We're All in This Together (5 page)

Dr. Vic could be wounded, but he could not he discouraged. When he told me that all of this was "a life passage," I could
see in his eyes that he was actually imagining some abstract tunnel in his own mind, with a bright light at the end, and the
sound of chirping birds and jingling ice cream trucks.

Perhaps there was nothing more at the heart of my dislike for my mother's fiance than simple incredulity. I was the son of
a single mother. I had lived in neighborhoods where ice cream trucks didn't go. It seemed to me that good will could only
carry a person so far, and after that, you were on your own.

How this tenet translated into my current sabotage campaign was not completely clear even to me, but I knew this was not the
time for hesitation, or half measures.

In the pantry freezer I retrieved the small plastic bag hidden under a mound of ice behind a stack of swordfish steaks. I
slipped on an oven mitt and herded the Laddies into the front yard and down to the meadow that lay a few hundred yards west
of the house. Well trained by weeks of practice, the two Pekinese bolted forward in full play mode. They dashed ahead and
then dashed back to implore me to hurry up. Their entire hind ends wagged with enthusiasm.

"Okay, okay," I said, and pulled one of the frozen turds out of the bag and hurled it across the field. The Laddies tore after
the soaring brown lump, disappearing in a wake of trembling blue bonnets.

The notion that there was anything cruel about teaching my prospective stepfather's dogs to fetch their own feces, or that
there was something more than a little demented about the trouble that I had gone to—sneaking outside after dark to pick up
these pieces of crap and then freezing them so that they could be thrown—did occur to me at a few odd moments. Luckily, I
was usually able to slough off such attacks of conscience. If this was a war—and it was—would a real soldier—like Steven Sugar—be
able to worry about a couple of crap-eating toy dogs who weren't even smart enough to have their own names? Somewhere along
the line, probably in a Vietnam movie, I had picked up the term "collateral damage," and it seemed to apply quite nicely to
the situation at hand.

I even had a line I wanted to use on Dr. Vic, and I imagined myself saying it like Gil, with a wink and a smirk, punctuated
by a big, jolly armpit fart. "Seems to me that there's nothing worse than a shit-eating dog," I would wryly observe, and then
wait a moment before adding, "except maybe two shit-eating dogs."

After a few tosses the frozen turds inevitably began to soften, and I quickly worked through the bag, chucking the shit into
the high grass until my shoulder started to click. The dogs were relentless, though, tumbling off in pursuit and returning
with wild foaming grins, the hard black biscuits clamped in their jaws.

Somewhere around the twentieth throw, one of them limped back, dropped a turd, and collapsed at my feet. The dog gave a few
strangled retches and panted heavily. Its eyes slid anxiously back and forth; the dog coughed, and seemed to pant harder.

Sensing his brother's weakness, the other Laddie darted in and snatched up the crap, then bolted into the grass to hoard his
prize.

The sick Pekinese flopped onto its side. I knelt down, feeling my stomach give a twist. "Shit poisoning," I thought to myself,
unsure if such a condition even existed.

I laid a hand on the animal's flank, and he lurched up. He looked up from beneath his mop tassel bangs and grinned. The dog
licked my palm. I let him for a moment before realizing where his tongue had been. I slapped his snout. The dog jerked away
and yipped in protest.

"Jesus, okay," I said. "Okay, I'm sorry."

Leading them inside, I reminded the dogs that I didn't feel sorry for them. "You don't even know any better," I said.

My mother watched me grab a handful of dog bones from the cookie jar. The Laddies started crunching happily. She blew a strand
of dark hair from her eye and nodded questioningly at the oven mitt still on my hand. I shrugged and crumpled it back in its
drawer.

I'm thirty-three years old and I can damn well do what I please,
my mother wrote.

As a form of nonviolent protest I had stopped speaking to her. Not deigning to explain the nature of my demonstration, or
even that it was a demonstration, I simply started carrying around a yellow legal pad for those occasions when communication
was unavoidable. Maddeningly, my mother had responded by refusing to speak to me as well, and purchased her own yellow legal
pad. Now, instead of yelling at each other, we argued by shoving our legal pads back and forth across Dr. Vic's dinner table.

