A Summer Life (9 page)

But my older brother kept me from being good. One day at Romain playground, while I was busy with a craft project that would transform a toilet roll into a pencil holder, he came from behind and yanked off my special smoke-tinted glasses. Earlier in the week, a doctor had prescribed those glasses to wear because I had infected my eyes when I stared half a day into a box fan. It was a contest among the idiot boys of the block to see who could stare the longest. I won by more than an hour.

My brother stole my glasses and ran off, which sent me home walking like a blind man in the harsh Fresno sun. When Mother found out, she whipped my brother from one corner of the backyard to the other while I watched from the bedroom window. I adjusted my smoke-tinted glasses and sipped from my tupperware glass of Kool-Aid. That night in our bunk beds, my brother promised to get me back. I laughed at my brother, but in the dark of poor vision I was scared. The next day I returned to the playground to finish my toilet-roll pencil holder and start on a planter. From the garbage I had pulled a Campbell's soup can, splashed it with peat moss, and painted it red. I glued on bottle caps I had dug out with a spoon from a gas station Coke machine: one row of Coca-Cola caps, then a row of Orange Crush, and finally one of Dr. Pepper. When I finished with this detail, I packed dirt into the can, poked in two pinto beans, and watered them carefully so the bottle caps wouldn't get wet and fall off.

I was pleased with my planter. When Mother came home that afternoon from candling eggs for Safeway, I took her by the hand to the backyard to show her. “Very pretty,” she said, her face unmoved. I showed my baby brother whom I had to boost into my arms. My sister seemed mildly interested. My older brother popped his fist into a baseball mitt and spit.

I intended to enter my planter into the crafts contest at the playground. I also intended to enter my pencil holder, my lanyard dog chain, my plaster-of-Paris footprint of Baby Brother, and my pickle-jar vase decorated with spray-painted macaroni. But my real hope was on the planter. For a week I watered it faithfully as I waited for the beans to unfurl from the earth. Each day I sat in the sunlight, reading books and occasionally smiling at my plant. I reglued the bottle caps that fell off, whisked away ants that came to tunnel holes in the dirt, and watered the beans which in my mind would soon push skywards and beyond.

Five days went by and I began to worry. I poured more and more water into the can, but nothing seemed to happen. I spoke to it softly, and muttered prayers. I moved it into the shade, thinking perhaps that it was thirsty for shadow. Finally, on the day of judging, I gathered my projects, including my planted can of dirt, and carried them to the playground. When I returned home I prayed and remembered my promises of dishes, dust, and tidy drawers. I did my chores, and mowed the lawn with a rusty mower.

The next day when I returned to Romain playground, I was a winner! My lanyard and plaster-of-Paris footprint took second place. My toilet-roll pencil holder won third, and my planter, minus its green growth, received fourth. In celebration, the coach poured us paper cups of Coca-Cola and handed out fistfuls of popcorn and candy.

When the party was over, my sister and I balanced our crafts in our arms and returned home. Debra had won two first place certificates and bragged all the way home and into autumn. Still, I was happy and taped my certificates on my bedroom wall. That evening after dinner I took my planter to the front yard where I sat on the lawn sucking a blade of grass and wondering why the plants had not come up. My brother Rick rode by on his bike and yelled, “I told you I'd get you.” I looked up at him as he rode off, and then looked at the can. I scratched the surface of the dirt lightly and then dug with the full force of my fingernails. Nothing. The beans were gone.

I looked up from the can and, with moist lips, muttered a promise, “My brother has to die.”

______

I
NEVER LIKED
jewelry. My sister Debra did. Twenty Bazooka comic strips and a dollar—after a three-week binge of reading teenage romances while waiting for the mailman—brought her a gold-painted locket, studded with plastic pearls and a fake diamond. I wanted her to choose the miniature binoculars because I helped her chew at least seven pieces of pink bubble gum and gave her a clean dime in exchange for our once-a-week pudding dessert. We were always selling desserts to each other. We were always short a dime or a quarter, and our only bargaining chip was dessert, especially the pudding mother served in gold-rimmed goblets, the kind kings and queens used in Robin Hood movies.

I wanted Debra to choose the binoculars. My head was large, but my eyes were small as a cat's, maybe even smaller. I could look through both lenses with one eye, and what I wanted was a better look at our neighbor, a junior college student who swam in an aluminum-sided doughboy pool. She used a ladder to get in, and often just stood on the ladder fiddling with her top and snapping her bikini bottom back into place. I could spy on her from behind our fence, the binoculars to my right eye because that one seemed to work better.

But Debra chose the locket. When it arrived in a business-sized envelope, I waved it at her and said, “It's here.” Angrily, she snatched it from me and took it to her room. I ate an afternoon bowl of Cocoa Puffs and watched a movie about giant ants no flame thrower could stop. I looked at her bedroom door now and then, wondering what was going on. Later, just before the ants got fried with a laser, she came out stinking of perfume, the locket around her brown neck. She didn't look at me as she went out the front door and crossed the street to see her friend, Jill.

