You Can Say You Knew Me When (2 page)

The first task was to haul our father’s mattress off his bed. One, two, three,
lift
: The waft of urine, infection and medicinal powder, faint but unmistakable, spiraled into the air between us, and I felt bile bubble up from my travel-addled guts. “This is nothing,” Deirdre said, seeing the expression on my face. “You should have been here two weeks ago.”

Or two months ago, I imagined her thinking. Or two years. “I’m about five seconds away from puking up airplane food,” I said.

“One thing I’ve learned—you can get used to
any
thing.” On her face I could see the toll of getting used to this: worry lines around her mouth and eyes, a tendony tightness to her neck. She was younger than me—she wasn’t yet thirty—but she’d started to look like my older sister.

We lugged the mattress, which was bowed at the center and blotchy with stains, out into the damp January air and wedged it into her minivan. It came to rest on top of the seat backs. “It’s kind of like a loft bed,” I wisecracked. “You might want to use it as a guest room.”

“Great, now I know where we can put you,” she said dryly. She was dangling the car keys in the air between us. “You remember how to get to the dump?”

“You’re kidding, right?” She was not kidding. “Isn’t there some service that can take this away?”

“Yeah, it’s called Big Brother’s Moving Company.” She pressed the keys into my palm.

“Don’t I have a say in this?”

“Not really.” Then, softening just a touch: “Please, Jamie. It’s your turn.”

Years ago I’d been part of the group that cleared out my friend Paul’s apartment after he died from AIDS, and his mattress was the very first thing we got rid of. Deirdre had put off this wretched task for two days, or three, whatever it had been, even with Nana living here and Andy around to lend muscle power. Why? Because it was my turn, my punishment? I knew how easy it was to slip into an argument with her; I wondered if she’d actually welcome it.

But I’d sworn to myself I’d get through this visit without incident. I took my place behind the wheel.

Coping with the smell was easy enough—I opened the windows, gladly enduring the cold air; I lit a cigarette and blew smoke across the dashboard—but the specter of my father wasting away on the mattress now bobbling behind my head was another matter entirely. He’d been a sturdy, almost stocky man—five feet eleven inches, nearly two hundred pounds—but illness would have shrunken him. Again I thought of Paul on the eve of his death, the skin-and-bones appearance; his shallow, dry breathing; the medicated glaze of his eyes as he held on longer than any of us thought he would, longer than we’d hoped was possible. My brain morphed them together, the friend I loved and the father I did not, until a sickly vision floated up behind me—the slate blue of my father’s eyes bulging out from a skeletal face, his cracked lips rasping out one of his characteristic truisms:
Responsibility breeds respect. Respect comes from responsibility. Show me one, Jimmy, and I’ll show you the other.
Even in death, a lecture.

My foot fell heavier on the gas, and I sped along the residential streets, gunning through a yellow light, honking at a slow-moving subcompact. I flipped the radio to an all-talk station and tried to lose myself in the angry pitch of political debate. Caller and host were arguing about whether or not Al Gore should distance himself from Bill Clinton in order to win the presidency. I joined in:
Yes, distance yourself. Don’t get dragged down by the last guy’s mistakes. Be your own person!

At the dump I was the third minivan queued up. I killed the engine and watched one, then another, middle-aged woman extract a withered Christmas tree from her vehicle’s rear door, drag it across the frozen ground and, with a scattering of dead needles, heave the barky skeleton into an enormous gray compactor. It was all rather efficient, a timeworn January ritual at which I was some kind of interloper. When my turn came, I felt like the punch line to a comedy sketch: soccer mom, Christmas tree; soccer mom, Christmas tree; gay guy, dirty mattress.

I held my breath as I catapulted his death-bedding into the compactor’s jaws, grunting “Rest in peace” as it slipped from my sight. I was answered by an uprising of dust that hovered high above before disseminating on the wind, carrying toward me a last gasp of pine.

I wanted so badly to sleep, but when I got back to the house I was conscripted into other projects. First, the arranging, and frequent rearranging, of living room/dining room/family room furniture according to Deirdre’s orders, in anticipation of the visitors who would stop by after the wake the next night. Given the number of cobweb-caked folding chairs we dragged up from the basement and wiped clean, it seemed that she was expecting half of Greenlawn. Then we took the van to Big Savers, one of those enormous concrete warehouses where everything is sold extra-extra-jumbo size, a place so antithetical to the town’s Mom-and-Pop main street that it wiped away all my quaint illusions of Greenlawn. Here were the locals en masse—teenage employees speeding by on forklifts, overweight retirees in motorized wheelchairs, four-year-olds scurrying among the free samples as one mother after another shouted “Jacob, put that down” and “Emily, I said
no.
” I was glad we’d left AJ behind with Nana.

