ONCE our father bought a convertible. Don’t ask me. I was five. He bought it and drove it home as casually as he’d bring a gallon of rocky road. Picture our mother’s surprise. She kept rubber bands on the doorknobs. She washed old plastic bags and hung them on the line to dry, a string of thrifty tame jellyfish floating in the sun. Imagine her scrubbing the cheese smell out of a plastic bag on its third or fourth go-round when our father pulls up in a Chevy convertible, used but nevertheless—a moving metal landscape, chrome bumpers and what looks like acres of molded silver car-flesh. He saw it parked downtown with a For Sale sign and decided to be the kind of man who buys a car on a whim. We can see as he pulls up that the manic joy has started to fade for him. The car is already an embarrassment. He cruises into the driveway with a frozen smile that matches the Chevy’s grille.
Of course the car has to go. Our mother never sets foot. My older brother Carlton and I get taken for one drive. Carlton is ecstatic. I am skeptical. If our father would buy a car on a street corner, what else might he do? Who does this make him?
He takes us to the country. Roadside stands overflow with apples. Pumpkins shed their light on farmhouse lawns. Carlton, wild with excitement, stands up on the front seat and has to be pulled back down. I help. Our father grabs Carlton’s beaded cowboy belt on one side and I on the other. I enjoy this. I feel useful, helping to pull Carlton down.
We pass a big farm. Its outbuildings are anchored on a sea of swaying wheat, its white clapboard is molten in the late, hazy light. All three of us, even Carlton, keep quiet as we pass. There is something familiar about this place. Cows graze, autumn trees cast their long shade. I tell myself we are farmers, and also somehow rich enough to drive a convertible. The world is gaudy with possibilities. When I ride in a car at night, I believe the moon is following me.
“We’re home,” I shout as we pass the farm. I don’t know what I am saying. It’s the combined effects of wind and speed on my brain. But neither Carlton nor our father questions me. We pass through a living silence. I am certain at that moment that we share the same dream. I look up to see that the moon, white and socketed in a gas-blue sky, is in fact following us. It isn’t long before Carlton is standing up again, screaming into the rush of air, and our father and I are pulling him down, back into the sanctuary of that big car.
WE GATHERED at dusk on the darkening green. I was five. The air smelled of newly cut grass, and the sand traps were luminous. My father carried me on his shoulders. I was both pilot and captive of his enormity. My bare legs thrilled to the sandpaper of his cheeks, and I held on to his ears, great soft shells that buzzed minutely with hair.
My mother’s red lipstick and fingernails looked black in the dusk. She was pregnant, just beginning to show, and the crowd parted for her. We made our small camp on the second fairway, with two folding aluminum chairs. Multitudes had turned out for the celebration. Smoke from their portable barbecues sharpened the air. I settled myself on my father’s lap, and was given a sip of beer. My mother sat fanning herself with the Sunday funnies. Mosquitoes circled above us in the violet ether.
That Fourth of July the city of Cleveland had hired two famous Mexican brothers to set off fireworks over the municipal golf course. These brothers put on shows all over the world, at state and religious affairs. They came from deep in Mexico, where bread was baked in the shape of skulls and virgins, and fireworks were considered to be man’s highest form of artistic expression.
The show started before the first star announced itself. It began unspectacularly. The brothers were playing their audience, throwing out some easy ones: standard double and triple blossomings, spiral rockets, colored sprays that left drab orchids of colored smoke. Ordinary stuff. Then, following a pause, they began in earnest. A rocket shot straight up, pulling a thread of silver light in its wake, and at the top of its arc it bloomed purple, a blazing five-pronged lily, each petal of which burst out with a blossom of its own. The crowd cooed its appreciation. My father cupped my belly with one enormous brown hand, and asked if I was enjoying the show. I nodded. Below his throat, an outcropping of dark blond hairs struggled to escape through the collar of his madras shirt.
More of the lilies exploded, red yellow and mauve, their silver stems lingering beneath them. Then came the snakes, hissing orange fire, a dozen at a time, great lolloping curves that met, intertwined, and diverged, sizzling all the while. They were followed by huge soundless snowflakes, crystalline bodies of purest white, and those by a constellation in the shape of Miss Liberty, with blue eyes and ruby lips. Thousands gasped and applauded. I remember my father’s throat, speckled with dried blood, the stubbly skin loosely covering a huge knobbed mechanism that swallowed beer. When I whimpered at the occasional loud bang, or at a scattering of colored embers that seemed to be dropping directly onto our heads, he assured me we had nothing to fear. I could feel the rumble of his voice in my stomach and my legs. His lean arms, each lazily bisected by a single vein, held me firmly in place.
I want to talk about my father’s beauty. I know it’s not a usual subject for a man—when we talk about our fathers we are far more likely to tell tales of courage or titanic rage, even of tenderness. But I want to talk about my father’s frank, unadulterated beauty: the potent symmetry of his arms, blond and lithely muscled as if they’d been carved of raw ash; the easy, measured grace of his stride. He was a compact, physically dignified man; a dark-eyed theater owner quietly in love with the movies. My mother suffered headaches and fits of irony, but my father was always cheerful, always on his way somewhere, always certain that things would turn out all right.
When my father was away at work my mother and I were alone together. She invented indoor games for us to play, or enlisted my help in baking cookies. She disliked going out, especially in winter, because the cold gave her headaches. She was a New Orleans girl, small-boned and precise in her movements. She had married young. Sometimes she prevailed upon me to sit by the window with her, looking at the street, waiting for a moment when the frozen landscape might resolve itself into something ordinary she could trust as placidly as did the solid, rollicking Ohio mothers who piloted enormous cars loaded with groceries, babies, elderly relations. Station wagons rumbled down our street like decorated tanks celebrating victory in foreign wars.
“Jonathan,” she whispered. “Hey, boy-o. What are you thinking about?”
It was a favorite question of hers. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Tell me anything,” she said. “Tell me a story.”
I was aware of the need to speak. “Those boys are taking their sled to the river,” I told her, as two older neighborhood boys in plaid caps—boys I adored and feared—passed our house pulling a battered Flexible Flyer. “They’re going to slide it on the ice. But they have to be careful about holes. A little boy fell in and drowned.”
It wasn’t much of a story. It was the best I could manage on short notice.
“How did you know about that?” she asked.
I shrugged. I had thought I’d made it up. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish what had occurred from what might have occurred.
“Does that story scare you?” she said.
“No,” I told her. I imagined myself skimming over a vast expanse of ice, deftly avoiding the jagged holes into which other boys fell with sad, defeated little splashes.
“You’re safe here,” she said, stroking my hair. “Don’t you worry about a thing. We’re both perfectly safe and sound right here.”
I nodded, though I could hear the uncertainty in her voice. Her heavy-jawed, small-nosed face cupped the raw winter light that shot up off the icy street and ricocheted from room to room of our house, nicking the silver in the cabinet, setting the little prismed lamp abuzz.
“How about a funny story?” she said. “We could probably use one just about now.”
“Okay,” I said, though I knew no funny stories. Humor was a mystery to me—I could only narrate what I saw. Outside our window, Miss Heidegger, the old woman who lived next door, emerged from her house, dressed in a coat that appeared to be made of mouse pelts. She picked up a leaf of newspaper that had blown into her yard, and hobbled back inside. I knew from my parents’ private comments that Miss Heidegger was funny. She was funny in her insistence that her property be kept immaculate, and in her convictions about the Communists who operated the schools, the telephone company, and the Lutheran church. My father liked to say, in a warbling voice, “Those Communists have sent us another electric bill. Mark my words, they’re trying to force us out of our homes.” When he said something like that my mother always laughed, even at bill-paying time, when the fear was most plainly etched around her mouth and eyes.
That day, sitting by the window, I tried doing Miss Heidegger myself. In a high, quivering voice not wholly different from my actual voice I said, “Oh, those bad Communists have blown this newspaper right into my yard.” I got up and walked stiff-legged to the middle of the living room, where I picked up a copy of Time magazine from the coffee table and waggled it over my head.
“You Communists,” I croaked. “You stay away now. Stop trying to force us out of our homes.”
My mother laughed delightedly. “You are wicked,” she said.
I went to her, and she scratched my head affectionately. The light from the street brightened the gauze curtains, filled the deep blue candy dish on the side table. We were safe.
My father worked all day, came home for dinner, and went back to the theater at night. I do not to this day know what he did all those hours—as far as I can tell, the operation of a single, unprosperous movie theater does not require the owner’s presence from early morning until late at night. My father worked those hours, though, and neither my mother nor I questioned it. He was earning money, maintaining the house that protected us from the Cleveland winters. That was all we needed to know.
When my father came home for dinner, a frosty smell clung to his coat. He was big and inevitable as a tree. When he took off his coat, the fine hair on his forearms stood up electrically in the soft, warm air of the house.
My mother served the dinner she had made. My father patted her belly, which was by then round and solid as a basketball.
“Triplets,” he said. “We’re going to need a bigger house. Two bedrooms won’t do it, not by a long shot.”
“Let’s just worry about the oil bill,” she said.
“Another year,” he said. “A year from now, and we’ll be in a position to look at real estate.”
My father frequently alluded to a change in our position. If we arranged ourselves a certain way, the right things would happen. We had to be careful about how we stood, what we thought.
“We’ll see,” my mother said in a quiet tone.
He got up from the table and rubbed her shoulders. His hands covered her shoulders entirely. He could nearly have circled her neck with his thumb and middle finger.
“You just concentrate on the kid,” he said. “Just keep yourself healthy. I’ll take care of the rest.”
My mother submitted to his caresses, but took no pleasure in them. I could see it on her face. When my father was home she wore the same cautious look she brought to our surveys of the street. His presence made her nervous, as if some part of the outside had forced its way in.
My father waited for her to speak, to carry us along in the continuing conversation of our family life. She sat silent at the table, her shoulders tense under his ministrations.
“Well, I guess it’s time for me to get back to work,” he said at length. “So long, sport. Take care of the house.”
“Okay,” I said. He patted my back, and kissed me roughly on the cheek. My mother got up and started to wash the dishes. I sat watching my father as he hid his muscled arms in his coat sleeves and returned to the outside.
Later that night, after I’d been put to bed, while my mother sat downstairs watching television, I snuck into her room and tried her lipstick on my own lips. Even in the dark, I could tell that the effect was more clownish than alluring. Still, it revised my appearance. I made red spots on my cheeks with her rouge, and penciled black brows over my own pale blond ones.
I walked light-footed into the bathroom. Laughter and tinkling music drifted up through the stairwell. I put the bathroom stool in the place where my father stood shaving in the mornings, and got up on it so I could see myself in the mirror. The lips I had drawn were huge and shapeless, the spots of crimson rouge off-center. I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me. I would have to be careful about how I stood, what I thought. Slowly, mindful of the creaky hinge, I opened the medicine cabinet and took out my father’s striped can of Barbasol. I knew just what to do: shake the can with an impatient snapping motion, spray a mound of white lather onto my left palm, and apply it incautiously, in profligate smears, to my jaw and neck. Applying makeup required all the deliberation one might bring to defusing a bomb; shaving was a hasty and imprecise act that produced scarlet pinpoints of blood and left little gobbets of hair—dead as snakeskin—behind in the sink.
When I had lathered my face I looked long into the mirror, considering the effect. My blackened eyes glittered like spiders above the lush white froth. I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be a beauty.
My mother grew bigger and bigger. On a shopping trip I demanded and got a pink vinyl baby doll with thin magenta lips and cobalt eyes that closed, when the doll was laid flat, with the definitive click of miniature window frames. I suspect my parents discussed the doll. I suspect they decided it would help me cope with my feelings of exclusion. My mother taught me how to diaper it, and to bathe it in the kitchen sink. Even my father professed interest in the doll’s well-being. “How’s the kid?” he asked one evening just before dinner, as I lifted it stiff-limbed from its bath.
“Okay,” I said. Water leaked out of its joints. Its sulfur-colored hair, which sprouted from a grid of holes punched into its scalp, had taken on the smell of a wet sweater.
“Good baby,” my father said, and patted its firm rubber cheek with one big finger. I was thrilled. He loved the baby so.
“Yes,” I said, holding the lifeless thing in a thick white towel.
My father hunkered down on his huge hams, expelling a breeze spiced with his scent. “Jonathan?” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“You know boys don’t usually play with dolls, don’t you?”
“Well. Yes.”
“This is your baby,” he said, “and that’s fine for here at home. But if you show it to other boys they may not understand. So you’d better just play with it here. All right?”
“Okay.”
“Good.” He patted my arm. “Okay? Only play with it in the house, right?”
“Okay,” I answered. Standing small before him, holding the swaddled doll, I felt my first true humiliation. I recognized a deep inadequacy in myself, a foolishness. Of course I knew the baby was just a toy, and a slightly embarrassing one. A wrongful toy. How had I let myself drift into believing otherwise?
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Good. Listen, I’ve got to go. You take care of the house.”
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Mommy doesn’t want to have a baby,” I said.
“Sure she does.”
“No. She told me.”
“Jonathan, honey, Mommy and Daddy are both very happy about the baby. Aren’t you happy, too?”
“Mommy hates having this baby,” I said. “She told me. She said you want to have it, but she doesn’t want to.”
I looked into his gigantic face, and could see that I had made some sort of contact. His eyes brightened, and the delta of capillaries that spread over his nose and cheeks stood out in sharper, redder relief against his pale skin.
“It’s not true, sport,” he said. “Mommy sometimes says things she doesn’t mean. Believe me, she’s as happy about having the baby as you and I are.”
I said nothing.
“Hey, I’m late,” he said. “Trust me. You’ll have a little sister or brother, and we’re all going to be crazy about her. Or him. You’ll be a big brother. Everything’ll be great.”
After a moment he added, “Take care of things while I’m gone, okay?” He stroked my cheek with one spatulate thumb, and left.
That night I awoke to the sound of a whispered fight being conducted behind the door of their bedroom at the end of the hall. Their voices hissed. I lay waiting for—what? Soon I had fallen asleep again, and do not know to this day whether or not I dreamed the sound of the fight. It is still sometimes difficult to distinguish what happened from what might have happened.
When my mother delivered one evening in December I was left behind with Miss Heidegger, the neighbor woman. She was a milky-eyed, suspicious old soul who had worried her hair to a sparse gray frazzle through which the pink curve of her skull could be seen.
As I watched my parents drive away together Miss Heidegger stood behind me, smelling mildly of wilted rose perfume. When the car was out of sight I told her, “Mommy’s not really going to have the baby.”
“No?” she said pleasantly, having no idea how to talk to children when they began speaking strangely.
“She doesn’t want to,” I said.
“Oh, now, you’ll love the baby, dear,” Miss Heidegger said. “Just you wait. When Momma and Poppa bring it home, you’ll see. It’ll be the sweetest little thing you can imagine.”
“She doesn’t like having a baby,” I said. “We don’t want it.”
At this poor Miss Heidegger’s remaining blood rushed to her face, and she went with a sound like rustling tissue to the kitchen to see about dinner. She put together something limp and boiled, which I with my child’s devotion to bland food liked enormously.
My father telephoned from the hospital after midnight. Miss Heidegger and I reached the phone at the same moment. She answered and stood erect in her blue bathrobe, nodding her withered head. I could tell something was wrong from her eyes, which took on a thinness and brilliance like that of river ice just before it melts, when it is no more than the memory of ice lingering another moment or two over bright brown water.
The baby would be described to me as a canceled ticket, a cake taken too soon from the oven. Only as an adult would I piece together the true story of the snarled cord and ripped flesh. My mother had died for nearly a minute, and miraculously come back. Most of her womb had had to be scooped out. The baby, a girl, had lived long enough to bleat once at the fluorescent ceiling of the delivery room.
I suppose my father was in no condition to talk to me. He left that to Miss Heidegger, who put the telephone down and stood before me with an expression of terrified confusion like that with which I imagine we must greet death itself. I knew something dreadful had happened.
She said in a whisper, “Oh, those poor, poor people. Oh, you poor little boy.”
Although I did not know exactly what had happened, I knew this to be an occasion for grief. I tried feeling inconsolable, but in fact I was enlivened and rather pleased by the chance to act well in a bad situation.
“Now, don’t you worry, dear,” Miss Heidegger said. There was true horror in her voice, a moist gargling undertone. I tried leading her to a chair, and found to my astonishment that she obeyed me. I ran to the kitchen and got her a glass of water, which was what I believed one offered somebody in a state of emotional agitation.
“Don’t you worry, I’ll stay with you,” she said as I got a coaster for the glass and set it on the end table. She tried pulling me onto her lap but I had no interest in sitting there. I remained standing at her feet. She petted my hair and I stroked the thin, complicated bones of her flannel-covered knee.
She said helplessly, almost questioningly, “Oh, she was so healthy. She just looked perfectly fine.”
Emboldened, I took one of her brittle, powdery old hands in mine.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she said. “Don’t you worry now, I’m here.”
I continued standing at her feet, holding the bones of her hand. She smiled at me. Was there some aspect of pleasure in her smile? Probably not; I suspect I imagined it. I gently kneaded her hand. We stayed that way for quite a while, bowed and steadfast and vaguely satisfied, like a pair of spinsters who have learned to find solace in the world’s unfathomable grief.
My mother came back over a week later, reserved and rather shy. Both she and my father looked around the house as if it were new to them, as if they had been promised something grander. In my mother’s absence Miss Heidegger had instituted a smell of her own, compounded of that watery rose perfume and the odor of unfamiliar cooking. She squeezed my parents’ hands and left discreetly, hurriedly. She might have been told privately that at any moment the house would catch fire.
After she had gone my mother and father both kneeled down and held me. They surrounded me, all but buried me, with their flesh and their brisk, known smells.
My father wept. He had never before shed a single tear in my presence and now he cried extravagantly, great phlegmy sobs that caught in his throat with the clotted sound of a stopped pipe. Experimentally, I placed my hand on his forearm. He did not brush it off, or reprimand me. His pale hairs sprouted up raucously between my fingers.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, though I don’t believe he heard me over his keening. “It’s okay,” I said again, in full voice. He did not derive any visible comfort from my reassurances.
I glanced at my mother. She was not crying. Her face was drained not only of color but of expression as well. She might have been a vacant body, waiting dumbfounded to be infused with a human soul. But when she felt my eyes on her she managed, in a strong-limbed, somnambulistic fashion, to draw me to her breast. Her embrace caught me off guard, and I lost my hold on my father’s forearm. As my mother crushed my face into the folds of her coat I lost track of my father entirely. I felt myself being pulled down into the depths of my mother’s coat. It filled my nose and ears. The sound of my father’s laments grew muffled and remote as I was impelled deeper into my mother’s clothes, through the outer layer of cold toward the scented, familiar-smelling core. I resisted a moment, tried to return to my father, but she was too strong. I disappeared. I left my father, and gave myself over to my mother’s more ravenous sorrow.
Afterward she was more reluctant than ever to go outdoors. Sometimes in the mornings she took me into bed with her and kept me there, reading or watching television, until mid-afternoon. We played games, told stories. I believed I knew what we were doing together during those long, housebound days. We were practicing for a time when my father would no longer be with us; when it would be just we two.
To make my mother laugh I did imitations, although I no longer felt inclined to imitate Miss Heidegger. I settled into doing my mother herself, which sometimes made her screech with laughter. I would put on her scarves and hats, speak in my own version of her New Orleans accent, which I made half Southern and half Bronx. “What are you thinking?” I’d drawl. “Honey, tell me a story.”
She always laughed until her eyes shone with tears. “Sweetheart,” she would say, “you’re a natural. What do you say we put you on the stage, you can support your old mama in her dotage?”
When finally we got up she dressed hurriedly, and set about cooking and cleaning with the relentlessness of an artist.
My father no longer massaged her shoulders when he came home at night. He did not plant exaggerated, smacking kisses on her forehead or the tip of her nose. He couldn’t. A force field had grown up around her, transparent and solid as glass. I could see it go up when he came home, with the rampant smells of the outside world clinging to his coat. When the field was up my mother looked no different—her face remained clever and slightly feverish, her movements exact as a surgeon’s as she laid out the perfect dinner she had made—but she could not be touched. We knew it, both my father and I, with a visceral certainty that was all the more real for its inexplicability. My mother had powers. We ate our dinner (her cooking got better and better, she hit ever more elaborate heights), talked of usual things, and my father kissed the air in our vicinity as he readied himself to return to the outside.
One night in late spring, I was awakened by the sound of a proper fight. My parents were downstairs. Even in rage they kept their voices down, so that only an occasional word or phrase worked its way up to my room. The effect was like that of two people screaming inside a heavy sack. I heard my father say, “ pun ishment,” and, nearly a full minute later, my mother answer, “what you want…something… sel fish.”