My sister was eleven. She still clacked the plastic faces of Barbie and Ken together, made them hug, made them cry and run back to each other, stiff arms extended, faces wet with pretend tears from the bathroom sink. But she and Jill played with them less and less. Now they were going for the real thing: boys with washed faces.

In spite of the plastic pearls and the chip of glass centered in the middle, the locket made her look grown-up. I didn't tease her, and she didn't tease me about wearing rummage-sale baseball cleats.

All summer Debra wore the locket, and Jill wore one, too, an expensive one her mother had bought at Penney's. But Debra didn't care. She loved the locket whose metal chain left her neck green. Mother admired the locket, said it made her look elegant. That summer, Debra began to complain less and less about doing the dishes.

When a pearl fell out, she glued it back in. Another lost its grip and rolled into the floor furnace. She vacuumed the furnace of its ghostly lint, and shook out the bag and ran her fingers through the stinking hair, lint, broken potato chips, Cocoa Puffs, Cheerios, staples, bits of Kleenex, dead ants, and blue, flowery marble. She searched through the debris until, miraculously, she found the tiny pearl. She glued it back into place and gave her locket a rest.

One day, while Debra was at the playground swimming, I snuck into her bedroom to peek in the locket because I knew she kept something in the frame. She was always snapping it open and closed, always feeling pretty happy when she looked down at her breasts, twin mounds that had begun to cast small shadows. When I opened it, slowly because the clasp looked fragile, I saw a face that was mostly an eyeball looking at me. I stared back at the eyeball, and after a moment realized that it was Paul of The Beatles. It was Paul's eyeball, a bit droopy, a bit sad like his songs. Paul was favored by the girls who rode their bikes up and down the block singing “Michelle, ma belle.”

A few days later I checked the locket again. Paul's eyeball was gone, and now I was staring at a smiling Herman and the Hermits. Herman looked happy. His hair was long and soft, and his teeth were large and charmingly crooked. I smiled wide and thought for a moment that I looked like Herman. A few days later it was back to Paul in a new picture that she had cut out of a magazine. I thumbed through the magazine, emptied of all the famous pop stars, and looked around the room. Almost everything was pink. The furry rug, the canopy bed, the bottles of perfume and nail polish, the much-hugged pillow, everything except the chest of drawers which she intended to paint by fall. I left in a hurry when I heard Debra's bike skid to a halt in the driveway.

All summer it was Paul's eyeball, Herman's teeth, and one time Paul Revere with his colonial hat. Debra began to polish her nails and walk more slowly, erect as a ladder. By fall, the chest of drawers was pink and Mother was no longer worried about the green around her neck where the chain rested—an allergic reaction to cheap metal. Debra no longer wore the locket. She was saving Bazooka comics for a camera that came with a free roll of film. She had her first boyfriend and wanted to take his picture on the sly, wanted more than a droopy eyeball or toothy smile. She wanted the entire face, and some of the neck.

______

T
ONY WAS HANDSOME
and so strong that I stood next to him when baseball teams were chosen. I was picked third from the last, right before the kid with the eyeglasses taped together at the bridge, right before the fat kid with a river of blue veins on his belly.

A slow pitch over the plate was nothing to Tony. The mousy scurry of a ball between short and third was nothing. A pop-up in a glaring sky was nothing. Tony was quick, fair when fights broke out, and the nickel in his pocket was yours if you asked. I kept my mouth busy with sunflower seeds, my fist popping in my mitt's pocket.

I sat on a splintery bench those long innings while both teams scored a dozen runs. I clawed the chain link fence while everyone else became a hero. Their eyelids stung from the dust of sliding into second. Their hands were sweaty from standing in the outfield and pounding their gloves waiting for the ball to sail off a bad pitch. When a pitch connected on the wrong part of the bat an electric shock ran up their arms and died at the elbow. They were lucky to have these feelings.

But I had my turn. I reached third base five times that summer and scored once when the wind peeled dirt around the plate, and the catcher, the boy with blue veins on his belly, couldn't see. The reason I made home, they said, was because I was skinny. I blended with the light, blended with the sand around the plate. Once, when I was hit in the back on a bad pitch, my teammates huddled over and begged Tony to let them take my place. Tony brought me to my feet by saying, “Try again.”

Maybe Tony was smart. I don't know. But he was the first poet I knew. He thought a lot about life after childhood. Sitting on his lawn, he worried about the air. He said the mountains should be right there, and his finger was God's finger touching Adam's. I looked where he pointed and knew what he meant. After a rain storm, the air cleared and we had a chance to start over, to park every car for good and walk, to shut the factories down and feed ourselves more on prayer than red meat.

