I Know This Much Is True (20 page)

. . . and Thomas forgets. Starts chewing on his shirt. Ray goes down in the cellar and he comes back up with a roll of duct tape and he duct-tapes Thomas’s hands. Covers up his fingers so that he can’t chew on them. He had to wear the tape for, I don’t know, a couple of days, at least. . . . It’s funny, the things you remember: I can still see Thomas with his head down in his plate, eating his meals like a fucking dog. Can still hear his whimpering, all goddamned day long.”

Joy reached over. Covered my hand with hers. “That’s so awful,”

she said.

“This other time? Ray punished us both by pouring rice out of the box and making us kneel on it. On the kitchen floor. I can’t even remember what the ‘crime’ was. Just the punishment. . . . It seemed silly, you know? Kneeling on rice. Big deal. But after about five minutes, it wasn’t so funny anymore. It
hurt.
I got to get up after about fifteen minutes because I hadn’t cried, but Ray made Thomas stay down there on his knees because he was crying. Bawling his head off. That was the biggest sin you could commit, as far as Ray was concerned. Letting the enemy see you cry.”

“And your mother used to just let him get away with it?”

“Ma? Ma was more scared of Ray than we were. More scared than I was, anyway. I was the only one of the three of us that would stand up to him. Stick my neck out. I guess, in a way, that was what saved me from the worst of it.”

It felt strange, actually: having Joy’s full attention like that.

Letting my guard down. It was like going over to that emergency I Know[116-168] 7/24/02 12:30 PM Page 127

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room after all and pulling down my underwear and saying, “Here.

Look. Here’s what that Nazi guard down there did to me. Take a look.” . . . Robocop, Ray: I was forty years old and
still
watching out for bullies.

I walked over to the window, looked out. There’d been a frost, first of the season. All the leaves were changing. “It’s just not worth dredging up, Joy,” I said. “It’s all ancient history. . . . I better shut up or you’re going to be late.”

She got up and came up behind me. Put her arms around me and leaned her forehead against my shoulder. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey, what?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“That Ray was so mean. That you have to go through all this with your brother.”

I gave a little snort. “Don’t feel sorry for me.
Thomas
is the one who’s locked up down there. Not me.”

She kept holding me. Held on tighter, as a matter of fact. Held on for over a minute.

After she left, I poured myself more coffee. Leafed through the rest of the paper. Maybe I’d give up caffeine again, once this stuff with Thomas was settled. Once I had pain-in-the-ass Rood’s house finished. Start jogging again, maybe. Take Joy on a trip. We could make it work, the two of us, if only we . . . if only . . .

I went back to the window. Watched all those dying leaves flapping outside in the wind. Came up with all kinds of arguments to give her—all kinds of reasons why I
had
to keep running interference for Thomas.

I
know
you need to be taken care of, Joy, but guys kill each other in places like Hatch. He never
could
defend himself. It’d be like throwing a rabbit to the wolves.

It’s
different
when you’re a twin, Joy. It’s complicated.

I promised Ma.

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8

f

1968–69

When my brother and I graduated from Three Rivers’ John F.

Kennedy High School in June of 1968, we received a joint present from our mother. She had Scotch-taped a three-quarter-inch aluminum key to the inside of each of our graduation cards and written identical inscriptions. “Congratulations! Love, Ma and Ray. Proceed to the front hall closet.”

Inside the closet, Thomas and I found a portable Royal typewriter in a dark blue carrying case, lockable and unlockable with either of our duplicate keys. We brought the typewriter into the living room, put it on the coffee table, and unlocked the case. Thomas, who had taken a typing class at JFK, rolled a piece of paper into the machine and tried a test sentence:
Now is the time for all good men to
come to the aid of their country
. I typed one, too:
Thomas Birdsey is an
asshole
. Ma said, all right, all right, that was enough of that kind of stuff. She gave us each a kiss.