This particular argument started with the oven mitt. What had I been doing with it, my mother wanted to know, and why did
it smell so funny? My evasions quickly led to the inevitable destination of all our arguments these days, to the real heart
of the matter. That is: Why are you doing this to me? Have you looked at the man sitting across the table? That foolish-looking
man over there? The roly-poly one with the American flag tie thrown over his shoulder? You're going to marry him? That guy?
Him?

How can you be so stupid? How could anyone be so stupid?

I've done
a lot
of stupid things in my life, George Claiborne, not the least of which was giving birth to a child at the age of nineteen. However, that particular error in judgment has turned out to be
the greatest joy of my life
, in spite of your current behavior. A lot of people called me stupid when I kept you. Stupid and I have a pretty fair track record.

I knew I was vulnerable on the matter of my conception, so I responded by jotting down a favorite stanza from one of Dr. Vic's
poems:

If she were a toaster, Yd make a toaster-coaster
If she were a toaster, Yd be a toaster-boaster

As she wrote, my mother pressed down so hard the pen made a whining sound.
What does any of this have to do with him? He's
never done
a thing
to you. Although it would be hard to blame him if
he did.

I hated the way she underlined things.
You're a blackleg
.

You're a little shit
, and furthermore, you don't have the first idea
what that word means. You're just reaching for the nearest
pejorative,
George. This isn't the legend of one of your grandfather's
strikes. This is the story of a little boy who still has
a hell of a lot
of growing up to do.

At the end of the table Dr. Vic sawed morosely at a chicken breast. He dabbed at his damp face with his patriotic tie. "I
feel like I should get a notebook," he said, but no one answered.

While she awaited a response, my mother maintained a posture of nunlike serenity, hands folded, long black hair tucked neatly
behind her ears. Her first streak of gray had appeared that spring; a fine, silvery tributary of her part that I hoped was
a biological reaction to her agonized conscience, although to this stage she had conceded nothing. A few mornings, in the
bathrooms of those crummy apartments in Orono and Blue Hill and Waterville, after a night of drinking with her friends or
her lover, I held that hair back while she vomited.

My grandparents had taught me about sides, about the line that separated one side from the other side, and the impossibility
of straddling that line. You were either in, or you were out. Until Dr. Vic came along, the men in my mother's life had always
gone about trying to get on
our
side. But when it came to Dr. Vic, my mother told me that some things were not open to negotiation. All the years of moving
from one town to another while she made her hiccuping way toward a bachelor's degree, all the years of crummy apartments with
three fuzzy channels and hose showers and cat hair in the corners, all of it had been an alliance of convenience. Now I saw
that the two of them, Emma and Dr. Vic, were on their own side, and I was on the other, and there was a very real line separating
us. Now she looked at me like that, with her hands clasped and her back straight, like a study hall proctor.

" . . . And I've come to realize that the only way to talk to these monsters is to speak in a language they understand." That
was the way Papa had put it.

I wanted to throw gravy in her face.

He let Nana die,
I wrote and sent my notebook skidding across the table.

Later that night, she knocked on my door, and when I opened it, just stood there. Her cheeks were stained with tear tracks,
and her eyes seemed to be directed at a point somewhere over my shoulder.

"Well?" I asked.

Her hand flew up, and I heard the report of the slap before I felt it. The sound seemed to expand, to fill the entire house,
to carry across the lake and into the wooded hills, like a gunshot. I didn't even take a step back; I was too startled.

My mother's expression never changed. Her gaze still focused on that place behind me. Emma reached into her pocket and threw
a balled up note rattling across the floor. Very softly, she closed the door.

When I was alone the memory of her tear streaks gave me solace, even as I forced myself to cry a little. The note said,
Someday, you
will be ashamed of the way you acted tonight.

