by Dave King
Laurel has another bite of my shortcake and picks up her pen. She’s still not looking at me. “Way past bedtime, mi compadre,” she says tiredly. Then, as we’re shuffling from the room, she adds, “Anyway, I know Howard plans to participate in this thing with your mom, whether you go ahead and accompany him or not.”
Ryan stops in his tracks, but only briefly. Then he takes the stairs two at a time. And Laurel’s great—I’ll be the first to acknowledge that—but she’s another one who doesn’t care to have her will undermined. When I turn to look, she’s gone back to her accounts.
17
LATER, I’m on the square second-floor landing that connects our three rooms. Against one wall stands my mother’s old sewing table, where a small lamp casts enough glow for finding the bathroom at night. Years ago, my mom spread a white lace cloth on the tabletop and plugged in the lamp, and except for dusting and laundry, nothing’s been touched since. But though I’m looking at the cloth and lamp, I’m thinking of Ryan. I’m trying to remember what life is like at nine years old, and whether kids in my day were as inscrutable as this one now. Compared to Ryan’s, my own childhood seems a crowded, busy affair, not important or even consistently joyful, but bustling with neighbors and relatives and other kids, with projects and passions that carried me from day to day. I wonder if his life is like that when he’s at home. It strikes me I’ve seldom seen playmates around the putty-colored house, and I remember what his childhood comprises that mine did not. The life with no father; Sylvia’s habit. I wonder if my first eighteen years were truly the full existence I like to remember, or if they only seem so by comparison with today.
I hear Ruby climbing the stairs, then she lies down on the worn rug. Her legs stick out like stretcher handles in front and back. I think of what happened to me, and I think childhood ought to be a person’s happiest days. There’s no guarantee life gets better as it goes along.
Ryan’s door suddenly opens, and Laurel backs out, stealthily closing it behind her. She turns, notices me, and says, “Oh!” I don’t move. Laurel says, “I just go in and check him at night, make sure he’s covered up.” I nod, and she puts her hands on her hips. I think here it comes: my tongue-lashing for letting him skip Sylvia’s visitation. But Laurel is silent. In the semidarkness, her pink top appears orange, and all her weight is on one black-jeaned hip. She looks like a long-in-the-saddle Texas gal, which is part of what she is, of course. I could take three steps and shut myself in my own room, but I wait.
Laurel says, “Well, I don’t know.” She raises a black sneaker to scratch her calf, then looks up and gives an exaggerated shrug. I shrug back, and she chuckles. “You could have the whole world talking like you, Howard,” she says. “Only”—she squints contemplatively at Ruby—“only you could smile just a bit more, you know? Sometimes I wonder if your gruff looks frighten him . . . Mind my saying that?” I shrug again, and she nods. “Oh, and did you want to go in? No reason you can’t visit him, too.”
Ryan’s on his back on the futon, a light cotton blanket pulled over his belly. He’s still in the white T-shirt he had on earlier, with a spot of crud, probably whipped cream, on the front. His face is turned away.
Laurel says, “Go on,” and I step in and squat down. One of his sneakers is lying at my feet, and I pick it up, then reach for the other and place them together by the futon. As my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, I can see other clothes lying around in heaps, along with Ryan’s pack and a couple of schoolbooks. There’s some white fluff in the corner, and I realize I should come in tomorrow and vacuum the remains of that Energizer Bunny. The strip of wall-paper has been put back in its place. It looks like somebody’s Scotch-taped it to the wall.
Ryan’s blue Indians cap is beside the pillow, as if it’s the last thing he took off. I touch his shoulder as gently as I can, and once again I see the long scrape on his forearm. I wish I’d remembered some ointment before he went to bed. I wonder what on earth I can offer to make these his good days, and I wonder if it’s gruffness and turmoil I project, or survival. I pat Ryan’s shoulder again just as Laurel says, “You can kiss him, you know.” His cheek’s soft against my lips.
I hear Laurel shift her weight, and we leave the room. The door clicks just as quietly as it did before; then she smiles. “I’m glad he’s here,” she says. “You’re a kind man, Howard.”
