Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  My mother takes the plate out of the microwave and puts it down in front of me with a fork and paper towel for a napkin. “Honey, we all miss Brenda—”

  “We do?” My father laughs, setting the ice in his drink astir like tiny bells. (He jokes that the house has never been so peaceful, but the other night I found him lying on Brenda’s bed in her bedroom, staring straight up at the ceiling. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he had come in to look for his glasses, until I pointed out that they were in his shirt pocket. “So they are,” he said, putting them on, and continued to stare at the ceiling, unfazed by me.)

  “Yes, we do,” my mother says firmly. “She’s our oldest, and she’s having a baby. And Eric”—she puts her hand over mine—“I know how protective you are of your sisters. That’s one of your many wonderful qualities.”

  “I just wish Brenda would figure things out and come back,” I say mechanically, my mouth full of food.

  “She will,” my mother says. “She will. In the meantime, we’ve just got to keep it together around here. We all have work. And now your prize. And there’s always Joani to watch. Now, will you go up there and let her know you’re back before she starts having nightmares? And then get some sleep,” my mother says, squeezing my face and taking away my finished plate.

  “Okay,” I say, glad to be dismissed. “Good night, Ma.” I kiss her quickly on the cheek. “Good night, Daddy,” I say absently, picking up my backpack.

  My father laughs. “Daddy?” he says. “That’s a blast from the past.”

  I’m embarrassed that I called him that in my absent-mindedness. “I’m sorry. I’m tired,” I say. “Night, Dad.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” my father says, but I’m already halfway up the stairs.

  I creep into Joani’s bedroom, where Grandma is snoring away in the dark, and stand over Joani’s bed. She’s sound asleep and looks so angelic and serene that I hate having to wake her up, but I’m afraid if she starts screaming with nightmares (as she’s been known to do) at three o’clock in the morning, it will be my fault. I rub her arm lightly and whisper into her ear.

  “Hey, Joani baby—”

  She opens her eyes, oblivious for a moment, then focuses on me. “Erky,” she says, holding out her arm. “Come here.” And I lean in further toward her and she puts her chubby arm around me and kisses me on the cheek.

  “I just wanted you to know I was okay,” I whisper to her. “Go back to sleep before Grandma wakes up, okay?”

  “Okay. I sewed an apron today.”

  “That’s great. You can show it to me tomorrow. Go back to sleep now, okay?”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  I creep out, into my own room. I know I’m going to be a basket case tomorrow, and I haven’t even done the five or so hours of homework I was supposed to tackle tonight, but all I can think about is those old photos, that glamorous woman and that handsome man, and how it happened that they both came to leave him. And I think about what he said about us both being loners, and, brushing my teeth, I start to think, in a creepy kind of way, that maybe he’s right: nobody really knows me, including my mother and Brenda, including Phoebe and Charlie, even my teachers, Mr. McGregor and old Mr. WASP-y What’s-His-Name from the Boston Globe. (If he really knew me, I think, he never would have given me that award.)

  I get into my own bed, safe and sound for now, I suppose. And I’m wishing he could be here, too. Or better, I’m wishing I could still be back there, up in that loft, freezing, with him.

  Eight

  The contest awards ceremony was tonight, the last Friday before Christmas. I had to put on a coat, tie, and loafers, and drive into Boston with my mother and father, Joani (looking sweet and uncharacteristic in a dress), and Phoebe (who said she wanted to come so she could hear how bad the second- and third-place speeches were). Grandma wanted to come, but my mother had to convince her she wasn’t up to the late night. I’d called Brenda at work earlier in the week asking her if she wanted to come, and she said she’d try to make it. Then, Thursday night, she called home and said she had been put on the schedule at the card shop for Friday night, at the last minute. I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

