by Wally Lamb
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 about a maid who’d found an aborted baby wrapped up in bloody 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 at UConn. It was time for each of us to become our own person, I told Thomas. It was the perfect opportunity for both of us to make the break. But Thomas resisted the idea of my cutting free, offering a number of reasons why separation was a big mistake. By summertime, his main argument centered on our joint ownership of that typewriter. “But it’s portable!” I kept screaming in exasperation. “I’ll deliver it to you when you need it.”
“It’s just as much mine as it is yours,” he shot back. “Why should I have to wait around for someone to deliver a typewriter I already half-own?”
“Keep it in your room then!”
Sensing Thomas’s gathering panic about our separation, Ma appeared out of the blue one afternoon at the YMCA pool while I was working. At the time, I had a crush on the head pool instructor, a woman in her twenties named Anne Generous who was married to a sailor. At night, in the dark, I’d sometimes lie in my top bunk and pull down my underpants, pretending to pull down Anne Generous’s black one-piece bathing suit with its YMCA insignia. I’d imagine her swimsuit-trapped breasts popping free, Anne Generous fondling one in each hand like a woman in a dirty magazine. I’d stroke those long, wet legs of hers as I lay there stroking my own boner and let go inside of Anne Generous the stuff that spilled onto my chest and belly. Below, in the bottom bunk, my brother slept unstained.
Innocent of our nighttime flings, Anne Generous told me one afternoon at the pool that I was a sweetie pie but too shy for my own good. She kept goading me to ask out a fellow instructor named Patty Katz. Patty was a junior at our school. She was cheerful and patient with kids and had purple acne on her back and a swimsuit that was always getting stuck in the crack of her ass. “Patty’s crazy about you, Dominick,” Anne confided. “She thinks you’re the greatest.”
When Ma showed up that day at the Y pool, Anne Generous and Patty both shook her hand and said they were pleased to meet her. They directed the kids to the other side of the pool so that my mother and I could have some privacy. Ma told me that she was sorry to bother me at work but that she really needed to speak to me about Thomas when Thomas wasn’t around. The two of them had had a little talk, she said. He was nervous about being away from home; living with me would make him feel more secure. And he was upset about the typewriter. She told me she just wanted everything to go right. It would be easier if the typewriter stayed put in one room, wouldn’t it?
I stood there, saying nothing, watching the tears in her eyes.
“I know he gets under your skin sometimes. But could you just do me a favor and be his roommate? He’s just feeling a little unsure of himself, that’s all. He’s never had your self-confidence, Dominick. Things have always been harder for him than they’ve been for you. You know that.”
“Things have been plenty hard for me,” I said. “Growing up in our house.”
Ma looked away. She said she knew one thing: that deep down, no matter how it seemed, our stepfather loved us very, very much. Ignoring my snort, she said that all Thomas needed was a little boost.
“And what about what I need, Ma?” I said. “What about that?”
She had interrupted a game of water tag when she’d arrived, and now several kids drifted back to our side of the pool and began calling my name. One of the boys cannonballed into the water and accidentally splashed my mother. I swore out loud at him, I remember, and everyone just stopped—treaded water and stared. From the middle of the pool, Anne Generous looked at me with a mixture of pity and disapproval.
“All right, fine,” I told Ma. “You win. I’ll room with him. Now would you please get out of here, for cripe’s sakes, before you get me fired? Your skirt’s sopping wet. You’re embarrassing me.”
After work that day, I stayed in the pool, swimming laps and sputtering curses and arguments into the chlorine. I hated my brother almost as much as I hated Ray. If I gave in, I’d never get free of him. Never. I swam until my eyes burned and my head ached—until my arms and legs were leaden.
When I got out of the Y, Patty Katz beeped at me from the front seat of her parents’ station wagon. She knew I was upset, she said. She was a good listener. Her mother drove her crazy, too. Why didn’t I let her buy me an ice cream?
When we got to the Dairy Queen, Patty got out of the car and got my cone so that I could sit and sulk. I studied her as she waited in line. With her hair dry and her clothes on, she wasn’t that bad. She was passable. She got back in the car and handed me my ice cream and an inch-thick stack of napkins. “What am I, a slob or something?” I said, and she blushed and apologized and said she was the slob—she was a klutz and a half.
On the long drive we took, Patty told me she thought that I was right to insist on a new roommate and that I should stick to my guns. She said she knew who Thomas was but didn’t really know him; they’d been in a study hall together, that was all. She said she could tell us apart with absolutely no problem: I was cool and my brother was a little on the finky side, no offense. A lot of people at school thought that about us. I’d be surprised.
