.

All the unkind things I’d said and thought about Gilligan came rushing back to shame me. I felt vaguely culpable, implicated in his bad luck. “We have to go see him,” I said to Dan.

He was cueing up a basketball game on TV and acted as if he hadn’t heard me.

“We have to bring him something—flowers, or, I don’t know, a cake.”

“Why would we do that?”

“He lives in the neighborhood. Our kids are best friends. And despite the fact that we can’t stand him, he’s been unfailingly nice to us. Don’t you think we owe him something?”

“I just spent two hours in an apartment full of five-year-olds and a bunch of stressed-out parents, several of whom were knocking back glasses of Chablis at eleven in the morning. At this point, I don’t think I owe anybody anything, least of all Gilligan. We didn’t run him down.”

Maybe Dan was right. Maybe I was overcompensating. We may have found Gilligan annoying; he may have loomed large in our collective psyche, but we never actually wished him harm. This unfortunate turn of events had nothing to do with us.

Even so, the next day I called Anita. Anita was basically the opposite of her husband. Introverted, reserved, unwilling or maybe even constitutionally unable to engage in small talk, which seemed to physically pain her. I could imagine the appeal someone like Gilligan had for her, at least in the beginning, his brash confidence and bright, garrulous disposition a counterweight to her own taciturn nature.

She didn’t pick up, so I left a voice mail. I told her we were sorry to hear about Peter’s accident and that we’d be happy to watch Hope over at our place any time. I don’t know if I was expecting her to call back, but she didn’t. We weren’t close, and she surely had plenty of other offers of help.

I let a few weeks go by and tried her again, and this time I reached her. By now Gilligan was back home recuperating. A fractured femur, Anita said, was the worst of his injuries. The break had been pretty bad, and they’d had to insert a metal rod inside the bone. He would be on crutches for two or three months, and it might be six or eight before he was fully recovered.

I told her we wanted to come for a visit when Peter felt up to it.

“Oh, I’m sure he’d love that. He thinks your husband Dan is hysterical. I know a visit would really cheer him up.”

I was shocked and relieved to learn that Gilligan had interpreted all Dan’s spiteful digs as jovial, good-natured ribbing. Anita and I set a date for the following Saturday, news I withheld from Dan until the last possible moment. Friday night over dinner, when we were making plans for the weekend, I told Daisy that tomorrow afternoon we were going to visit Hope. I said we were all going, Daddy too. Dan’s glance veered sharply from Daisy to me, and I smiled in a way that let him know there was no getting out of it.

The next afternoon, when Anita greeted us at the door, she told Daisy that Hope was up in her room, and hearing this, Daisy wriggled out of her jacket and snow boots and bolted up the staircase. I stood holding a lemon cake I’d baked that morning, unsure what to do with it. Anita led Dan and me into the living room.

“Welcome to the orthopedic ward,” Gilligan said mirthlessly. He was sprawled, semi-reclined, on their upholstered sofa, his broken leg immobilized by a complicated-looking brace. There was a bed in the corner and a pair of crutches, which did give the room a hospital feel. He hoisted himself up on the sofa, and as he did, he jostled his injured leg and screamed in pain. Without quite looking at us, he muttered, “Getting hit by a car. I don’t recommend it. My whole body hurts like a motherfucker. Pardon my French.”

Dan and I winced. I smiled dimly at Anita and handed her the cake.

“Oh, this looks delicious. Would everyone like some coffee?”

“That sounds great,” Dan said.

Alone with Gilligan, Dan and I poured forth our condolences. “And you were in the crosswalk, for Christ’s sake!” Dan said. “With the light! Jesus, the recklessness! I sure hope they caught the guy.” He was going for commiseration and shared outrage.

“I never even saw the car coming, and honestly, I have no recollection of any of it.”

“Maybe it’s better that way,” I said. “So you don’t have to keep reliving the scene.”

He made no reply. He kept shifting on the sofa, fitfully adjusting the arrangement of his body, though no position seemed to do.

“How long a recovery are you in for, Pete?” Dan asked.

“Good question. The surgeon seems incapable of giving me a straight answer. If it takes a long time, it’ll be because I’m a slow healer. If things go quickly, it’ll be because he’s a miracle worker. He says inane things like, ‘It takes as long as it takes.’ And this is one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the city?”

“But you’re here,” I said. “And you’re okay! I mean, good grief, you got hit by car! It could have been so much worse, right?”

Surely I was on Gilligan’s wavelength now, looking on the bright side, which had always seemed not just his preferred side but the only one he cared to acknowledge. But now he just smiled icily; I hadn’t even known he was capable of an expression like that.

“Right,” said Dan. “You get to camp out in the living room, read novels, watch movies, and have Anita and Hope at your beck and call. I’d milk it for all it was worth.” He laughed, I laughed. We were working as hard as we could, trying to out-Gilligan Gilligan, to locate silver linings under the sofa cushions and behind the drapes, as if his gloominess had created a vacuum that desperately needed filling.