We rode our bikes to the country thinking that nature began where the stoplights gave way to stop signs, and trucks outnumbered cars. We looked at cows, and neither of us was disturbed that flies crawled over their faces. Even the stink of the chicken hatchery was nature. We rode until we came to a dairy, where we each drank a quart of chocolate milk and then relieved ourselves on a patch of collapsed mushrooms. We sat in the grass of a quiet roadside, looking west where the mountains rose in a blue haze. Jays maddened the air with their bickering. The wind moved the shadows of the oak trees, and a chill ran along our arms.

Tony, a stalk of sweet grass in his mouth, asked what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't have to think twice. I said I wanted to join the army so that I could travel. He pulled the grass from his mouth, and said he used to have the same wish but now he wanted to take the bullet for the president.

I looked at him, confused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I want to die for the president. Like President Kennedy. But it's too late for him.”

I pictured my grandmother's living room where portraits of President Kennedy and Jesus with flame over his brow hung on the wall.

Tony explained that someone had to step in front of gunfire for the president, that it might as well be him. He wasn't happy all the time, and he had dreams about water that kept him from a good night's sleep. In the summer light, his eyes didn't look puffy. They were clear in the corners. He did seem quiet, though, and he had gone from swimming at the playground pool to playing chess under a tree.

“Don't you think it would hurt?” I asked.

He looked at the mountains for a long time. I followed his stare to a hawk floating on warm air. A passing truck made him wake up and say, “Maybe.”

The ride back home was slower, less fun, though we did stop at a canal to walk in murky water flowing west toward a stand of sunlit eucalyptus. We sat on the bank and chewed sweet grass, the sun flaring when the branches moved.

All summer I slept hard as a stone, and only during a dumb, playground fist fight did I think about the bullet Tony would someday take. Summer was baseball, and the wish to hit someone home. Summer was a stalk of grass hanging from a mouth.

Like other heroes, Tony moved away. He left without a goodbye. I peeked in his front window and saw a cardboard box of old clothes, an ironing board leaning against the wall, and yellow curtains crumpled on the floor. A bare light bulb burned in the kitchen. I went around to the back, where I lit a leaf fire and thought about the zero a bullet makes in flesh. The sky was gray. Faraway birds were migrating. The orange tree was turning orange, bobbing the perpetual fruit of all that comes back.

______

I
T WAS SCARY
at home. After Father died, after two years and many months, my mother remarried. The man who showed up with boxes of clothes sat in our only good chair, drank, and looked at a television screen with a flickering line through its middle. He never laughed at Jackie Gleason's bug-eyed jokes, Red Skelton's hobo walk, or Lucille Balls's bosom bulging a hundred chicken eggs. He just looked, crushed beer cans, and moved the box fan in his direction, the blades like a thousand spoons. His stiff hair, which was hard from a yellow paste in a jar, didn't move, but the lapels of his work shirt flapped in the breeze.

I stayed outside a lot. It was scary to go inside, and besides, friends were sitting on their front lawns singing Beatle songs. Cathy was very good. She could start off humming “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and because she was older, in junior high, sing the words without feeling embarrassed. Her body rocked, yellow hair bouncing and perfuming the air about us, and her mouth made a near perfect “O” when her voice lifted on the word “hold.” At first, I didn't join her or the others, but when I saw my sister start singing, her words dragging softly behind Cathy's, I started singing too, but stopped just before the song came to an end.

I was too shy to sing on the front lawn because my voice was flat, and I was scared that my friends riding by on bicycles would make fun of me. But they just rode by, squeezing bags of sunflower seeds, their mitts hanging on the handlebars. They wanted to join us, but didn't know how.

David and I saved enough money from mowing lawns to buy a tape recorder from Long's Drugs. We wanted to hear our voices, to sing along with Beatle records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was already off the charts, but we still liked it, that one and “Love, Love Me Do.”

That winter we sang in David's bedroom because it was too scary at my house. My stepfather didn't like The Beatles because they were like girls, he said. He crushed a can and asked if we wanted to grow up queer. We shook our heads no. He turned his liquid gaze to the TV, the line cutting deeper into the screen, and we lowered our faces into our school work.

On Saturday, I cut my hair to please him, a butch that showed that my scalp was blue under my black hair. But still he grumbled when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, right after Señor Wences, who made his money by dabbing lipstick on his fist and making it open and close like lips. “Sí,” the fist said, “Sí, I drink the water.” My stepfather stared at the fist, which was dressed in a tiny wig. When The Beatles came on, John running onto the stage so that his hair bounced, my stepfather made a face and changed the channel. He crushed a can, and we, brother and sister, left the room to fill in dot-to-dot cartoons at the kitchen table.