We ended up on a dirt road out by the Falls, with the station wagon’s backseat flopped down and my tongue down Patty’s throat and her hand on my crank. She was eager to please but inexperienced, yanking away as if she’d gotten hold of a cow’s udder. “Faster, faster,” I whispered, and guided her, my hand over her hand. When she got it about right, I closed my eyes and came to the wet inside of Anne Generous’s mouth, to my hands on Anne Generous’s breasts, to Anne Generous’s hurried stroking.
I cleaned myself off with the Dairy Queen napkin
s. Patty Katz said she had never done anything like this before. It wasn’t that she regretted it. She wasn’t sure how she felt. Her voice, her crying, were like the sounds of a girl in some other car. I got up, got zipped, got out of the car for a walk.
When Patty dropped me off at my house, she said she thought she loved me. I thanked her for the ice cream and told her I’d call her the next day—a promise I doubted I’d deliver on, even as I was making it. After she drove away, I stood there in the front yard, looking up at the light behind the shade in Ma and Ray’s bedroom. It was after midnight: Ma was up there worrying. It wasn’t as if she ever asked for much, I reminded myself. Or got much, either, for that matter—from Ray or from my brother and me. I had put up with Thomas for seventeen years at that point. What was one more friggin’ year?
I didn’t call Patty Katz that next day. And the following week, when I suggested that she and I go for another drive out by the Falls, she told me she’d rather go to a movie or go bowling or do something with other people. Did I know Ronnie Strong from school? He and her girlfriend Margie were going out. Maybe we could double. Yeah, maybe, I told her. But I didn’t want to date Patty; I only wanted to screw her. So I was cool to her for the rest of the week and got a little chillier each week after that. Anne Generous, too, had lost some of her allure. She had large feet for a woman her size. She could be bossy. By the middle of August, I was hardly speaking to either of them.
But here’s the funny thing: after the big stink Thomas had made about that typewriter, he hardly touched the damn thing all during our freshman year. Hardly ever cracked the books, either. He’d been a pretty conscientious student in high school—had worked harder for his B’s and B-minuses than I’d worked for my A’s. But at UConn, Thomas couldn’t sit still long enough to study. He claimed he was too distracted. The dorm was too noisy. His professors were impersonal. Our room was too hot; it bothered his sinuses and made him sleepy whenever he tried to read. He was always walking out to the fire escape for gulps of air, or squirting Super Anahist up his nose, or talking about how miserable he was—how much he hated all the jerks and losers and skanky girls who went to our stupid school. Instead of studying, he watched TV in the lounge, drank instant coffee all day long (we had an illegal hot plate), then stayed up half the night and slept through his morning classes. He resisted making friends and resented the friendships I made with some of the other guys on our floor—Mitch O’Brien and Bill Moynihan and this senior named Al Menza who was always looking for a game of pinochle or pitch. Thomas would get a bug up his ass if someone just knocked on the door or asked to borrow something of mine or wanted me to play some pickup basketball. “Am I invisible or something?” he’d huff. Or mimic. “Is Dominick here? Where’s Dominick? Everyone loves Dominick the Wonder Boy!”
“Hey, if you want to play some hoops, then just come out on the court and start playing,” I told him. “What do you expect, an engraved invitation?”
“No, I don’t, Dominick. All I expect is that my own brother isn’t going to stab me in the back.”
“How’s my playing a game of basketball stabbing you in the back?” I asked, exasperated.
He sighed and flopped facedown on his bed. “If you don’t know, Dominick, then just forget it.”
One afternoon, Menza asked me in the middle of a pitch game what was “with” my brother. Instantly, I felt the cards bend in my hand. Felt my face get hot. “What do you mean, what’s ‘with’ him?” I said.
“I don’t know. He’s a little off kilter or something, isn’t he? You don’t see him all day long and then you get up in the middle of the night to take a leak and there he is, wandering around the halls like Lurch from The Addams Family.”
The other guys laughed. O’Brien was one of them. I forget who else was playing with us. O’Brien said he’d gotten up one night and seen Thomas running laps around our dorm. After midnight, this was. The middle of the frickin’ night. I said nothing, stared hard at my cards, and when I finally looked up, all three guys were looking at me. “Jesus Christ, Birdsey, you’re blushing like a virgin on her wedding night,” Menza said. “Someone pop your cherry or something?”
I threw my cards down on the bed and got up, walked toward the door. “Hey, where you going?” Menza protested. “We’re in the middle of a game?”
