The Draw

by Lee Siegel

  Lola, said Claire. Lola, please.

  The injustice of my mother promising to let me use the Impala and then breaking her promise enraged me. I could not allow her to take the keys away from me again. When she reached for them this time, I snatched them away.

  You ungrateful little shit! she shrieked. Do you see this, Claire? she said. Do you see what the man you love is doing to his mother? He came from my body! I took care of him! I wiped him and cleaned him up. I wiped his penis. I gave him my last pennies. Everything I had! Everything! And he gives me nothing in return. Nothing! He’s a bum! A bum!

  The part about being a bum came from a movie that my mother had once seen and that had moved her greatly. It was called The Eddie Cantor Story. The scene that stayed in her mind portrayed the singer’s grandmother, a saintly, self-sacrificing woman saying to him on her deathbed, when he was a little boy, “Don’t be a bumma.” Whenever she recalled that scene, my mother cried, and now, when she said the word “bum,” her eyes filled with tears.

  Lola, Lola, murmured Claire. She stared at my mother in awe.

  I held the keys up in the air. My mother was blocking my path to the door, so I ran up the three steps with them. She ran after me and began slapping me on the back and on my arms.

  Oh no, said Claire. Oh no, no, no, she said, running up the steps. She tried to grab my mother’s hands to restrain her. My mother took hold of my shirt and then my arms. Claire struggled with my mother’s arms in an effort to pry her away from me. The three of us whirled around in the narrow hallway with the pink bathroom.

  My mother would not let go of me. With a long grunting sound that she made through clenched teeth, she pressed the nails of both hands into my forearm. I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and her nails sank into my skin. Startled by the pain, I jerked the keys away from her.

  She hurt you, Claire said in disbelief. My arm began to bleed. Seeing Claire gently touch my bloody arm, my mother backed against the wall.

  Go, she hissed. Take the car. Leave your mother here like this, she said. My heart is beating so fast, she said. I’m dizzy. I think I’m going to pass out. Leave your mother here to die.

  Pass out, I said. Die. I put the keys in my pocket and applauded like a madman.

  I had to get Claire out of the house. There was no telling in what direction her kindness would lead her. My mother’s malice flowed so obviously from her weakness that she was a double, even a triple threat.

  But I did not have to worry. Claire’s sensitive nature had been affronted. Embracing my arm, she walked fast with me to the door. We drove in silence on the Garden State Parkway to the apartment in Orange, twenty minutes away, where Paul was living with a roommate while attending Drew. The three of us drank wine and talked all night about what had happened in my mother’s house.

  For the next week, Claire went to Mandee, where she worked full-time. I drove my Pied Piper truck. My mother, penitent and refreshed, made my favorite dinners—beef Stroganoff, pot roast and kasha, chicken parmesan. None of us brought up what had happened.

  At the end of the week, Claire told me that she was going home. Her father insisted on paying for a one-way plane ticket to O’Hare after she told him what had happened. It was the end of the summer and she would have left the following week anyway. We drove together to the airport. My mother lost herself in a tearful goodbye, saying, I hope I will see you again. You’re part of our family now!

  Claire and I promised to meet again in Peoria as soon as I saved enough money to find a place to live there. After two or three months, we stopped calling and writing to each other. I never returned to Peoria, and I never saw or heard from her again.

  6

  SINK AND SWIM

  What do you do for a living?

  The immigration official had a wide face. His complexion was red from the sharp November wind. There was humanity in his broad, amiable face. I noticed that he wore a wedding band. I tried to imagine him as a father, playing with his children on the living room floor. He was a big bear of a man, with a full beard and plentiful dark curly hair. I smiled at him, hoping to strike a sympathetic chord. But he was all business. Unlike an American, he was not personally there in any part of his interaction with me. The stoniest American bureaucrat is likely to expose his personal feelings in the business he is conducting with you at some point: his refusal to yield will betray annoyance or anger; his understanding will hint at something he senses he might have in common with you. It all has to do with the great big proscenium of American life. There is so much going on, expectations are so high, reality seems so promising and gratification so impending that few people are able to remain in the audience without writing themselves into another person’s life. Americans take everything personally. But duty in this Norwegian official existed in a separate space from the rest of him. There was nothing petulant, exasperated, or angry about his impassivity with me. If he had seen me drowning in the North Sea not far from his office, he would have jumped into the icy water to save my life with the same commitment to protocol. At least that is what I told myself to try to stay cheerful and respectful as he interrogated me.

  I’m a writer, I said.

  A journalist?

  No. I write fiction.

  If you write fiction, then you are self-employed.

  No, I write fiction for a magazine.

  Which magazine?

  The New Yorker magazine.

  Ah, yes. Of course. I know this magazine.

  Do you?

  Yes, he said. So, he asked, you are employed by The New Yorker magazine?

  Yes, I said. Well, not exactly.

  Not exactly?

  They are publishing a story of mine.

  The story will be published soon?

  Yes. Well, yes. Pretty soon.

  Congratulations.

  Thank you, sir. Thank you.

  But that is one story. You need to show me that you are receiving a salary from them. The state needs to confirm that you will have an income while you are here in Norway.

