American Fraternity Man (12 page)

Her eyes were open now, and she was mumbling again.

“One arm around her shoulder,” my father told me, and I did as he instructed. “One arm at her waist. And lift.” And we did, my mother’s legs jiggling beneath her as she rose, her head rolling from side to side before finally going rigid to stare me in the eyes. “Whoa!” my father said, because I nearly dropped her. I tightened my grip on her waist. My other arm brushed against my father’s, both of us volleying for position at my mother’s back; he tapped my forearm, a sort of “you okay?” gesture, and I nodded. We were standing now, an interlocked three-person unit. “All right,” he said. “Going out the doors now, Kim. One foot in front of the other. I’ve already pulled the car up.”

W
hen had he done this? How long had he known about Mom, passed out, before finally enlisting my help? Where had I
been
for the last thirty minutes?

“One foot in front of the other, Kim,” he said again.

We lumbered forward, but she was at least conscious now, legs regaining their stability but still bending like rubber swords poked into steel armor. If we loosened our grip, she’d take a hard spill.

“There you go, there you go,” my father said.

“Charles,” she said then, and I tried not to hear. “Charlie. Charlie boy.” Words as haunting as a nightmare that you can’t convince yourself wasn’t real. “Oh, Charlie.”

“Keep going,” my father said, gripping the bathroom door now. He was sweating, fingers trembling as he pushed the door open.

Mother still staring into my face. “You’ve grown,” she said and nodded sloppily, her body weight shifting. My father was letting her rest against my chest and shoulder so that he could keep the door open, his foot wedged into the doorway. Soon we were moving again, out into the hallway where the sounds of the ping-pong balls and the splashing and the midnight chatter of other parents and children replaced the wet empty echoes of the bathroom. “Oh,” my mother said, “don’t let them see.” I held her tighter, already feeling the stares of Tim French and Bryan Hopper, both of them saying “oh shit!” in unison as they saw the three of us proceed through the hallway and toward the living room. Brand-new president, Todd Hampton, standing and watching with his arms crossed, rolling his eyes.

“Oh,” my mother said, “I ruined your party, Charlie.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said. “Just keep walking, Mom. You’re doing fine.”

I kept my gaze fixed to the ground before us, tried not to imagine what my fraternity brothers were seeing at that moment, how they were reacting, at what point the initial shock of a husband and son escorting a drunk mother outside would give way to laughtrack, as if we were just a couple of bumbling characters in
a sitcom created for their enjoyment. One foot in front of the other, and finally we turned a corner and the front door was only yards away.

I saw the flash of a picture being taken, but tried to ignore it.
Tried not to think of the comments I’d get on Facebook.

“Charlie,” my mother said. “I’m so sorr-rrrry.”

“Stop, Mom.”

“Charlie. Charrr-rrrrlie.”

My father kept us moving. “Could you grab the door for us?” he asked someone who was standing in the foyer, and then we were outside, teetering down the steps and onto the sidewalk that slit through the front yard to the curb of Greek Park Drive. One foot in front of the other, and I knew that they were gathering in the doorway, men and women, boys and girls.

But there was my father’s Lexus convertible at the curb, his shining
I’ve-made-it
toy. “Hold her,” he said, and now I had her full weight again as he searched his keys and then opened the passenger-side door.

“Charlie
Boy,” my mother said, glassy eyes upon me once again, one hand now resting on my shoulder. I held her in a dancer’s embrace: we were chest to chest, hands at one another’s waists and necks. “I ruined your little party.”

“No,” I said. “Just…let’s just get you into the car.”

“I don’t want to go,” she said.

“Kim,” my father said. “Please.”

“No!” Voice like a petulant child ripped from the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese at the end of her birthday party. “I don’t want to
go
! I don’t want to ruin the
party
!”

And now the front door of the fraternity house
did
close, any onlookers shrinking inside, likely sensing that this moment was becoming too personal, the sitcom humor now bleeding over into reality TV “should I laugh or should I cry?” horrorshow. A trainwreck scene on
The Real World
or
Rock of Love
that you turn the channel to avoid.

“I’m closing the door,” my father said. We’d sat her down. “Pull your legs inside.”

“Charles,
tell
him!”

“Pull your legs inside.”

“Tell him I want to go back to the party!”

“Kim. We’re going to the hotel. You’re done drinking.”

“Charles, help me.” My father was now grabbing her legs, trying to manage them into the car, but my mother had been reinvigorated by all of this, had a burst of strength in which she was able to land one good kick to my father’s chest. He stumbled back, hand to his shirt, face scrunched in pain…and then, just as suddenly, my mother’s mood changed again and she was crying, feet inside the car. “Oh God, Charles, I just want to go. I just want to…I just want to…”

My father stood up straight, smoothed his shirt and closed the door as gently as he could. He took a deep breath, ran his hands through the grayest of his hair above his ears, and this was the closest I’d ever seen him to becoming unraveled.

“Is this…” I started, looking in at my sobbing mother. She was now attempting to buckle her seatbelt, but couldn’t quite finish the job. “Does this happen often?”

“This?” he asked, and he touched the kick-mark on his shirt, the bits of grass and sand that had been deposited by the tip of her shoe. “I’d be lying if I said that I saw this as a possibility for the night.”

“I guess this is how you know it’s a good party, right?” I forced a smile, slapped my father’s sore chest. “Aside from the violence, of course.”

“Charles.”

“Sorry. Bad joke.”

He closed his eyes.

“Will she be okay?” I asked.

He
went silent for a moment, looking back at the fraternity house behind us. Arms crossed over his chest even though he was still breathing heavy. “When do you move out?”

