Little Boy Blues (19 page)

“And to be resourceful. Remember how Lawrence led that attack across the desert when they said it couldn’t be done?”

My mind leaped forward, past that scene to where Lawrence received his Arab robes from Sherif Ali, where he was accepted as one of the people he had chosen to fight alongside.

“Even after they beat him, he got back up and led his men?”

That wasn’t the way I remembered it. In the movie I had just seen, Lawrence got caught by the Turks because of his own foolishness, because he insisted on going into the Turkish stronghold
with only Ali to help him and then all but insisted on getting caught. Even an eleven-year-old boy could see the perversity in that. And then he had to be coaxed by the British general back in Cairo, tricked almost, into going back to fight after that. What was that about? Heroes didn’t have to be coaxed, at least not in any stories I knew. Even while I was still sitting in the theater, I was thinking that this story wasn’t adding up in the usual ways. At least my mother’s version made sense. But when I turned to tell her that, I saw her hands gripping the steering wheel the way she did when she was upset, and I braced myself. Sure enough, she was crying, which was bad. What was worse was that I didn’t know why. At times like that, the inside of our car, which normally seemed as big and boxy as our living room, resembled a chamber from which someone had sucked all the oxygen. All I could think of was how much I hated riding in the car in the summertime because my legs, where they stuck out of my shorts, glued me to the hot plastic of the seat covers and the sweat ran down the backs of my legs.

“They beat him and beat him and beat him.”

“Lawrence?” As obvious as this answer seemed, I knew it was wrong.

“Jesus, darling. They beat Jesus, the Roman soldiers. That’s what happened to Jesus, just like that.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know.”

“When I think about that, how they beat him, I just—.” She shook her head impatiently and put her arm out to signal a turn (the Plymouth didn’t have turn signals either). “You’re lucky,” she said, looking over. “You don’t know what it’s like to be persecuted.” Then, as quickly as her outburst began, it stopped, a passing storm. I was not surprised. Conversations in our household
took such odd turns more often than not, and those unscheduled detours usually involved Jesus who, besides being our Lord and Savior, was always spoken of as a member of the family, or at least a close friend, someone whose life my mother knew as well as she knew her own. The way my mother talked, it always sounded like she and Jesus had grown up together. To be on the safe side—or what I hoped was the safe side, because with Mother, there was just no telling—I tried to wrench the conversation back to its original course.

“Can we see that again?”

She looked at me like I’d just asked for a hundred dollars. “Can we see that again?” she said, her voice cartoonishly low, her way of acknowledging that my voice was changing. But the way she did it annoyed me: she was making fun of me, as though I were pretending to be older than I was.

“Can we?”

My mother laughed. “Some people go to picnics and never get enough.”

“Some people go to picnics and never get enough” was her unvarying caution against greediness. I knew better than to pursue the issue. I didn’t want a lecture, and I’d taken the hint that Mother didn’t want to talk about the movie. In this she was no different than anyone else in my family. Movies were something you went to, not something to talk about, except in the time it took to get from the theater to the car. If the movie was based on a biblical character, they would talk not about the movie but about that character. Samson betrayed his gift. Moses didn’t trust God. The one movie I ever remember my mother’s discussing—with my aunts, around the kitchen table, over Pepsi, while I trolled the perimeter—was
Written on the Wind
, a Douglas Sirk
movie that they had heard was based on the Z. Smith Reynolds-Libby Holman murder case in 1932, the Winston-Salem scandal that made national headlines because Reynolds was a tobacco-fortune heir and Holman, who was accused of his murder, was a torch singer (her big hit was a ballad called “Moanin’ Low”). The conversation turned not on how good the movie was but on just how far it stretched the facts. They were interested in it only to the extent that it was about real people. I wanted to know what a torch singer was. They said, just a singer in a nightclub, as if that explained anything. Nobody would explain “Moanin’ Low.” It sounded like a song about cows.

My father was the only member of my extended family who went to the movies for almost any reason—because he wanted to see the picture or because he was bored or because it started in half an hour. He wouldn’t take me to movies for children. If I wanted to go with him, I went to see what he wanted to see, mostly Westerns. That made me feel grown-up.

My mother and I began going to the movies together all the time when I was about nine or ten. By that time Daddy was gone more often than he was around. Going to the movies was what she and I did together for fun. We started with Bible movies and then branched out to the high-class sword-and-sandal epics
(Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis)
. We liked any historical movie or anything about the South.
To Kill a Mockingbird
was, as far as we were concerned, pretty much made just for us. Mother said the movie portrayed her childhood to a T. I merely saw the childhood I wanted.

Sometimes, just to see what would happen, I kept talking about what we had seen even after she had gotten through making sure I understood the message, but all that did was irritate
her. During this period there was no time when my mother did not have something on her mind—my father, her job, the fact that we had no money—something that was more important than hashing over a movie with me. It would have been about this time that I began talking to myself. From about the age of eleven or twelve, as I walked home from school or sat at my desk staring at my homework, I spun out long, intricate dialogues. Dividing myself in two seemed the most natural thing in the world. And of course the conversations stole their shape from the only dialogues I knew: movie dialogue. I scripted my interior life. And on the screen inside my head, I shot what I imagined: long shot, close-up and, best of all, telephoto, even before I knew what to call it, that beautiful combo shot of intimacy and distance. Why couldn’t the world be more like that?

