Family Secrets (38 page)

Near the beach he bought a hot dog and a paper cup of coffee from a stand. He ate in his car. Look at those fools on vacation, all strutting up and down, dressed up, staring and wanting to be stared at! He hated them. Tall, skinny, and innocuous in his college clothes he hoped he looked like a million other kids. He didn’t want to stand out … yet, if only someone would notice him, speak to him, be his friend …

At eighteen, Everett was six feet tall, weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, and looked like a fox. His face was long with high cheekbones, his pale eyes (green like his mother’s, but so light they seemed bleached out by the sun) looked out from a fringe of thick, long eyelashes and bushy fox-colored brows. They were frightened eyes, but looked devious. His hair was sandy, silky, like the hair of a red fox. His movements were quick but graceless. He seldom smiled. He had never been out with a girl.

He was consumed with the thought of sex. It haunted him; lust and curiosity and fantasy, girls. He bought girly magazines and kept them in his room. He yearned for some of the girls he saw on the campus and made up stories about his exploits with them, in case anyone should ever ask, but no one would. No one cared whether Everett Bergman had been to a gang-bang, had enjoyed a night of wild passion with a blonde senior, had been picked up by a stewardess, a nurse, a waitress. He had all these fantasy stories at the ready, but no one asked and no one cared because he had no friends.

It was bad enough to be a virgin, but there were other boys his age who were virgins. What was worse was to be unable to talk to a girl at all. His tongue would dry up in his mouth, he would develop amnesia, speech would leave him.

There was a beautiful red-haired girl in his compulsory freshman English class with a lot of fuzzy sweaters which she filled as well as any girl in Everett’s girly magazines, whom he longed for. No, lusted for was better, he saw her in all his lonely fantasies. He wanted to put his hands on her. She didn’t have a steady boyfriend and he could have tried to ask her to have a cup of coffee with him. But his thoughts were so hot he was afraid they burned through his eyes. Maybe it would have been better if they had, then at least she would notice him. One day she was trying to get past him in the row of seats—he always sat on the aisle for a quick getaway—and she stepped on his foot.

“Oh, I’m
sorry
!” she said, looking him right in the eyes and smiling.

“S’okay,” Everett murmured grumpily, looking over her shoulder. God, there were those angora-covered boobs, right up against him, practically in his face, and it was all he could do not to make a lunge for them. He shrank inside his own sweater and sat on his sweaty hands. She pushed on past him to an empty seat, and later he saw her glance at him with a puzzled look and then shrug. He looked away. The next time he saw her she was in the hall in an animated conversation with two handsome guys and she didn’t even seem to recognize him.

He was hopeless. He stopped going to English class because it bored him, even though it was compulsory to pass, and at midterms he got a D. What did he expect, when he hadn’t done the reading and had only gone to a few of the classes? He was lucky he hadn’t gotten an E. It was only because he was so smart. The hell with them all.

Every evening at six o’clock sharp Everett had to appear for dinner at Papa’s. He could see that Etta resented him. Her sharp, sarcastic voice whenever she deigned to address a question to him gave her away. “And what did the genius do today?”

She knew the genius had cut classes and was tinkering with his electrical equipment in his room. Henny must have told her. The two of them were thick as thieves. Everett thought Etta had a screw loose. Who would spend her days betting on horses with a nigger? It was a good thing they made all those colored live out of the beach area. They had to have an identification card to walk around after dark or the cops would get them. It kept the crime down. The Southern attitude, which he had never encountered in Brooklyn, which was full of well-meaning Jewish liberals like his family, gave Everett someone to hate. Not that he would ever dare to say a word to their faces, but he thought it, murmured it under his breath. “I’m wise to you, you schvartze …”

His father was the only person Everett had ever known who wasn’t a do-good liberal. He said it right out about all the no-good bums he treated in that slum where he went to practice every day, all the minority groups who didn’t pay their bills and were always sick because they didn’t know how to eat right. That chink, what did he expect, eating hazerei? That wop, stuffing himself with spaghetti and garlic. That schvartze, frying everything in lard. Even his own people didn’t escape Lazarus’ scorn. That yiddel, poisoning himself with chicken fat.

