Little Boy Blues (12 page)

“You’re not alone,” I said, and felt foolish. There were, after all, two of us in the car. But I felt compelled to say something, because while I never knew quite what to do when she got upset, I knew that it was now my responsibility to get her to calm down.

She looked at me as if she had just noticed I was there. And then she burst into tears. This was the worst that could happen. I hated to see her cry, because it made me feel utterly helpless and embarrassed. I glanced through the windshield and was relieved
to see that traffic was moving faster. For something to do, I rooted in her pocketbook on the seat between us, searching for the tissue.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

I knew I was never supposed to go through a lady’s pocketbook. But this was an emergency.

“Looking for the Kleenex,” I said in what I hoped was a matter-of-fact, man-of-the-house sort of tone. I found a piece wadded up at the bottom, smelling of hand lotion and wintergreen Life Savers and handed it to her.

“Thank you, honey.” She wiped her eyes and then examined the tissue to see if she’d wiped her makeup off. Then she looked in the rearview mirror. Then she turned back to me.

“Why won’t they give us a chance? They never did when we lived in Lancaster and I guess they never will.” She was gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white. I could see that she was getting ready to have another fit. So I said the first thing that came into my head that I was sure would convince her that I was on her side.

“I hate Mother Jones,” I said, deliberately using what I thought of as the grown-up version of my grandmother’s name. The sentence hung in the air, awkward and raw, like a shop sign that blinks on when it is still daylight out.

In the silence I could hear us both breathing. Then she relaxed her grip on the steering wheel and simply sat there, not untense but not quivering any longer as she stared ahead at the endless stream of cars shining in the late slanting sunlight. There was time to hear a nearby car rev its engine, once, twice, and for a second there I thought things were going to be all right. Then I saw the thin, humorless smile, and I knew better.

“Shame on you,” she said quietly.

“I mean it. I—”

“Shame on you for trying to upset me at a time like this.”

She waved her hand in front of her, taking in everything that lay before her, the cars and their noise and their music and their trashy people, the sort who would go to something as close-to-nothing as you can imagine. “My husband doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. His mother does everything but come right out and blame me for his drinking. Now we’re going to get home in time to get up for school. And all you can think about is yourself, how to find the one thing you can think of that you could say to hurt me and then dig it in. Dig it in. Dig it in! That’s what everybody does to me. There’s Margaret, let’s dig it in. Again again and again.” Her voice had risen slowly, inexorably, as she spoke, until it was almost a screech, a sound like metal scraping on metal. Watching her, listening to her words fill up the space between us, I, like some feral animal trapped in an alley, had wedged myself into the right angle created by the seat back and the door, bracing myself with my foot against the dashboard. I thought at first that she was going to hit me, but all she did was go on screaming. I don’t know how long she went on like that, or what she said. It was just sound that battered me. I don’t know when it stopped. I don’t know when the traffic broke up for good and cars began moving smoothly up the highway again. I did not see night come on, nor do I remember falling asleep. All I remember is my mother’s shaking me awake in the parking lot outside the apartment, saying, “Wake up now, come on. You’re too big now for Mommy to carry. Big boys have to get themselves to bed.”

  Bachelor Living  

My father was a quiet man. If he put more than two sentences together, that was a speech. There was nothing forbidding or taciturn about his silence, though. On the contrary, it was somehow companionable, almost comforting. He wore his quietness lightly, like a windbreaker. So when I think of him, I think not in words but in images. I don’t hear him. I see him. I remember the way he sat, the way he slept, the way he smelled: of aftershave, hair tonic, pipe tobacco, cigarettes, sometimes whisky and always shoe polish. Drunk or sober, he was the best-groomed man I’ve ever known. Without ever looking fussy, he managed to keep his shoes spit-shined and his nails manicured. He used brass polish on his belt buckle, and he never looked like he needed a haircut. Mostly, though, my memories of him are of a man in motion. I loved to watch him walk. He was big, six foot two, broad-shouldered but lean and lithe and never clumsy. He had that ex-athlete’s unconscious ease with his body. He didn’t walk so much as glided, moving on the balls of his feet, center of gravity canted slightly forward. You never heard him coming.