I straggled alongside Deirdre, who commandeered a shopping cart so large an average supermarket cart could have fit inside it. She loaded it up with restaurant-size packs of paper products, cases of carbonated soda, loaves of bread the sizes of roasting pans, boxes of shrink-wrapped guacamole, gallon jars of salsa and all manner of mass-produced snacks, each labeled to sound upscale: Mesquite Chips, Fancy Cookies, Four Cheese Tuscan Pizza.

“Could we maybe buy something besides junk food?” I finally asked, watching another chunky ten-year-old gobble up samples of Turkey Jerky.

“It’s just for people to nibble. Nana’s making a roast.” She handed me a laundry-detergent-size box of Gourmet Party Mix.

“Do you even know what’s in this?”

“AJ loves it. You gonna tell me how to feed my son?”

I put on a Big Savers mom-voice and wagged my finger: “Deirdre, I said
no.
”

She paused a moment. Was I joking? Was this worth a fight? “Some fruit would be good,” she said finally, returning the offending snack food to the mile-high shelves.

The quiet of the house started to spook me. I had moved my bags into a small room at the end of the upstairs hall that had once been where our mother sewed the clothes Dee and I wore as kids. I pictured Mom staring out the window into the backyard—the weedy lawn, overgrown bushes and tall evergreens—guiding inexpensive poly-cotton fabrics under the needle as she hummed one of the German songs of her childhood. Her Singer sewing machine, with its varnished wood table and brown-plastic foot pedal, was long gone, probably donated to the Salvation Army after her death.

My mother’s death had been the inverse of my father’s: quick, shocking, unbearable. She’d gone into the hospital suffering sudden, debilitating chest pain and died a day later, after twelve hours on the operating table. The postmortem diagnosis blamed a defective heart valve that had gotten infected, flooding her bloodstream with toxic microorganisms. My father spent the rest of his life suing the hospital and various members of its staff for malpractice. He became a self-taught medical expert, obsessed with figuring out what had gone wrong in surgery, sure that this could have, should have, been averted, and it had made him as crazy as any single-minded crusader.

I was seventeen when she died, a junior in high school, already a troublemaker—chain-smoking, breaking curfew, drinking until I puked. Mom’s death turned me into a sort of runaway, hopping between overnights with friends, piling up unexplained absences, infuriating my father. I could no longer stand to be in this house, which was, back then, so clearly hers. Not only had she been home more than the rest of us—she worked part-time as a lab technician in the same hospital where she died—but she kept our family in equilibrium, mediating arguments, offering compromises. I’d been identified as the problem child a decade earlier, a smarty-pants always talking back, and at the same time a confrontation avoider, a late sleeper, a dawdler. My mother had patience for my restlessness.
One day you’ll outgrow this,
she’d say, her English so perfect it revealed no trace of her German upbringing. My father was the pessimist.
A wiseass never wins
. We were two stubborn red-haired males, always at odds—though before my mother died we at least had someone to run interference for us.

This was the most I’d thought about her in years.

This sewing room was now a guest room, big enough for only an end table, a twin bed and an enormous wicker planter sporting a dusty bouquet of fake peacock feathers. The wallpaper had a leafy green, vaguely jungly pattern; the bedspread, in contrast, was midnight blue and swirled with stars and galaxies—the same one beneath which I’d agitated as a teenager. The mattress might have been my teenage mattress, too. It was so broken-in I couldn’t get comfortable.

Nearly thirty hours had passed since Deirdre’s call cut off my last deep sleep, but I was wide awake. Is there anything more enervating, short of chronic physical pain, than not being able to sleep when you’re clearly exhausted? I tried reading the book I’d packed and watched pages turn while words went unabsorbed. I opened up the notebook I carry around as a journal, wrote down some thoughts about brick storefronts, dirty mattresses and the dystopia of Big Savers, but then gave up when I tried to put into words what I might be feeling about the reason I had come here. It was too soon; I was too freshly in it. I tried jacking off but couldn’t shake the vehemently nonsexual cloak of death hovering in the air, not to mention the image of my grandmother in the next room. The muffled bass tone of her TV rumbled through the wall.