“You win,” I said. “All of you. I fucking forfeit.”
For the rest of that afternoon, those guys blasted “The Monster Mash” nonstop on Moynihan’s stereo. Put the speaker in the doorway and filled up the hallway with the sound of that friggin’ song. Sang the Addams Family theme when Thomas and I went downstairs to supper, complete with finger-snapping. It passed; that kind of ball-busting usually does. But the nickname they’d given Thomas stuck. From that afternoon on, he was “Lurch” to all the guys in Crandall Hall.
When I wasn’t arguing with Thomas or defending him in some half-assed way, I was spending my time with my face in the books or slumped in front of our Royal typewriter, hunting-and-pecking my way through some paper that was almost due. The noises I made while I was studying became an issue: the clacking of the typewriter keys, the squeak of the highlighter across the page, even the crinkling of cellophane if I got myself a snack from the machine in the basement. I began studying in the library as much as possible. I hated the sight of Thomas’s scowling face, the squirt-squirt of his nose spray, and those faraway sighs of his in the dark in the middle of the night. He was going to flunk out if he didn’t wake up—break Ma’s heart and make Ray hit the roof. He could end up getting his head blown off in Nam. But I was goddamned if I was going to make him study—if I was going to throw him over my shoulder and carry him to his classes.
Somewhere near the end of second semester, Thomas got notification from the freshman dean about his academics. The letter advised my brother to make an appointment with his office as soon as possible. Instead, Thomas began a frenzy of makeup work. “I can pull this off, Dominick,” he told me. “What are you looking at me like that for? I can.” He went to professors’ offices and pleaded for extensions and incompletes. He kept our hot-plate coils glowing orange and threw cup after cup of coffee down his throat. A kid on the second floor sold him some speed so that he could cram night and day for his upcoming exams. He was popping No-Doz like they were M&Ms. Thomas put so much shit into his system that he burst blood vessels in both his eyes.
One afternoon I came back to our room and found him sobbing on my bed. “Don’t be mad at me, Dominick,” he kept repeating. “Just don’t be mad. Please.” It was the way Thomas had begged Ray when we were kids—when Thomas had triggered one of Ray’s rampages.
Our whole room was pulled apart; there were papers and shit all over the floor. Over on my desk was a screwdriver and a rock and a hammer and our typewriter. The case had been cracked up the middle, a six-inch piece broken right off.
I told him he’d better fucking explain what was going on.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Just don’t be mad at me.”
He had finally written an overdue English paper, he told me, and then had gone to type it and not been able to find his key. He’d waited and waited and waited for me—he never knew where I was anymore. He might as well not even have a roommate. After a while, he’d panicked, convincing himself that I’d taken the key and hidden it from him because I wanted him to fail. I wanted him to flunk out. Why did I even lock the stupid typewriter, anyway? Why did it always have to be locked?
“Because guys in this dorm steal,” I said.
“Then they’d steal the whole thing!” he sobbed. “It’s portable!”
When the lock on the typewriter case wouldn’t give, no matter what he tried, Thomas had gone outside and gotten the rock and busted it open. It had seemed like the best thing to do until he did it. Then, right after that, he remembered where he’d hidden the key at the beginning of the semester: in his extra soap dish up on the top shelf, the one he never used. Would I please, please just type his paper for him? He’d st
raighten out, buy a new case for the typewriter. The paper was due at 9:00 o’clock the next morning. He couldn’t type because his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He was too nervous to concentrate. The “w” and the “s” on our typewriter weren’t working now, but he’d gone down to O’Brien’s room and O’Brien said we could borrow his typewriter. The paper itself had come out pretty good, he thought. But his English teacher wouldn’t give an inch. If he got it there at 9:01, she probably wouldn’t even accept it. She was out to get him.
I could have whaled into him for what he’d done—for what he had failed to do all year long. But as angry as I was, I felt scared, too—scared of those blotches of blood in his eyes and the tremors in his hands, the revved-up way he was talking.
I got him calmed down. Heated him a can of soup. Yeah, I’d type the stupid paper, I told him. I had him lie down and told him to not say one friggin’ word about the noise O’Brien’s typewriter was making. I began.
It was an essay about the theme of alienation in modern literature—a patchwork of Cliff Notes and bullshit that contained no specifics and made hardly any sense. Its rambling sentences went off in a dozen different directions and never came back; the handwriting was almost unrecognizable as Thomas’s. That paper scared me more, even, than his behavior. But I typed what he’d written, fixing up things here and there and hoping against hope that his teacher would find something coherent in what he’d put together.