Ruby heaves to her feet and plants her butt on the carpet, her eyes round and lidless in her flat little face. “Well, good night,” Laurel says. “Sweet dreams. See you in the morning.” I nod and put my hands under my overall bib, and I’m turning toward my own room when she goes on tiptoe. I ball my fists against my stomach, and her kiss is so quick on my cheek that I barely feel it. But it’s been so long since I was kissed at all.
18
SATURDAY AT BREAKFAST I notice Ryan needs a haircut. He has the kind of hair that loses its tight curl as it grows longer, and it’s begun to look weedy. I think it’s possible he’ll decide to see Sylvia with me after all, and he should look his best, so once the cartoons have ended, I wave him to the truck. I could use a trim myself.
The barbershop is in a little strip mall, between a cleaner’s and a pet supply store. Four boys are milling around in front, dressed in yellow jerseys with swoops of script across the chest. I hesitate as we approach—gangs of kids always notice my scar—then one boy announces, “Radnor Tag Day.” Radnor’s the local elementary school, but I haven’t a clue what the heck the kid means, and Ryan eyes him with suspicion. After a moment the boy adds dubiously, “Care to make a donation?” He holds out a coffee can with a slit cut from the lid.
I reach for my wad of bills and peel off a one, and as I poke it through the slit, the boy hands me a small, square card. “‘Thank you for supporting Radnor Little League,’” Ryan reads aloud. “‘Have a great day!’” The other boys step forward now, each self-consciously fiddling with his own slitted coffee can, and I notice that on a sleeve of each yellow shirt is a striped emblem like the one on the door of Li’l Tony’s Barbershop. Suddenly they seem like decent kids, perhaps even the sons of the Irish and Scandinavian boys who were my own Radnor classmates, and they’re about Ryan’s age. I nod and pass out three more bucks. Ryan murmurs, “You don’t have to give them all something,” but he follows behind and collects three more cards.
Inside the barbershop, Li’l Tony says, “Tank you, my friend! You supporting my boys!” He’s got an Italian accent that’s a bit overdone, and I doubt he even knows my name, but he makes an effort. Slapping the chair with a towel, he says, “So. How you like today?” then goes ahead and trims me to the gray-brown fuzz I get every time. It looks fine. Ordinarily, I get a shave with my haircut, just to prolong the interaction, but today I don’t want to keep Ryan waiting. When Tony lathers up his brush, I wave him off.
I stand up. Behind me, Ryan’s sneaking looks at a Playboy in the magazine rack, but he snaps to as I turn around. I nod toward the chair, and he gives a startled look and mouths the word no. I go over and lift off his Indians cap, then take a lock of his hair in my fingers. Li’l Tony says, “Come on, young man. I make a look nice.” I chuck Ryan on the shoulder.
Ryan whispers, “I can’t get my hair cut here. I gotta go to a black place.” I give him a moment’s appraisal. Because of Sylvia, I’ve always considered Ryan a kind of disguised Caucasian, but he says, “Andee Barber School, Howie,” and we turn to go. The baseball boys perk up as we exit the shop, but Ryan brandishes the fan of cards. “We paid already,” he says with a touch of menace. They back off.
He guides me to a mostly black neighborhood not far from Sylvia’s development, where the Andee Barber School sits in another small strip of shops. Ryan holds the door, then comes in right on my heels, and I catch him swaggering like a junior gangsta.
This place is busier than Li’l Tony’s. Hip-hop music is playing nice and loud, and five middle-aged black men in white coats are cutting hair. One of them nods at Ryan, who nods back vacantly, bouncing his head to
the beat. In fact, he’s a bit transformed by the environment. He’s a black kid now, with a more urban-style cool than he’s exhibited around the house, and any similarity to the four pasty Little Leaguers has vanished. The shop’s other customers are sharp-looking guys in their teens and twenties, and it’s touching to see Ryan work at fitting himself in. When his turn comes, he steps forward with that same tough-boy shamble, and I give him an amused glance. He climbs into the chair without acknowledging my look.
I rub a palm over my fresh-clipped head and sit back to watch the proceedings. I’m the only white guy here, but I don’t care; if I learned anything from the army, it’s that race is the least of my worries. Ryan continues to bop in the chair, and the barber says, “Keep still, my man, or I’m a cut you,” though a minute later he leans around and smiles at Ryan. I can’t hear what Ryan says in return.