Finally, I got up and phoned Woody at work.

“I’m missing you, Wormy,” I told him. “This is pretty hard.”

“Must be hard for you there. Is everyone really sad?”

“Not so much sad as—I don’t know—tense. Nana’s avoiding me. Deirdre’s bossing me around.”

“What about you, Germy?” (That’s right, Wormy and Germy, the private us.)

“Painfully tired. I can’t sleep, I’m so traumatized by the sound of Deirdre’s cracking whip. You’d be proud of me, though. I haven’t started any fights.”

I told him I wished he was here with me. This was sidestepping the truth: I hadn’t invited him to come along. There was no way to pull him from his fifty-hour-a-week dot-com job, went the official reasoning for his absence, but the fact was, I just couldn’t cope with a boyfriend in the midst of the family reunion. The irony of this wasn’t lost on me: While my father was alive, my boyfriends weren’t welcome.

On my last trip back, a couple months after AJ was born, I’d been hopeful. AJ’s birth was a big deal, something to pull us, once and for all, out of the gloom of Mom’s death. Change was in the air, and spirits were high. Dad organized a big summer party, inviting friends from all corners of the past along with the whole extended family. Deirdre and Andy had married quickly, and quietly, after she got pregnant, but they’d been dating for years, and everyone was ready to celebrate. This would be the wedding reception my father had been deprived of.

The sun blazed strong that day, the humid air thick with barbecue smoke, cut grass and honeysuckle, the yard trampled with the carefree steps of guests getting drunk. Deirdre wore the tired-but-smiling face of the new mother; Andy was fast growing into the part of proud papa, boasting that AJ’s big hands were a sign he would play for the New York Mets some day. Dad had lorded over the grill all afternoon, a whiz with spatula and tongs, his voice booming greetings across the yard, his new apron announcing him as the
WORLD
’
S BEST GRANDPA
.

That night, I cornered him in his bedroom for a talk that I’d nervously rehearsed ahead of time. I told him that I had wanted to bring David—the guy I was seeing back then—to the picnic, but that I hadn’t because I didn’t think Dad would approve. My father, without hesitation, said, “You were correct.” The conviction of his voice, its done-deal tone, squeezed the air out of me. “I thought you’d changed,” I said, and he replied, “As always, I prefer that you keep your private life private.” To which I said, “Then I prefer to not come home anymore.”

That’s the headline-news version. The actual conversation was lengthy and insulting and loud. I called him a bigot in a dozen different ways. He took great issue with my timing: I was
stealing Deirdre’s spotlight
; I was
ruining a joyful occasion.
“You’re looking for attention,” he told me in his calm, clenched voice. “You’ve always craved attention.” I tried to notch it down, to take the anger out of my voice, to sound as rational as he did, but I wasn’t able: It hurt. It hurt because we’d been through this before, when I was a teenager and he’d first discovered my sexuality; after I got out of college, finally able to admit to myself what I was; when I decided to move to San Francisco, hoping he’d understand; and then long-distance, over the phone, in smaller doses. I’d been “coming out” to him for most of my adult life.

That night I told him he wouldn’t hear from me until he’d changed his mind. What I actually said was “Until you stop being so fucking closed minded.”

All this came roaring back to me after I got off the phone with Woody. I was sitting in a nook in the upstairs hallway, in an armchair next to a small wooden table—the “telephone table” we called it, a name that had always sounded sophisticated to me, something out of a Rosalind Russell movie. I glanced toward my father’s bedroom. An eerie, vertical slice of darkness floated between the half-open door and the frame, beyond which I could see our penultimate argument in pantomime: me, pacing uneasily, wearing shorts made from cut-off Army fatigues, a sleeveless T-shirt emblazoned with a random high-school sports logo (
WOLVERINE WRESTLING
), silver rings on my fingers, silver hoops in my ears, a fresh tattoo inked around my bicep, the whole look an ironic pastiche of the very masculinity that he embodied. I must have appeared so adolescent to him. Clownish.
Gay.
Sitting tensed on the bed, he was intimidating and solid: freshly showered, his clean white T-shirt snug across his barrel chest, his freckled and furry arms, his clenched fists. I saw each contour so clearly. He was dead, but his presence was stronger than it had been for years.