I lay in the dark, listening. Presently I heard footsteps—my father’s—mounting the stairs. I believed he would come into my room, and I feigned elaborate, angelic sleep, my head centered on the pillow and my lips slightly parted. But my father did not come to me. He went instead to the room he shared with my mother. I heard him go in, and heard nothing more.
Minutes passed. My mother did not follow him. The house was silent, filled with a gelid, wintery hush even as lilac and dogwood leaves brushed darkly against the windowpanes. I lay carefully in my own bed, uncertain of what was expected and what allowed on a night like this. I thought I would just go back to sleep, but that refused to happen.
Finally, I got out of bed and walked down the hall to my parents’ room. The door stood ajar. Light from their bedside lamp—a pink-gold light tinted by the parchment shade—hung with a certain weight in the semidarkness of the hall. From the kitchen my mother could be heard shelling pecans, a series of sharp, musical cracks.
My father lay diagonally across the double bed, in an attitude of refined, almost demure, abandon. His face was turned toward the wall on which a blue-and-green Paris street, unpeopled, hung in a silver frame. One of his arms was draped over the edge of the mattress, the large fingers dangling extravagantly. His rib cage rose and fell with the steady rhythm of sleep.
I stood in the doorway for a while, contemplating my position. I had expected him to hear me, to look up and commence worrying over the fact that I had been disturbed. When he maintained his posture on the bed I stepped quietly into the room. It was time for me to speak but I could not think of what to say. I had thought my simple presence would cause a next thing to happen. I looked around the room. There were the twin bureaus, with my mother’s makeup and perfumes arranged on a mother-of-pearl tray. There was the oak-framed mirror, displaying a rectangle of flowered wallpaper from the opposite wall. Empty-handed, without an offering, I crept to the bed and cautiously touched my father’s elbow.
He lifted his head and looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me; as if we had met once, long ago, and now he was trying to summon up my name. His face nearly stopped my heart. For a moment it seemed he had left us after all; his fatherly aspect had withdrawn and in its place was only a man, big as a car but blank and unscrupled as an infant, capable of anything. I stood in the sudden glare of his new strangeness, shyly smiling in yellow pajamas.
Then he brought himself back. He reoccupied his face and laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered. “What are you doing up?”
I shrugged. Even today, as an adult, I can’t remember a time when I did not pause and consider before telling the truth.
He could have picked me up and taken me onto the bed with him. That gesture might have rescued us both, at least for the time being. I ached for it. I’d have given everything I imagined owning, in my greediest fantasies, to have been pulled into bed with him and held, as he’d held me while the sky exploded over our heads on the Fourth of July. But he must have been embarrassed at having been caught fighting. Now he was a man who had awakened his child by yelling at his wife, and had then flung himself across the bed like a heartbroken teenage girl. He could become other things, but he would always be that as well.
“Go back to sleep,” he said, in a voice gruffer than he may have intended it to be. I believe he hoped the situation could still be undone. If he acted forcefully enough, we could jump back in time and restitch the fabric of my sleep. I would wake in the morning with nothing more than dimly recollected dreams.
I refused. I would settle for nothing less than consoling him. My father ordered me back to bed and I grew balky and petulant. I hovered at the edge of tears, which strained his patience. I wanted him to require my presence. I needed to know that by my kindness and perseverance I was victorious in the long contest for his love.
“Jonathan,” he said. “Jonathan, come on.”
I let myself be taken back to my room. I had no options. He picked me up and for the first time I did not exult in his touch or his spicy smell, the broad curving shine of his forehead. At that moment I came to know my mother’s reticence, her delicate-boned sense of remove. I had practiced imitating her and now, in a rush, I could do nothing else. If my father rubbed my weary shoulders I would tense up; if he stomped in from the snow I would think nervously of the collapse of my spinach soufflé.
He put me into bed tenderly enough. He pulled the covers over me, told me to get some shut-eye. He did not act badly. Still, in a fury, I slipped out of bed and ran across the room to my toy chest. Unfamiliar feelings racketed in my ears, made me light-headed. “Jonathan,” my father said sharply. He started after me, but I was too quick for him. I dug to the bottom of the chest, knowing just where to reach. I pulled the doll out by her slick rubber leg and held her roughly in my arms.
He hesitated, half standing over my miniature bed. On my headboard, a cartoon rabbit danced ecstatically on a field of four-petaled pink flowers.
“This is mine,” I said, in a nearly hysterical tone of insistence. The floor of my bedroom felt unsteady beneath my feet, and I clung to the doll as if it alone could keep me from losing my balance and slipping away.
My father shook his head. For the single time in my recollection, his kindness failed. He had wanted so much, and the world was shrinking. His wife shunned him, his business was not a success, and his only son—there would be no others—loved dolls and quiet indoor games.
“Jesus Christ, Jonathan,” he hollered. “Jesus H. Christ. What in the hell is the matter with you? What ?”
I stood dumb. I had no answer to that question, although I knew one was expected.
“This is mine” was all I could offer by way of an answer. I held the doll so close to my chest her stiff eyelashes gouged me through my pajamas.
“Fine,” he said more quietly, in a defeated tone. “Fine. It’s yours.” And he left.
I heard him go downstairs, get his jacket from the hall closet. I heard my mother fail to speak from the kitchen. I heard him close the front door, with a caution and deliberateness that implied finality.
He would return in the morning, having slept on the couch in his office at the theater. After an awkward period we would resume our normal family life, find our cheerfulness again. My father and mother would invent a cordial, joking relationship that involved neither kisses nor fights. They would commence living together with the easy, chaste familiarity of grown siblings. He would ask me no more unanswerable questions, though his singular question would continue crackling in the back of my head like a faulty electrical connection. My mother’s cooking would become renowned. In 1968, our family would be photographed for the Sunday supplement of the Cleveland Post: my mother cutting into a shrimp casserole while my father and I looked on, proud, expectant, and perfectly dressed.
WE LIVED then in Cleveland, in the middle of everything. It was the sixties—our radios sang out love all day long. This of course is history. It happened before the city of Cleveland went broke, before its river caught fire. We were four. My mother and father, Carlton, and me. Carlton turned sixteen the year I turned nine. Between us were several brothers and sisters, weak flames quenched in our mother’s womb. We are not a fruitful or many-branched line. Our family name is Morrow.
Our father was a high school music teacher. Our mother taught children called “exceptional,” which meant that some could name the day Christmas would fall in the year 2000 but couldn’t remember to drop their pants when they peed. We lived in a tract called Woodlawn—neat one- and two-story houses painted optimistic colors. Our tract bordered a cemetery. Behind our back yard was a gully choked with brush, and beyond that, the field of smooth, polished stones. I grew up with the cemetery, and didn’t mind it. It could be beautiful. A single stone angel, small-breasted and determined, rose amid the more conservative markers close to our house. Farther away, in a richer section, miniature mosques and Parthenons spoke silently to Cleveland of man’s enduring accomplishments. Carlton and I played in the cemetery as children and, with a little more age, smoked joints and drank Southern Comfort there. I was, thanks to Carlton, the most criminally advanced nine-year-old in my fourth-grade class. I was going places. I made no move without his counsel.
Here is Carlton several months before his death, in an hour so alive with snow that earth and sky are identically white. He labors among the markers and I run after, stung by snow, following the light of his red knitted cap. Carlton’s hair is pulled back into a ponytail, neat and economical, a perfect pinecone of hair. He is thrifty, in his way.
We have taken hits of acid with our breakfast juice. Or rather, Carlton has taken a hit and I, considering my youth, have been allowed half. This acid is called windowpane. It is for clarity of vision, as Vicks is for decongestion of the nose. Our parents are at work, earning the daily bread. We have come out into the cold so that the house, when we reenter it, will shock us with its warmth and righteousness. Carlton believes in shocks.
“I think I’m coming on to it,” I call out. Carlton has on his buckskin jacket, which is worn down to the shine. On the back, across his shoulder blades, his girlfriend has stitched an electric-blue eye. As we walk I speak into the eye. “I think I feel something,” I say.
“Too soon,” Carlton calls back. “Stay loose, Frisco. You’ll know when the time comes.”
I am excited and terrified. We are into serious stuff. Carlton has done acid half a dozen times before, but I am new at it. We slipped the tabs into our mouths at breakfast, while our mother paused over the bacon. Carlton likes taking risks.
Snow collects in the engraved letters on the headstones. I lean into the wind, trying to decide whether everything around me seems strange because of the drug, or just because everything truly is strange. Three weeks earlier, a family across town had been sitting at home, watching television, when a single-engine plane fell on them. Snow swirls around us, seeming to fall up as well as down.
Carlton leads the way to our spot, the pillared entrance to a society tomb. This tomb is a palace. Stone cupids cluster on the peaked roof, with stunted, frozen wings and matrons’ faces. Under the roof is a veranda, backed by cast-iron doors that lead to the house of the dead proper. In summer this veranda is cool. In winter it blocks the wind. We keep a bottle of Southern Comfort there.
Carlton finds the bottle, unscrews the cap, and takes a good, long draw. He is studded with snowflakes. He hands me the bottle and I take a more conservative drink. Even in winter, the tomb smells mossy as a well. Dead leaves and a yellow M & M’s wrapper, worried by the wind, scrape on the marble floor.
“Are you scared?” Carlton asks me.
I nod. I never think of lying to him.
“Don’t be, man,” he says. “Fear will screw you right up. Drugs can’t hurt you if you feel no fear.”
I nod. We stand sheltered, passing the bottle. I lean into Carlton’s certainty as if it gave off heat.
“We can do acid all the time at Woodstock,” I say.
“Right on. Woodstock Nation. Yow.”
“Do people really live there?” I ask.
“Man, you’ve got to stop asking that. The concert’s over, but people are still there. It’s the new nation. Have faith.”
I nod again, satisfied. There is a different country for us to live in. I am already a new person, renamed Frisco. My old name was Robert.
“We’ll do acid all the time,” I say.
“You better believe we will.” Carlton’s face, surrounded by snow and marble, is lit. His eyes are bright as neon. Something in them tells me he can see the future, a ghost that hovers over everybody’s head. In Carlton’s future we all get released from our jobs and schooling. Awaiting us all, and soon, is a bright, perfect simplicity. A life among the trees by the river.
“How are you feeling, man?” he asks me.
“Great,” I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? “Oh,” I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder.
“Stay loose, Frisco,” he says. “There’s not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I’m here.”
I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive.
“I’m here,” Carlton says again, and he is.
Hours later, we are sprawled on the sofa in front of the television, ordinary as Wally and the Beav. Our mother makes dinner in the kitchen. A pot lid clangs. We are undercover agents. I am trying to conceal my amazement.
Our father is building a grandfather clock from a kit. He wants to have something to leave us, something for us to pass along. We can hear him in the basement, sawing and pounding. I know what is laid out on his sawhorses—a long raw wooden box, onto which he glues fancy moldings. A single pearl of sweat meanders down his forehead as he works. Tonight I have discovered my ability to see every room of the house at once, to know every single thing that goes on. A mouse nibbles inside the wall. Electrical wires curl behind the plaster, hidden and patient as snakes.
“Shhh,” I say to Carlton, who has not said anything. He is watching television through his splayed fingers. Gunshots ping. Bullets raise chalk dust on a concrete wall. I have no idea what we are watching.
“Boys?” our mother calls from the kitchen. I can, with my new ears, hear her slap hamburger into patties. “Set the table like good citizens,” she calls.
“Okay, Ma,” Carlton replies, in a gorgeous imitation of normality. Our father hammers in the basement. I can feel Carlton’s heart ticking. He pats my hand, to assure me that everything’s perfect.
We set the table, spoon fork knife, paper napkins triangled to one side. We know the moves cold. After we are done I pause to notice the dining-room wallpaper: a golden farm, backed by mountains. Cows graze, autumn trees cast golden shade. This scene repeats itself three times, on three walls.
“Zap,” Carlton whispers. “Zzzzzoom.”
“Did we do it right?” I ask him.
“We did everything perfect, little son. How are you doing in there, anyway?” He raps lightly on my head.
“Perfect, I guess.” I am staring at the wallpaper as if I were thinking of stepping into it.
“You guess. You guess? You and I are going to other planets, man. Come over here.”
“Where?”
“Here. Come here.” He leads me to the window. Outside the snow skitters, nervous and silver, under streetlamps. Ranch-style houses hoard their warmth, bleed light into the gathering snow. It is a street in Cleveland. It is our street.
“You and I are going to fly, man,” Carlton whispers, close to my ear. He opens the window. Snow blows in, sparking on the carpet. “Fly,” he says, and we do. For a moment we strain up and out, the black night wind blowing in our faces—we raise ourselves up off the cocoa-colored deep-pile wool-and-polyester carpet by a sliver of an inch. Sweet glory. The secret of flight is this—you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws. I swear it to this day.
We both know we have taken momentary leave of the earth. It does not strike either of us as remarkable, any more than does the fact that airplanes sometimes fall from the sky, or that we have always lived in these rooms and will soon leave them. We settle back down. Carlton touches my shoulder.
“You wait, Frisco,” he says. “Miracles are happening. Fucking miracles.”
I nod. He pulls down the window, which reseals itself with a sucking sound. Our own faces look back at us from the cold, dark glass. Behind us, our mother drops the hamburgers sizzling into the skillet. Our father bends to his work under a hooded lightbulb, preparing the long box into which he will lay clockworks, pendulum, a face. A plane drones by overhead, invisible in the clouds. I glance nervously at Carlton. He smiles his assurance and squeezes the back of my neck.
March. After the thaw. I am walking through the cemetery, thinking about my endless life. One of the beauties of living in Cleveland is that any direction feels like progress. I’ve memorized the map. We are by my calculations three hundred and fifty miles shy of Woodstock, New York. On this raw new day I am walking east, to the place where Carlton and I keep our bottle. I am going to have an early nip, to celebrate my bright future.
When I get to our spot I hear low moans coming from behind the tomb. I freeze, considering my choices. The sound is a long-drawn-out agony with a whip at the end, a final high C, something like “ooooooOw.” A wolf’s cry run backward. What decides me on investigation rather than flight is the need to make a story. In the stories my brother likes best, people always do the foolish, risky thing. I find I can reach decisions this way, by thinking of myself as a character in a story told by Carlton.
I creep around the side of the monument, cautious as a badger, pressed up close to the marble. I peer over a cherub’s girlish shoulder. What I find is Carlton on the ground with his girlfriend, in an uncertain jumble of clothes and bare flesh. Carlton’s jacket, the one with the embroidered eye, is draped over the stone, keeping watch.
I hunch behind the statue. I can see the girl’s naked arms, and the familiar bones of Carlton’s spine. The two of them moan together in the dry winter grass. Though I can’t make out the girl’s expression, Carlton’s face is twisted and grimacing, the cords of his neck pulled tight. I had never thought the experience might be painful. I watch, trying to learn. I hold on to the cherub’s cold wings.
It isn’t long before Carlton catches sight of me. His eyes rove briefly, ecstatically skyward, and what do they light on but his brother’s small head, sticking up next to a cherub’s. We lock eyes and spend a moment in mutual decision. The girl keeps on clutching at Carlton’s skinny back. He decides to smile at me. He decides to wink.
I am out of there so fast I tear up divots. I dodge among the stones, jump the gully, clear the fence into the swing-set-and-picnic-table sanctity of the back yard. Something about that wink. My heart beats fast as a sparrow’s.
I go into the kitchen and find our mother washing fruit. She asks what’s going on. I tell her nothing is. Nothing at all.
She sighs over an apple’s imperfection. The curtains sport blue teapots. Our mother works the apple with a scrub brush. She believes they come coated with poison.
“Where’s Carlton?” she asks.
“Don’t know,” I tell her.
“Bobby?”
“Huh?”
“What exactly is going on?”
“Nothing,” I say. My heart works itself up to a humingbird’s rate, more buzz than beat.
“I think something is. Will you answer a question?”
“Okay.”
“Is your brother taking drugs?”
I relax a bit. It is only drugs. I know why she’s asking. Lately police cars have been browsing our house like sharks. They pause, take note, glide on. Some neighborhood crackdown. Carlton is famous in these parts.
“No,” I tell her.
She faces me with the brush in one hand, an apple in the other. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” She knows something is up. Her nerves run through this house. She can feel dust settling on the tabletops, milk starting to turn in the refrigerator.
“No,” I say.
“Something’s going on,” she sighs. She is a small, efficient woman who looks at things as if they give off a painful light. She grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and spent her girlhood tying up bean rows, worrying over the sun and rain. She is still trying to overcome her habit of modest expectations.
I leave the kitchen, pretending sudden interest in the cat. Our mother follows, holding her brush. She means to scrub the truth out of me. I follow the cat, his erect black tail and pink anus.
“Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you,” our mother says.
I keep walking, to see how far I’ll get, calling, “Kittykittykitty.” In the front hall, our father’s homemade clock chimes the half hour. I make for the clock. I get as far as the rubber plant before she collars me.
“I told you not to walk away,” she says, and cuffs me a good one with the brush. She catches me on the ear and sets it ringing. The cat is out of there quick as a quarter note.
I stand for a minute, to let her know I’ve received the message. Then I resume walking. She hits me again, this time on the back of the head, hard enough to make me see colors. “Will you stop ?” she screams. Still, I keep walking. Our house runs west to east. With every step I get closer to Yasgur’s farm.
Carlton comes home whistling. Our mother treats him like a guest who’s overstayed. He doesn’t care. He is lost in optimism. He pats her cheek and calls her “Professor.” He treats her as if she were harmless, and so she is.
She never hits Carlton. She suffers him the way farm girls suffer a thieving crow, with a grudge so old and endless it borders on reverence. She gives him a scrubbed apple, and tells him what she’ll do if he tracks mud on the carpet.
I am waiting in our room. He brings the smell of the cemetery with him, its old snow and wet pine needles. He rolls his eyes at me, takes a crunch of his apple. “What’s happening, Frisco?” he says.
I have arranged myself loosely on my bed, trying to pull a Dylan riff out of my harmonica. I have always figured I can bluff my way into wisdom. I offer Carlton a dignified nod.
He drops onto his own bed. I can see a crushed crocus, the first of the year, stuck to the black rubber sole of his boot.
“Well, Frisco,” he says. “Today you are a man.”
I nod again. Is that all there is to it?
“ Yow,” Carlton says. He laughs, pleased with himself and the world. “That was so perfect.”
I pick out what I can of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Carlton says, “Man, when I saw you out there spying on us I thought to myself, yes. Now I’m really here. You know what I’m saying?” He waves his apple core.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Frisco, that was the first time her and I ever did it. I mean, we’d talked. But when we finally got down to it, there you were. My brother. Like you knew.”
I nod, and this time for real. What happened was an adventure we had together. All right. The story is beginning to make sense.
“Aw, Frisco,” Carlton says. “I’m gonna find you a girl, too. You’re nine. You been a virgin too long.”
“Really?” I say.
“ Man. We’ll find you a woman from the sixth grade, somebody with a little experience. We’ll get stoned and all make out under the trees in the boneyard. I want to be present at your deflowering, man. You’re gonna need a brother there.”
I am about to ask, as casually as I can manage, about the relationship between love and bodily pain, when our mother’s voice cuts into the room. “You did it,” she screams. “You tracked mud all over the rug.”
A family entanglement follows. Our mother brings our father, who comes and stands in the doorway with her, taking in evidence. He is a formerly handsome man. His face has been worn down by too much patience. He has lately taken up some sporty touches—a goatee, a pair of calfskin boots.
Our mother points out the trail of muddy half-moons that lead from the door to Carlton’s bed. Dangling over the foot of the bed are the culprits themselves, voluptuously muddy, with Carlton’s criminal feet still in them.
“You see?” she says. “You see what he thinks of me?”
Our father, a reasonable man, suggests that Carlton clean it up. Our mother finds that too small a gesture. She wants Carlton not to have done it in the first place. “I don’t ask for much,” she says. “I don’t ask where he goes. I don’t ask why the police are suddenly so interested in our house. I ask that he not track mud all over the floor. That’s all.” She squints in the glare of her own outrage.
“Better clean it right up,” our father says to Carlton.
“And that’s it?” our mother says. “He cleans up the mess, and all’s forgiven?”
“Well, what do you want him to do? Lick it up?”
“I want some consideration,” she says, turning helplessly to me. “That’s what I want.”
I shrug, at a loss. I sympathize with our mother, but am not on her team.
“All right,” she says. “I just won’t bother cleaning the house anymore. I’ll let you men handle it. I’ll sit and watch television and throw my candy wrappers on the floor.”
She starts out, cutting the air like a blade. On her way she picks up a jar of pencils, looks at it and tosses the pencils on the floor. They fall like fortune-telling sticks, in pairs and crisscrosses.
Our father goes after her, calling her name. Her name is Isabel. We can hear them making their way across the house, our father calling, “Isabel, Isabel, Isabel,” while our mother, pleased with the way the pencils had looked, dumps more things onto the floor.
“I hope she doesn’t break the TV,” I say.