  Why?

  So that you don’t look for work here. The state cannot give you a visa to work. It can only give you a temporary visa to live here. But first you have to prove that you can support yourself while you are in Norway without working here.

  Ah, that’s good. Then everything is okay. I’ll get enough money from the story to be able to stay here for a few months. After that, I’ll publish another story.

  The official smiled.

  So much for my theory, I thought. I had touched him somehow. I smiled back. I felt relaxed and relieved.

  The official continued to smile. If you were Norman Mailer, he said, laughing good-naturedly, you could stay. But you are not. So I am afraid that the state cannot give you a visa. You will have three months from your date of arrival to live in Norway. In the middle of December, you will have to return to the United States.

  He stood up from behind his desk. Closing my passport with one hand, he stretched across the desk to return it to me. I got to my feet. After I took back my passport he kept his hand extended over the desk. I shook his hand. Good luck, he said.

  Outside in the charming little street, I told Gretchen what the immigration official had said.

  What should we do? she asked me.

  I don’t know, I said. It looks like we’re going to have to go back.

  Would that be so bad? she said.

  I don’t know, I said. Yes, it would be bad.

  Let me see what my grandmother and my great-uncles have to say, she said.

  We walked to the harbor, where we waited for the ferry to return us to Tromøy, a small island in the North Sea where we were staying with Gretchen’s grandmother and one of her several Norwegian great-uncles. Ever since I had met Gretchen and she told me about her grandmother’s small white house on Tromøy, the island had occupied a central place in my imagination as, finally, a new home for us, a new beginning for me, and a place to rest.

  * * *

>   After Claire went back to Chicago, I had lived with reluctance in my mother’s house for a few months. I had no money. Without money, I could not move in with Paul, which was my plan.

  My mother resented me for having to live with her. She was waiting, with apprehension, for Angelo’s divorce to come through so that he could move in. But my father was nearly indigent in his small room in Elmwood Park, a neighboring town, and she had no money to spare for me to help me move out, even if getting me out of the house served her purpose.

  I didn’t want to be anywhere near my mother, so I stayed in the basement. I barely recognized the person she had become. She had fallen through whatever had remained of her socialized, regulated self as if through those traps in the Vietnamese jungle with sharp wooden pikes waiting below. She was impaled on unconscious forces that most people negotiate and navigate. She was at the mercy of every absurd or ugly whim and impulse.

  Two floors above me, she lay in her bed at night and listened for every sound that I might make underground. She had had another phone line installed for me there so that I could talk late at night without disturbing her. But she could not tolerate this new arrangement. Unable to sleep, I would talk for hours with Claire in the weeks after she left, or with Paul or some of my other friends. My mother would storm into the basement.

  Get off the phone, she would say. I’m trying to sleep! Your mother is trying to sleep! I am so tired, she would say. Can’t you see how tired I am?

  From my spot on the sofa bed, I could see the dark half-moons under her eyes. She stood at the basement door, her nightgown open so that I could see her underpants and bare legs. She stood there staring at me. We were all alone at the bottom of the dark, empty house.

  I’m sorry, I would say. I’m going to bed now anyway. I won’t be talking anymore. Good night, Mom. She looked at me with an indescribable expression on her face—exhausted, spiteful, confused, suspicious, enraged, sorrowful, knowing, hungry, disappointed—and dragged herself back upstairs.

  In fact she could not hear anything at all in the basement from her bedroom. Paul and I had tested the acoustics one afternoon when she was out. But the very thought that I was talking with a friend or with Claire tormented her.

  After she returned to her bedroom, I would call Paul or Claire or another friend again, this time speaking in the softest whisper I could manage.

  One night, when I was on the phone with I don’t know who, I heard a click. A telephone operator came on. She told me that I had to clear the line to receive an incoming emergency call. Terrified that someone I knew had been hurt, maybe my father, I hung up the phone. In a second, it rang and I picked it up with a trembling hand.

  Who is this? I cried. What’s wrong? Is everything okay?

  After a pause, I heard a familiar voice.

  Are you trying to kill me? my mother said. Are you trying to kill your mother? Get off the phone and let me sleep. For God’s sake, stop torturing me and let me sleep.

  * * *

  In an effort to save as much money as I could in as little time as possible, I started working at a gas station a few blocks away. My mother had pulled in there for gas one day and struck up a conversation with the woman who owned the place with her husband, and who just happened to be working the pumps. The woman explained that they were shorthanded. As my mother related to me: I informed her what a smart and talented boy you are and that you are looking for a job. That day I went over there and got hired. My mother told me how proud she was of me.

  I worked a full day, pumping gas, checking oil, and cleaning windshields. The first few times someone from my high school drove in, I wanted to quit and run home before they could see me. I could not bear to witness the surprise on their faces, especially the girls’. The brief conversation that followed was usually conducted on their end in hushed tones, as if in the presence of a tragedy. After a time, I came up with a story about taking time off to write a novel before going back to school.