Ma hadn’t bought the typewriter; she’d redeemed it. For years, she had been saving S&H green stamps in hopes of cashing them in
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for a chiming grandfather clock, handcrafted in Germany and obtainable for 275 books. Ma had wanted that grandfather clock so badly that she visited it from time to time at the redemption store on Bath Avenue, just to hear its tone and stroke the polished wood.

She was more than halfway to her goal—had accumulated nearly 150 books of green stamps—when she revised her plan and got us the typewriter instead. Our success, she told us, was more important than some silly clock.

By “our success,” I think Ma meant our safety. The year before, a neighbor of ours, Billy Covington, had been killed in Vietnam—shot down during a bombing raid near Haiphong. As a kid, Billy had walked to our house after school because his father had left the family and his mother worked downtown. Four years older than Thomas and me, he was unbeatable at tag and baseball and his favorite game, Superman. He owned Superman pajamas, I remember, and would pack them in his school bag and change into them before we played, completing his costume with one of our bath towels, which Ma would safety-pin around his neck. Billy would begin each episode of our play with an imitation of the TV show opening:

“
Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive!”
But if Billy seemed invincible as the Man of Steel, he was pitiable afterwards. “Poor Billy,” Ma would sometimes sigh as we watched him walk down our front steps, hand in hand with Mrs. Covington. “He doesn’t
have
a nice daddy like you boys do.
His
father left Billy and his mother high and dry.”

Years later, Billy Covington was our paperboy—a lanky near-man of fourteen or fifteen whose voice alternated between baritone and donkey’s bray and who, from the street, could land a folded
Daily Record
at the base of our cement flowerpot with deadly accu-racy. By the time Thomas and I entered high school ourselves, Billy had graduated and enlisted in the Air Force and become irrelevant.

At his military funeral, I thought nothing about the meaning of Billy Covington’s life and death or the waste of the Vietnam War or even the implications for my brother and me. I focused, instead, on Billy’s fiancée, whose breasts shook tantalizingly as she sobbed, and I Know[116-168] 7/24/02 12:30 PM Page 130

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on his black GTO (386 cubes, 415 horses). Maybe his mother would want to sell his “goat” dirt cheap so she could forget about him and get on with her life, I remember calculating in the very presence of Billy’s flag-draped silver casket.

Although Billy Covington’s death failed to move me at age sixteen, it clobbered my mother. “Goddamn this war,” she said in the car on the way back from the memorial service. “Goddamn this war to hell.” In the backseat, Thomas and I looked at each other, jolted.

We had never before heard Ma use God’s name in vain. More shocking, still, was the fact that she’d said it right in front of Ray, who had fought in both World War II and Korea and thought all antiwar protesters should be put against the wall and shot. Ma moped for days afterward. She found an old snapshot of Billy and bought a frame and put the picture on her chest of drawers along with the studio portraits of Thomas and me and her framed photos of her father and Ray. She said novenas on behalf of Billy’s departed soul. Her eyes teared over whenever she saw Mrs. Covington walking zombielike past our house. I remember feeling slightly annoyed by what I perceived as Ma’s mournful overreaction. It was only years later—well after the trouble with Thomas had begun—that I came to understand my mother’s strong reaction to Billy Covington’s death: four years our senior, Billy had been, all his life, a sort of living “preview of coming attractions” for her two boys. If Superman could be shot down from the sky, then so could his younger side-kicks. Vietnam could kill us. College would keep us safe.

Ray hadn’t really signed our graduation cards with love and congratulations. Our stepfather had, in fact, opposed the idea of college educations for Thomas and me. For one thing, he said, he and Ma couldn’t afford twin tuition bills. He should know, not her.
He
was the one who paid the bills and managed their savings. She had no idea what they could or couldn’t afford. For another thing, from what he read and heard down at the shipyard, half the teachers at those colleges were Communists. And half the kids were on drugs.