As the school year wore on, Everett attended fewer and fewer classes, using the excuse that they were boring. He had not made a single friend. He would never have lived in the dormitory because he was too frightened to live with strangers. Share a bathroom with strangers? Have to talk to strangers? He knew he would never have friends, and as long as he didn’t live in the dorm no one would know he was friendless. He was almost invisible. Only his jalopy was visible, bright red and emitting loud noises, zoom, zoom, varoom! People looked at it admiringly. It was his status symbol. If only some sexy, pretty girl would ask him for a ride in his car! But none of them ever did. They just gave him dirty looks when he sped by too close to them.

His inventions were his only solace. In his room he was putting together an intercom telephone system for the whole house. A private system. Actually, none of his inventions were original, they were copies of things he had read about in his magazines, but even the fact that he could put them together showed that he had ability. He knew his life work would be in something like that, inventing, or working with electrical or mechanical things. He knew he would never go into the family business and he would never work for anyone. He would be no one’s slave. He would be the master, the boss, self-employed. The garage in back of Papa’s house was filled with Everett’s things, his inventions, the things he was working on, half-finished. His tools were there, his rolls of wire, his equipment, all the same things he had lovingly bought and put in the garage at Windflower. These were new things, new equipment, new inventions, which he had as lovingly bought with his own money here in Miami Beach. The garage was his major workshop. His room was only for the one work in progress. Etta had already insisted on that, furious.

“I won’t have you messing up this room,” she had said. “You’re a guest here. This isn’t your house. If your parents want to send you to me, okay, I’ll take you, but not your junk. Get that stuff out of here!”

He had argued with her, and finally, because he had lied and said that the work was a project for school, she had agreed to let him keep just one in the bedroom. The rest had to stay in the garage. Many nights when the rest of the household was asleep, Everett went to the garage, where he worked for hours, playing his radio softly for company, lost in the beauty of creating things that worked. It was the only time he was happy. Electrical sparks were beautiful, more beautiful than poetry. He hated poetry. He hated words. They strangled him. But the human voice coming out of wires and cables was magic. He could speak for hours to strangers on his ham radio set because their voices and his voice uniting through the air via the magic of electricity was a union of perfect friendship. He couldn’t talk to a neighbor on the phone without hemming and hawing and wishing to hang up, but when he sent his call out over the air on his ham radio set he felt like a part of the entire universe.

Now his ham radio set was his only social life. He had put it in the garage because people could hear him if he used it in his room. There was no privacy in that house. He would no more put his ham radio set into his room and communicate on it than he would bring a girl into his room and lay her right under the noses of his family.

His mother kept nagging him about school. How was he doing? Was he buckling down to work more? She knew about his bad marks at midterm, the D in English, the F in French—at that rate he should have had an A in advanced applied science, but he had a C minus. He knew more than the teacher, so why go to class to do what he already had learned at home? Was it his fault they had taken attendance, or that they had sprung a test on the class one day when he wasn’t there? He could have gotten an A on that test. The hell with them all.

Why did everyone tell him he had to make something of himself? What did they think he was going to make? He wasn’t God.

On weekends Everett either fooled around in his room or else went riding around in his car. Sometimes he put the car in the driveway and practically took it apart, cleaning each piece lovingly, and put it together again. He wanted to keep it in such perfect condition that it would be a collector’s model, at least until he had the money to buy a really good, powerful car. Papa was home from the office during the day on weekends, and from his attempts at conversation Everett could tell that Papa wanted to talk to him about the family business. He tried to listen because it was only polite, but he didn’t want to be sucked into that thing. He wasn’t meant for a desk job. After a while Papa seemed to understand and stopped trying to talk to him. Papa seemed to think it was an honor to go into the family business, and Everett supposed for some of the relatives it would be, but not for him.

He got along with Papa usually, but Etta made his life miserable. She was always complaining about him and picking on him. She said his room was a pigsty. Everett said what did she care, they had maids didn’t they? The maids could stay out, for all he cared. He would prefer it. Then no one would encroach on his territory.