At last Anita returned with the coffee and four small plates. She carved the cake into dainty slices and passed them around. Now we had a new topic of conversation: the cake’s subtle flavor and delicate crumb. I recited the recipe at length and then told a story about the first time I made it, for a brunch with Dan’s parents when we were first going out, and how the inside came out sludgy and raw. I could tell Dan had no recollection of this minor catastrophe, but he chimed in anyway, adding, “We almost called off the relationship.”

All the while Gilligan seemed to recede from our midst, fading into the sofa’s off-white upholstery, interjecting a word or two when prodded, while the rest of us did our best to keep the conversation going. At no point during our visit did the man on the sofa bear any resemblance to our genial, self-regarding neighbor, the guy we loved to hate.

As soon as enough time had passed, Dan and I looked at each other and stood up to go. We offered to take Hope back to our place for a sleepover, and this idea was a hit with Anita, who looked like she could use a break. Living with Gilligan in this new incarnation seemed to be wearing her down.

With the girls in tow, we trudged the three blocks back to our place, past piles of dirty snow lining the sidewalks, navigating the street corners that had devolved into treacherous pools of slush.

Once the girls had been given a snack and let loose in Daisy’s room, Dan and I sat down and dug into the inevitable topic before us.

“My God,” I said.

“I never thought I’d say this, but poor Gilligan. The pain must be something awful. If it were me, you’d have to plug me in to a morphine drip, twenty-four seven.”

“But it’s been almost five weeks.”

“Yeah, but it was a bad break. Requiring hardware. I don’t think you bounce right back after something like that.”

“I guess not. But he just seemed so shattered.”

We looked out the window at the quickly fading light on our street. We both knew there had been accidents like Gilligan’s right here in our own idyllic neighborhood. People got knocked down daily all over the city—kids, cyclists, people like us, and not all of them fared as well as Gilligan had.

Dan took my hand. “Be careful out there.”

I nodded. “You too.”

***

Gilligan’s accident had a strange effect on us, as if we ourselves had had a brush with death. Dan started going back out on more auditions. When he got passed over for a job, he took it philosophically or, failing that, convinced himself it was a crap part anyway, unsuited to his talents. That August he was cast in a good role on a TV show that went on to generate a fair amount of buzz. His part lasted three and a half seasons before he was written out. But the vicissitudes of an acting career no longer seemed to gall him so completely. Some days he even felt lucky.

And me? I did something I’d been unable to do for more than two decades. I bought a ticket and went to see a dance performance at Lincoln Center. I’d been avoiding that part of Manhattan—the entire west 60s—ever since I left Julliard. Trauma, self-loathing, call it what you want. It was the locus of my failure, the place I’d taken a running leap and fallen on my face. On one level, I’d long since moved on, yet in its own way, the whole thing still haunted me. But I was forty-two years old, old enough to look head-on at what I’d wanted to become but hadn’t. The performance was The Four Temperaments by Balanchine, danced by the Joffrey Ballet. The dancers were magnetic, witty, supple, gravity defying, young. I was no longer any of those things, if I’d ever been them at all. How long does it take to get over your life’s one great disappointment? It takes as long as it takes, as Gilligan’s sagacious surgeon might have told me.

***

We heard nothing more about Gilligan until the end of June. Shortly after we’d gone to see him, Hope and another girl became newly inseparable and Daisy was cast off, left to navigate the wilds of kindergarten on her own. But there was a little graduation ceremony at the end of the school year, and it was there that I saw Anita. I put my arms around her, remembering too late that she wasn’t a hugger.

“How’s Peter?” I asked.

A strange expression flickered across her face, and I braced myself for the worst, but in fact she said he was doing well.

“His leg is as good as new. His surgeon was astounded by how fast he healed for an old guy in his forties. Apparently the bone knit together flawlessly. He’s been off crutches for about six weeks. No limp, and he’s talking about going for a run in the park.”

That night I passed this update along to Dan, and we shared a moment of satisfaction, as though the earth, briefly off kilter, had righted itself. Was it really surprising that Gilligan’s bones healed faster and better than everybody else’s?

“I’m genuinely glad old Gilligan has been restored to his former obnoxious self,” Dan said. “Who doesn’t like a happy ending?”

But that wasn’t quite the end. We saw him one more time, nearly a year later, the following spring. We were sitting on a bench in front of a neighborhood shop, sipping coffee, and Dan spotted him coming down the street. I don’t think I would have recognized him. He looked older, grayer, altered in a way that was hard to define. He walked right by us, and it was unclear whether or not he’d seen us. Neither Dan nor I made a move or called out to him. We watched as he stopped at the corner, waiting for the light to change. When it did, he turned his head to the left and then the right, once, twice, three times, before slowly venturing into the crosswalk.

“Do you suppose,” Dan said after a minute, “there was always another aspect of him, wounded and brittle, but we just never saw it?”

Maybe so. But it seemed to me that Gilligan was burdened now with a devastating awareness, the knowledge that he was mortal, vulnerable, just like all the rest of us.

***

 

Carol Ghiglieri lives in Brooklyn in a nonfictional neighborhood not unlike the fictional one in this story. Her short stories have appeared in Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, the Literary Review, and elsewhere. She’s currently at work on a novel.