“She’ll do what she needs to do,” Carlton tells me.
“I hate her,” I say. I am not certain about that. I want to test the sound of it, to see if it’s true.
“She’s got more balls than any of us, Frisco,” he says. “Better watch what you say about her.”
I keep quiet. Soon I get up and start gathering pencils, because I prefer that to lying around trying to follow the shifting lines of allegiance. Carlton goes for a sponge and starts in on the mud.
“You get shit on the carpet, you clean it up,” he says. “Simple.”
The time for all my questions about love has passed, and I am not so unhip as to force a subject. I know it will come up again. I make a neat bouquet of pencils. Our mother rages through the house.
Later, after she has thrown enough and we three have picked it all up, I lie on my bed thinking things over. Carlton is on the phone to his girlfriend, talking low. Our mother, becalmed but still dangerous, cooks dinner. She sings as she cooks, some slow forties number that must have been all over the jukes when her first husband’s plane went down in the Pacific. Our father plays his clarinet in the basement. That is where he goes to practice, down among his woodworking tools, the neatly hung hammers and awls that throw oversized shadows in the light of the single bulb. If I put my ear to the floor I can hear him, pulling a long low tomcat moan out of that horn. There is some strange comfort in pressing my ear to the carpet and hearing our father’s music leaking up through the floorboards. Lying down, with my ear to the floor, I join in on my harmonica.
That spring our parents have a party to celebrate the sun’s return. It has been a long, bitter winter and now the first wild daisies are poking up on the lawns and among the graves.
Our parents’ parties are mannerly affairs. Their friends, schoolteachers all, bring wine jugs and guitars. They are Ohio hip. Though they hold jobs and meet mortgages, they think of themselves as independent spirits on a spying mission. They have agreed to impersonate teachers until they write their novels, finish their dissertations, or just save up enough money to set themselves free.
Carlton and I are the lackeys. We take coats, fetch drinks. We have done this at every party since we were small, trading on our precocity, doing a brother act. We know the moves. A big, lipsticked woman who has devoted her maidenhood to ninth-grade math calls me Mr. Right. An assistant vice principal in a Russian fur hat asks us both whether we expect to vote Democratic or Socialist. By sneaking sips I manage to get myself semi-crocked.
The reliability of the evening is derailed halfway through, however, by a half dozen of Carlton’s friends. They rap on the door and I go for it, anxious as a carnival sharp to see who will step up next and swallow the illusion that I’m a kindly, sober nine-year-old child. I’m expecting callow adults and who do I find but a pack of young outlaws, big-booted and wild-haired. Carlton’s girlfriend stands in front, in an outfit made up almost entirely of fringe.
“Hi, Bobby,” she says confidently. She comes from New York, and is more than just locally smart.
“Hi,” I say. I let them all in despite a retrograde urge to lock the door and phone the police. Three are girls, four boys. They pass me in a cloud of dope smoke and sly-eyed greeting.
What they do is invade the party. Carlton is standing on the far side of the rumpus room, picking the next album, and his girl cuts straight through the crowd to his side. She has the bones and the loose, liquid moves some people consider beautiful. She walks through that room as if she’d been sent to teach the whole party a lesson.
Carlton’s face tips me off that this was planned. Our mother demands to know what’s going on here. She is wearing a long dark-red dress that doesn’t interfere with her shoulders. When she dresses up you can see what it is about her, or what it was. She is responsible for Carlton’s beauty. I have our father’s face.
Carlton does some quick talking. Though it’s against our mother’s better judgment, the invaders are suffered to stay. One of them, an Eddie Haskell for all his leather and hair, tells her she is looking good. She is willing to hear it.
So the outlaws, house-sanctioned, start to mingle. I work my way over to Carlton’s side, the side unoccupied by his girlfriend. I would like to say something ironic and wised-up, something that will band Carlton and me against every other person in the room. I can feel the shape of the comment I have in mind but, being a tipsy nine-year-old, can’t get my mouth around it. What I say is, “Shit, man.”
Carlton’s girl laughs at me. She considers it amusing that a little boy says “shit.” I would like to tell her what I have figured out about her, but I am nine, and three-quarters gone on Tom Collinses. Even sober, I can only imagine a sharp-tongued wit.
“Hang on, Frisco,” Carlton tells me. “This could turn into a real party.”
I can see by the light in his eyes what is going down. He has arranged a blind date between our parents’ friends and his own. It’s a Woodstock move—he is plotting a future in which young and old have business together. I agree to hang on, and go to the kitchen, hoping to sneak a few knocks of gin.
There I find our father leaning up against the refrigerator. A line of butterfly-shaped magnets hovers around his head. “Are you enjoying this party?” he asks, touching his goatee. He is still getting used to being a man with a beard.
“Uh-huh.”
“I am, too,” he says sadly. He never meant to be a high school music teacher. The money question caught up with him.
“What do you think of this music?” he asks. Carlton has put the Stones on the turntable. Mick Jagger sings “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Our father gestures in an openhanded way that takes in the room, the party, the whole house—everything the music touches.
“I like it,” I say.
“So do I.” He stirs his drink with his finger, and sucks on the finger.
“I love it,” I say, too loud. Something about our father leads me to raise my voice. I want to grab handfuls of music out of the air and stuff them into my mouth.
“I’m not sure I could say I love it,” he says. “I’m not sure if I could say that, no. I would say I’m friendly to its intentions. I would say that if this is the direction music is going in, I won’t stand in its way.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. I am already anxious to get back to the party, but don’t want to hurt his feelings. If he senses he’s being avoided he can fall into fits of apology more terrifying than our mother’s rages.
“I think I may have been too rigid with my students,” our father says. “Maybe over the summer you boys could teach me a few things about the music people are listening to these days.”
“Sure,” I say, loudly. We spend a minute waiting for the next thing to say.
“You boys are happy, aren’t you?” he asks. “Are you enjoying this party?”
“We’re having a great time,” I say.
“I thought you were. I am, too.”
I have by this time gotten myself to within jumping distance of the door. I call out, “Well, goodbye,” and dive back into the party.
Something has happened in my small absence. The party has started to roll. Call it an accident of history and the weather. Carlton’s friends are on decent behavior, and our parents’ friends have decided to give up some of their wine-and-folk-song propriety to see what they can learn. Carlton is dancing with a vice principal’s wife. Carlton’s friend Frank, with his ancient-child face and IQ in the low sixties, dances with our mother. I see that our father has followed me out of the kitchen. He positions himself at the party’s edge; I jump into its center. I invite the fuchsialipped math teacher to dance. She is only too happy. She is big and graceful as a parade float, and I steer her effortlessly out into the middle of everything. My mother, who is known around school for Sicilian discipline, dances freely, which is news to everybody. There is no getting around her beauty.
The night rises higher and higher. A wildness sets in. Carlton throws new music on the turntable—Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Dead. The future shines for everyone, rich with the possibility of more nights exactly like this. Even our father is pressed into dancing, which he does like a flightless bird, all flapping arms and potbelly. Still, he dances. Our mother has a kiss for him.
Finally I nod out on the sofa, blissful under the drinks. I am dreaming of flight when our mother comes and touches my shoulder. I smile up into her flushed, smiling face.
“It’s hours past your bedtime,” she says, all velvet motherliness. I nod. I can’t dispute the fact.
She keeps on nudging my shoulder. I am a moment or two apprehending the fact that she actually wants me to leave the party and go to bed. “No,” I tell her.
“Yes,” she smiles.
“No,” I say cordially, experimentally. This new mother can dance, and flirt. Who knows what else she might allow?
“Yes.” The velvet motherliness leaves her voice. She means business, business of the usual kind. I get myself out of there and no excuses this time. I am exactly nine and running from my bedtime as I’d run from death.
I run to Carlton for protection. He is laughing with his girl, a sweaty question mark of hair plastered to his forehead. I plow into him so hard he nearly goes over.
“Whoa, Frisco,” he says. He takes me up under the arms and swings me a half-turn. Our mother plucks me out of his hands and sets me down, with a good farm-style hold on the back of my neck.
“Say good night, Bobby,” she says. She adds, for the benefit of Carlton’s girl, “He should have been in bed before this party started.”
“ No,” I holler. I try to twist loose, but our mother has a grip that could crack walnuts.
Carlton’s girl tosses her hair and says, “Good night, baby.” She smiles a victor’s smile. She smooths the stray hair off Carlton’s forehead.
“ No,” I scream again. Something about the way she touches his hair. Our mother calls our father, who comes and scoops me up and starts out of the room with me, holding me like the live bomb I am. Before I go I lock eyes with Carlton. He shrugs and says, “Night, man.” Our father hustles me out. I do not take it bravely. I leave flailing, too furious to cry, dribbling a slimy thread of horrible-child’s spittle.
Later I lie alone on my narrow bed, feeling the music hum in the coiled springs. Life is cracking open right there in our house. People are changing. By tomorrow, no one will be quite the same. How can they let me miss it? I dream up revenge against our parents, and worse for Carlton. He is the one who could have saved me. He could have banded with me against them. What I can’t forgive is his shrug, his mild-eyed “Night, man.” He has joined the adults. He has made himself bigger, and taken size from me. As the Doors thump “Strange Days,” I hope something awful happens to him. I say so to myself.
Around midnight, dim-witted Frank announces he has seen a flying saucer hovering over the back yard. I can hear his deep, excited voice all the way in my room. He says it’s like a blinking, luminous cloud. I hear half the party struggling out through the sliding glass door in a disorganized, whooping knot. By that time everyone is so delirious a flying saucer would be just what was expected. That much celebration would logically attract an answering happiness from across the stars.
I get out of bed and sneak down the hall. I will not miss alien visitors for anyone, not even at the cost of our mother’s wrath or our father’s disappointment. I stop at the end of the hallway, though, embarrassed to be in pajamas. If there really are aliens, they will think I’m the lowest member of the house. While I hesitate over whether to go back to my room to change, people start coming back inside, talking about a trick of the mist and an airplane. People resume their dancing.
Carlton must have jumped the back fence. He must have wanted to be there alone, singular, in case they decided to take somebody with them. A few nights later I will go out and stand where he would have been standing. On the far side of the gully, now a river swollen with melted snow, the cemetery will gleam like a lost city. The moon will be full. I will hang around just as Carlton must have, hypnotized by the silver light on the stones, the white angel raising her arms up across the river.
According to our parents the mystery is why he ran back to the house full tilt. Something in the graveyard may have scared him, he may have needed to break its spell, but I think it’s more likely that when he came back to himself he just couldn’t wait to get back to the music and the people, the noisy disorder of continuing life.
Somebody has shut the sliding glass door. Carlton’s girlfriend looks lazily out, touching base with her own reflection. I look, too. Carlton is running toward the house. I hesitate. Then I figure he can bump his nose. It will be a good joke on him. I let him keep coming. His girlfriend sees him through her own reflection, starts to scream a warning just as Carlton hits the glass.
It is an explosion. Triangles of glass fly brightly through the room. I think for him it must be more surprising than painful, like hitting water from a great height. He stands blinking for a moment. The whole party stops, stares, getting its bearings. Bob Dylan sings “Just Like a Woman.” Carlton reaches up curiously to take out the shard of glass that is stuck in his neck, and that is when the blood starts. It shoots out of him. Our mother screams. Carlton steps forward into his girlfriend’s arms and the two of them fall together. Our mother throws herself down on top of him and the girl. People shout their accident wisdom. Don’t lift him. Call an ambulance. I watch from the hallway. Carlton’s blood spurts, soaking into the carpet, spattering people’s clothes. Our mother and father both try to plug the wound with their hands, but the blood just shoots between their fingers. Carlton looks more puzzled than anything, as if he can’t quite follow this turn of events. “It’s all right,” our father tells him, trying to stop the blood. “It’s all right, just don’t move, it’s all right.” Carlton nods, and holds our father’s hand. His eyes take on an astonished light. Our mother screams, “Is anybody doing anything?” What comes out of Carlton grows darker, almost black. I watch. Our father tries to get a hold on Carlton’s neck while Carlton keeps trying to take his hand. Our mother’s hair is matted with blood. It runs down her face. Carlton’s girl holds him to her breasts, touches his hair, whispers in his ear.
He is gone by the time the ambulance gets there. You can see the life drain out of him. When his face goes slack our mother wails. A part of her flies wailing through the house, where it will wail and rage forever. I feel our mother pass through me on her way out. She covers Carlton’s body with her own.
He is buried in the cemetery out back. Years have passed—we are living in the future, and it’s turned out differently from what we’d planned. Our mother has established her life of separateness behind the guest-room door. Our father mutters his greetings to the door as he passes.
One April night, almost a year to the day after Carlton’s accident, I hear cautious footsteps shuffling across the living-room floor after midnight. I run out eagerly, thinking of ghosts, but find only our father in moth-colored pajamas. He looks unsteadily at the dark air in front of him.
“Hi, Dad,” I say from the doorway.
He looks in my direction. “Yes?”
“It’s me. Bobby.”
“Oh, Bobby,” he says. “What are you doing up, young man?”
“Nothing,” I tell him. “Dad?”
“Yes, son.”
“Maybe you better come back to bed. Okay?”
“Maybe I had,” he says. “I just came out here for a drink of water, but I seem to have gotten turned around in the darkness. Yes, maybe I better had.”
I take his hand and lead him down the hall to his room. The grandfather clock chimes the quarter hour.
“Sorry,” our father says.
I get him into bed. “There,” I say. “Okay?”
“Perfect. Could not be better.”
“Okay. Good night.”
“Good night. Bobby?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Why don’t you stay a minute?” he says. “We could have ourselves a talk, you and me. How would that be?”
“Okay,” I say. I sit on the edge of his mattress. His bedside clock ticks off the minutes.
I can hear the low rasp of his breathing. Around our house, the Ohio night chirps and buzzes. The small gray finger of Carlton’s stone pokes up among the others, within sight of the angel’s blank white eyes. Above us, airplanes and satellites sparkle. People are flying even now toward New York or California, to take up lives of risk and invention.
I stay until our father has worked his way into a muttering sleep.
Carlton’s girlfriend moved to Denver with her family a month before. I never learned what it was she’d whispered to him. Though she’d kept her head admirably during the accident, she lost her head afterward. She cried so hard at the funeral that she had to be taken away by her mother—an older, redder-haired version of her. She started seeing a psychiatrist three times a week. Everyone, including my parents, talked about how hard it was for her, to have held a dying boy in her arms at that age. I’m grateful to her for holding my brother while he died, but I never once heard her mention the fact that though she had been through something terrible, at least she was still alive and going places. At least she had protected herself by trying to warn him. I can appreciate the intricacies of her pain. But as long as she was in Cleveland, I could never look her straight in the face. I couldn’t talk about the wounds she suffered. I can’t even write her name.
OUR seventh-grade class had been moved that September from scattered elementary schools to a single centralized junior high, a colossal blond brick building with its name suspended over its main entrance in three-foot aluminum letters spare and stern as my own deepest misgivings about the life conducted within. I had heard the rumors: four hours of homework a night, certain classes held entirely in French, razor fights in the bathrooms. It was childhood’s end.
The first day at lunch, a boy with dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders stood behind my friend Adam and me in the cafeteria line. The boy was ragged and wild-looking: an emanation from the dangerous heart of the school itself.
“Hey,” he said.
I could not be certain whether he was speaking to me, to Adam, or to someone else in the vicinity. His eyes, which were pink and watery, appeared to focus on something mildly surprising that hovered near our feet.
I nodded. It seemed a decent balance between my fear of looking snobbish and my dread of seeming overeager. I had made certain resolutions regarding a new life. Adam, a businesslike barrel-shaped boy I had known since second grade, dabbed at an invisible spot on his starched plaid shirt. He was the son of a taxidermist, and possessed a precocious mistrust of the unfamiliar.
We slowly advanced in the line, holding yellow plastic trays.
“Some joint, huh?” the boy said. “I mean, like, how long you guys in for?”
This was definitely addressed to us, though his gaze had not yet meandered up to address our eyes. Now I was justified in looking at him. He had a broad handsome face with a thin nose slightly cleft at the tip, and a jaw heavy enough to suggest Indian blood. There were aureoles of blond stubble at his lips and chin.
“Life,” I said.
He nodded contemplatively, as if I had said something ambiguous and thought-provoking.
A moment passed. Adam would have gotten through the conversation by feigning well-mannered deafness. I struggled to be cool. The silence caught and held—one of those amicable, protracted silences that open up in casual conversations with strangers and allow all members to return, unharmed, to the familiarity of their own lives. Adam visibly turned his attention toward the front of the line, as if something delightful and unprecedented was taking place there.
But then, forgetting my resolution, I fell into a habit from my old life, one of the personal deficiencies I had vowed to leave behind.
I started talking.
“I mean, this is it, don’t you think?” I said. “Up till now everything’s been sort of easy, I mean we were kids. I don’t know what school you came from, but at Fillmore we had recess, I mean we had snack periods, and now, well, there are guys here who could fit my head in the palm of their hand. I haven’t been to the bathroom yet, I hear there are eighth-graders waiting in there for seventh-graders to come in and if one does they pick him up by his feet and stick his head in the toilet. Did you hear that?”
Adam impatiently plucked a speck of lint from his collar. My ears heated up.
“Naw, man,” the stranger said after a moment. “I didn’t hear anything like that. I smoked a joint in the head before third period, and I didn’t have any problems.”
His voice carried no mocking undertone. By then we had reached the steam table, where a red-faced woman parceled out macaroni casserole with an ice-cream scoop.
“Well, maybe it’s not true,” I said. “But you know, this is a rough place. A kid was murdered here last year.”
Adam looked at me impatiently, as if I were a new stain that had somehow appeared on his shirtfront. I had abandoned my second resolution. I was not only babbling, I was starting to tell lies.
“Oh yeah?” the boy said. He appeared to find the assertion interesting but unexceptional. He wore a washed-out blue work shirt and a brown leather jacket that dribbled dirty fringe from its sleeves.
“Yeah,” I said. “A new kid, a seventh-grader. It was in all the papers. He was, well, sort of fat. And a little retarded. He carried a briefcase, and he kept his glasses on with one of those black elastic bands. Anyway, he showed up here and a whole gang of eighth-graders started teasing him. At first it was just, you know, regular teasing, and they would probably have gotten tired of it and left him alone if he’d been smart enough to keep his mouth shut. But he had a bad temper, this kid. And the more they teased him, the madder he got.”
We worked our way down the line, accumulating small bowls filled with corn kernels, waxed cartons of milk, and squares of pale yellow cake with yellow icing. We sat together without having formally decided to, simply because the story of the murdered boy wasn’t finished yet. I stretched it out over most of the lunch period. I omitted no detail of the gang’s escalating tortures—the stolen glasses, the cherry bomb dropped in the locker, the dead cat slipped into the victim’s briefcase—or of the hapless boy’s mounting, impotent rage. Adam alternated between listening to me and staring at the people sitting at other tables, with the unabashed directness of one who believes his own unimportance renders him invisible. We had finished our macaroni and corn and had started on our cake before the victim took his revenge, in the form of a wire stretched all but invisibly, at neck’s height, across the trail where the older boys rode their dirt bikes. We were through with our dessert by the time he botched the job—he had not secured the wire tightly enough to the tree trunks—and were on our way to our next classes before the police found him floating in the reservoir, his new glasses still held in place by their elastic band.
We walked together, we three, to Adam’s and my math class. He and I had planned to share as many classes as possible. I finished the story at the door.
“Hey, man,” the stranger said. He shook his head, and said nothing more.
“My name is Jonathan Glover,” I said.
“I’m, um, Bobby Morrow.”
After a moment, Adam said, “Adam Bialo?” as if uncertain whether such a name would be believed. It was the first time he had spoken.
“Well, see you later,” I said.
“Yeah. Yeah, man, I’ll see you later.”
It was not until he walked away that I saw the faded blue eye stitched to the back of his jacket.
“Weird,” Adam said.
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought you weren’t going to tell any more lies,” he said. “I thought you took an oath.”
In fact, we had traded oaths. I was to abandon my storytelling, and he to cease inspecting his clothes for imperfections.
“That was a tall tale. It’s different from a lie.”
“Weird,” he said. “You’re about as weird as he is.”
“Well,” I answered, with a certain satisfaction. “I guess maybe I am.”
“I believe it,” he said. “I have no doubt.”
We stood for a moment, watching the stranger’s embroidered eye recede down the biscuit-colored hall. “ Weird,” Adam said once again, and there was true indignation in his voice, a staunch insistence on the world’s continuing responsibility to observe the rules of cleanliness and modesty. One of Adam’s attractions had always been his exasperated—but ultimately willing—sidekick quality. His shuffling, uncurious ways made me look more exotic than I was; in his company I could be the daring one. As I chronicled our mild adventures in my own mind, I cast Adam as a hybrid of Becky Thatcher and Sancho Panza, while I was Huck, Tom, and Nancy Drew all mixed together. Adam considered a nude swim or a stolen candy bar to be broaching the limits, limits I was only too happy to exceed. He helped me realize my own romantic ideal, though lately I’d begun to suspect that our criminal escapades were pathetically small-time, and that Adam would not accompany me into waters much deeper than these.