As long as he was alive, I could never think of my father without at least some low-level hum of anxiety—not even when he sobered up for good for the last twenty years of his life, not even after he undertook his longest and most successful career, as an addiction counselor in an alcohol treatment center. Well before I started school, I made a habit of keeping an eye on him. I studied him like the weather, and I learned to see trouble in a cloudless sky long before I learned to read. If I came home from school and found him sitting on the sofa playing solitaire, I exhaled a little—not all the way, never all the way. Those were good days. He might or might not have had a job, but he wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t missing. There were more good days than bad, but the good ones weren’t inevitable and the bad ones were. I probably came home to find him drunk and passed out maybe a dozen times, but those are the days I remember most vividly. The worst were the afternoons when I came home to an empty apartment, because then I had no idea where he was or when or if he was coming back. Sometimes he would be gone for hours, sometimes for days, and sometimes he would have packed up and gotten on the bus to South Carolina without telling anyone. And as good as I got at knowing what he was going to do before he did, that, in the end, didn’t count for much, since it was never a question of if he was going on a drunk—it was a question of when, and it was the waiting for things to go wrong that wore me out. Living with an alcoholic, you never can tell when they’re going to fall off the wagon, or go missing or for how long. My father always slept like a baby. It was the rest of us who lay there with one eye open.

In the summer of 1962, when I was ten, I spent the summer with my father in South Carolina. It was the longest uninterrupted
time we ever spent together. He had been gone longer and longer every time he left us in Winston-Salem, so much so that he almost seemed like a visitor when he came home. Sometimes he went away to dry out. Sometimes he moved in with his mother in her apartment in Lancaster. That summer, two months after Uncle Buddy’s funeral, Daddy was still bunking with Uncle Robert at Jones Crossroads outside Lancaster.

The old farmhouse where they lived was small, one story, unpainted and raised up on pilings with the living room and kitchen taking up one side and two bedrooms on the other and a hall down the middle. Uncle Richard lived just down the road with his wife, who clerked in town at the five-and-dime. Richard ran a general store at the five-point intersection called Jones Crossroads, named after their grandfather, a former state legis lator.

When you entered Uncle Richard’s store, you went temporarily blind while your eyes adjusted to the gloom. He never turned the lights on during the day, so the only illumination came from the windows that flanked the front door. The walls and shelves were packed with groceries, tools, farm supplies and a few spare auto supplies—fan belts, antifreeze, motor oil. As soon as you walked in, you were ambushed by the rank smell of rat cheese. Uncle Richard kept a big hoop of that vile stuff under a glass cake stand beside his cash register. Farther down the counter stood big jars of candy, which sort of made up for the cheese smell, and on the shelves behind the register, he stocked fireworks, which would have made up for anything. A little farther back in the shadows, he kept one of those old fire-engine-red, tin-lined coolers in which bottles of soda pop stood submerged in icy water so cold that your hand hurt when you searched for a bottle.

“You bachelors better behave,” my mother cautioned me on the ride down to South Carolina. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it sounded appealing. My life to that point had been spent in a world of women. My father, when he was around, and my uncle Tom, who was too old to play catch and who was challenged by anything more mechanically taxing than changing the ribbon in his typewriter, were the only men in my life. Otherwise I was surrounded by what seemed like endless legions of aunts and grandmothers. I was ready for some bachelor life.

My mother was ready to leave as soon as we got there. The house smelled of unemptied ashtrays and old bacon grease. The beds weren’t made. Dishes stacked up in the sink. It looked like one of those “what happens when the wife’s out of town for the weekend”
cartoons in the
Saturday Evening Post
. Mother hugged and kissed me like she was selling me to Gypsies, and fled.

I was surprised to find that, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t altogether sorry when she drove away. But there was that other part of me—the part that craved certitude, that found comfort in routine—that wanted to go with her, because I wasn’t in any way sure what I was in for in this strange place, with a father who was more shadow than substance and uncles I didn’t know at all.

By the time I turned ten, I had faced down most of the fearful things that had made me a fretful, uneasy little boy. I was no longer scared of wolves, spiders, pirates or escalators. I knew how to swim and how to ride a bike. I was not afraid of getting a shot from a doctor or losing a tooth (especially once I discovered Turkish taffy at the movies: quite by accident I found that if I bit into that hard, almost bricklike candy, a loose tooth stuck to the candy when I opened my jaw; it became my favorite method of losing teeth). By the time I made that trip to South Carolina, I had only one phobia I couldn’t lick: I was terrified of mayonnaise. I wouldn’t touch the stuff, which made eating in a Southern family problematic, since, as far as I could tell, for Southerners, mayonnaise was one of the basic food groups. Luckily, I lived with an accommodating family—my aunt and uncle, at least—that was willing to serve me tuna fish straight out of the can while everyone else got it mixed up with mayo, olives, celery and Lord knows what else. I didn’t have to eat congealed salad or French dressing or anything else with mayonnaise. I thought I more than made up for this by eating calf’s liver and spinach without complaint. My mother thought otherwise and smuggled mayonnaise into food that I was fond of, cackling like a victorious guerilla leader whenever she tricked me into eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich into
which she’d surreptitiously ladled mayo. Somehow, though, I’d held my own at home. Here, in a strange house in a different state, I wasn’t sure what we’d be eating. Mayo straight from the jar? Squirrels with the heads still on?