Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  * * *

  Christmas crept up, spooking me. When I was younger—twelve, thirteen—I took a tremendous amount of comfort in Christmas. It always seemed like no matter what depths of ridicule or alienation I was suffering at school (or out of school), the holy season filled me with warmth and goodwill; I felt close to the colonies of tiny lights strung around trees and bushes; the voices of Brenda Lee and Perry Como that seemed to whisper out of every corner; the luxurious practice of reading O.Henry or Dickens in the living room under the tiny lights of our own tree. Christmas seemed to welcome me when nothing else did.

  Not this year, in which I felt oddly banished, as though Christmas were a pure thing, a celebration of the honest and the good, that I was marked not to attend. One night shortly after the awards ceremony, I found myself walking home late from school (having stayed to cobble together the end-of-year edition of the newspaper, complete with my scathing predictions for New Year 1987), extremities freezing despite boots and gloves, breath crystallizing ghoulishly in front of my face as I walked. A full mile before I reached home, not far from the town library, I had a vision of what I’d find there: leftover meatballs congealing in a pot on the stove, both my parents, exhausted, my father bent over paperwork, Joani and Grandma knitting, whirring (Grandma turning Joani into some warped 1950s ideal of domesticity, and for what?), and a dark room, collecting dust, that used to belong to my hell-raising older sister; in every room, dry heat billowing out of low metal radiators painted beige.

  I looped back toward the old brick library, its tall windows casting white panes of light on the ground below, fished a dime out of my pocket, and put it in the pay phone outside the building.

  “Goolsbee.” It was some stoner’s voice, slurred, the pitch-perfect music of indifference.

  “Could you get Francis Tremont for me?”

  “Aah. Lemme see if he’s still here. He mighta gone home early on break.”

  The sound of a receiver falling from an in-house pay phone, swinging in space, like a hanged man. I waited for three minutes, into the recorded warning of termination, put in another dime, waited, was warned again, redeposited, still waited. Finally I heard the clanking sound of someone retrieving a receiver from thin air.

  “Mr. Godfrey? I’m so sorry, I was packing and making arrangements—”

  “Brooks, this isn’t Mr. Godfrey.”

  Then him, perplexed: “It isn’t?”

  “No. It’s Eric.”

  The usual silence, then, quieter: “You’re catching me at a bad time. My auntie died this morning.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” Suddenly I could have kicked myself for choosing this of all nights to call.

  “Well—” Another pause. “I thought you were Mr. Godfrey. He’s the executor of her will. My guardian now, until I’m twenty-one. He arranged a flight home for me, and my housemaster’s driving me to Logan tonight to catch it.”

  “Oh. All right, I won’t keep you, then.”

  “I’m starting my Christmas break early. It goes until the middle of January.”

  “Are you coming back?” I said, fighting back a plummeting feeling.

  “Presumably. I don’t think I’ll get a red cent out of Godfrey if I at least don’t come back and finish the year.”

  “Oh,” I said again. “Well, I guess I’m glad that you’re coming back.”

  More silence, then, faintly ironic, “How are you?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, not wanting to talk about myself. “I’m really sorry about your aunt. I know you liked her.”

  “Did you pay a terrible price for our last catnap?”

  I laughed. “Not really. Well, sort of. My parents had the cops out looking.”

  “Not them again.”

  “Yeah. I told them I was driving to see my sister—”

  “What, the pregnant one? The runaway?”

  “Yeah. That I was driving to see her, and I pulled over because I was lost, and closed my eyes for a minute and fell asleep.”

  He laughed thinly. “A likely story.”

  “I know. Did you get in trouble? Did you sneak back in okay?”

  “I did. The proctor himself had sneaked away that night, too, though not for the same reasons. Into town, I guess, to watch the hockey game at a bar.”

  “That was lucky for you,” I said.

  “Wasn’t it, though?” he said wearily. “I wonder if it ever expires.”

  “If what does?”

  “One’s luck.”

  “Oh, yeah.” There was another silence, and a gust of wind against the brick front of the library that reminded me how cold the night was. “The falling asleep in there that night?” I ventured into the void. “And the getting in trouble?”