Because David paid two dollars more for the tape recorder and bought the batteries, he got to be Paul all the time, Paul, the cute Beatle with sad eyes. I had to be George and wasn't allowed to beat pencils against David's makeshift drum set of two shoe boxes and one oatmeal box.

Neither cared what the other looked like when we jumped around singing “Love, Love Me Do.” David's beagle, which looked like Ringo with his mouth closed, pawed the bedspread and licked himself. David's mother was too kind to bang on the door, and only now and then threw us outside to get fresh air. With the bedroom windows closed, we sweated and beat holes into our paper drums.

David had to cut his hair, too, because his father had bought him three fresh batteries. He had to stay on his good side because his father drank, too, and would sometimes stare at the sprinkler and become so self-absorbed that no one dared tell him that the water was flowing into the gutter.

One evening, David let me take the tape recorder home. When I walked in the front door, my mom and stepfather were arguing in the living room. The blades in the box fan were turning faster than I remembered, rattling the pages of our dot-to-dot magazines on the TV tray. I went to my bedroom without looking at them, closed the door, and recorded my stepfather: “My feet hurt. You don't give a shit when the car don't work. You'll never give a shit. I work all day and your kids aren't happy with food.” My mother said: “You don't know a damn thing about my children. You've ruined the chair. Where were you when I told you to come home? You don't know a damn thing about anything. The cooler don't work. Damn fool, you got rice on your face.”

While they went back and forth, I did a dot-to-dot cartoon, looking up now and then to stare into the mirror sadly because I didn't look anything like George of The Beatles. I would never be famous, never travel across the Atlantic Ocean, never pick up a guitar and have kids go crazy. When my parents stopped after the front door was opened and slammed shut, I played the argument back because I wanted to understand what they were saying and why they were so loud. They sounded scary. The batteries were weak, their voices slurred, and finally my mom's voice died on the word “face.” It took more batteries to make me sing again.

______

W
HEN
F
RANK
, our babysitter from juvie, picked some black stuff from under his fingernail with a playing card and suggested that we take my mom's car (Mom was out dancing for the evening), I stopped marching around the living room with smashed Pepsi cans on the heels of my tennis shoes. I had never been in a car driven by someone who was only three years older than me, which is to say, a fifteen-year-old. Rick, my older brother, was camping in a friend's backyard, while Debra played on the couch with our baby brother.

“You don't know how to drive,” I said, unhooking the Pepsi cans from my shoes. But I was eager to help drive the car. I had once started the car and revved it up until smoke filled the garage and the five kids sitting with me became sick. The mother of one of the other kids later called, and I was spanked from one corner of the room to the other. I thought of that day and shook my head. “Mom'll find out.”

Frank fanned out a deck of cards on the kitchen table and asked, “How?”

“She just will.”

He shuffled the cards and said, “Pick one.”

I picked a card: a jack of clubs with a little spittle of plum on his chin. He reshuffled the deck, fanned out the cards again, and said, “Pick another.”

It was the jack, with the glob of plum.

Frank got up from the table and dipped his pudgy fingers into the Disneyland coffee cup where the keys were kept. “Come on, don't be a baby.” My baby brother looked up with spittle from thumb sucking hanging on his face. Debra got off the couch. “Mom's gonna get you if you drive her car.”

“No, sir,” I said. I looked up at Frank. “Will she?”

Frank said we could go for a short ride, and if we didn't tell he would buy us a milkshake. He said he was almost fifteen, and on farms people knew how to drive tractors when they were twelve. I said he didn't live on a farm, but he said that I was missing the point. He reminded us that he would buy us a shake, a jumbo one if we agreed. Debra looked at me, and I at her. That was enough for us, and we carried the baby into our Chevy, which was parked in the driveway. While we snuck into the car, ever mindful of the neighbors, Frank walked tall as a Marine and twirled the keychain on his index finger.

“Stay down,” I warned Debra and my baby brother who were in the backseat on their knees. Frank started the engine, adjusted the mirror and the seat, and said, “Here goes,” not looking over his shoulder as he backed out of the driveway. I peeked out of the window like an alligator and saw Cross-eyed Johnny shooting marbles in his driveway. A shirtless Mr. Prince was watering his yellow lawn. Mrs. Hancock was tying back a rose bush with strips of bedsheet.

The Chevy purred as it picked up speed, a tail of blue smoke trailing. When the car slowed to a stop at the end of the block, we sat up. Frank seemed in control. He looked both ways, then accelerated smoothly, warm wind filling the car and rattling the newspapers on the floorboard.

As we drove up a street past neighbors sitting in lawn chairs under the orange glow of porch lights, Debra said she wanted a banana shake. I thought chocolate would be fine, though banana would be OK as long as we had two straws to pump our cheeks full of sweetness. Our baby brother, who had yet to squeal more than “Mama” and “sha-sha,” said nothing. He was pulling at the thread of a busted seam in the upholstery.