The barber’s a tall, dark man of about my age, with a way of ignoring the movements of his own ring-covered fingers. The other barbers are also in their forties and fifties, and I wonder if this is really any kind of a school. For a moment, I wonder if it’s one of the spots Sylvia copped—hair places are famously good for drugs—but the truth is I can’t tell. The young guys and the old guys sustain a banter that’s hard to follow over the pulsing music, and every few minutes someone runs through the door, but the furtive urgency I recall from my own purchasing days is hard to detect. Still, I watch Ryan’s guy carefully. He’s been grinning since we arrived, and I wonder if he’s lit.
And then I’m ashamed of myself. Even if the place isn’t a barber school, I think, that doesn’t mean it’s a drug place; and even if it’s a drug place, there’s no reason it’s not a barbershop, too. I look at Ryan’s barber again, and he catches my eye. “How you doin’, brother? Here for a cut?” Big, big smile.
Ryan says, “He got his hair cut already. At another place.”
The man nods. “I can tell. But you c’mon to me next time, my friend. I set you up good.” At this he cracks a laugh, and I think he’s got to be talking hair; anything else is simply too broad. He catches the eye of the next barber over, and the two go gleefully limp; for a second I’m on edge. Then Ryan’s barber steps out and slaps my palm. “You a good guy,” he says. “Y’all don’t think we do white people hair here, but we do.” He grins at me some more, and I nod back merrily. No one seems to notice I can’t speak. I’m just a white guy, not a mute, and he’s only cutting the boy’s hair.
Ryan gets his hair cropped close, instead of the fade he had before. At first I think he’s emulating my own short cut; then I realize all the young dudes have the same preppy look. The barber lifts the smock with a flourish, and I make Ryan pause before donning the old Indians cap. He’ll be a good-looking fellow someday, I think, and I wonder, as I’ve wondered before, who his father was. Always that pang of jealousy. Ryan whispers, “It’s seven dollars,” and I hand the man a pair of fives. The barber grins some more and shakes my hand, and I speculate on the tip Sylvia gives.
On the way home, we pass a summer market set up in a parking lot, with booths of fresh produce and baked goods and flats of seedlings laid out on trestle tables. I don’t want to prolong this to the point that we resent each other, but maybe we’re not there yet, so I pull over. Ryan’s slipped from the street pose of the barbershop back into the neutral persona he employs with me, and when he covertly inspects a jar with a piece of honeycomb inside, I buy it.
When I was small and we’d just moved into our house, my dad built two white planters for the front porch railing, and each year he and I would fill them with flowers and dangling ivy. I don’t know if Ryan’s too macho for flowers, but when I stroll toward the plants he follows along, and together we gaze over the grids of greenery. There are the usual suspects: six-packs of impatiens and petunias and pansies, and I think of a song a neighbor girl made up in grammar school: Pansy and Petunia are very much in love / They sit together every day just like two little doves. I suppose that girl has long since married, divorced, and grown embittered, but I wonder what happened to those two old wooden planters. Certainly no one put out floral displays once I came home injured, but when I think of the nice job Robin does at the convent, it seems a few blooms might spruce up my home. I reach for a six-pack of white impatiens, then set it back. I should have done this while my mother was alive.
Ryan is standing by a flat of petunias, squeezing a fleshy trumpet between finger and thumb. As I move toward him, a lady says, “Don’t do that, young man. They bruise easily,” and he steps back and looks at her darkly. The woman turns to me. “Yes, sir.”
I put my hand on Ryan’s shoulder so she knows we’re together, then pick up the petunia he’s bruised. I gesture at him with it, and he shrugs sullenly, then abruptly mumbles, “Nice.” I hold up four fingers, and the plant lady reaches for four six-packs. “Purple,” Ryan says loudly.
“All mixed colors, sonny,” the lady says. “You wouldn’t want just purple; it’d be too dark.” I hold up my hand again—we’ll have what he wants—then the three of us peer over the plants and choose an assortment that’s mostly purple. In the end, Ryan tries to sneak the one he’s damaged back onto the trestle table, but I take it anyway, tapping the Indians cap to make my point. In my world we welcome handicapped plants.