If he ever caught either of us messing with that kind of junk, he’d knock us into the day after tomorrow. He couldn’t for the life of him I Know[116-168] 7/24/02 12:30 PM Page 131

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see why two able-bodied young men out of high school couldn’t
work
for a living. Or enter the Navy the way he had done. There were worse things in life than a military career. It was the draftees they were sending to Vietnam; enlisted men had choices. Or, if we didn’t want that, maybe he could get us in down at Electric Boat as apprentice pipe fitters or electricians or welders. Some of those jobs carried deferments. Building submarines might not be a fancy college-boy job, but it “backed the attack.” It put meat and potatoes on the table, didn’t it?

“But that’s not the point, Ray,” my mother said one night at supper.

“What do you mean it’s not the point?” His fist banged against the tabletop hard enough to make the dishes jump. “I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is, Tweedledum and Tweedledee here have been living high off the hog all their lives. The two of them know nothing but take, take, take, and I’m getting goddamned fed up with it.” He got up and slammed out of the house. When he came back, he was speaking single syllables to Thomas and me but nothing at all to Ma. He gave her the silent treatment for days.

After that, there were arguments and tears behind my mother and Ray’s bedroom door. Ma threatened to go to work if she had to in order to get us the money for school, and when Ray told her no one would hire her, she called his bluff and filled out an application for a maid’s job down at Howard Johnson’s. She was petrified at the thought of working outside the home—afraid of taking orders from a boss and making mistakes, scared that she might have to make small talk with strangers who would look at her funny because of her cleft lip. Howard Johnson’s called her for an interview and offered her the job that same afternoon. She was to start the following Monday.

On the morning of her first day of work, Ma stood at the stove cooking breakfast in her uniform, distracted, her hands shaking visibly. From his seat at the table, Ray taunted and bullied her. People were pigs. There was no telling
what
they’d leave behind for her to clean up. A while back, he’d read a story in the
Bridgeport Herald
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sheets. Ma clunked his dish of eggs down in front of him. “All right, Ray. That’s enough,” she said. “I’ll clean up whatever I have to.

These boys are going to school and that’s that.” Only then—when the threat of a working wife stood before him in a yellow acetate uniform—did my stepfather agree to cough up four thousand dollars for Thomas’s and my college educations and allow my mother to stay home. No wife of
his
was going to clean toilets for strangers.

No wife of
his
was going to do nigger work.

Relieved to be spared the outside world, Ma was nevertheless ashamed not to show up at her new job. She made
me
drive down to Howard Johnson’s and surrender her uniform on a wire hanger. The man at the desk made a joke about it. Holding up the uniform, he called into the empty collar. “Hello, Connie? Yoo-hoo? Anybody home?” I made no objection on my mother’s behalf. I might have even smiled at the joke. But I was so pissed off that when I got outside, I kicked the tire of Ray’s Fairlane, hard enough to break my toe. It was Ray I was kicking, not the tire or the stupid fuck of a desk clerk. With Ray’s four thousand dollars and our student loans and the money we made from our part-time jobs, Thomas and I now had the funds to go to school. But he had made Ma beg for that money—had taken his usual pound of flesh and then some. Over the years, he had taken so much of her that it was a wonder she
wasn’t
an empty uniform.

As a high school senior, I had hungered for a clean break from my entire family—a reprieve from Ray’s bullying and Ma’s overindulgence and from the lifelong game of “me and my shadow”

I had played with Thomas. My grades and SATs were decent, and my guidance counselor had helped me envision how I might turn my work as a YMCA swimming instructor—a job I loved and was good at—into a career in teaching. Duke University had rejected me, but I’d been accepted at New York University and the University of Connecticut. Thomas had applied only to UConn and been accepted. At first, he didn’t know what he wanted to be, but then he said he wanted to be a teacher, too.

When cost made it impossible for me to distance myself from my brother, I lobbied hard for separate dorms, separate roommates I Know[116-168] 7/24/02 12:30 PM Page 133

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