Now that he had grown up Everett had a ravenous appetite, a far different person from the little noneater he had been as a child, but no matter what he wolfed down he stayed thin. Etta always complained that he ate too much. It seemed that whatever he put into his mouth, that was the one morsel Etta decided she had been saving for Papa. “You took the last bagel!” “You had to grab the last piece of lox?” “I bet that boy ate a pound and a half of roast beef all by himself.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Papa would say. “Thank God we can afford it.”

“You’re not the only person in this house, you know,” Etta would snap at Everett. She would grab away the plate of tiny Danish with a swift, practiced, ladylike movement, and put it on the other side of the table where Everett couldn’t reach it. Then he would have to ask for it. “Another?” she would say. “You had five already, but who’s counting?”

“Oh, forget it,” Everett would snarl under his breath. He knew he could go into the kitchen after lunch and eat whatever was left.

One Saturday at lunch Papa looked up from his cold borscht and said, “Today, Everett, you should clean out the garage.”

“What?”

“Clean out your junk. There isn’t any more room for anybody else.”

“It’s in the corner,” Everett said, and when he glanced at Etta she had a smug look on her face. She loved it when anyone was making his life miserable.

“You call it the corner,” Papa said. “I call it the whole garage. Clean it.”

“Oh all right.” He knew what “clean it” meant. Many times he’d been forced to clean up his room by his parents, and it just meant arrange everything neatly in boxes, but it took forever. It would take his whole weekend, and today of all days he’d been meaning to go to the sale at Sears Roebuck. Nobody around here cared about him. First he would go to the sale, and then he would pick up some empty boxes, and then he could work on the garage all night. It would be something to do when all the other college kids were whooping up and down the beach in their cars, tops down, out on dates, going to beer parties and dances and the movies, feeling each other up in parked cars, having Saturday night fun. Everett hated Saturday nights. By Saturday morning he had that heavy feeling in his throat which meant another Saturday night was going to be lost, another sexual encounter passing him by, another night of his youth wasted. Better to stay in the garage and feel he had something important to do.

But when he went to Sears he found browsing around there so engrossing that he spent the whole afternoon and also a hundred and seventy-two dollars. Now he was broke. He put his new purchases into the trunk of his car and went to the back of the largest market in town, where he picked up several thrown-out cardboard boxes and put them into the back seat. Then he drove back to the house. It was time for dinner.

“So?” Papa said, looking up from his steak. “You didn’t clean up your junk this afternoon.”

“I’ll do it tonight.”

“Good.”

After dinner Everett took his new purchases into the garage and unpacked them lovingly. How could he resist not trying them out, not playing with them? He sat on the floor of the garage and began happily putting everything together the way it should be, because everything always came packed separately and unassembled from the store. It was true, he did have a lot of stuff, but everyone was entitled to a hobby. Could he help it if his took up space? Besides, it was more than a hobby, it was his future life’s work.

It was midnight by the time he had finished fooling around. He still hadn’t started putting anything away and now he was tired. He should have had another cup of coffee at dinner, but he’d been too full after two big pieces of Henny’s delicious key lime pie. Well, at least he would get the boxes out of his car and put them into the garage, and then tomorrow bright and early he would get to work.

When he had put the boxes into the garage Everett looked at his ham radio and wondered if anyone was calling at this hour. The air was probably full of messages at only a little after midnight on a Saturday night. He couldn’t resist turning it on and making a call. They didn’t have dates either, those people, and they were much more interesting than those stupid college kids. He found a man on a yacht to talk to, and then a thirteen-year-old boy who was confined to his home with paralysis from polio and had been making ham calls since he was eleven. Obviously a genius. Everett enjoyed talking to him. He had a lot in common with the kid, both of them loners and outsiders. The poor kid was paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheel chair, but he had put together his whole ham set by himself, just the way Everett had when he was young. They talked about mechanical things and Everett was very impressed with the kid’s knowledge. Then the kid said his mother was nagging him to go to bed and Everett laughed because it reminded him of when he was that age. They signed off, and then to his surprise Everett found a woman calling, so he had a good talk with her for about half an hour. She was an older woman and she had become interested in ham radio through her husband’s interest, and then when he had died she had continued.