Bobby was waiting for us at lunch the following day. Or, rather, he managed to turn up next to us in line again. He had a particular talent for investing his actions with the quality of randomness—his life, viewed from a distance, would have appeared to be little more than a series of coincidences. He exerted no visible will. And yet, by some vague-eyed trick, he was there with us in line again.
“Hey,” he said. Today his eyes were even redder, more rheumily unfocused.
“Hey,” I said. Adam bent over to pull a loose thread from the cuff of his corduroys.
“Day number two, man,” Bobby said. “Only a thousand five hundred to go. Yow.”
“Have we really got one thousand five hundred days of school left?” I asked. “I mean, is that an actual count?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Like, give or take a few.”
“They add up, don’t they? Two years here, four in high school, and four in college. Man. A thousand five hundred days.”
“I wasn’t counting col lege, man.” He smiled, as if the idea of college was grandiose and slightly absurd—a colonial’s vision of silver tea sets gleaming in the jungle.
“Right, man,” I said.
Again, the silence opened. Again, in defiance of Adam’s fierce concentration on the front of the line—where the red-faced woman ladled up some sort of brown triangles in brown sauce—I started in on a story. Today I told of a new, experimental kind of college that taught students the things they would need to know for survival in the world: how to travel inexpensively, how to play blues piano and recognize true love. It wasn’t much of a story—I was only an adequate liar, not a brilliant one. My fabricating technique had more to do with persistence than with inspiration. I told lies the way Groucho Marx told jokes, piling one atop another in the hope that my simple endurance would throw a certain light of credibility onto the whole.
Bobby listened with uncritical absorption. He did not insist on the difference between the believable and the absurd. Something in his manner suggested that all earthly manifestations—from the cafeteria peach halves floating in their individual pools of syrup to my story of a university that required its students to live for a week in New York City with no money at all—were equally bizarre and amusing. I did not at that time fully appreciate the effects of smoking more than four joints a day.
All he did was listen, smile vaguely, and offer an occasional “Yeah” or “Wow.”
Again, he sat and ate with us. Again, he walked us to our math class.
When he had gone, Adam said, “I was wrong yesterday. You’re weird er than he is.”
Adam and I took less than a month to realize that our friendship was already a childhood memory. We made certain attempts to haul it into the future with us, because we had, in our slightly peevish, mutually disapproving way, genuinely loved one another. We had told secrets; we had traded vows. Still, it was time for us to put one another aside. When I suggested one afternoon that we steal the new Neil Young album from the record store, he looked at me with a tax accountant’s contempt, based not so much on my immediate dishonesty as on the whole random, disorderly life I would make for myself. “You’ve never even listened to Neil Young,” he said. “Man,” I said, and left the sphere of his cautious, alphabetizing habits to stand near a group of long-haired high school students who were talking about Jimi Hendrix, of whom I had never heard. I stole Electric Ladyland after Adam, with a sigh of exhausted virtue, had walked out of the store.
We did not accomplish the split without rancor or recriminations. I had an immediate new friend and he didn’t. Our final conversation took place at the bus stop before school on a warm October morning. Autumn light fell from a vaulted powder-blue sky that offered, here and there, a cloud so fat and dense-looking it might have been full of milk. I motioned Adam away from the knot of other kids waiting for the bus and showed him what I’d brought: two pale yellow pills stolen from my mother’s medicine cabinet.
“What are they?” he asked.
“The bottle said Valium.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A tranquilizer, I guess. Here. Let’s take one and see what they do.”
He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “Take one of these pills?” he said. “Now?”
“Hey, man,” I whispered. “Keep your voice down.”
“Take one and go to school ?” he asked, in a louder voice.
“Yep,” I said. “Come on.”
“We don’t even know what they’ll do to us.”
“This is one way to find out. Come on. My mom takes ’em, how bad can they be?”
“Your mom is sick,” he said.
“She’s no sicker than most people,” I told him. The pills, yellow disks the size of nailheads, sat in my palm, reflecting the suburban light. To end the discussion, I snatched one up and swallowed it.
“Weird,” Adam said sorrowfully. “ Weird.” He turned from me and went to stand with the others waiting for the bus. We had our next conversation twelve years later, when he appeared with his wife out of the red semidarkness of a hotel bar in New York and told me of his cleaning business, which specialized in the most difficult jobs: wedding gowns, ancient lace, rugs that had all but married themselves to the dust of ten decades. He seemed, in truth, to be quite content.
I slipped the second pill back into my pocket, and spent the morning in a drowsy bliss that matched the weather. When I saw Bobby at lunch, we smiled and said, “Hey, man,” to one another. I gave Adam’s pill to him. He accepted it, slipping it into his mouth with simple gratitude and no questions. That day I did not tell any stories; I hardly spoke at all. I learned that Bobby found sitting silently beside me just as amusing as he did listening to me talk.
“I like those boots,” I said as he sat for the first time on the floor of my bedroom, rolling a joint. “Where did you get them? Or, wait a minute, that’s the kind of question you’re not supposed to ask, isn’t it? Anyway, I think those boots of yours are great.”
“Thanks,” he said, expertly sealing the joint with a flick of his tongue. I had never smoked marijuana before, though I claimed to have been doing it regularly since I was eleven.
“That looks like good stuff,” I said of the plastic bag full of green-gold marijuana he had produced from his jacket pocket.
“Well, it’s—you know—all right,” he said, lighting up. There was no scorn in his stunted sentences, just a numbness and puzzlement. He had about him the hesitant quality of an amnesiac struggling to remember.
“I like the smell,” I said. “I guess I’d better open the window. In case my mother comes by.”
I naturally assumed we needed common enemies in the forms of the United States government, our school, my parents.
“She’s nice,” he said. “Your mother.”
“She’s all right.”
He passed the joint over to me. Of course I tried to handle it in a polished, professional manner. Of course on my first toke I gagged so hard I nearly vomited.
“It’s pretty strong,” he said. He took the joint back, sucked in a graceful nip of smoke, and returned it to me without further comment. I choked again, and after I’d recovered was given the joint a third time, as if I was every bit as practiced as I pretended to be. The third time I did a little better.
And so, without acknowledging my inexperience, Bobby set about teaching me the habits of the age.
We spent every day together. It was the kind of reckless overnight friendship particular to those who are young, lonely, and ambitious. Gradually, item by item, Bobby brought over his records, his posters, his clothes. We spent just enough time at his house for me to know what he was escaping from: a stale sour smell of soiled laundry and old food, a father who crept with drunken caution from room to room. Bobby slept in a sleeping bag on my floor. In the dark, I lay listening to the sound of his breath. He moaned sometimes in his dreams.
When he awoke in the mornings, he’d look around with a startled expression, realize where he was, and smile. The light slanting in through my window turned the medallion of hair on his chest from gold to copper.
I bought myself a pair of boots like his. I started growing my hair.
With time, he began to talk more fluently. “I like this house,” he said one winter evening as we sat idly in my room, smoking dope and listening to The Doors. Snowflakes tapped against the glass, whirled down into the empty, silent street. The Doors sang “L.A. Woman.”
“How much would a house like this cost?” he said.
“Can’t be too much,” I said. “We’re not rich.”
“I want a house like this someday,” he said, passing me the joint.
“No you don’t,” I told him. I had other things in mind for us.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I like this place.”
“You don’t really,” I said. “You just think you do because you’re stoned.”
He sucked on the joint. He had a cultivated, almost feminine way of handling his dope, pinching a joint precisely between thumb and middle finger. “So I’ll stay stoned all the time,” he said on his exhale. “Then I’ll always like this house and Cleveland and everything, just the way it is now.”
“Well, that would be one way to live,” I answered.
“Don’t you like it?” he said. “You should like it. You don’t know what you got here.”
“What I’ve got here,” I said, “is a mother who asks me first thing in the morning what I think I’d like to have for dinner that night, and a father who hardly ever leaves his movie theater.”
“Yeah, man,” he grinned.
His forearm, thick-wristed, golden-haired, rested casually on his knee. It just rested there, as if it was nothing special.
I believe I know the moment my interest turned to love. One night in early spring Bobby and I were sitting together in my room, listening to the Grateful Dead. It was an ordinary night in my altered life. Bobby passed me the joint, and after I’d accepted it, he withdrew his hand and glanced at a liver-colored mole on the underside of his left wrist. His face registered mild incredulity—in the thirteen years he had known his own body, he had apparently not taken stock of that particular mole, though I had noticed it on any number of occasions, a slightly off-center discoloration riding the fork in a vein. The mole surprised him. I suspect it frightened him a little, to see his own flesh made strange. He touched the mole, curiously, with his right index finger, and his face was nakedly fretful as a baby’s. As he worried over that small imperfection, I saw that he inhabited his own flesh as fully and with the same mix of wonder and confusion that I brought to my own. Until then I had believed—though I would never have confessed it, not even to myself—that all others were slightly less real than I; that their lives were a dream composed of scenes and emotions that resembled snapshots: discrete and unambiguous, self-evident, flat. He touched the mole on his wrist with tenderness, and with a certain dread. It was a minute gesture. Seeing it was no more dramatic than seeing somebody check his watch and register surprise at the time. But in that moment Bobby cracked open. I could see him—he was in there. He moved through the world in a chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.
Then the moment passed and I was on the other side of something. After that night—a Tuesday—I could not have returned, even if I’d desired it, to a state that did not involve thinking and dreaming of Bobby. I could not help investing his every quality with a heightened sense of the real, nor could I quit wondering, from moment to moment, exactly what it was like to be inside his skin.
Night after night we roamed the streets like spies. We befriended a bum named Louis, who lived in a piano crate and bought us bottles of red wine in exchange for food we stole from my mother’s kitchen. We climbed up fire escapes onto downtown roofs for the strangeness of standing in a high place. We dropped acid and wandered for hours through a junkyard that sparkled like a diamond mine, rife with caverns and peculiar glitterings and plateaus that glowed with a bleached, lunar light I tried to scoop up with my hands. We hitchhiked to Cincinnati to see if we could get there and back before my parents realized we were missing.
Once, on a Thursday night, Bobby took me to the cemetery where his brother and mother were buried. We sat on their graves, passing a joint.
“Man,” he said, “I’m not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want.”
“What do we want?” I asked blurrily.
“Aw, man, you know,” he said. “We just want, well, the same things these people here wanted.”
“What was that?”
He shrugged. “To live, I guess,” he said.
He ran his fingers over the grass. He handed me the joint, which was wet with our mingled saliva, and I blew a stream of white smoke up into the sky, where the Seven Sisters quivered and sparked. Cleveland sent up its own small lights—television and shaded lamps. A passing car left a few bars of “Helter Skelter” behind on the cold night air.
April came. It was not swimming weather yet, but I insisted that we go to the quarry as soon as the last scabs of old snow had disappeared from the shadows. I knew we’d go swimming naked. I was rushing the season.
It was one of those spring days that emerge scoured from the long, long freeze, with a sky clear as melted snow. The first hardy, thick-stemmed flowers had poked out of the ground. The quarry, which lay three miles out of town, reflected sky on a surface dark and unmoving as obsidian. Except for a lone caramel-colored cow that had wandered down from a pasture to drink in the shallows, Bobby and I were the only living things there. We might have hiked to a glaciated lake high in the Himalayas.
“Beautiful,” he said. We were passing a joint. A blue jay rose, with a single questioning shrill, from an ash tree still in bud.
“We have to swim,” I said. “We have to.”
“Still too cold,” he said. “That water’d be freezing, man.”
“We have to, anyway. Come on. It’s the first official swim of summer. If we don’t swim today, it’ll start snowing again tomorrow.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody knows it. Come on.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Awful cold, though.”
By then we had reached the gravel bed that passed for a beach, where the cow, who stood primly at the water’s edge, stared at us with coal-black eyes. This quarry had a rough horseshoe shape, with limestone cliffs that rose in a jagged half circle and then fell back again to the beach.
“It’s not the least bit cold,” I said to Bobby. “It’s like Bermuda by this time of year. Watch me.”
Spurred by my fear that we would do no more that day than smoke a joint, fully clothed, beside a circle of dark water, I started up the shale-strewn slope that led to the clifftop. The nearer cliffs were less than twenty feet high, and in summer the more courageous swimmers dove from there into the deep water. I had never even thought of diving off the cliff before. I was nothing like brave. But that day I scrambled in my cowboy boots, which still pinched, up the slope to the cracked limestone platform that sprouted, here and there, a lurid yellow crocus.
“It’s summer up here,” I shouted back to Bobby, who stood alone on the beach, cupping the joint. “Come on,” I shouted. “Don’t test the water with your fingers, just come up here and we’ll dive in. We’ve got to.”
“Naw, Jon,” he called. “Come back.”
With that, I began taking off my clothes in a state of humming, high-blown exhilaration. This was a more confident, daring Jonathan standing high on a sun-warmed rock, stripping naked before the puzzled gaze of a drinking cow.
“Jon,” Bobby called, more urgently.
As I pulled off my shirt and then my boots and socks, I knew a raw abandon I had never felt before. The sensation grew as each new patch of skin touched the light and the cool, brilliant air. I could feel myself growing lighter, taking on possibility, with every stitch I removed. I got ungracefully out of my jeans and boxer shorts, and stood for a moment, scrawny, naked, and wild, touched by the cold sun.
“This is it,” I hollered.
Bobby, far below, said, “Hey, man, no—”
And for the sake of Bobby, for the sake of my new life, I dove.
A thin sheet of ice still floated on the water, no more than a membrane, invisible until I broke through it. I heard the small crackling, felt the ice splinter around me, and then I was plunged into unthinkable cold, a cold that stopped my breath and seemed, for a long moment, to have stopped my heart as well. My flesh itself shrank, clung in animal panic to the bone, and I thought with perfect clarity, I’m dead. This is what it’s like.
Then I was on the surface, breaking through the ice a second time. My consciousness actually slipped out of my body, floated up, and in retrospect I have a distinct impression of watching myself swim to shore, gasping, lungs clenched like fists, the ice splintering with every stroke, sending diamond slivers up into the air.
Bobby waded in to his thighs to help pull me out. I remember the sight of his wet jeans, clinging darkly to his legs. I remember thinking his boots would be ruined.
It took another moment for my head to clear sufficiently to realize he was screaming at me, even as he helped me out of the water.
“Goddamn it,” he yelled, and his mouth was very close to my ear. “Oh, goddamn you. God damn.”
I was too occupied with my own breathing to respond. He got us well up onto the gravel before letting go of me and launching into a full-scale rant. The best I could do was stand, breathing and shivering, as he shouted.
At first he strode back and forth in a rigid pattern, as if touching two invisible goals ten feet apart, screaming “You motherfucker, you stupid motherfucker.” As he shouted, his circuit between the two goals grew shorter and shorter, until he was striding in tight little circles, following the pattern of a coiled spring. His face was magenta. Finally he stopped walking, but still he turned completely around, three times, as if the spring were continuing to coil inside him. All the while he screamed. He stopped calling me a motherfucker and began making sounds I could not understand, a stream of infuriated babble that seemed directed not at me but at the sky and the cliffs, the mute trees.
I watched dumbly. I had never seen wrath like that before; I had not known it occurred in everyday life. There was nothing for me to do but wait, and hope it ended.
After some time, without saying what he was going to do, Bobby ran off to retrieve my clothes from the clifftop. Though his fury had quieted somewhat, it was by no means spent. I stood nude on the gravel, waiting for him. When he came back with my clothes and boots he dumped them in a pile at my feet, saying, “Put ’em on fast,” in a tone of deep reproach. I did as I was told.
When I had dressed he draped his jacket around me, over my own. “No, you need it,” I said. “Your pants are all wet…”
“Shut up,” he told me, and I did.
We started back to the highway, where we would hitch a ride to town. On the way Bobby put his arm around my shoulders and held me close to him. “Stupid fucker,” he muttered. “Stupid, stupid. Stu pid.” He continued holding me as we stood with our thumbs out by the roadside, and continued holding me in the back seat of the Volkswagen driven by the two Oberlin students who picked us up. He kept his arm around me all the way home, muttering.
Back at my house, he ran a scalding-hot shower. He all but undressed me, and ordered me in. Only after I was finished, and wrapped in towels, did he take off his own wet clothes and get in the shower himself. His bare skin was bright pink in the steamy bathroom. When he emerged, glistening, studded with droplets, the medallion of pale hair was plastered to his chest.
We went to my room, put on Jimi Hendrix, and rolled a joint. We sat in our towels, smoking. “Stupid,” he whispered. “You could have killed yourself. You know how I’d have felt if you’d done that?”
“No,” I said.
“I’d have felt like, I don’t know.”
And then he looked at me with such sorrow. I put the joint down in the ashtray and, in an act of courage that far outstripped jumping off a cliff into icy water—that exceeded all my brave acts put together—I reached out and laid my hand on his forearm. There it was, his arm, sinewy and golden-haired, under my fingers. I looked at the floor—the braided rug and pumpkin-colored planks. Bobby did not pull his arm away.
A minute passed. Either nothing or something had to happen. In terror, with my pulse jumping at my neck, I began to stroke his arm with the tip of my index finger. Now, I thought, he will see what I’m after. Now he’ll bolt in horror and disgust. Still I kept on with that single miniature gesture, in a state of fear so potent it was indistinguishable from desire. He did not recoil, nor did he respond.
Finally I managed to look at his face. His eyes were bright and unblinking as an animal’s, his mouth slack. I could tell he was frightened too, and it was his fear that enabled me to move my hand to his bare shoulder. His skin prickled with gooseflesh over the smooth broad curve of his scapula. I could feel the subtle rise and fall of his breathing.
Quickly, because I lacked the nerve for deliberation, I moved my hand to his thigh. He twitched and grimaced, but did not retreat. I burrowed my hand in under the towel he wore. I watched expressions of fear and pleasure skate across his eyes. Because I had no idea what to do, I replicated the strokes I’d used on myself. When he stiffened in my hand it seemed like a gesture of forgiveness.
Then he put out a hand and, with surprising delicacy, touched me, too. We did not kiss. We did not embrace. Jimi sang “Purple Haze.” The furnace rumbled from deep in the house. Steam hissed through the pipes.
We mopped up with Kleenexes afterward, and dressed in silence. Once we were dressed, however, Bobby relit the joint and began talking in his usual voice about usual things: the Dead’s next concert tour, our plan to get jobs and buy a car together. We passed the joint and sat on the floor of my room like any two American teenagers, in an ordinary house surrounded by the boredom and struggling green of an Ohio spring. Here was another lesson in my continuing education: like other illegal practices, love between boys was best treated as a commonplace. Courtesy demanded that one’s fumbling, awkward performance be no occasion for remark, as if in fact one had acted with the calm expertise of a born criminal.
OUR SON Jonathan brought him home. They were both thirteen then. He looked hungry as a stray dog, and just that sly and dangerous. He sat at our table, wolfing roast chicken.
“Bobby,” I asked, “have you been in town long?”
His hair was an electrified nest. He wore boots, and a leather jacket decorated with a human eye worked in faded cobalt thread.
“All my life,” he answered, gnawing on a legbone. “It’s just that I’ve been invisible. I only lately decided to let myself be seen.”
I wondered if his parents fed him. He kept glancing around the dining room with such appetite that I felt for a moment like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. As a child in New Orleans, I had watched termites browsing the wooden scrollwork under our parlor window, and found that the intricate carving broke away in my hands like sugar.
“Well, welcome to the material world,” I said.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
He did not smile. He bit down on that bone hard enough to crack it.
After he’d gone I said to Jonathan, “He’s a character, isn’t he? Where did you find him?”
“He found me,” Jonathan said with the exaggerated patience that was a particular feature of his adolescence. Although his skin was still smooth and his voice sweet, he had devised a brusque knowingness by way of entry into manhood.
“And how did he find you?” I asked mildly. I could still work Southern innocence to my advantage, even after all those years in Ohio.
“He came up to me the first day of school and just started hanging around.”
“Well, I think he’s peculiar,” I said. “He gives me the creeps just a little, to tell you the truth.”
“I think he’s cool,” Jonathan said with finality. “He had an older brother who was murdered.”
In New Orleans we’d had a term for people like Bobby, unprosperous-looking people whose relations were more than usually prone to violent ends. Still, I allowed as how he was quite evidently a cool customer.
“What would you say to a game of hearts before bed?” I asked.
“No, Mom. I’m tired of playing cards.”
“Just one game,” I said. “You’ve got to give me a chance to recoup my losses.”
“Well, okay. One game.”
We cleared the table, and I dealt the cards. I played badly, though. My mind kept straying to that boy. He had looked at our house with such open, avid greed. Jonathan took trick after trick. I went upstairs for a sweater and still could not seem to get warm.