I was further comforted by the slamming of doors downstairs, and the echoes of my mother yelling, and of her lover—my late
grandmother's oncologist and my prospective stepfather, Victor Lipscomb, M.D., Ph.D.—trying to calm her. His deep voice pleaded
up through the heating vents: "Emma, honey," and, "Come on," and, "We just have to keep working at this." Nor was I unhappy
to register, as I drifted to sleep, the quiet of a night without music.

I awoke from a nightmare at dawn, gasping and rubbing the sheets against my chest, attempting to wipe off the words that Steven
Sugar had spray-painted on my body.

In the nightmare I was tied to a tree, and the Richard Nixon mask was on my face, making it hard to breathe. From the shadows,
a figure emerged; Steven Sugar was dressed in his army fatigues and his eyes were my mother's eyes, dark and unforgiving.
He held a spray can.

As I wriggled and cried for help, he patiently filled in the letters, bending the words around my torso in cheap red paint.
GET OVER IT
SHITHEEL! YOU LOST!

4.

Stationed in the guest room, my grandfather and I kept watch through the next afternoon, and waited for Steven Sugar to make
his move. The lights were off to keep the room cool, and the main source of illumination came from outside, through the curtains.
The filtered light spilled across the room in a bright orange column. Papa sat in the chair alongside the rifle and tripod,
and flicked back the curtain every minute or so to see if anything was moving on the C-curve segment of the street that was
visible from the window.

For the most part, we sat in silence. I had simply showed up and plopped down on the guest room bed. Papa said, "Howdy," without
glancing from his window. In the attic I had discovered a box of my mother's brittle old Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks—where
you moved through the story according to your own strategic decisions—and I absently paged through one entitled
The Alien's
Tomb.
Out of the corner of my eye, I kept an eye on Papa; light fell across his forehead, and made him look young. I wondered if
he was thinking about my grandmother.

If you trust the dead alien, and follow him through the doorway
into the Forever Country. If you retrace your
footsteps to the nearest Time Pod.

"You should be out with your friends." He lifted the corner of the curtain, grimaced at the street, and dropped it back down.

"I haven't got any," I said. "Not really."

He sucked on a peanut, then slowly ground it up. "I hold this claim in dubious regard."

"We moved too much." My mother and I had lived in six towns so far during my school-age years, which in adolescent terms made
me a kind of Okie. It wasn't that I didn't get along with people, or nod to friendly acquaintances in the halls at school.
Rather, I thought, very rationally, that growing up was embarrassing enough without trying to gain an invitation to the party.
Maybe I was more lonely than I let on; maybe after two years in the Amberson school system it was time to accept that my boyhood
fantasy of staying put in one place had finally become a reality. Then again, I found it hard to accept Dr. Vic as a part
of any dream come true.

If you stay with the jackass and his shit-snarfing dogs
. If you ramble on to another town.

"A boy ought to have friends, George."

"I'm fifteen."

"Pardon me. A teenager ought to have friends, George."

"I get along with people."

"Well," he said.

"Well," I said.

He pulled back the curtain, looked, let go of it. My grandfather cast a sideward glance in my direction. I raised my eyebrows
at him and brushed at the collar of my T-shirt. He snorted, flicked the peanut crumbs from his button-down.

"You're afraid, aren't you? It's a risk, isn't it? To try and break the ice?"

"Sure." I wasn't about to deny it.

Papa rocked back and patted his knees and nodded, as if that just about made everything obvious. "Well, you're a goddamned
freak, aren't you?"

This statement hung in the air between us for a minute. My grandfather stared at me with perfect assurance; I was too baffled
to be hurt.

"Thanks a lot," I said, finally. "That helps. That really helps a lot."

"I mean, kids are curious. They love freaks."

"Jesus, Papa. This is great. Do you think you might be able to give me a kick in the nuts, too?"

"No, no," he said, and drew his foot up over his knee. He patted his slipper. "Your toe. Show your toe. It's a conversation
starter. It's interesting."

I slumped back on the bed.

"Let me see it," he said. "Come on."