  “Yes?”

  “It was worth it,” I said. “I had a really good time that night.”

  “Oh, you did? You like being dressed down by a misanthropic doom-sayer who tells you how miserable your life is?”

  “I don’t mean that part of it,” I said. “I mean, you know—the part before. And seeing your pictures. And falling asleep was nice, too, even though it went on too long.”

  “Yes, falling asleep was nice,” he said briskly. “And thank you for looking at my memorabilia. I guess I’m the real keeper of the family archives now.”

  “I guess you are.”

  More silence. I wanted to tell him how much I missed him, that I had been thinking of him at the awards ceremony, that it had almost been like he was there, in some funny way, but I said nothing. “Well!” he finally sang. “More packing awaits me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Happy holidays to you and yours. I’ll see you in Anno Domini 1987.”

  “Who are you going to spend Christmas with?” I suddenly asked, horrified at the thought of his having to spend the day alone.

  He laughed. “My dear boy, I am about to spend Christmas with more of Fleurie’s immediate kin and next of kin and friends and fellow church ladies than I’ve ever seen before in one sitting. They’re going to turn her house into one final revival meeting before it goes forever into my trust. So I don’t imagine I’ll be alone on Christmas Day—although I’d prefer it to making nice with hundreds of living fossils in their holiday finery from the Reconstruction era.”

  “Well, I’m glad you won’t be alone,” I said.

  “You’ve gotten awfully solicitous of my welfare.”

  “I guess I have.”

  “Are you quite all right, Eric? Where are you, anyway? Are you outside?”

  “Uh. Yeah. I’m in front of the library. I was doing research.”

  “I see. Well, I return the sixteenth of January. If you call then, I’ll be back in Goolsbee House, all right?”

  “All right,” I said, unable to believe I wasn’t going to see him for a month. “I will.”

  “All right, then,” he said, sounding hesitant, sounding like he wanted to get back to packing. “Good-bye, my dear boy.”

  “Good-bye. Brooks, I’ll miss you.”

  Silence. Then, melodramatically: “But you must be strong. Let no one know your private grief!”

  “I was serious,” I said.

  A clearing of the throat. “I know. I’ll miss you, too. So ’bye for now.” And then a click on the other end.

  I stared at the receiver for a moment and then hung up. It was almost eight o’clock and I still didn’t want to go home. I walked the fifteen minutes down Main Street to B.J.’s Sub Shop, empty despite the come-hither tinsel and cardboard-cutout Santa face I had taped up in the window during my shift last week. Inside it was bright and warm. Sal was surprised to see me on one of my nights off; I told him my house was noisy and I needed a quiet place to do my homework. He lowered the radio and wiped down a table for me, and I lost myself in trigonometry. Sal served me an Italian sub, a Coke, and, from the display rack, a bag of Ruffles and a Little Debbie brownie, all on the house. Except for that, he didn’t bother me at all, just kept reading his car magazines, and I thought about how de
cent people could be when you most needed it, even people like Sal, whom I had always thought of as Tony Danza’s evil twin brother, even when they didn’t have a clue as to what was bothering you in the first place, even when they probably wouldn’t want to know.

  * * *

  Christmas Day was disconcertingly warm, but it rained most of the day, compounding the strangeness of our second holiday without Brenda. She wouldn’t come to Auntie Lani’s house, just over the border in New Hampshire, where the Ianellis and the timid in-laws of the Ianellis have gathered every Christmas to exchange presents. My mother, who usually gives the best presents, was so distracted this year that she ended up buying everyone easy-assembly wine racks she got on sale at T.J. Maxx. Everyone professed to love their wine racks, but later in the day, after dinner, I overheard a whispered conversation between Auntie Winnie and my cousin Frannie.

  “Poor Terry. She didn’t even scrape the whole price tag off my rack, so I know she got them at T.J. Maxx,” Auntie Winnie said to Frannie. “She never used to overlook something like that before.”

  “I know. The poor thing,” Frannie said. “She’s not herself these days.”