  Marinza  

The phone was ringing when we got back to the apartment after supper. I was toting the mop and bucket we’d used to clean the schoolroom, so Mother was the first through the door and first to the phone. As I walked back to the little pantry off the kitchen that doubled as a broom closet, I could easily hear her end of the conversation. The phone was in her bedroom, right inside the door, but our apartment was so small that to have a private conversation, you had to shut the bedroom door. And Mother’s voice was rising every time she spoke, in a mixture of anger and bewilderment and fear. I came back from the kitchen in time to see her silhouetted in the bedroom door. She was batting at the air the way she did when she got angry or frustrated or frightened—like a bird that flies into a building and then can’t find its way out. That could only mean she had Eddie’s girlfriend on the other end of the line. “Eddie’s girlfriend” was all we ever called her, because she never gave a name, not even a fake one. We could never remember exactly when the crank calls began, just some time after school had ended, but the mystery woman had been calling all summer, two or three times a week.

“Who is this Eddie?” Mother demanded. “I don’t know anyone named Eddie.” I could hear the hysteria constricting her voice. I hated that sound, whether it was directed at me or not. It made me think of a mainspring in a cartoon that’s wound so tight you know it’s going to explode any second.

“I told you, I am not after your boyfriend.”

I stood in the bedroom door, staring at my mother’s back. She must have sensed me lurking, because without turning, she shooed me away with the hand that wasn’t clutching the phone.

“Leave me alone,” she said in that same taut voice. “No. No. No.” I went into my bedroom but left the door open.

“I don’t go to bars. I don’t drink. You have—” Because our bedrooms were so close, I could hear the voice on the other end of the line, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

“Stop it. Stop laughing. I am not who you say I am. Stop persecuting me.”

No sooner did my mother slam the phone down than it began to ring again. She let it ring: ten times, twenty, more. And even when it stopped, when minutes had gone by, neither of us could stop waiting for it to begin again. When she finally spoke, I jumped. “Why am I so persecuted? What does she want? What do they want? Oh Jesus, I pray and I pray.” She said that over and over: “I pray and I pray.” Then she started crying and pounding her fist on her knee over and over. After a while she stopped saying anything, but the pounding just went on. I desperately wanted to help her, and I just as desperately wanted to run away, and I had no idea how to do either.

The worst part was the helplessness, the feeling we had that there was nothing that could stop it and that it was never going to
stop. It was like being thrust into a soap opera, or maybe a soap opera in a nightmare, certainly one with nightmarishly bad timing, because although the woman on the other end was always just acting, my mother was not. The idea that she would steal someone’s boyfriend—that was plainly ridiculous. But the emotions those calls provoked were real enough. Mother was scraped raw after years of putting up with my father. Half the time she didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, and the rest of the time she spent wishing she didn’t know. And always there was the nagging question: how much of his drinking was her fault? None of it, to hear her, but I think she had her doubts. Either way, she was ripe for a crank caller. The weirdest thing was the way she’d get caught up in the conversation. Instead of cutting across the other woman’s routine, Mother would listen to the accusations and then deny them, one by one, as though they were real. This would go on for minutes at a time, and no one ever strayed from the script.

We never found out who placed the calls. Mother thought the woman was calling from a bar, because she could hear people talking in the background and sometimes she thought she heard music. I based my image of the caller on what knowledge of trashy women I’d gleaned from the funny papers: a tight sweater, too much eye makeup and a cigarette parked in the corner of her mouth. Whoever she was, she was as mean as she was clever and twice as persistent. “Who do you think you are, you tramp? Breaking up a love affair, stealing my man.” She really said stuff like that, and if she had called just once, it would have been funny, but she called again, and again and again, always at night. If I answered, she hung up as soon as she realized she wasn’t talking to my mother. If my mother hung up, she called right back.

Mother complained to the telephone company and the police, but nobody ever did anything about it.

The next morning—Saturday—we were cleaning the apartment when the phone rang. Mother picked it up, and the tone of her voice told me that it was someone she knew. Before I could make out whom she was talking to, her voice went up a notch. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” For a second, I thought maybe Eddie’s girlfriend had gotten an early start, but this sounded different. Mother was upset, but about what? Before I could figure anything out, she shut herself up in the bedroom. The talking went on and on, louder and louder. This sounded nothing like anything I’d heard before. She sounded as angry as I’d ever heard her, even through a bedroom door, but more than that she sounded terrified. And that terrified me. She was the only thing between me and—what? I never allowed myself to finish that sentence. I piloted my broom toward the front door, as far as I could get in the apartment without going outside. When I finished sweeping, I turned on the television and tried to watch cartoons, but even with the sound up, the hysterical crying cut right through Acme’s best explosions.
Looney Tunes
went off and
Huckleberry Hound
came on, and she was still talking, and I was still trying hard not to listen. I dreaded fights and scenes more than anything. Finally I went out to the little front porch and tried to concentrate on a story in
Boy’s Life
about army ants slowly but thoroughly consuming everything in their path as they marched across a stretch of beach toward a shipwrecked man with a broken leg. That’s where my mother found me a half hour later. She had washed her face and brushed her hair, but her eyes were still red.