“Two weeks.”

“And then you drive up to Indianapolis. To start your job?”

“That’s right.”

“Then you drive across the country, to fifty fraternity houses just like this one.”

“That’s the idea.”

“So what would you do if you encountered this particular scene?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” I said through
a long exhale, and now I leaned against the car with him, looked at the house also, trying to see something different than what he was seeing. I tried to invoke the same fraternity excitement as always; I could hear myself asking him where else in America you could go on a Friday night at midnight to find a well-kept
mansion
, first-floor popping with activity, a full bar and
no end to the night
…a party like
this
, a house like this, accessible to a common middle-class young man? Where else but fraternity rows? This was an
American institution
! Sounded nice in my head, of course, but all I could focus upon now were the empty bottles on the front steps, one of which I’d accidentally kicked over, and a long wet trail of…something…leading down the sidewalk. Silhouettes inside the house, young men fist-pumping to some sort of chugging chant. The sound of shattering glass from the backyard. “I assume there’s some standard operating procedure for breaking up parties,” I said. “It’s parents, though? All grown-ups. Who am I to tell them not to drink? They’re responsible.”

“Are they?”

“I mean…for the most part?”

“Hmm,” he said and
went silent once again. “Your mother will feel like hell tomorrow. But yes, this is indeed her responsibility.”

S
till, my father looked as if he had more to say, as if he had full dissertations waiting to be delivered. His words were coming slow: was he pacing himself, saving something for later, afraid of saying something? He motioned toward the house. “You think you can stop a party like this from getting out-of-hand if it’s all kids?”

“It’ll be my job. I’ll have to.”

“It’s your job right
now
, isn’t it? President of the house. And you couldn’t stop your own fraternity brothers, could you? There was a kid passed out in the men’s bathroom, too, Charles.”

“You’re blaming me
, aren’t you?” I said.

“Blaming you?”

“For everything that happened in there. For Mom. You’re blaming me.”

“I’m not blaming you, Charles.”

Head spinning again, now that I was leaning against the car, now that the unthinking labor of carrying my mother was finished. Harder to find the right words, harder to make any sense. “This was a
party
, all right?” I said. “Things happen at parties. But it’s like…this is what we do
every
night. This is my life.” Stop. Reconsider. “Not
every
night. It’s not, you know, a lifestyle. It’s just a party, is all I’m saying. A Friday night. Just a party. And I’m graduating tomorrow. And I have a job, which is, like, more than some of the other Seniors can say. So…like…why
wouldn’t
I celebrate?”

He unfolded his arms
, held them out. “So you celebrated.”

“Right. I celebrated. That’s all this is.”

“So what happens next time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Every night isn’t a celebration. What happens when you’re on the road? What do you do, Charles? If you encounter this?”

“I told you. I’ll act different when it’s my actual job. That’s what people do.”

“I’m not an idiot, you know,” he said. “I know you didn’t plan
everything
in there. It’s not as if you bought all that alcohol yourself.”

And I realized at that moment
that he didn’t know: I’d made no speech, no declaration that these were all
my
purchases, this entire bar full of Stoli and Bacardi Limon. He assumed it was some sort of collaborative house effort. Hell, he probably didn’t even know that I’d initiated the Beer Pong tournament. Who, after all, would take it upon himself—all by himself—to get five or six dozen parents wasted out of their minds? It was unthinkably dumb.

“I don’t want you to fail, Charles, but you need to hear this
.” He was no longer looking up at the columns of the Nu Kappa Epsilon house, no longer looking through the car window at his wife. She’d passed out by now. No, my father was now pinning me to the door with the same Authority Figure look that he’d used in key moments throughout my life: when I’d gotten into my first fight at a soccer game in elementary school, when I’d been suspended from school in seventh-grade for swearing at a teacher, when he’d found a bottle of Aftershock hidden in my bedroom on the night before Senior Prom. His chin up, five o’clock shadow blooming across his cheeks, and even in the dark it seemed as if he could find a way to make every inch of his face illuminated. “When my own father sent me off to college, he told me—from the start—he told me I was on my own. Make your own mistakes, he said. This is where you learn to be the man you’ll be for the rest of your life.”

“And I think I
have
—”

“Don’t talk. Listen,” he said. “I worked landscaping in the afternoons, on the weekends. Lived in a co-op in Gainesville, cheaper than the dorms. Biked to campus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Had to find rides back to Jacksonville for Thanksgiving. Hitch-hiked a few times. Hated my father because he wouldn’t come to visit, never gave an encouraging word. Made me pay my own tuition, even though he could afford to help. I hated the man, Charles. Hated him for many years, even when he tried to make nice.” Chin still raised, breathing still heavy from the exertion of the struggle. “It wasn’t until your freshman year that I understood his point. It wasn
’t until I saw you on the floor. I can live with myself if you hate me, Charles, because it was my father who
let
me become a man on my own.”

“I don’t hate you,” I said, pretending to be shocked that he would imply such a thing. But, of course, the faux-shock was betrayed by the fact that I had
a response ready to fling: “But you have it out for fraternities. And fraternity is who I am. You don’t recognize any of the good things we’re doing.”

“The good things?”

“We had this whole awards ceremony inside!” I shook my fist, traded the shocked look for one of pure anger. I gestured toward the sloping grass lawn, the house and the porch and the plantation shutters. But my father just sighed, again ran his fingers through the sweat-dampened gray hair on the sides of his head, smoothing it back. He didn’t look at me, either, only stared straight ahead into the house windows for a few silent seconds before finally turning and peering through the passenger-side window of his Lexus.