  “I know.” Winnie made the clucking sound all the Ianelli women make when they’re discussing someone’s bad fortune. “It’s because of that Brenda.”

  “I know,” Frannie said. “She’s breaking Auntie Terry’s heart, and I don’t even think she knows it.”

  “And at Christmas, too,” Auntie Winnie added.

  The only other thing that happened was that Grandma almost had another stroke playing a too-lively game of patty-cake with Frannie’s daughter, Brittany. The pace had accelerated considerably, until suddenly Grandma turned chalk white and started clutching her heart and calling out for the Holy Mother. There was complete fear and chaos for about three minutes, while Auntie Reenie screamed at Grandma to take deep breaths, dispensed her heart pills (which Grandma had forgotten to take that afternoon), and put her to bed. As usual, during the entire incident, my father and all my uncles were playing cards in the other room and never even knew it happened.

  Grandma stayed to spend the night at Auntie Lani’s when my parents, Joani, and I departed for home in the late afternoon to open our presents, as we do every year. As we approached the driveway, even through the rain, Joani called out “Look! It’s Brenda’s car. Brenda’s come back!”

  We found her in the kitchen, drinking coffee out of her old mug with the chipped silver “B” on the front, a shopping bag full of presents at her feet, big with pregnancy, but wearing a pretty holly-flecked red jersey maternity dress, looking rested and actually happy. She had had her huge, towering mane of big hair cut into a short, flipped-back style that actually made her look kind of chic. The second Joani saw her, she ran to her and grabbed her around the waist, heedless of the baby, saying her name again and again. I was so happy to see her I felt something catch in my throat, but I only stood there in the hall with my parents, taking her in.

  She gently unlaced Joani and stood up a little nervously, smoothing down her dress over her belly, keeping her arms there, as though she wanted to hide, or protect, her progress. “Hi. I used my old key to get in.”

  “That’s okay, honey,” my mother said, almost in a whisper.

  “I didn’t forget, you know? I mean, I remembered this is the time we open the family presents. So I brought mine, okay?”

  “We’re glad you came,” my father croaked, his right eye leaking waterworks.

  Brenda fidgeted. “So—hey. Merry Christmas.”

  Then my mother just lost it—I saw her whole face crack open, heard the rumble coming up in her throat, until she burst into tears, ran to Brenda and hugged her so tightly I thought they were going to flatten out the baby. “Oh, baby, oh, baby, oh, baby, don’t ever just leave us like that again, do you understand? You scared the living hell out of me,” and Brenda, bawling now, too, just saying, “Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry,” and Joani, holding onto both of them now, blubbering too, for the hell of it. I got teary-eyed, too; I couldn’t help it. I caught my father’s eye, but I didn’t care; he was red with pent-up emotion, but he couldn’t let it out, and I was fiercely glad not to be like him at that moment. I stood there and smiled at the spectacle of my mother and two sisters through my own haze.

  Finally Brenda poked her head out from the clump and looked at me. “Hey you, the big literary celebrity, get ovah here.” And I joined them in their cluster, and we all sniffled and laughed and cried, and my father went upstairs to turn on the electric candles in their windows. When he came down in a moment, when Brenda, Joani, and I were pouring eggnog and slicing up cheese and pepperoni, I heard my mother talking to him in the hallway.

  “So, are you happy to see her?” she asked.

  “Um-hmmm,” I heard him say, that forced devil-may-care voice with the edge of “Don’t probe me.”

  “She looks beautiful, doesn’t she?” my mother said, combing her hand through my father’s hair.

  “She certainly does, Terry. She certainly does.”

  “She loves you, you know. She just doesn’t know how to show it. And neither do you.”

  “Terry, c’mon,” with a deeper edge.

  “Well, it’s the truth.”

  “All right, honey. Whatever you say.”

  “Now, let’s have a nice Christmas night with all our kids in one place, okay? We don’t know how long we’re gonna have her back here for, so let’s just have fun, okay?” And I heard his peevish note of compliance—“that’s exactly what I want, too”—and I heard her lips smack his cheek.