Jonathan shot the moon. “Look out,” he said. “I’m hot tonight.”
He took such simple, boyish delight in winning that he forgot about his new peevishness. I could not imagine why he wasn’t more popular at school. He was clever, and better-looking than most of the boys I saw around town. Perhaps my Southern influence had rendered him too gentle and articulate, too little the brute for that hard Midwestern city. But of course I was no judge. What mother isn’t a bit in love with her own son?
Ned got home late, after midnight. I was upstairs reading when I heard his key in the door. I resisted an urge to snap out the bedside light and feign sleep. Soon I would turn thirty-five. I had made some promises to myself regarding our marriage.
I could hear his breathing as he mounted the stairs. I sat up a bit straighter on the pillow, adjusted the strap of my nightgown. He stood in the bedroom doorway, a man of forty-three, still handsome by ordinary standards. His hair was going gray at the sides, in movie-star fashion.
“You’re still up,” he said. Was he pleased or annoyed?
“I’m a slave to this,” I said, gesturing at the book. No, wrong already. I waited up for you. That was the proper response. Still, the book had in fact been what kept me awake. I liked to think you could change your life without abandoning the simple daily truths.
He came into the room, unbuttoning his shirt. A V of chest appeared, the dark hair flecked with gray. “Looks like Deliverance is a little too strong for Cleveland,” he said. “Three sets of parents called to complain tonight.”
“I don’t know why you booked it,” I said.
He peeled off his shirt and wadded it into the clothes hamper. Sweat glistened under his arms. When he turned I could see the hair, like a symmetrical map of Africa, that had sprouted on his back.
No. Focus on his kindness, his gentle humor. Focus on the shape of his flanks, still lean, in his gabardine slacks.
“I’m lucky to have it,” he said. “It’ll be a hit. The seven o’clock was three-quarters full.”
“Good,” I said. I put my book down on the night table. It made a soft but surprisingly audible sound against the wood.
He took his slacks off. If I’d been a different sort of person I could have said, humorously, “Sweetheart, take your socks off first. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s the sight of a man in nothing but his Jockey shorts and a pair of black socks.”
I wasn’t that sort of person. Ned hung his pants up neatly and stood for a moment in the lamplight, wearing briefs and the slick dark socks he insisted on buying. They had rubbed the hair off his shins. When he removed them, they would leave the imprint of their weave on the hairless flesh.
He put his pajama bottoms on over his shorts, then sat on the bed to remove his socks. Outside of the shower, Ned was rarely stark naked.
“Whew,” he said. “I’m beat.”
I reached over to stroke his back, which was moist with perspiration. He startled.
“Don’t you worry,” I said. “I mean you no harm.”
He smiled. “Nervous Nellie,” he said.
“Jonathan had a new friend over tonight. You should see him.”
“Worse than Adam?” he asked.
“Oh, much. Of a different order entirely. This one’s a little, well, frightening.”
“How so?”
“Grubby,” I said. “Silent. Sort of hungry-looking.”
Ned shook his head. “Leave it to Jonny,” he said. “He can pick ’em.”
I felt a twinge of annoyance. Ned was away so much of the time. Whatever took place in his absence became a domestic comedy of sorts; a pleasant little movie playing to a sparse house across town. I continued stroking his back.
“But this boy seems frightening in a more adult way,” I said. “Adam and the others were children. I feel like this boy could steal, he could be up to all kinds of things. And it got me thinking. Jonathan himself is changing, there’ll be girls and cars and lord knows what-all.”
“Sure there will be, Grandmaw,” Ned said, and got good-naturedly under the bedcovers. I knew how he pictured it: a teenage comedy, harmlessly entertaining, replete with first dates and hippie friends. Perhaps he was right. But I couldn’t see it as a movie, myself. I couldn’t tell him how different it feels when it’s your hour-to-hour experience. I knew that if I tried to, I’d end up sounding just like the mother in the movie: a bird-like, overly dramatic character; the one who doesn’t get the jokes.
“Okay with you if I douse the lights?” he said. “Or are you going to flail away at that book a little longer?”
“No. Turn out the light.”
We settled ourselves and lay side by side, breathing in the darkness. It seemed there should be so much for us to talk about. Perhaps the biggest surprise of married life was its continuing formality, even as you came to know the other’s flesh and habits better than you knew your own. For all that familiarity, we could still seem like two people on a date that was not going particularly well.
“I made the chicken with tarragon tonight,” I said. “You should have seen him gobble it up. You’d have thought he hadn’t eaten in a week.”
“The friend?” Ned said.
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“Bobby.”
Outside, one of the neighbor’s cats yowled. Since Miss Heidegger died, her house had been rented to a succession of three different families, all of whom were prone to noisy, underfed pets and sudden departures. The neighborhood was going down.
“Ned?” I said.
“Mm-hm?”
“Do I look much older to you?”
“You look about sixteen,” he said.
“Well, I’m far from sixteen. Thirty-four used to seem so old. Now it doesn’t seem like anything. But I’ve got a son who’s going to be shaving soon. Who’s going to be keeping secrets and driving away in the car.”
I didn’t know how to tell him in a way he’d understand: I felt myself ceasing to be a main character. I couldn’t say it in just those words. They would not pass through the domestic air of our bedroom.
“Thirty-four is nothing, kiddo,” he said. “Look who you’re talking to. I can hardly remember being thirty-four.”
“I know. I’m just vain and foolish.”
I reached over, under the blanket, and stroked his chest. Again, his skin prickled under my hand. He was not accustomed to these attentions from me.
“You look great,” he said. “You’re in the prime of your life.”
“Ned?”
“Uh-huh?”
“I do love you, you know. Lord, how long has it been since I’ve said that?”
“Oh, sweetheart. I love you, too.”
I worked my fingers down along his bicep, petted his forearm. “I’m being mawkish tonight,” I said. “I’m departing from my old stiff-backed ways.”
“You’re not stiff-backed,” he said.
“Not tonight,” I said in an even voice. It was not seductive, but neither was it dry or matronly.
He wrapped his fingers over mine. I’d imagined marriage in one of two ways: either you loved a man and coupled with him happily, or you didn’t. I’d never considered the possibility of loving someone without an accompanying inclination of the flesh.
He cleared his throat. I leaned over to kiss him, and he let himself be kissed with a passivity that was virginal, almost girlish. That touched me, even as his beard stubble scraped against my skin.
“Not tonight,” I said again, and this time I was able to make my voice low and breathy. It seemed a good imitation of lust, one I might catch up with and take as my own if he caressed me as shyly as he permitted my kiss.
“Mmm,” he said, a low growl that rumbled up from deep in his throat. I felt a lightness in the pit of my stomach, a sense of expanding possibility I had not known with him in some time. It could still happen.
Then he kissed me back, raising his head off the pillow and pressing his mouth against mine. I felt the pressure of his teeth. The lightness collapsed inside me, but I did not give up. I answered his kiss, took his bare shoulder in the palm of my hand. It was moist with sweat. I could feel the coarse corkscrew hairs on the palm of my hand. His teeth, only thinly cushioned by his upper lip, bit urgently into my mouth.
And I knew I couldn’t make it. Not that night. I fell out of the scene. My attention left my body and stepped to the far side of the room, where it watched disapprovingly as a man of forty-three roughly kissed his wife, ran moist hands over her aging back and sides. I could have gone through the motions but it would have been only that and nothing more. I’d have suffered through it with the smoldering anger that lies bring.
I disengaged my mouth, planted a series of small kisses along his neck. “Honey,” I whispered, “just hold me a minute. Okay?”
“Sure,” he said easily. “Sure.” To be honest, I think he was relieved.
We lay embracing for a while, until Ned kissed my scalp affectionately and turned away for sleep. We did not sleep in one another’s arms; never had. Soon he was breathing rhythmically. Sleep came easily to Ned. Almost everything did. He had a talent for adjusting his expectations to meet his circumstances.
Perhaps tonight had been a start. Perhaps, the following night, I would manage a little more.
I didn’t want to be the monster of the house—the fretting mother, the ungenerous wife. I made the promises to myself once again, and hardly slept until the windows were blue with the first light.
Jonathan persisted in his fascination with Bobby, who became a fixture at our table. Ned tolerated him, because it was Ned’s nature to go along. He kept a layer of neutral air between his person and the world, so that whatever reached him had been filtered and rarefied.
It was I who kept the accounts.
Bobby seemed to have no other plans. He was perennially available. He never invited Jonathan to his house, which sat all right with me, but still I began to wonder. One night I asked him, “Bobby, what does your father do?”
We were eating dinner, he sopping up the last of his beurre blanc with his third piece of homemade bread seemingly before Jonathan or Ned or I had started to eat.
“He’s a teacher” was the answer. “Not our school. Over at Roosevelt.”
“And your mother?”
“She died. About a year ago.”
He stuffed the bread into his mouth and reached for another piece.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“You shouldn’t be sorry,” he told me. “You didn’t even know her.”
“I meant it in a more general way. I meant I’m sorry about your loss.”
Gorging, he looked at me as if I had just spoken in Sanskrit. After a moment he said, “How do you make this sauce?”
“Butter and vinegar,” I said. “Lemon, a little vermouth. Nothing to it, really.”
“I never had sauce like this,” he said. “You made this bread?”
“Bread’s a hobby of mine,” I said. “I just about do it in my sleep.”
“Yow,” he said. Shaking his head in astonishment, he reached for his fourth slice.
After dinner the boys went up to Jonathan’s room. In a moment we heard the stereo, an unfamiliar drumbeat that thumped through the floorboards. Bobby had brought some of his records over.
Ned said, “My God, the kid’s an orphan.”
“He’s not an orphan,” I said. “His father is alive.”
“You know what I mean. That kid’s in a bad way.”
I got up to clear the dishes. When I was a girl there had been parts of town we never went near. They were dark spots, blank areas on the map. I said, “Yes, and that’s why Jonathan is so taken with him. If he were lame on top of it, we’d have him here every night instead of every other.”
“Whoa there,” Ned said. “This doesn’t sound like you.”
I stacked Bobby’s empty plate on top of Jonathan’s. Jonathan had artfully distributed his food around the edges of his plate, so it would appear to have been consumed. He was so thin you could just about see through him in a strong light. Bobby’s plate was spotless, as if he had scoured it with his tongue. Nary a crumb was left on the cloth where he’d sat.
“I know it doesn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry about all that’s happened to him, I really am. But something about that boy frightens me.”
“He’s wild, is what he is. He’s a boy with no one but a father, growing up half wild. We have resources enough to give some shelter to a wild boy, don’t you think?”
“Of course we do.”
I carried the plates into the kitchen. I was sullen, bone-hard Alice, married to Ned the Good.
He followed, bringing dishes. “Don’t worry,” he said from behind me. “Every kid brings home a few wild friends. Jonathan will grow up fine, regardless.”
“But I do worry about him,” I said, running water. “He’s thirteen. This is like—oh, I don’t know. It’s almost like seeing some hidden quality of Jonathan’s come suddenly to light. Something he’s been harboring all along that we never knew about.”
“You’re overplaying the scene.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. If I had the time I’d tell you all about Robby Cole. He was my best friend in grade school. I was devoted to him because he could set off caps with his teeth. Among other things.”
“And look how you turned out.”
“Well, I married you,” he said.
“A laudable accomplishment. Perhaps less than a life’s purpose, though.”
“I married you and I run the best movie theater in Greater Cleveland. And I’ve got to go.”
“Goodbye.”
He put his hands around my waist, kissed me loudly on the neck. I was visited briefly by his smell, the particular odor of his skin mingled with citrus after-shave. It was like entering his sphere of inhabited air, and as long as I stood within that sphere I could share his belief that bad things passed away of their own accord, that the world conspired toward good outcomes. I turned and lightly kissed his rough cheek.
“Worry less,” he said.
I promised to try. While he was in the house, it seemed possible. But as soon as he left, the possibility receded like light from a lantern he carried. I watched him through the kitchen window. Perhaps Ned’s most remarkable feature was his ability to walk serenely in this city of gray stone and yellow brick, where the wind off the lake could shrink people’s hearts to pins.
I took down the new cookbook I had just bought, full of recipes from the French countryside, and began planning tomorrow’s meal.
Bobby stayed until well after ten, until I’d called out, “Boys, it’s a school night.” Even then, after thirteen years of it, I was surprised at how much like somebody’s mother I could sound.
I was reading the paper when Bobby came downstairs. “Good night,” he said.
His way of speaking, his whole manner, was like that of a foreigner learning the customs of the country. He resembled more than anything a refugee from some distant place, underfed and desperate to please. His delivery of the words “good night” had precisely matched my own.
“Bobby?” I said. I had no next statement, really. It was just that he stood so expectantly.
“Uh-huh?”
“I truly am sorry about your mother,” I said. “I hope I didn’t sound just polite at the dinner table.”
“It’s okay.”
“Do you and your father manage all right? Does dinner get cooked, and the house cleaned up every now and then?”
“Uh-huh. A woman comes once a week.”
I said, “Why don’t you bring your father for dinner one night? Maybe early next week?”
He looked at me darkly and questioningly, as if I had violated some taboo from his country; as if he could not immediately know whether I had meant to insult him or whether the rules were just that different over here.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, maybe I’ll give him a call. You’d better get along now, it’s late.”
“Okay.”
I believe he’d have just continued standing in front of me until I told him to go.
“Good night,” I said again, and had the sentiment returned to me in a young male version of my own voice.
After he’d gone I went upstairs and knocked on Jonathan’s door.
“Uh-huh?” he said.
“Only me. May I come in?”
“Uh-huh.”
He lay on his bed. A nasal male voice, accompanied by acoustic guitar, rasped through the speakers. The window stood open though it was early November, and frosty. I believed I detected a smell, something sweet and smoky which the chill air had not quite dissipated.
I said, “Did you have a good evening?”
“Sure.”
“Bobby’s had a hard time of it, hasn’t he?” I said.
“You shouldn’t pity him.”
“Did you know before that his mother was dead?”
“Uh-huh,” Jonathan said.
“Do you know how she died?”
“Sort of. I mean, she took too many sleeping pills. But she had a prescription, she’d been taking them for years. I guess she’d started complaining they weren’t working anymore. So it could have been an accident.”
“Bobby had a brother who died, too?”
Jonathan nodded. “That was definitely an accident. It wasn’t a murder after all. That’s when the mother started in on sleeping pills.”
He delivered these facts with a certain pride, as if they represented Bobby’s worldly accomplishments.
“Lord. The things that happen to people.”
I went and shut the window. It was almost cold enough to steam your breath in that room.
“And nothing’s ever happened to us,” Jonathan said. “Nothing bad.”
“We’re very lucky.”
As I turned from the window I saw Bobby’s leather jacket, draped over the chair. The embroidered eye, cyclopean, iris big as a hockey puck, stared from the worn cowhide.
“Bobby forgot his jacket,” I said.
“He’s loaning it to me,” Jonathan said. “It used to be his brother’s. I loaned him mine at school today.”
“Your good windbreaker? You traded it for that?”
“Uh-huh. Bobby talks about his brother a lot. I mean, it sounds like he was pretty cool. When he died, it just about blew their whole family apart.”
“Do you know what that windbreaker cost?” I asked.
He looked at me in the new way, his jaw set challengingly and his eyes gone hard.
I decided to let it go. I thought I’d give him the leeway to work it through his system.
“What would you think about veal stew for dinner tomorrow night?” I said. “There’s a recipe I’d like to try, veal with mushrooms and pearl onions. How does that sound?”
“I don’t care.” He shrugged.
I held my arms close over my chest. It was freezing in that room.
“How about a quick game of hearts before bed?” I asked. “I’m in disgrace, you know. I lost so badly the last couple of times, I can barely hold my head up.”
“No. I’m beat.”
“One short game?”
“ No, Mom.”
“All right.”
I stood for a moment, though it was clearly time to leave him alone. The light from his bedside lamp, which I had bought ten years ago, shone on his pale hair and precise, sculpted features. He took after me, but in an idealized way. My own looks, which any mirror told me were rather too severe, had come up softened in him.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night. Sleep well.”
Still I lingered. I could not leave off looking at him, even if he resented me for it. If I’d had the courage I’d have said to him, “Don’t do it. Please don’t start hating me. You can have the world without shutting me out of your life.”
I walked quietly from the room, as full of him as I had been when I was pregnant.
I invited Bobby and his father for dinner the following Tuesday. They arrived half an hour late, with two bottles of wine. “Sorry,” the father said. “We had to drive all over town looking for a decent Chardonnay. I hope you like Chardonnay.”
I told him we loved it.
He wore a goat’s beard, and a mustard-colored jacket with bright brass buttons. His florid face was a riot of broken capillaries. He looked like an older, drunken Bobby.
The father’s name was Burton. He scarcely touched his food when we sat down to eat. He drank wine, smoked Pall Malls, and paused occasionally in these activities to fork up a bit of my poached sole, hold it aloft for a moment or two, and insert it into his mouth with no more notice than a carpenter gives a tenpenny nail.
Ned asked him, “How do you find the kids over at Roosevelt?”
Burt Morrow looked at him uncomprehendingly. I recognized the expression.
“They can be difficult,” he said in a measured voice. “They are not bad kids by and large but they can be difficult.”
After a moment, Ned nodded. “I see.”
“We try to get along,” Burt said. “I try to get along with them. I try not to offend them, and am mostly successful, I believe.” He turned to Bobby and asked, “Would you say that I’m mostly successful?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Bobby said. He looked at his father with an expression neither loving nor disdainful. They shared a certain stunned quality, a way of responding to a question as if it had been posed by some disembodied voice whispering from the ether. They might have been the kindly, dim-witted older brothers in a fairy tale—the ones on whom the charms and enchantments are wasted. Jonathan sat between them, his blue eyes snapping with intelligence.
“That’s all I try to do myself,” I said. “Just stay out of Jonathan’s way and let him experience life. Lord, I wouldn’t know how to discipline. I sometimes still feel like a child myself.”
Both Bobby and his father looked at me with numbly astonished faces.
“I married young, you know,” I said. “I wasn’t but a few years older than these boys are now, and I certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love with a Northerner named Ned Glover, nor on getting myself moved to Ohio, with that Canadian wind blowing sleet up off the lake. Brr. Not that I’d do things any differently.”
Ned winked and said, “I call her Helen of Louisiana. I’m still waiting for a bunch of Southerners to leave a wooden horse on the front lawn.”
Burt lit another cigarette. He let the smoke drift out of his open mouth, and watched it snake its way over the table. “I might do some things differently,” he said. “I think you’d have to say that I would. Yes.”
I was not ignorant of psychology. I knew Jonathan needed to escape from his father and me, to sever the bonds: to murder us, in a sense, and then resurrect us later, when he was a grown man with a life of his own and we had faded into elderly inconsequentiality. I wasn’t blind, or foolish.
Still, it seemed too soon, and Bobby seemed the wrong vehicle. At thirteen we have so many choices to make, with no idea about how consequences can rattle through the decades. When I was thirteen I had consciously decided to be talkative and a little wild, to ensure that my own parents’ silent dinners and their long, bookish evenings—marked only by the chimes of the clock—would have no lasting effect on me. I had been barely seventeen when I met Ned Glover, a handsome, humorous man in his twenties, owner of a Chrysler convertible, full of stories from the North.
That night in bed I said to him, “Well, at least now we know how Bobby comes by it.”
“Comes by what?”
“Everything. His whole personality. Or the mysterious lack thereof.”
“You really can’t stand that kid, can you?” Ned said.
“I don’t bear him any particular malice,” I said. “I just, well, this is an important time in Jonathan’s life. I’m not sure he should be hanging around with a character like that. Do you think Bobby might be a little retarded?”
“Sweetie, the infatuation will wear off. Trust your own kid a little more. We’ve been raising him for thirteen years, we must’ve taught him a thing or two.”
I didn’t speak. What I wanted to say was “I’ve taught him a thing or two; you’ve been holed up in that theater.” But I kept quiet. We lay waiting for sleep. There would be no sexual congress that night. I was miles from the possibility. Still, I thought we had time.
Perhaps I struggled too hard to remain Jonathan’s friend. Perhaps I ought to have distanced myself more. I simply could not believe that the boy with whom I’d played and shared secrets—the achingly vulnerable child who told me every story that entered his head—needed suddenly to be treated with the polite firmness one might apply to a lodger.
Our ongoing game of hearts came to an end, as did our Saturday shopping trips. Bobby continued wearing Jonathan’s blue windbreaker, and started turning up in Jonathan’s shirts as well. When he stayed overnight, he slept in Jonathan’s room on the folding cot. He was consistently cordial to me, in his rehearsed, immigrant’s fashion.
One morning in March I was slicing a grapefruit for breakfast. Jonathan sat alone at the kitchen table, it being one of the mornings Bobby was not with us.