It’s not easy locating Dad’s two planters, and I’m surprised Ryan tags along, instead of peeling off to watch TV. After all, I can’t even say what we’re looking for. We find the planters in a storage cubby behind the cupola, and he says, “Oh-h-h,” as if all has been made clear.
“Nh-h-h,” I echo.
One planter’s rotted through, but the other is serviceable. We carry it downstairs and find its old place on the railing, and it upsets the house’s symmetry. The annual lady’s right about dark blossoms, too, but I let it go because Ryan’s suddenly on the case. “I know how to do this,” he announces as I cut open a bag of soil; then he all but elbows me aside. I’ve bought a bunch of geraniums and some morning glories, too, and as I place the pots of geraniums on the stairs, I get thinking about my mom.
We moved to this place the summer before first grade. My folks were working people who took a chance on the neighborhood, and they fell in love with this house and with fixing it up. They saw it as a place where I might raise a family, too. Both my parents were old-school homebodies who enjoyed the sanding and caulking and painting and refinishing, and by the time I left for boot camp the place was a showcase—at least, it seemed that way to us. Then I came home, and all was different. First, my mother let things go, while my father sustained the maintenance and care. Then my dad hit the sauce, and Mom kept the place up. But no matter who led the charge, joy was gone from the upkeep. The changing of storm windows and the mending of porch steps were carried out with the same dutifulness as my own unending courses of speech therapy, and my parents must have many times asked themselves what on earth is the use? I think of my father’s bottles, stowed under the seat of his car or in the tack room, by the privy. That was how I knew he’d given up. I think of a warm night when I was so wrecked I lay on this very lawn, tearing at my thighs and inventing vulgar poems to ward off the explosions above me; I couldn’t speak a word of poetry, of course, but I bellowed and screeched at the top of my lungs, and when my mother came out in her nightgown and begged me to stop, I wasn’t even sure it was she, not some figment. Even when she took hold of my hands, I swung out, thinking—or maybe that’s another occasion. This happened more than I like to admit.
Even after I got my shit together, after Dad was gone and only Mom and I remained in this place, the sense of mulish duty was hard to shake. I saw reclaiming the house as a sign of my new life, and I mended and plastered and caulked until my hands bled. But I could go no further: no flowers, no bright colors or wallpaper. I looked around me and thought what the fuck is the use? And I think that now, staring at the tray of morning glories in the bed of the truck. What’s the sense of a display now, after sitting so long unadorned? Do I think things ca
n change? My mother rarely mentioned flowers, and I don’t know that she wished for morning glories. But it’s a lost opportunity.
I lean on the truck, wondering how the brightness fled from the day. I can’t explain why my dark moods descend. The boys screech up in their white van, music blasting, and slog past me with barely a word; but a few minutes later a third-floor window opens, and Nit’s head pops out. “Hey, Howard, man. Harrison’s taking for-fuckin’-ever in the shower. Lemme wash up in your guys’ bathroom?” I stare at the gravel and think what’s the use? I make him ask twice before I look up.
Then there’s the sound of honking, and Laurel’s leaning from her Beetle. “I barely knew the place,” she shouts. “You busy guys.” Ryan runs out, calling that purple was his idea, and Laurel smiles appraisingly as she climbs from the car. I head toward them, arms folded, and she puts a hand on my forearm. “Why the glum look?”
Inside the house, the phone rings, and Laurel’s fingers tense on my skin. Only one person calls here. Laurel says, “Ryan—” but he turns with a wild look, and she breaks off abruptly. She leans on my shoulder an instant, and I hear her murmuring, “Let it go . . .” Then she picks up a grocery bag. “Shortcake, shortcake!” she says. “I got more strawberries.” And I feel less of a freak.
Around dusk, I return to the driveway. Alongside the stable lies a narrow flower bed edged in paving stones, and I kneel down and tear out a jungle of crabgrass, then space out the tiny morning glory shoots. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll rig up a trellis of strings. Maybe Ryan will help—or I can do it alone. We needn’t do everything together, I guess, but it is good to have something to tend to. Stepping back, I picture vines covering the clapboards, green heart-shaped leaves and bright blue morning glory circles, stretching and twining and growing lusher every day. Then I remember the flower that interested the lieutenant.