  The night and the rain crept on; we opened our presents, modeled new clothes for each other, listened to the warped Christmas albums my parents had bought in their first year of their marriage, drank more eggnog. There was a fragile atmosphere that made us all pass the night with our senses more acute than ever before—the knowledge that momentous things had happened that year reconfiguring us, that we might be reconfigured still, but that for the precarious balance of this night, we would count our blessings, make happy, and defer talk of 1987 until tomorrow.

  Brenda trundled an exhausted Joani up to bed around nine; in a rare recreational spirit my father challenged me to a game of cards, and we played, near-silently, while my mother and Brenda rustled through maternity gifts in the other room, talking of baby accessories and Brenda’s progress and skirting the broader issues of what she planned to do with her life, and where she planned to do it, and with whom. At about nine-thirty, the phone rang, a chilling caw in our otherwise cloistered night. I peered into the next room.

  My mother looked troubled. “I hope that’s not about Ma,” she said, going into the kitchen. Brenda waddled into the den and looked over my father’s shoulder at his hand of cards.

  “Jesus, Art, what a killer hand!” she said.

  “Oh, yeah?” my father said, looking up at her. “Whaddya think I should throw next?”

  “Lemme see,” Brenda said, resting a hand on my father’s shoulder. “That one,” and she pointed.

  “That’s patently unfair!” I said. “No special consultation, unless it’s on both sides.”

  “If we’re gonna have special consultation,” my father said to me, “I want your sister. You can have your mother. She was never any good at this up at the beach.” And I noticed Brenda laughed and her hand briefly grazed my father’s shoulder, again, before it settled back on her stomach.

  My mother came into the room, frowning. “Brenda, that was Frank. He said he wanted to come over to see you, to give you your Christmas presents.”

  Brenda’s hand fell from her stomach and her face chalked over. “What did you say to him?”

  “Well, I told him we were getting ready to go to bed, and maybe he could come by tomorrow—”

  “And?” Brenda said, tense.

  “And he said he’d just come by for a minute, and he was leaving right away.”

  “Oh, shit!” Brenda said, turning away from us.

 
“Well, look, Terry,” my father said, throwing down his cards. “Just call him back and tell him he can’t come over tonight. Or I’ll call him myself. Christmas is over. It’s too late to go passing around presents at this time of night.” Frank and my father get along really well; they love discussing football stats and playing cards together, which is why the tone in his voice took me back.

  “But he said he was leaving right away,” my mother said, looking guilty. “He just about hung up on me. I think he’s on his way here now.”

  There was a split-second silence before Brenda said, “That’s it. I’m outta here. I was gonna spend the night, but I’ve gotta get outta here now.” And she hustled into the living room to start collecting her presents.

  “Bren, honey, hold on a minute,” my mother said, pleading, following her. “Can’t you just see him for a minute, to swap presents? Just a minute, and then he’ll go, and it’ll be just us again tomorrow?” My mother had her hands on the presents in Brenda’s arms, trying to take them away from her.

  “No, Terry!” Brenda snapped. “I can’t swap presents with him, because I didn’t buy him any presents! I didn’t have any intention of seeing him! And how dare you say it’s okay for him to come over just because you want us to get back together again?”

  “I didn’t invite him over!” my mother protested. “He wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise! He strong-armed me!”

  “Hey, hey, both of you, take it easy!” my father called out, ineffectually, because Brenda was already in motion, up the stairs to retrieve her things, my mother chasing after her. My father and I heard a door slam, then the resigned footsteps of my mother coming back down the stairs.

  “Jesus Christ,” my father said, collapsing back onto the couch, looking at me. “Can’t we have just one night of peace and quiet in this house?” I didn’t know how to answer; I just looked at him and shrugged.

  My mother reemerged in the doorway. “She thinks it’s me. She thinks I told him to come over. But I didn’t! It’s not my fault. Now what am I gonna do?”

  “When he gets here,” my father said, finishing off the rest of his Manhattan, “we’re gonna tell him that Brenda left because she’s not ready to see him yet. And that she’ll call him when she’s ready, and it’s her right to see him or not to see him when she wants. And that’s that.”