  The ceremony was in some enormous room inside Faneuil Hall, complete with gilt and towering windows and marble floors, a colossal Christmas tree, pine boughs, and tiny lights everywhere for the holiday season. First, there were opening speeches: the editor-in-chief of the Globe, who talked about the power of the written word in such trying times; then WASP-y Philip Coe, who talked about the history of the contest and looked about as suave as ever in a red tartan jacket; then a thin, exceedingly jaded-seeming nun in a tailored suit, talking about the methadone clinic she ran in Roxbury and the meaning of the word “ministry” in the 1980s; then a rookie for the Celtics who had pulled himself out of the ghetto somewhere and up into the pros, talking about pride and dignity and self-reliance; he got a huge welcome from the audience (including my father, who seemed more excited than I could remember him being in a long time) and, when he was finished, a standing ovation in which Phoebe and I joined, although neither of us had ever heard of him before.

  A jazz band played swing versions of Christmas songs after that, and they served a fancy dinner (something with chicken, which meant that Phoebe, being a vegetarian, ate only her vegetable medley). Then Philip Coe got up and announced that the top three winners would now read their essays, starting with third place. “This is it,” my mother whispered, beaming like my father, and Joani held my hand underneath the table. Even Phoebe seemed to be chomping nervously on her hair. I felt inside the breast pocket of my coat to make sure my typed copy of the essay was there.

  The third-place winner was a skinny black kid with big, square-framed glasses who was leaving the tough neighborhood of Roslindale and going to M.I.T. on full scholarship next year, the oldest of nine fatherless kids and the first in his extended family to go on to college. What he cherished in America, he said in his speech, was that anyone, even a poor inner-city kid like him, could get a top-notch education and achieve success as long as they worked hard and stayed out of trouble. That’s why America was so much better than Europe or Japan or anywhere else, he said, where only a select few got to go on and pursue their dreams; here, he said, anyone could truly be whatever he wanted to be, which was why America was truly a democracy. He concluded by actually singing the last two lines of the national anthem, in a deep, wavering voice that sent the audience into wild fits of applause. Standing in front of the crowd, the kid burst into tears and said “God bless you!” into the microphone, spurring the audience to clap and holler twice as hard. The kid seemed so transported he just stood there at the podium while the applause raged on, until Philip Coe had to escort him gently back to his table, where he collapsed into the arms of his mother and younger siblings. Phoebe raised her eyebrows, giving me a look that said, “My goodness!” and I started wondering why that kid hadn’t received first place instead of me.

  The second-place winner was a gawky, pale girl from Framingham, with big moussed hair like Brenda’s, who clattered up to the podium with a walker. In a horrible, grating South Shore accent, she began her essay by relating how, back in the summer, she had been driving to her job as a cashier in the supermarket when a drunk driver in a minivan came careening around a corner and smeared her little compact up against a telephone pole, knocking her unconscious and breaking nearly every bone in her body. She was in a coma for three weeks and traction for several months, until she was finally able to go back to school while taking intense physical therapy. In the meantime, her family’s parish had raised money to cover half the hospital bills, the nurses took turns reading Judy Blume books to her to bring her out of her coma, and her classmates had even voted her Homecoming Queen in absentia and shown up en masse the night of the dance to crown her in her hospital room. What she cherished in America, she told the audience, was that despite the fast pace of contempora
ry life, community and compassion still existed; people would still band together in times of crisis to feed the hungry in Ethiopia, or fight against evils like apartheid, or even save the life of someone like her. She finished her essay by explaining how her physical therapist, Debbie, had inspired her to pursue her own career as a therapist next year at Framingham State College. If I thought they couldn’t have cheered louder than they did for the kid from Roslindale, I was wrong, because they did. About half the people in the audience were crying, too, including my own mother.

  After the girl from Framingham had clattered back to her seat and the applause had died down, Philip Coe finally rose to the podium, and there was silence in the great hall. My mother put her arm around me, my father nodded at me deeply across the table and whispered, “Stand up straight,” and Joani squeezed my hand so hard I had to squirm away.

  “We chose our first-place winner because, never in fifteen years of administering this contest, had we come across prose that moved us quite as strongly as it did in this instance,” Philip Coe said soberly into the microphone. “I think you’ll see why in just a moment.”