I said, “Looks like a lovely day if you like ducks.”
A moment passed. Jonathan said, “Yes, if yew lack ducks.”
He was mocking my voice, my Southern accent.
I ought to have let the insult pass. I ought simply to have ignored him and served the grapefruit. But instead I turned and asked pleasantly, “What did you say?”
He just smiled as if unutterably pleased with himself.
I asked again, “What did you say, darling? I’m not sure if I heard correctly.”
He stood up and left the house, saying, “Believe I’ll skip break-fuss this mornin’, dahling.” As he walked away that eye stared at me from the back of the jacket.
It happened again in the evening, while we were watching television. That night we did have Bobby. Ned was at the theater, and we were watching a Star Trek rerun, the boys and I. I said, “Mr. Spock might not be much fun at parties, but I love him best of all.”
Jonathan said, “He’s on a five-year mission in deep space. If you were married to him, you’d need a dozen sons to keep you company.”
I might have laughed along like a true sport but I was still too surprised by this new, outright meanness. “I rather thought we kept one another company,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Boys like nothing better than to shop and cook.”
Bobby sat on the floor, as was his custom. He objected for some reason to furniture.
He said, “Quit, Jon.”
“All in fun,” Jonathan said.
“Yeah, but quit anyway.”
And so Jonathan quit. He watched the program without further comment. His feet looked huge and rather weapon-like in the black cowboy boots he had insisted on buying.
Bobby had pared his fingernails, and forced a comb through his hair. He appeared to have abandoned boots in favor of simple black sneakers.
He was always polite to me. More than polite, really: he was courtly, in his way. He inquired after the particulars of the dinners I made, and asked me how my day had gone. Answering wasn’t always easy, because I was never quite sure to whom I spoke. He stubbornly retained his foreign quality, although with time he did a better job of simulating the clean-minded normality of a television character. He polished his act. He took to trimming his hair, and even turned up in some new clothes that had not originally belonged to Jonathan.
One night in May I was passing by Jonathan’s room when I heard music less shrill and raucous than what the boys usually played. I had grown accustomed to the endless noise of their music, the way one does to a barking dog. Electric guitars and bass drums had become a new kind of silence for me, but this particular music—a single, sweet female voice accompanied by a piano—was distinctly audible.
I hesitated outside Jonathan’s door. Then I knocked, and was surprised by the timid little mouse-like sound my knuckles made against the wood. He was my son, living in my house. I was entitled to knock on his bedroom door. I knocked again, louder.
“Yeah?” he called from within.
“Only me,” I called back. “May I come in a minute?”
There was silence, filled with the tinkle of piano keys. After a moment, Bobby opened the door.
“Hey,” he said. He stood smiling, looking rather peculiar—miscast—in a pin-striped dress shirt and jeans. I could see Jonathan within, sitting sulkily in his black boots and T-shirt.
“I didn’t mean to bother you boys,” I said, and was annoyed at the craven sound of my own voice. I might have been a poor relation, come for her annual duty dinner.
“It’s okay,” Bobby said. “It’s fine.”
“I just, well, I wondered what that music was. It sounded so…different.”
“You like it?” Bobby asked.
It seemed a trick question. Would I open myself to ridicule? Then, brushing aside my own girlish fears, I answered like a woman of thirty-five. “It’s lovely,” I said. “Who is she?”
“Laura Nyro,” Bobby said. “Yeah, she’s good. It’s an old one, you want to come in and hear it for a minute?”
I glanced at Jonathan. I should of course have said no. I should have gone about my offstage business, folding the towels and sheets. But I said, “All right, just for a minute,” and stepped gratefully into the room to which I had previously enjoyed free access. During the past year, Jonathan had all but covered the walls with posters of scowling long-haired rock singers. The woman’s voice, soaring and melancholy, filled the room rather tenuously, surrounded by all those hard masculine eyes.
Jonathan sat on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest and his hands clasped over his shins. He had sat in just that way since the age of four—it was a sulking posture. I saw, perhaps for the first time, how the nascent man had always been folded up inside the boy. He would carry those same gestures with him right into adulthood. It surprised me a little, though it was the most ordinary of insights. I had rather imagined Jonathan transformed as an adult, appearing one day as a kind, solicitous stranger. I saw that I had been both right and wrong about that.
Bobby picked up the album cover and held it out to me, as if I had come to consider buying it. “This is it,” he said. When I took it from him his face flushed, either with pride or with embarrassment.
The album cover was dark, a murky chocolate color. It depicted a rather plain-looking woman with a high, pale forehead and limp black hair parted in the middle. She might have been a poetic, unpopular student at a girls’ school, more an object of pity than of ridicule. I’d known such girls well enough. I’d felt in danger of becoming one myself, and so had forced myself to change. To speak up and take risks, to date boys you couldn’t take home to mother. Ned Glover had driven down from Michigan in an electric-blue convertible, a suave, humorous man far too old for me.
“Lovely,” I said. “She has such a pretty voice.”
It sounded exactly like the response of a prim middle-aged woman. I handed the album cover back quickly, as if it cost far more than I could afford.
“She quit singing,” Bobby said. “She got married and, like, moved to Connecticut or something.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We stood there awkwardly, like strangers at a party. I could feel the force of Jonathan’s desire impelling me from the room. It registered physically, a pressure on my forehead and shoulders. “Well,” I said. “Thanks for letting an old lady barge in.”
“Sure,” Bobby said. One song had ended and another begun, a faster number I thought I recognized. Yes. “Jimmy Mack,” once sung by Martha and the Vandellas.
“I know this one,” I said. “I mean, I’ve heard it before.”
“Yeah?” Bobby said.
And then he did something peculiar. He started to dance.
I can only think that language ran out on him, and he resorted to what he knew. He did it automatically, as if it were a logical extension of the conversation. He started swaying his hips in rhythm, and shifting his feet. His sneakers squeaked on the floorboards.
“Yes, indeed,” I said. “This is an ancient one.”
I glanced at Jonathan, who looked startled. He returned my glance, and for a moment we found our old complicity again. We were united in our consternation over the habits of the local people. I half expected that once we were alone together, he might do an imitation of Bobby—dancing big-shouldered and dim-faced—just to make me laugh.
But then Bobby took my hand and pulled me gently forward. “Come on,” he said.
“Oh, no. Absolutely not.”
“Can’t take no,” he said cheerfully. He did not let go of my hand.
“ No,” I said again. But my refusal lacked force. Perhaps it was my Southern upbringing; my inbred determination to avoid social unpleasantness at any cost. I laughed a little as I said no, without quite having meant to.
He turned with me gently, moving in rhythm. He was a better dancer than his ordinary manner let on. I’d been quite a dancer myself as a girl—it was one of the resolutions I’d made, a salient feature of the person I’d meant to become—and I recognized the signs. There were boys you knew you could trust on the dance floor; you knew it almost instantly, more by feel than by appearance. Certain dancers imparted to the air itself a sense of confidence and inevitability. They had a generous grace that took you in; they told you just by the touch of their hands that you were incapable of making a wrong move. Bobby was that kind of dancer. I could not have been more surprised if he’d snapped a flock of live pigeons from under his pin-striped cuffs.
I responded. I took his other hand and danced with him as well as I could in that cramped room, under the disapproving eyes of my son and the sullen stares of the rock singers. Bobby smiled shyly. The woman’s voice ran through the notes with sorrowful abandon, like somebody’s gawky cousin set briefly, deliriously free.
After the song had ended I took back my hands and touched my hair. “Lord,” I said. “Look what you drove an old lady to do.”
“You’re good,” Bobby said. “You can dance.”
“Used to. In the early Pleistocene.”
“Naw,” he said. “Come on.”
I looked again at Jonathan, and saw what I expected: all sense of complicity was burned out of his face. He stared at me not so much with resentment as with nonrecognition, as if I were someone who only resembled his mother.
“Stroke of midnight,” I said. “Love to stay, but I’ve got sheets to fold.”
I got quickly out of the room. In less than a minute the melancholy woman had been replaced by a driving male voice and a cacophony of electric guitars.
Ned came home late that night, after I’d gone to sleep. I awoke and found him beside me, breathing deeply and frowning over a dream. I lay on my side watching him for a while. Ned had once been a boy. Perhaps the fact had never quite impressed itself on me, though of course I’d seen the pictures: little Ned grinning under an oversized bowler hat, Ned scrawny and big-footed in sandals at the beach. I had personally packed a carton of his iron cars and lead soldiers into the attic. Still, I’d never fully apprehended it. This man here was what grew from a boy. He had been twenty-six and I seventeen when we met; by my lights he’d been middle-aged even then. He might have been born an adult. Those pictures and toys might have been the artifacts of a boy who had died young, the former inhabitant of an old house who took his sense of limitless possibility out of the world with him when he went. What remained was china stored behind glass and the patience of African violets—an unhurried elderly life. But now, as if for the first time, lying beside Ned, I could see the boyish crook of his elbow under the pillow, the young muscles of a chest gone hairy and slack. Poor thing, I thought. Poor boy.
I reached over to stroke his shoulder. I might have kissed him. I might have let my hand stray down to the lush tangle of his chest. But my new sense of his innocent beauty was still too delicate. If he awoke and kissed me hard, if he mauled my ribs, it might collapse altogether. So I contented myself with watching him, and petting the soft, furred mound of his shoulder.
MY FATHER has bought himself a new pair of glasses—aviator style, with spindly pink-gold rims. He comes to my bedroom door and poses there, one elbow crooked jauntily against the frame.
“Bobby, what do you think?” he asks.
“Huh?” I say. I’ve been lying in the dark with the headphones on, smoking a joint and listening to Jethro Tull. The music has scooped out my thoughts and I need a few minutes to reenter the world of cause and effect.
“Bobby, what do you think?” he asks again.
“I don’t know,” I answer eventually. He will have to give me more time with the question.
My father points to his head. He is standing in light. Hundred-watt rays stream around him, cut through the dusk of my room.
What do I think of his head? It is in fact an expansive question, probably beyond my scope.
“Well,” I say. I let the syllable hang.
“My glasses,” he says. “Bobby, I got new glasses today.”
A stitch of time passes. He says, “What do you think? Are they a little young for me?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I can hear how foolish I sound; how empty. But I am helpless before his questions. He might as well be an angel, posing riddles.
He sighs, a slow punctured hissing sound. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll start dinner.”
“Good, Dad,” I say, in a voice I hope comes out cheerful and cooperative. I check with myself—is it his night or mine to make dinner? This is Tuesday. His. I have got that right.
Only after he’s removed his shape from the doorway do I realize his questions were simple ones. He’s traded in his tortoiseshells for a racier model, and wants reassurance. I should follow him to the kitchen, start the conversation over. But I don’t do that. I collapse under the weight of my own self-interest, and permit myself a return to the music and the dark.
Sometime later, my father calls me to dinner. He has made chopped steak and squares of frozen hash browns. He sips Scotch from a glass decorated with pictures of orange slices round and evenly spoked as wagon wheels.
We eat for a while without talking. Once they’ve established themselves, our silences are hard to break. They are tough and seamless as shrink-wrap. Finally I say, “Those glasses look okay. I mean, I like them.”
“I think they’re probably a bit too young,” he says. “I suspect a man my age probably looks a little foolish in glasses like these.”
“Naw. All kinds of people wear that kind. They look fine.”
“Do you honestly think so?”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Well,” he says. “I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to have a younger person’s opinion on the subject.”
“They do. They look, you know, real nice.”
“Good.”
Silverware clicks against the plates. I can hear the action of my father’s throat, swallowing.
For weeks now, he has been dyeing his hair. He is on a strand-by-strand agenda—every few days, he dyes a few more. In this way he hopes to present the change as natural, as if time had reversed itself against his personal will.
This is his solution—to age in big-collared shirts and leather vests, to try every combination of mustache, beard, and sideburns. I’ve seen him in the old courtship pictures, big-armed in T-shirts, a meandering, hard-drinking musician who bumped up against the limits of his own talent and fell in love with a farm woman, a widow who knew about seeds and harvest.
Then I remember. It comes to me: today is the anniversary. It is two years ago today.
He replenishes his drink from the Ballantine bottle and says, “Let me ask you another question.”
“Okay.”
“What would you think about a new car?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “Isn’t the one we’ve got okay?”
He sets his drink down hard enough to splash Scotch and a thumbnail-sized ice cube on the tabletop. “You’re right,” he says. “You’re absolutely right. There is absolutely no need for change of any kind. I couldn’t agree more.”
The grandfather clock ticks. I say, “A new car would be okay, Dad.”
“I was just thinking about something a little snazzier,” he says. “Perhaps a foreign model, with a sunroof.”
“Uh-huh. Good.”
“Something that would let a little air in.”
“Yeah.”
We work our way through dinner. My father’s face is remote and optimistic as he eats. He is taking the gray out, hair by hair. His eyes swim behind the oval lenses of his new glasses.
She left by slow degrees before making it official. She lived in the guest room, made rare silent appearances in a pale turquoise robe. Once, when she passed me in the hall on her way to the bathroom, she stopped long enough to stroke my hair. She didn’t speak. She looked at me as if she was standing on a platform in a flat, dry country and I was pulling away on a train that traveled high into an alpine world.
After my father and I found her he made the calls and we sat together, he and I, in the empty living room. We left her alone—it seemed like the polite thing to do. We sat quietly, waiting for the police and the paramedics to arrive. We didn’t speak.
In the dining room, the autumn farm scene hasn’t changed. Cows still cast orange shadows, trees still sprout yellow leaves. My father nibbles demurely at his steak, doesn’t touch the square potatoes. I finish my dinner, take my plate to the kitchen and add it to the pile. An enormous fly, iridescent, roams ecstatically over a quarter moon of yellowed lamb fat. The curtains still sport blue teapots.
Later, after my father has gone to bed, I get up and walk around. I took a hit of Dexedrine after school, thinking I might clean up the house, but I fell into music instead. Two joints haven’t dulled the speed enough to allow anything like sleep, so once my father has killed the bottle and settled into bed, I take a walk through the rooms, my head crackling and blazing like a light bulb. Under the gathering disorder is a perfect replica of a house, like the period reproductions they put together in small-town museums. Here is their living room, a cherry-red sofa once considered brash, and an old copper washtub, where logs would be kept if fires were built in the hearth. Here is the front door, yellow oak with a single frosted-glass window through which strangers can be seen but not identified. And here is the rumpus room, paneled, with a rag rug like a bull’s-eye on the brown linoleum floor.
After the accident, my father tried to sell the house. But in six months the single interested party offered slightly more than half the market value. This section of Cleveland was not a growth proposition.
Music plays inside my head. I walk down the hall to my father’s door. My head is an illuminated radio—for a moment I believe the music will wake him up. I stand in front of his door, watching the grain of the wood. I open the door and creep inside.
My father breathes noisily. His digital clock flips the red seconds away. I stand, just stand, with time passing on the bedside table. My head plays “Aqualung.” At that moment, I get the point of psycho killers. I could take his head in my hands, stroke his dead-black hair. I could punch him and feel his teeth break like sugar cubes, hear them scatter on the floor. I get it about the dark silence of the world, and your own crackling internal light and noise. I get the space-suit feeling.
I could have come to murder my father. Now, right now, I could sneak up and press a pillow over his face. He’s too drunk to fight. I can see myself doing it. The movie plays inside my head, with Jethro Tull on the sound track. A snow-white pillow and my own body pinning his; a brief struggle and then the rapture of the drowned. Aqualung my friend, don’t you start away uneasy.
Or I could plant a kiss on his worried head. He’s drunk enough to sleep through that, too. I could crawl into bed with him and lose myself in the musky warmth, the smells of Scotch and underarm and British Sterling. I stand a minute beside his bed, considering the possibilities.
What I finally do is leave. I go out of my father’s room, down the hall, and through the front door into the starry, streetlighted Cleveland night.
The Glovers live less than a mile away, in a house with diamond-pane windows. A white-wicker swing sways creakily on the front porch, crisp as frozen lace. I watch their house from among the irises. It is early June; flowers whisper around my knees. Careful as a thief I survey their property, keeping to the shadows. There is the light in Jonathan’s window, a feeble ivory glow from the gooseneck lamp beside his bed. He is reading John Steinbeck for school, and will tell me the story afterward. I creep behind a mulberry tree. Kitchen light throws a long rectangle onto the grass as Alice dries the spoons and the measuring cups. I can’t see her but I know her moves—she is fast and certain as science itself, though she cares more about perfection than she does about order. The cast-iron skillets are always oiled, but the Sunday paper still sits in the living room on a Wednesday night. The Glovers keep a nourishing, semi-clean house that has little to do with neatness. Things catch and hold here.
I wait breathing in the dark as she turns out the kitchen light and goes upstairs. Ned won’t be home for another hour or more. I sneak around in time to see the light go on in her bedroom window. I watch her window and I watch the others, the ones that open onto empty rooms. Behind paired black windows is the gleaming darkness of the dining room, its silver tea service putting out an icy glitter. Behind a third, smaller window is the laundry room, with its scoured smell. Upstairs, Alice sends a brief shadow across the windowscreen.
I wait, watching, until Ned’s car pulls up. I can see him walk from the garage to the front door, his white shirt brilliant in the porchlight, coins jingling in his pockets. Ned slicks his hair with Vitalis; he wears Sansabelt slacks. I hear the click of his key in the door—a perfect fit. He douses the light and goes upstairs. I can feel his tread. Alice is waiting for him, her hair pulled up off her neck. Jonathan still reads in his own room, taking in the story he’ll tell me tomorrow.
I sit in the bushes until every light is out, until the house has settled itself for the night. Then I walk a slow circle around it, with stars and planets shining overhead. Above us, suns nova and collapse, punching holes in the galaxy, pulling their light after them into the next world. Here below, on an earth night humming with gnats and crickets, I orbit the Glovers’ house.
BOBBY rid his voice of its droning, metronomic quality and acquired a boyish lilt, finishing sentences on a high note, so that any statement sounded like an eager, tentative question. His electric hair, when submitted to a barber’s shears, emerged as the ordinary, dryly windblown crop of a teenager prone to cowlicks. Once, as he stood grinning before our front door at noon, I saw that he had daubed his acne with a concealing flesh-colored ointment.
Still, he never managed the complete transition. He retained a subvert, slightly dangerous quality—something ravenous and watchful. It came out at dinner, as he scoured his plate, and it came out in his insistent, unfailing politeness. Only fugitives are capable of flawless courtesy from morning till night. And, besides, the boy Bobby was struggling to become could never have danced like he did.
He took to bringing over records he thought I’d like—a sweeter, more melodic music than the sort Jonathan favored. Every now and then he’d call down from Jonathan’s room: “Mrs. Glover? If you’re not too busy, come on up and listen to something?” I’d almost always go on up. How busy could I be, cooking and washing clothes?
I learned a collection of new names: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Boz Scaggs. Sometimes I just sat with the boys, listening. Sometimes, when an upbeat song came on, I accepted Bobby’s invitation to dance.
His dancing was something to see. His sense of rhythm did not in any way derive from the granite cornices and box hedges of Cleveland. Dancing, he was an original—his hips swayed with a voluptuous certainty more graceful than lewd, and his arms and legs cut their own brisk, surprising pattern through the confined air of my son’s room. Once the song ended he’d smile and shrug, as if dancing had been a slightly embarrassing failure of wit. He’d return by visible degrees to his continuing impression of the pallid suburban boys mothers are supposed to delight in.
Sometimes Jonathan grudgingly joined us dancing, sometimes he sulked with his knees drawn up to his chest. I wasn’t a fool—I knew no fifteen-year-old boy would welcome his own mother’s participation in his social life. But Bobby was so insistent. And, besides, Jonathan and I had always been good friends despite our blood bond. I decided that accepting Bobby’s little gifts of music and dance would do no harm. I had been a bit wild myself, at Jonathan’s age, not so very long ago.
Jonathan grew his hair nearly to his shoulders, in defiance of the school’s dress code. He sewed bright patches on his jeans, and persisted in wearing Bobby’s old leather jacket even after the elbows wore through. At home he was largely silent. Sometimes his silence was petulant, sometimes it was simply blank. Although he worked hard at it, Jonathan could not make himself a stranger to me. I knew him too well. His dancing was as hesitant and clumsy as his father’s, and the flippant nastiness he affected had a shallow bottom. Caught off guard, he would slip into acquiescence automatically, without having meant to. He would smile before he remembered to scowl.
One night in January, Bobby called me up to listen to a new record by Van Morrison. I’d settled myself on the floor with the boys, nodding to the music. Bobby sat cross-legged and straight-backed to my immediate left, like a Yogi meditating. Jonathan sat farther away, sulkily hunched, his shoulders curved over his knees.
“This is nice,” I said. “I like this Van Morrison.”
“Van the Man?” Bobby grinned. Sometimes his meanings remained inscrutable, despite his careful intentions. I often just smiled and nodded, as I would to a foreigner speaking indecipherable but evidently friendly English.