  The story became so necessary that I began to believe it myself, and then I got caught up in it. I started to write a novel at home, at my old Ethan Allen desk late at night before going down to the basement to sleep and to conduct my surreptitious phone calls. I did not make them until I was absolutely certain that my mother was no longer awake. I knew that my mother was asleep when her bed stopped creaking and I could no longer hear her pacing around her bedroom.

  Writing at night instilled in me my old sense of destiny. I began reading again, taking beloved old books off shelves of the hutch on top of my desk. I reread The Sun Also Rises and Understanding the Great Philosophers. Soon the Old Man reappeared. He assured me, once again, that one day all the world would admire me for the way I endured my ordeal.

  I took my copy of Spinoza off the shelf and read to myself, over and over again this line: “All things excellent are both difficult and rare.” I cherished my undercover, untested importance. I savored the ironic contrast between what I was doing and who I believed I was.

  * * *

  Missing the shared intimacy with literature that I had felt in my English classes at Bradley, I registered for a literature course at Bergen Community College. The classes were held not at the college, whose campus adjoined a public golf course, but in a classroom in my old high school. I tried to shrug off the shame I felt when I discovered that I would be sitting in a place that my friends had left behind, and that I also should have gone far beyond. In my eyes, the shame of it was the price I had to pay for pursuing an exceptional destiny. The Old Man provided commentary as I walked through the old corridors: “In every corner he saw traces of what he had been, and hints of what he was to become.”

  Despite my resolve, I was relieved to arrive at the classroom where I could feel, once again, enclosed and elevated by literature. But the class, on the eighteenth-century English novel, was nothing like what I had expected. The first novel we read was called Clarissa. Its heroine, who is raped by a corrupt aristocrat, suffers a nervous breakdown and eventually finds refuge with a humble shopkeeper and his wife. She dies in penury. Her virtue, by dint of her suffering, is an indictment of the debased landed and moneyed class that ruined her.

  The social themes were right up my alley. Most of all, the novel’s affirmation of the transcendence of the human spirit above material matters restored in me that familiar feeling of having a secret complicity, by means of literary art, with fundamental truths invisible to most other human eyes.

  The professor, however, a shortish woman in her early sixties with snow-white hair, took a literal approach to the book. Instead of discussing timeless themes of good versus evil, reality versus appearance, robust but ultimately corrupt respectability versus the integrity involved in profound mental confusion and exhaustion—instead of taking up these worthy subjects, she invited into class someone from a nearby rape center, who gave us statistics on rape, first by county, then by state, and then nationally. She ended her presentation by outlining the legal definition of rape. The professor added that this definition applied to what had happened to Clarissa, who had been drugged and then violated. Clarissa, the professor concluded, had been a victim of date rape. She said this with a kind smile that, it seemed to me, possessed a finality of virtue that brooked no disagreement.

  I was surprised by the effect the presentation had on me. My head began to swirl with associations: the legal terminology and the sheriff’s visit to our house; the leaden economic sound of statistics; the absolute moral rightness of what the two women were saying and the absolute wrongness, to my mind, of the context in which they were saying it—their moral rightness melting in my overheated conscience into the irreproachable moral platitudes on my mother’s refrigerator. The class sent me right back to the place I had fled from. “There is nothing,” the Old Man declared, “like a good cause to bring out the worst in people.” Having not yet begun to acquire the confidence to ask questions, I was still in the declarative stage of my life.

  Clarissa and all the other great works
of literature were my alternative world above, beyond, and opposite to the filthy, transactional world that judged you by standards that didn’t apply to you. My father’s inability to pay back Albatross, rather than his kindness and creativity, had determined his fate. My fate, on the other hand, was being determined by higher powers. By immortal books. By immortal authors. By the Penguin Classics. I was not going to sit there and allow emissaries from the world of upside-down values—where the appearance of respectability and responsibility hid ruthless grasping and greed; where conventional standards of merit disguised contempt for true human worth—pollute the sources of my value as a person.

  After the class was over, I stormed out. As I marched back down the hallways of my old high school, my rage blasted my shame to smithereens.

  * * *

  Once, further along in time, a black intellectual told me how food had become his enemy. His father had destroyed himself with drugs, he said. His brother, his self-esteem sucked away by the same asphyxiating circumstances, destroyed himself with alcohol. My friend said that he was determined not to be ruined in the same way. He became a great success. He avoided drugs and alcohol with religious discipline. Instead he ate, and he ate, and he ate. He tried to eat himself to death to feed his rage. One of the more toxic blends in the human mind, he told me, is success mixed with self-loathing.

  I had always been angry, but for the first time I was aware of being angry. I could sit at my mother’s kitchen table and eat a whole Pepperidge Farm seven-layer cake without realizing it. As I chewed, my heart pounded and my head whirred with memories of slights received. I brooded on fantasies of revenge against people who had treated me not like the boy who suffered for his offbeat merit, or the boy who could read a book like nobody’s business, but like a loser who was lucky to get what he had.

  * * *

  I got fired from the gas station because I couldn’t bring myself to quit. Remaining in a painful situation was becoming an established pattern of behavior. The minute I resolved to leave I realized that I had no one to turn to beyond the situation that had, at least, become a reliable part of my life. So I stayed put, seething to get out.