  I turned to Phoebe, whose face was actually flushed with anticipation. “I can’t read this,” I whispered to her. “It’s bullshit.”

  “What do you mean?” she whispered back. “You won first place.”

  “But I didn’t mean any of it. It was a joke. It’s mean and sarcastic.”

  She shrugged. “Nobody knows that. Just read it like you mean it. Be sincere.”

  The rest was like some fantastic, sped-up dream sequence. Philip Coe announced my name. I heard “—happy to introduce Eric Fitzpatrick, a senior at Mendhem—I’m sorry, West Mendhem High School,” and then in what felt like a rocking ocean of applause, I was threading my way between tables, sweating, shaking, until I had reached the podium, standing under harsh light and staring down at a sea of encouraging, expectant faces. Way in the back, I could see my own table, Joani’s head bobbing like a little banner of support, and across the room I could see where Goody Farnham sat, erect and alert in her seat, next to her equally Puritan-looking husband. But as for the rest, looking out at them, all I could think was They’re going to see right through me. I’m a liar, and they’re all gonna see it.

  My hands were shaking badly, but I managed to pull out the essay, unfold it, and smooth it down on the top of the podium. The room was so quiet that the most muffled cough flew up into the air and reverberated against the ceilings. I swallowed a lump in my throat and, startled by the sound of my own voice coming out of the loudspeakers, eeked out the first sentence of the essay, the one about Kerrie Lanouette’s murder. Immediately, a grave murmur of recognition shot through the entire room—the murder had been in the news and the papers across the state for months now. Originally, I had only wanted to get through the essay as quickly and unremarkably as possible, but now, buoyed by this instant ripple of response, I calmed down a bit and settled into the cadences, actually growing to like the sound of my own voice over the loudspeakers, to the point where I was experimenting with different inflections just to hear what they sounded like.

  The funny thing was, after about the first paragraph, still flushed and sweating, I started to have a weird sort of fantasy, right there in front of hundreds of people. I started to believe that the essay was actually about me and him, Brooks, that it was a declaration, or a confession, that somehow I was appealing to all these people, including my family, Goody Farnham, and Phoebe, but also the state representatives, and media celebrities, and sports figures in the audience, to recognize us, and understand, and absolve us, even embrace us, in the name of American liberty and justice, and the great river of Christian charity. And when I got to the part where I had to repeat the word “flame” over and over again, it struck me as so funny—but a joyous kind of funny, like I was sharing the joke with everyone—that I actually laughed aloud, which evoked a funny trigger laugh in the audience (I actually heard Joani’s inimitable shriek-laugh float up above the rest). And then, toward the end, feeling elated, feeling this extraordinary warmth and trust between me and all these good people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I slowed down and deliberately counted out the pauses between the final lines:

  “For it is the flame that guides all nations, casting blessed, burning light upon the way whole nations live.

  “The way whole nations thrive.” (And I actually choked a bit before uttering the final line.)

  “The way whole nations love.”

  There was total silence; I looked out into the room and it seemed that every face was hanging in the balance of my next breath, slack-jawed, luminous. And at that moment, I heard him clearly in my head—“Baby, we’ve arrived,” whispered in my ear—and a wave of exhilaration and joy rushed up my back and over my head, like breakers at high tide on Hampton Beach, and with tears mounting in my eyes, blurring my vision and turning the whole room into a muddy collage of green smudges and white-light pinpricks, I leaned forward and rasped into the microphone, “Thank you.”

  The applause didn’t build; it crashed over me, instantly, like a wall that finally gives way to the overflowing river outside. All the people in the room rose to their feet, and in the middle of their deafening ovation, whistles, and hollers, through the haze of my tears, I could make out Philip Coe, aglow with proprietary good cheer, Goody Farnham, striking her hands together like tiny cymbals, my own family, my parents, my mother, transmitting to me What a day to be an Ianelli! It felt like all the disparate pieces of my entire life had finally come together, a splendid fusion, and even though he wasn’t there, he was, blindingly, he was part of it.