At moments, even in his fits of eager incoherence, Bobby made sense to me. He was an outlander, striving to assimilate. Hadn’t I myself been transplanted to a wintery place where most women of my age and station were overweight and undereducated? Years earlier, when I was still making an effort to fit in, the other women at the PTA and the church guild had offered me recipes for parfaits made with pudding and candy bars, and for frankfurters soaked in mustard and grape jelly. I couldn’t begrudge Bobby his own difficulties with the local ways of making do.
“Van’s all right,” Jonathan said. “If you like this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing is he?” I asked.
“Well, folk-y. Moony. He’s a good old boy singing about the love of a good woman.”
“I don’t know, Jon,” Bobby said. “He’s sort of, you know, better than that?”
“He’s okay,” Jonathan said. “Just a little wimpy. Mom, how about if I play you some real stuff?”
“This seems real enough,” I said.
Jonathan looked at Bobby, whose smile had taken on a stiff, worried quality. “That’s what you think,” Jonathan said. He got up and took the needle off the record in the middle of a song, pulled another out of the collection that was stored in a series of orange crates lined up against the wall.
“This is Jimi Hendrix,” he announced. “The world’s greatest dead guitarist.”
“Jon,” Bobby said.
“You’re going to love this, Mom. Really. I’m turning the volume up a little here, because you’ve got to listen to Jimi pretty loud.”
“Jon,” Bobby said, “I don’t know if—”
Jonathan touched the needle to vinyl, and the room exploded with electric guitars. They squealed and shrieked like tortured animals. A thumping bass line started, so loud and insistent I could feel it up my spine. I had the impression that my hair was being disarranged.
“Nice, huh?” Jonathan shouted. “Jimi was the greatest.”
Our eyes met through the storm of sound. Jonathan’s face was flushed, his eyes brilliant. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to blow me out of the room, to send me tumbling downstairs into the familiar sanctity of dirty dishes and vacuuming. On the record, a male voice sang, “You know you’re a cute little heartbreaker.”
“The greatest,” Jonathan hollered. “Much better than Van the Man.”
I made a decision. I stood up and said, “Bobby, let’s dance.”
He joined me immediately. We danced together in the chaos of the music. It wasn’t so bad, as long as you kept moving. It gave you the airy, buffeted sensation a sparrow must feel when caught in an updraft—a simultaneous sense of assault and liberation. You could scream into the face of this music. It all but lifted your arms into the air.
From the corner of my eye I could see that Jonathan was disappointed. His mother had not cowered before his hard-driving music. Once again, I could see the child contained in the burgeoning man—his expression at that moment recalled the times his checkers moves didn’t work out, or no one fell for his April Fool’s trick. If he’d permitted it, I would have reached over and pinched his cheek.
Presently, he started dancing, too. What else could he do? As we three swayed to the music, that small room seemed as densely packed as Times Square, and every bit as full of the weight of the moment. Jimi Hendrix growled “Foxy lady,” and it struck me as a fair appellation. A smart older woman who didn’t scare easily. Who wouldn’t just retreat to her domestic chores, and start getting fat.
After that, I paid more regular visits. I abandoned my old rule about waiting to be invited. We seemed to have passed beyond that. When my ordinary errands took me upstairs I’d tap on the door and go in for a song or two. I never stayed long.
One night when I knocked on the door I detected a shuffling on the other side. Neither of them answered my knock. I thought I could hear them whispering. Then Jonathan called, “Come in, Mom.”
I smelled it the moment I entered—that sweet smoky reek. The room was blue with it. Bobby stood in an attitude of frozen panic, and Jonathan sat in his accustomed place by the radiator. Bobby said, “Um, Mrs. Glover?”
Jonathan said, in a voice that was calm and almost suave, “Come on in, Mom. Have a hit.”
He extended a smoldering, hand-rolled cigarette in my direction.
I stood uncertainly in the doorway. For a long moment I lost track of my own character and simply floated, ghost-like, watching dispassionately as my son extended a pathetic-looking gnarled cigarette, its ember glowing orange in the dim light of a baseball-shaped lamp I’d bought for him when he was seven years old.
I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to express my shock and outrage or, at the very least, to speak gently but firmly to him about the limits of my tolerance. Either way, it would be the end of our familiar relations—our impromptu dance parties—and the beginning of a sterner, more formal period.
After the silence had stretched to its breaking point, Jonathan repeated his offer. “Give it a try, Mom,” he said. “How else will you know what you’re missing?”
“Your father would have a heart attack,” I said evenly.
“He isn’t here,” Jonathan said.
“Mrs. Glover?” Bobby said helplessly.
It was his voice that decided me—his fearful intonation of my married name.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “How else will I know what I’m missing?”
I took three steps into the room, and accepted the sad little cigarette.
“Atta girl, Mom,” Jonathan said. His voice was cheerful and opaque.
“How do you do this?” I asked. “I’ve never even smoked regular cigarettes, you know.”
Bobby said, “Um, just pull the smoke, like, straight into your lungs. And hold it as long as you can?”
As I put the cigarette to my lips, I was aware of myself standing in a pale blue blouse and wraparound skirt in my son’s bedroom, about to perform the first plainly illegal act of my life. I inhaled. The smoke was so harsh and bitter I nearly choked. My eyes teared, and I could not hold the smoke in my lungs as Bobby had told me to do. I immediately blew out a thick cloud that hung in the air, raggedly intact, for a full second before dissipating.
Nevertheless, the boys cheered. I handed the cigarette to Bobby.
“You did it,” he said. “You did it.”
“Now I can say I’ve lived,” I answered. My voice sounded cracked and strained.
Bobby pulled in a swift, effortless drag, pinching the cigarette between his thumb and first finger. The ember fired up. When he exhaled, only a thin translucent stream of smoke escaped into the air.
“See?” he said. “You have to, like, hold it in a little longer?”
He handed the cigarette back to me. “Again?” I asked.
He shrugged, grinning in his panicky, baffled way. “Yeah, Mom,” Jonathan said. “You smoke the whole joint. One hit doesn’t do much of anything.”
Joint. It was called a joint, not a cigarette.
“Well, one more,” I said. I tried again, and this time managed to hold the smoke in for a moment or two. Again, I dispelled a riot of smoke, very different from Bobby’s gray-white, elegant jet trail.
I returned the joint to him. Jonathan said, “Hey, I’m here, too.”
“Oops. Sorry.” I handed it over. He took it greedily, as he had once accepted the little treats I brought home from shopping trips.
“What will this do, exactly?” I asked. “What should I prepare myself for?”
“It’ll just make you laugh.” Bobby said. “It’ll just, you know, make you feel happy and a little foolish?”
“It’s no big deal, Mom,” Jonathan said. “The lamb chops won’t start talking to you, or anything like that.” He took a drag, with expert dispatch, and handed the joint along to Bobby. When Bobby passed it to me I shook my head.
“I think that’s enough,” I said. “Just do me one favor.”
“Uh-huh?” Bobby said.
“Play me a Laura Nyro song, and then I’ll get on about my business.”
“Sure,” he said.
He put the record on, and we three stood listening. I waited to start feeling whatever there was to feel. By the time the song was over, I realized that marijuana had no effect at all, beyond producing a dry scratchiness in the throat. I was both relieved and disappointed.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your hospitality, boys.”
“Any time, Mom,” Jonathan said. I could not read his voice. It might have been mocking, or swaggering, or simply friendly.
“Not a word to your father,” I said. “Do you promise? Do you swear?” For a moment I thought the marijuana had affected me after all. But it was just the flush of my own guilt.
“I promise,” he said. “I swear.”
Bobby said, “Mrs. Glover? This is really cool. You are…I don’t know. Really cool. Yow!”
“Oh, call me Alice, for God’s sake,” I told him. And then I left them alone.
A week or so later I tried dope again (it was called dope, not marijuana), and found that if you kept at it, it did have its effects. It made you giddy and pleasantly vague. It took the hard edge off your attention.
On a Wednesday afternoon in February, when a frigid white hush lay over the world, I sat with Jonathan and Bobby sharing a joint. It was the fourth of my career, and I had by then acquired a certain expertise. I held the smoke, feeling its heaviness and herbal warmth inside my lungs. On the stereo, Bob Dylan sang “Girl from the North Country.” The lamp was lit against the afternoon dusk, and the paneled walls had taken on a rich, dark-honey color.
“You know,” I said, “this should be legal. It’s just utterly sweet and harmless, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” Jonathan said.
“Well, it should be legal,” I said. “If Nixon smoked a little, the world would be a better place.”
Bobby laughed, and then looked at me self-consciously, to be sure I’d intended to make a joke. His expression was so hesitant—he agonized so elaborately over the simplest social transactions—that I started to laugh. My laughter inspired more laughter in him, and Jonathan joined in, laughing over some private joke of his own. This was one of the herb’s best qualities: under its influence you could start laughing at any little thing and, once you’d started, feed it just by letting your eyes wander. Everything seemed absurd and funny—the Buddha-shaped incense burner standing next to a spring-driven hula girl on Jonathan’s desktop; the domesticated, dog-like quality of Bobby’s tan suede shoes.
Sometimes in those days I thought of Wendy from Peter Pan —an island mother to a troop of lost boys. I didn’t make an outright fool of myself. I didn’t buy gauzy skirts or Indian jewelry or sandals from Mexico. I didn’t let my hair grow long and wild. But there was a different feeling now. I had a new secret, a better one. Previously, my only secrets had been the facts that I feared sex and could not summon any interest in getting to know our neighbors. I’d felt frail and thin to the point of translucence, an insubstantial figure who got headaches from the cold and sinus infections from the heat. But this new secret was buoying, exhilarating—I would be the scandal of the neighborhood if I was found out. The secret warmed me as I passed along the aisles of the supermarket. I was a mother who got stoned with her son. The local women—big women loading their wire carts with marshmallows and ice cream, with bright pink luncheon meats and sugared cereals—would have considered me unfit, scandalous, degenerate. I felt young and slender, full of devious promise. There would be a life after Cleveland.
And, perhaps best of all, I found that when I got stoned I could manage things with Ned. The dope loosened me, so that if he pressed his mouth onto mine or stroked me roughly I could go along with it in a lazy, liquid state that differed utterly from what I had once meant by arousal. Sex had always produced a queasy inner tightening that turned quickly from pleasure to panic and from panic to pain, so that as Ned worked his sweaty way toward conclusion I lay nervous and angry beneath him, saying silently, “Finish, finish, finish.” Now I could accommodate him with a languor that produced neither outright pleasure nor pain, but rather an unblemished ticklish sensation that struck me as slightly funny. Dope miniaturized sex; it reduced the act itself from a noisy obligation to a humorous, rather sweet little fleshly comedy. This was Ned, only Ned, bucking and groaning here; a boy grown big and ungainly. This was Ned and this was me, a woman capable of surprising herself.
It lasted into the spring. In my new life I was foxy and unorthodox, liberal-minded and sexually generous—I was the character I wanted to be. That character lived through the thaw and the first green into April, when the pear tree in the back yard exploded in white blossoms. On the Saturday night before Easter, after I had finished dressing the ham, I walked out to look at the tree. It was nearly midnight, and I was alone in the house. Ned had added a late show on Fridays and Saturdays, to compete with the theater complexes that were opening in the malls. Bobby and Jonathan were off somewhere.
I wore an old woolen shirt of Ned’s over my sweater. The air smelled of wet, raw earth, and the pear tree stood in the middle of our small yard as splendid and strange as a wedding dress, its blossoms emitting a faint white light. I stood for a while on the kitchen steps. It was a moonless night, clear enough for the band of the Milky Way to show itself among the multitudes of stars. That night, even our modest back yard looked ripe with nascent possibilities. If the future was a nation, this would be its flag: a blooming tree on a field of stars.
I stepped onto the lawn, though my shoes were too thin for the weather. I wanted to feel the frosty crunch of the grass. I strolled under the tree’s branches, past the beds where my tulips were already pushing their way up. By the time the tree had lost its flowers, the lilacs would be in bloom. Someday we would live in a house with a view of the water. I ran my fingers over the scaly bark of a low branch, shook a few loose blossoms onto my hair.
I’d been out there some time before I noticed that the boys were sitting in my car. It was parked in the graveled space between the garage and the house proper, shadowed by an aluminum overhang, in a pocket of darkness so deep I could not have seen them at all if I hadn’t stood in exactly the right position, so that their heads showed in silhouette between the rear and front windshields.
Their presence struck me as odd but marvelous. Perhaps they were playing at a cross-country trip. I was too enamored of the night to ask questions. The sight of them seemed, simply, a stroke of good fortune. We could smoke a joint together, and shake pear blossoms down onto our heads. I went without hesitation to the car. As I drew closer I could hear rock music playing on the radio. Derek and the Dominos, I thought. I skipped up to the driver’s door, opened it, and said, “Hey, can I hitch a ride?”
We passed, all three of us, through a shocked silence filled with the clash of guitars. Sweet-smelling smoke drifted out of the car. Jonathan sat in the driver’s seat. I saw his penis, pale and erect in the starlight.
“Oh,” I said. Only that.
His eyes seemed to shift forward in their sockets, as if pressed from behind. Even at that moment I could perfectly remember him taking on the same expression at the age of two, when he was denied a bag of lurid pink candy in a supermarket aisle.
“Get out of here,” he said in a tone of quivering control that cut through the music like a wire through fog. It was an entirely adult voice. “How dare you.”
“Jon?” Bobby said. He pulled his jeans up, but before he did so I had seen his penis too, larger than Jonathan’s, darker.
Jonathan waved the sound of his own name away. “Get out of here,” he said. “Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
I was too surprised to argue. I simply closed the car door, and went back into the house. It was bright and warm inside. I stood in the foyer, breathing. I saw the empty living room with perfect clarity: magazines fanned out on the coffee table, a throw pillow still bearing the dent made by someone’s elbow. A fly walked a half circle across the celadon curve of my grandmother’s vase.
I went upstairs and ran a hot bath. It was all I could think of to do. As I lowered myself into the water I felt a kind of relief. This was real and definite—water slightly too hot to bear. My feet burned as if stuck with pins. My thighs and buttocks and sex were scalded, but I held fast. I didn’t rise up out of that steaming water.
It was not wholly a surprise. Not about Jonathan. I must have known. But I had never consciously thought, “My son won’t marry.” I had thought, “My son is gentler than other boys, kinder, more available to strong feelings.” These were among his virtues. I knew the bite and meanness of boys was missing from his nature. I lowered myself deeper into the tub, so the hot water covered my shoulders and burned against my chin. When it started to cool, I opened the hot tap again.
How had I failed to notice the signs? Jonathan and Bobby were fifteen, yet they never talked of girls. They tacked no airbrushed nudes to the walls. Although I must have suspected, I had never in any part of my being imagined the fleshly implications of their love. To my mind Jonathan had been a perennial child; an innocent. What I could not accustom myself to was the sight of his small erection and Bobby’s larger one, hidden away in the night.
How had I contributed? I knew too much of psychology, and yet I knew too little. Had I been the sort of mother who drives her son from women? Had I feminized him by insisting too obdurately on being his friend?
Jonathan came in hours later, after Ned had returned home and gone to sleep. I thought he might tap on my bedroom door but of course he couldn’t, not with his father present. He went into his own room, producing his usual booted thump on the hall carpet. I wanted to go and comfort him, tell him it was all right. I wanted to go and pull his hair hard enough to draw blood.
It was Easter, and we went through the motions of the day. Ned, Bobby, and Jonathan invaded their baskets, exclaiming over the little prizes, filling their mouths with jelly beans and marshmallow chickens. Jonathan bit the ears off a chocolate rabbit with a gusto that sent an unexpected chill through me. Ned gave me a flat of delphiniums, which I was happy to have, and a silk scarf covered with the brilliant flowers sometimes favored by older women looking for a little flair when they go out to lunch.
Ned must have seen the dismay on my face as I pulled the bright, elderly scarf out of its tissue. He said softly, “What do I know about scarves? It came from Herman Brothers, you can take it back and get something else.”
I kissed him. “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s a lovely scarf.”
I couldn’t help thinking that Jonathan would have known what scarf to buy me.
We ate the dinner I’d made, talked of everyday things. After dinner, Ned left for the theater. On his way out the door, Jonathan said to him, “We’ll come to the eight o’clock show, okay?”
“You bet,” he answered, and winked enormously. After he was gone, the boys washed the dishes. I tried to help, but Jonathan shooed me out of the kitchen. From the living room, where I leafed through a magazine, I could hear the two of them speaking in low, undecipherable voices. Occasionally, they both laughed.
When they were through with the dishes, they went upstairs to Jonathan’s room. “Great dinner, Mom,” Jonathan said as they passed through the living room. Bobby added, “Yow! It was, like, the best?”
They did not invite me up. They did not put on any music. After an hour they came down again with their jackets on. They were out the door almost instantly.
“Night, Mom,” Jonathan called from the lawn.
“Night, Mrs. Glover?” Bobby added.
I stood for a while watching them walk down the street, their hands in their jacket pockets. Bobby’s stride was lithe and sure, Jonathan’s slightly bowlegged in the way of adolescent boys who offer swagger in place of conviction. Behind me, the house was empty, the dishes dried and put away.
I waited to talk to Jonathan until we had a chance to be alone. It took almost a week. Finally he came home unaccompanied from his nocturnal rounds, and I caught him on his way upstairs. He could make such a racket with those boots.
“Jonathan?” I called. “Might I have a quick word?”
“Uh-huh.” He stopped halfway up the stairs and leaned over the banister like a cowboy bellying up to a bar. His hair hung lankly over his face.
“Would you consider coming down?” I said. “I don’t really feel like playing a balcony scene.”
“Okay,” he said with bland good cheer. He allowed himself to be taken into the living room, where we sat down.
“Well,” I said. I did not quite know how to begin a difficult conversation with him. I had always spoken to him as effortlessly as if I were talking to myself.
“Uh-huh?” he said.
“Jonathan, honey, I know you care a great deal about Bobby.” Wrong. The tone was sexless, schoolmarmish. I attempted a laugh but my laugh thinned out, went squeaky on me. “A great deal,” I added.
Wrong again. Now my tone was too knowing, too suggestive. I was still his mother.
He nodded, looking at me with a blank, serene face.
“Well, honey,” I said, “to be honest, I’ve been wondering if it’s good for you to see so much of Bobby. Don’t you think you should have some other friends, too?”
“No,” he said.
I laughed again, more successfully. “At least you’re open-minded on the subject,” I said.
He shrugged, and wrapped a hank of hair around a finger.
“I remember when I was your age, we ran around in a big gang,” I said. “We were all more or less in love with one another, and there were seven or eight of us. Girls and boys alike. I mean, I think I know what it’s like to so desperately love a friend.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, in what seemed a less impenetrable, good-boy’s voice. I suspected—I knew —his love for Bobby must have frightened him. It might in fact have been the true cause of this manly posturing, these clomping seven-league boots.
“Listen, now,” I said. “I’m your friend. I think I understand about Bobby. He can be very—compelling. But I have to tell you. Don’t hem yourself in too much. Not so early in life.”
He looked at me from under his ragged shelf of hair, and I saw in his face a lick of my old Jonathan, plagued by doubts and almost ostentatiously available to harm. For a moment it seemed we had broken through.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “I know how you feel. Honestly, I do. So trust me. The day will come when Bobby will just seem like somebody you used to know.”
His face shut down. It was a visible process, like shutters slammed over a lighted window.
He said, “You don’t know how I feel. And you don’t know Bobby. I’m the one who knows him. Stop trying to take over my life.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes you are. I can’t stand it. You use up all the air in here. Even the plants keep dying.”
I stared at him disbelievingly. “Your life is your own,” I said. “I’m only trying to tell you I’m on your side.”
“Well, honey, there jest ain’t no room on ma side for nobody but me.”
I slapped him at almost the same moment I knew I was going to. I caught him full across the face, hard enough to pull a string of saliva from the corner of his mouth. My hand stung from the impact.
After a moment, he smiled and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. The slap appeared to have afforded him great satisfaction, to have proven something he’d suspected all along.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never meant to hit you. I never have before, have I?”
He stood without speaking and walked upstairs, carrying with him that air of satisfied discovery. His boots reported like cannon fire on every tread.
Our old friendship was finished. Jonathan and Bobby spent more and more time out of the house, coming home late and going directly to bed. They did not invite me up to get stoned with them, or to dance. Ned told me they came to the movies fairly often. Sometimes, he said, he sat with them, watching a film he’d seen a half-dozen times already. He said Jonathan was surprisingly astute about movies—perhaps he had the makings of a film critic.
I knew better than to try barring Bobby from the house. Hadn’t my own parents forbidden me to see Ned? Hadn’t their glacial ultimatums driven me straight into marriage? I couldn’t honestly have said whether I worried more about Jonathan’s love of boys in general or about his particular devotion to Bobby. Although of course I hoped he would grow into conventional manhood, meet a girl, and have babies, I knew that that decision already lay beyond my powers of intervention. Jonathan was on his own there. But Bobby, a sweet, uncertain boy of no discernible ambitions and questionable intellect…If Jonathan remained tied to Bobby he might never know what the larger world had to offer. Bobby was, ineluctably, a Cleveland boy, and I knew the future Cleveland offered. The downtown streets were full of young men who hadn’t gotten out: men in bright, cheap neckties, thick-waisted at twenty-five, dawdling in luncheonettes before returning to a job performed under fluorescent lights while the second hand swept the face of the clock.
It was nearly another week before Bobby and I had our encounter.
I had gone down to the kitchen well after midnight, to roll out the crust for a couple of pies. I had not been sleeping well during the past two weeks, and the problem wasn’t helped by Ned’s asthmatic snoring. Finally, resigned, I’d gone down in my nightgown, hoping that some simple kitchen task would help settle my mind for sleep.
I only turned on the dim light in the hood of the range, and didn’t truly need that. I could easily enough have made pies in a coal mine.
I was nearly finished when Bobby appeared, looking sleepily disoriented, though with Bobby it was sometimes difficult to tell. He stood in the kitchen doorway, large and pallidly muscular in boxer shorts.
“Oh, hi,” he murmured. “I didn’t know you were here. I just, um, came down for a drink of water?”
Water flowed reliably enough from the bathroom taps. I knew what he had come for: the gin we kept on a kitchen shelf was nearly half water by then. I played along, though.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “So I decided I might as well do something useful.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. He remained standing in the doorway, caught between the danger of advance and the embarrassment of retreat. I filled a glass with tap water and held it out to him.
“Thanks,” he said. When he stepped forward to take the glass from me he brought his distinctive smell into the kitchen, a young male odor with an underlayer like the smell of metal on a cold day. I could hear the steady gurgle his throat made in swallowing the water.
“Bobby,” I said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Bobby, aren’t we friends? I thought we were friends, you and I.”
He nearly dropped his glass. He smiled in an agony of nervousness, and said, “Well, we are. I mean, I think you’re, you know, really cool.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you think I’m really cool. But we haven’t seen much of one another lately, have we?”
“I guess not,” he said. “I’ve been, you know, pretty busy—”
I couldn’t stifle a snort of derisive laughter. “You’re not exactly the chairman of the board of General Motors,” I said. “Let’s not try to fool one another, all right? It’s just a waste of time.”
His smile wilted, and he shrugged helplessly. “Well,” he said. “You know. Jonathan—”
“Jonathan what?”
“Well, he sort of. You know. You’re, like, his mother.”
“That sounds exactly right,” I said. “I’m like his mother. I resemble someone who can be fooled with lame excuses.”
Bobby offered another Punch-like smile, as if I’d made a joke. I could see that there was no point in pursuing the subject with him. He was only following orders. I stood before him with my arms folded over my breasts. I could easily have said, “Leave this house now and don’t come back.” I could have confirmed his romantic status.
Struggling visibly to change the subject, Bobby asked, “What’s that you’re making?”
“What? Oh, a pie. I’m making a couple of pecan pies for tomorrow.”
“You’re a great cook,” he said avidly. “I’ve never tasted food like this that somebody just made, I mean it’s like a restaurant.”
“No big deal,” I said. I could tell from his face that this was not a conversational gambit, after all. He was genuinely interested in the fact that I had come downstairs to bake pies at midnight.
“I’d like to open a restaurant one day,” he said. “I mean, I think it’d be cool to have a restaurant in a big old house somewhere.”
He looked with open fascination at the pie crust, a pale, lucent circle on the pastry board.
“No real trick to it,” I said. “I could teach you to cook. It’s just a step-by-step process, no magic involved.”
“I don’t know,” he said doubtfully.
“Look here,” I said. “I haven’t rolled out the second crust yet, why don’t you try it?”
“Really?”
“Come here. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is, once you’ve learned a few of the tricks.”
He came and stood close to me at the counter. I slipped the rolled crust into one of the tins, refloured the board, and plopped the remaining dough onto it.
“Lesson one,” I said. “You want to handle it as little as possible. It’s not like bread dough—you maul that until it comes to life. Pie crust is just the opposite, it needs kid gloves. Now. Roll away from you, in sort of upward motions. Don’t bulldoze it.”
He took up the rolling pin and pressed it into the soft bulk of the dough.
“Just coax it,” I said. “Good. That’s right.”
“I’ve never done this,” he said. “My mother never made things like pies.”
“You’ll be a good student,” I said. “I can tell already.”
“Do you know how to make those fancy edges?” he asked.
“Sure I do,” I said.
During the ensuing year I taught Bobby everything I knew about cooking. We had long sessions in the kitchen together, moving from pies to bread and from bread to puff pastry. When his work came successfully out of the oven, fatly golden and steaming, he contemplated it with frank, unmitigated wonder. I have never seen anyone take so to baking. He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced.
Jonathan sometimes sat in on our baking sessions, but his heart and mind were clearly elsewhere. He lacked the patience for precise measurements and slow risings. Truly, he lacked the fundamental interest in nourishment itself. Even as a baby he’d been indifferent to food.
He would linger a while in the kitchen, then wander up to his room and put a record on. Sometimes he played Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones, sometimes a new record I’d never heard before.
Neither of the boys ever again invited me to listen to music. Now, instead, Bobby would trot into my kitchen, saying, “Look here, I found this recipe for fish that’s, like, inside a pastry.” Or, “Hey, do you know how to make something called brioche?”
Jonathan applied to several colleges and was accepted at New York University and the University of Oregon. All the schools he’d applied to were at least a thousand miles from Cleveland.
Bobby applied to no colleges—he did not even mention the possibility. He just continued bringing me recipes, and buying ever more elaborate kitchen aids. He bought a Cuisinart, and a set of German knives so thin and sharp they could have sliced away the kitchen wallpaper without disturbing the plaster beneath.
In June, Ned and I attended their graduation ceremonies with Burt Morrow, whom we had not seen in over a year. Burt had exchanged his goatee for muttonchop sideburns since our last meeting. He wore a green sport coat and a turtleneck, with a gold medallion the size of a half dollar hanging from a chain around his neck.
We took seats toward the rear of the high school auditorium, a vast, pale, salmon-colored chamber that smelled, even on this occasion, faintly of damp cement and brown-bag lunches. As the students’ names were called and they stepped up onto the stage to receive their diplomas, they were accompanied by the various hoots and catcalls of their peers. You could gauge the popularity of each individual by the uproar his or her name produced. Neither Bobby nor Jonathan inspired any outburst at all—they might have been unknown to their classmates, although Burt did emit a surprisingly shrill whistle at the sound of Bobby’s name.
Afterward, Bobby and Jonathan went off to an all-night party at an amusement park on a school bus full of other kids. Ned and I invited Burt out for a drink, since we could not just let him drive home alone.
“A drink?” he said. “Yes, a drink with the adults would be nice. I think we should do that, yes.”
His eyes held no light. They might have been made of agate.
We went to a quiet place near the lake, with copper tables and young waitresses dressed as Mother Hubbard. I ordered a vodka gimlet, which was given to me on a doily instead of on a napkin.
Ned lifted his glass and said, “To the new generation. Best of luck.”
We all drank to the new generation. Through hidden speakers, a band played “Moon River.”
It seemed we were in the least important place on earth.
Burt Morrow said, “Jonathan chose NYU, did he?”
“Yep,” Ned answered. “The decision was made strictly on an economic basis. NYU is more expensive than Oregon.”
Burt blinked, and lit a cigarette. “Well, I’m sure he’ll distinguish himself there,” he said. “Bobby doesn’t seem to be very much interested in college.”
“He’s still young,” Ned said. “You never know what’ll happen in a year or so.”
Burt said, “Whatever he chooses is all right with me. I wouldn’t interfere in his life. Oh, no. I wouldn’t think of it. He’s got to do his own thing.”
“I guess,” Ned said. “They’ve all got to do their own things, don’t they?”
Burt nodded, pulling deeply at his Pall Mall as if sucking up the stuff of life itself. “Certainly,” he said sagely. “Certainly they do.”
It was his use of the word “certainly” that got to me. It made him sound so like a precocious child left in our care.
“They do not,” I said emphatically, “have to do their own thing.”
“Well,” said Burt, “as long as they don’t hurt anybody—”
“Burt,” I said. “When Jonathan entered into a relationship with your son he was a sweet, open-natured boy, and now three years later he’s turned into someone I scarcely recognize. He’d been a straight-A student and by the time Bobby was through with him he was lucky to get into any college at all.”
Burt blinked at me through his own smoke. Ned said, “Now, Alice…”
“Oh, pipe down,” I said to him. “I just want to ask Burt here one question. I want to ask him what I did wrong.”
Burt said, “I don’t imagine you did anything wrong.”
“Then what am I doing here?” I asked. I had begun tapping my glass with my fingernail. I heard the steady rhythmic tapping as if it were an annoying sound being made by someone else. I said, “Why am I living in a city I despise? How did I end up with a son who hates me? I seemed to be doing just one thing and then the next, it all felt logical at the time, but sitting here at this moment, it all seems so impossible.”
“Well,” said Burt, swallowing smoke. I could still hear my fingernail tapping the glass.
“We just set out to be a family,” I told him. “We had every good intention.”
“Well,” said Burt. “Things will work out. You’ve got to have faith.”
“Faith is something the young can afford. I’ve read all the great books, and I’m not pretty anymore.”
“Whoa there,” Ned said. “If you’re not pretty I don’t know what half the men in the room have been staring at.”
“Don’t you patronize me,” I told him. “Don’t you dare. You’re welcome to resent me or despise me or feel bored silly by me, but don’t patronize me like I was some kind of little wife. It’s the one thing I won’t have. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
Ned, without speaking, put his hand over mine to silence the tapping of my nail against the glass. I looked at his face.
“Ned.”
I said only that, his name.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll pay for the drinks and go home.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s nothing,” he assured me. “We’ve had an emotional day. Our only son just graduated from high school.”
He kept his hand on mine. I looked across the table at Burt, who had fixed upon me a look of direct, dreadful understanding.
After Jonathan left for New York, Bobby got his own apartment in an austere limestone building across town. He enrolled in culinary school and worked nights as a waiter. He began to talk of our opening a restaurant together.
“A family place,” he said. “I think a restaurant would be a good business to go into, don’t you? We could all work there.”
I allowed as how I might make a passable dishwasher.
“You’ll be the head cook,” he said. “It’ll be, like, the only true Southern-style place in Ohio?”
Soon he was making dinners for Ned and me at our house. He did become a good cook, and seemed to have some cogent ideas about financing a restaurant.
I told him if he wanted to open a place on his own, I’d be his first customer, but to count me out as head cook. He smiled as he had when we first met years before—a smile that implied I had just switched over to a language he didn’t speak.
That winter I found a job myself, as a secretary in a real estate office. We needed the money. Ned’s theater was faring worse than ever, now that so many malls had established themselves on the outskirts. People avoided downtown after dark. The theater flashed its pink neon on an avenue where streetlights offered only small puddles of illumination; where nude mannequins smiled behind the dark glass of an extinct department store.
Although my secretarial job was nothing exalted or even especially interesting, I enjoyed having a daily destination so much that I began to dread the weekends. In my spare time I started an herb garden in the back yard.
Bobby met me occasionally for lunch downtown, since his cooking school was not far from the office in which I worked. He had grown rather handsome, in a conventional fine-featured way, and I must admit I took pleasure in meeting him at crowded restaurants, where the din of all those hungry wage-earners put an edge on the air.
Over our lunches, Bobby spoke with great animation about the restaurant business. At some undeterminable point he had ceased imitating a clean, personable young man and had actually become one, save for odd moments when his eyes glowed a bit too brightly and his skin took on a sweaty sheen. At those times he put me in mind of a Bible salesman, one of the excruciatingly cordial Southern zealots I knew well enough from my girlhood. In his excitement Bobby could take on that quality but he always caught himself, laughed apologetically, and lowered his voice, actually appeared to retract the sweat back into his pores, so that the effect finally was boyish and charming, a young dangerousness being brought under control.
I confessed my worries to him, and indulged myself every now and then in a complaint or two about my own situation, since I hated to burden Ned. His asthma had grown much worse as business declined, and he had started drinking a bit.
Bobby said numberless times, “I’ll find backers and have the restaurant going in another year, two at the most. We can all run it. Everything will turn out all right.”
I told him, “That’s easy for you to say. You’re young.”
“You’re young, too,” he said. “I mean, you’re young for your age? You’ll love being head chef, wait and see.”
“I am not going to be head anything.”
“Yes you will. You’ll want to when you see the place I’m going to build for you. Come on, Alice? Tell me you’re behind me, and I’ll build the best restaurant in Ohio.”
A man at the next table glanced our way. He was fiftyish, trim and successful-looking in a slate-colored suit. I could see the question in his eyes: older woman, severe of face but not utterly through with her own kind of beauty, lunching with avid, handsome young man. For a moment I followed the thread of his imagination as he saw Bobby and me out of the restaurant and up to a rented room where afternoon light slanted in through the blinds.
Bobby leaned forward, his big hands splayed on the tabletop. I reached out and lightly touched his broad, raw fingers with my own.
“All right,” I said. “If you’re really all that determined to start a restaurant, count me in. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
“Good,” he said, and his eyes actually glowed with the possibility of tears.
He opened his restaurant less than a year later. Perhaps he’d been too much in a rush. If he’d waited until he knew more about the business, he might have done better. But he kept insisting he was ready, and I can only speculate whether Ned’s dwindling fortunes had any bearing on Bobby’s own sense of urgency. He got backing from a rather dubious-looking character named Beechum, a man with cottony hair brushed forward over his bald spot and several heavy silver-and-turquoise rings on his thin white fingers. This Beechum owned, or claimed to own, a prosperous string of coin laundries, and envisioned, or so Bobby said, similar success in the realm of Southern cooking.
Under Beechum’s guidance, Bobby leased space in a small shopping center in the suburbs, between a discount dress store and a bakery that displayed in its window an enormous, slightly dingy wedding cake. I expressed some doubts about the location, but Bobby had compiled a list of virtues that brooked no argument.
“It’s near some major retail outlets,” he recited gravely. “Penney’s is the flagship store, and Sears is practically around the corner. There are other food stores in the area. And it’s cheap. I mean, you’ve got to start somewhere, right?”
I needn’t offer much detail about the restaurant’s optimistic beginnings and its immediate decline. Suffice to say that Bobby named it Alice’s, and did what he could with a fluorescent-lit, acoustic-ceilinged room that had most recently failed as a pizza parlor. He hung framed posters of New Orleans—wrought-iron balconies in the French Quarter, a black man blowing a trumpet—and found old wooden tables and chairs at garage sales. I tested recipes with Bobby, debated over seasonings, though Beechum generally prevailed with admonitions about cost overruns or the timidity of Ohio tastes. The final menu turned out to be a Northerner’s version of Southern cooking: gumbo, hush puppies, frozen shrimp fixed every which way. The desserts were remarkable. I made it a point to stop by as often as I could.
Sometimes when I came for lunch I’d find one or two other parties—shoppers with bags from the discount store next door, lone salesclerks on their lunch hours—and sometimes I’d be the sole customer. On those occasions Bobby sat with me while the waitress either wiped the already clean pie case or gave in and read a movie magazine beside the refrigerator.
Through it all, Bobby never lost his Bible-salesman’s good cheer.
“Things are always slow at first,” he said. “You’ve got to let word of mouth get around. The people who leave here have all had great meals, they’ll tell ten other people. You’ve got to give it some time.”
“The food is fine, Bobby,” I said. “I’d like to think people will come to recognize a good thing.”
“Sure they will,” he said. “If you’ve got the product, people’ll find you. It’s a matter of time.”
We sat talking together in the empty room, under the fluorescent tubes. People passed by the spotless window and looked in with an expression I recognized: the humorous and rather frightened face one turns toward any ill-fated enterprise. I had looked in just that way through countless windows myself, into the depopulated interiors of fussy little gift shops, understocked delicatessens, boutiques in which every dress was five years out of style. As people rushed past with packages from Sears and Penney’s, I understood their feelings; I understood the particular sort of nervous disdain inspired by any singular evidence of mankind’s general failure to spin the straw into gold.
On an unseasonably warm night in November, six months after the restaurant’s opening, Burt Morrow burned himself and half his house to ashes by falling asleep with a cigarette. Ned and I were awakened by the sirens, though of course we could not know their destination.
Still, I had a feeling. I just had a nameless edgy feeling and so I stayed awake long after Ned had returned to his noisy, almost painful-sounding slumber. When the phone rang I knew. We drove straight over, with coats pulled on over our bathrobes.
Bobby saw us pull up. He did not move. He stood on the lawn beside a black-coated fireman. As Ned and I ran to him, Bobby watched us with his old numbed, uncomprehending expression; that foreigner’s look.
I put my arms around him. He was still as salt. He said in a high, clear voice, “My father died tonight at about twelve-thirty.”
Bobby’s shirtsleeves were singed, and his hair emitted an awful burnt smell. He must have tried to go into the burning house.
I stroked his ruined hair. He stood unmoving in my embrace. Half the house had burned to rubble; the other half was obscenely unscarred. The front door hung open, offering the blackened floral paper of an interior wall on which a mirror still hung in its ornate frame.
Presently Ned went off to see about Burt. I stayed with Bobby. He soon began to tremble, so I held him the harder, which seemed in turn to inspire more trembling. His spasms frightened me but I did not loosen my hold. I just dug in the way I had with Jonathan, when he was a baby given to mysterious crying fits and I, ignorant even for twenty-two, knew nothing but to hold him tight through my own terror and uncertainty.
Jonathan came home for the funeral. His blond hair still tumbled down past his shoulders, but he had taken to wearing loafers and a tweed jacket with his jeans. Bobby dressed in the style of the working young of Cleveland: sharply creased synthetic slacks, pastel shirts with epaulets.
They went for drives together, watched old movies on television. Bobby was pale and distracted, as if the interior of his own skull was putting out a noise only he could hear. Jonathan watched him carefully, sat close by, touched his shoulder or hand.
They might have been a convalescent and his nurse. There was compassion between them, but no hint of romance. For all their youth, they had taken on an elderly quality; sitting on the sofa together, they made you think of curio cabinets and Venetian blinds. Bobby always sat beside Jonathan, childishly close. At any given moment a stranger might not have been able to tell which was the comforter and which the consoled. After a week, Jonathan returned to his new life in New York City.
Bobby soon closed the restaurant, and finally declared bankruptcy as a way of clearing his debts. Now he works in a bakery. He seems to feel more secure amid the floured surfaces, the fresh eggs and pastry tubes.
Because he could no longer pay the rent on his apartment, he has moved in with us. He stays upstairs, in Jonathan’s room, sleeping on the narrow bed.
We don’t much mind having Bobby. To be honest, we can use even the small amount of rent he pays, what with Jonathan in college and Ned’s theater refusing to pull out of its slump. He has started booking foreign films, the kind that don’t play in the mall theaters. He mends the lobby carpet with duct tape.
Jonathan calls on Sundays, like a dutiful son. He’s moved out of the dormitory into an apartment in Greenwich Village. I try to imagine his life: movies and coffeehouses, music in basement clubs. I need to imagine those details because he relates none of them. What I hear from him is that his classes are going well, and that he requires no bedding, kitchen utensils, or new clothes.
Sometimes I think I’ll leave Ned. Sometimes I think I’ll just announce the fact and go, like a child of seventeen. But I can’t imagine doing it, not really. One of the revelations of my early middle age is the fact that I care for him, right down to the marrow of my bones. He inspires my tenderness, even my pity. If he were more successful, perhaps I could manage it.
Instead, I am making another effort to fit in here. I’ve rejoined the church guild. I’ve begun giving a baking class at the YMCA, for wives who want to surprise their families at the holidays. My class has attracted a surprising number of students. Many of them are humorous and good-hearted, and some can probably be coaxed away from their devotion to Jell-O and granulated-pudding mix. When the class ends at Christmastime, three or four of us will probably continue as baking friends.
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand. I sit typing at a desk from Monday to Friday, and twice weekly instruct other women in the art of folding eggs into batter, of rolling dough so thin you could read newsprint through it. I have little time for housework, but Bobby keeps the whole place spotless in my absence. Save for the hours he puts in at the bakery, he is always home. Always. He makes dinner every night. After dinner, Ned returns to the theater and Bobby and I watch television or play cards. I sit with him until it’s time for bed. Sometimes I suggest he go out and see what the world is up to. I even offer to slip him some money, but he always says he’s exactly where he wants to be. So there we sit, passing the hours. To be perfectly frank, I sometimes wish he’d leave. He’s so dogged in his devotions, so endlessly agreeable.