  I couldn’t feel my legs—they felt somewhere far, far below me, as though someone had untethered my upper region, my head and heart, and they were floating somewhere high above—but I managed to leave the podium and weave my way back toward my family, through tables of people who were still on their feet, applauding me, blanketing me in a quilt of smiles and good wishes. A middle-aged woman, about my mother’s age, stepped out, grabbed me by the arm and stared right into my eyes, her face red with the heat in the room. “You have a gift from God,” she said sternly, almost remonstratively. “Don’t waste it.”

  Only after I smiled dumbly, putting a hand over her arm, and said, “Don’t worry, I won’t,” did she let me go.

  My mother embraced me when I had finally wended my way back to our table. “You were the best,” she whispered to me. “You were definitely the best.” A wringing handshake from my father and a booming “Nice job!” From Joani, cries of “Erky!” and kisses. Even Phoebe hugged me and said, “You sounded so evangelical!”

  “I didn’t expect that to happen,” I told her, dazed.

  She laughed. “I thought you said it was bullshit.”

  “I thought it was!” I protested. “I guess—who knows how people are going to react. It ended up moving me. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be.”

  Philip Coe made closing remarks, the band swung into “Jingle Bell Rock” (in the spirit of the moment, my mother grabbed Joani and jerked her around in a jitterbug for a moment before restoring herself), and they unleashed us. We could hardly get past the table for the well-wishers; first, Goody Farnham and her husband, who proclaimed to my parents, “He is a voice. He really is a voice,” then parents, whose praise didn’t throw me, but their children as well—teenagers, my own age, who approached me with awe and respect, not the usual malice, and that threw me. Then reporters from papers around the state, asking me questions as my parents, the Farnhams, and Phoebe gathered around me like a half-shell. What inspired the essay? (“I don’t know; I guess Kerrie Lanouette’s murder, but it mostly just wrote itself.”) Where are you off to school next year? (“I don’t know; Yale, I guess, if they’ll take me.”) Do you want to be a writer? A priest? You’d write great sermons. (“I guess I’d have to say a writer, some kind of writer. I’ve never thought about being a priest.”) “He’s always had a way with words,�
� my mother shared with the reporters. What do I think is the biggest social problem facing our society today? (To which I responded, absurdly, “Yuppies. Materialism.”)

  On the way home in the car, first, there was jubilation, all of us puffed up on the shimmer of the evening, and the applause, and the reporters. My mother marveled over how “elegant” everyone had looked; Joani insisted that I was going to get my own TV show, just like Michael J. Fox on Family Ties (on whom she has a big crush); Phoebe told Joani to hold still while she tried to work Joani’s too-short, too-fine hair into little reggae braids. My mother told me that my delivery was electric and gave her shivers. And then my father asked, “Why’d you start cryin’ at the end, though?”

  “I did not!” I snapped, indignant.

  “It looked that way, from where I was sitting.”

  “I think it was just the strong lights made it look that way,” my mother said. To which my father merely hiccupped “Hmph” and we all became silent. It was late now, nearly midnight, and Phoebe and Joani fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, in the backseat with me, and my mother cocked her head back in the passenger seat. In the rare silence of sleeping women, sleeping girls, my father and I didn’t talk. He drove on; I slumped down so as to be invisible to him in the rearview mirror, and feigned dozing. Instead, I stared up at the black December sky unfurling above Route 95 between Boston and West Mendhem. Some of the delirium of the evening began to fade; the sky, bright with the stars of the Advent season, seemed to be a clarifying agent. And I started feeling profoundly foolish for my delusion. I had cried, in my oddly seized moment of joy. He wasn’t there, I told myself now, in the creeping cold of the car. He couldn’t be there, no matter how badly I wanted him there. And I curled up into myself, crawled back into the husk that I felt I had shed for just one night, because the more time I spent thinking about him, the more obvious it became that he could never, never appear before anyone but me.