Shrug

by Lisa Braver Moss

  I kind of knew what Hildy meant about the order of the Beatles. It was like red, blue, green, and yellow: ever since I first saw the line of wooden cubbyholes in my kindergarten classroom, those four colors seemed to demand being thought of only in that sequence. It holds true for the Beatles too. Red really is the color of John Lennon. Paul is sky-blue. George is green, and Ringo is yellow. I’d have to tell that to Brett and see if he agreed, even though lately, he was always burning incense in his room, which Stephanie was pretty sure he did to mask the smell of grass. One thing Stephanie and I both knew for sure was that we didn’t want to get hung up on drugs.

  “Dad?” I shouted. “Can we put this on?” The living room turntable and speakers sounded a lot better than the children’s portable record player, but we weren’t allowed to use it ourselves.

  My father came back into the living room, his eyes twinkling. “Let’s do it!”

  The three of us gathered around my father as he slid the disc from the inside cover, extending his hand so that the middle fingers reached the papered inner circle while his thumb stayed at the edge. “Never put your fingers in the grooves,” he reminded us—then used the sleeve of his shirt in a round elbow motion to remove any dust from the factory.

  I didn’t say anything, but because of Brett, I was already familiar with Yesterday And Today, along with all the other albums. I’d figured out that when I responded deeply to a song, it was often written by George Harrison. “You Like Me Too Much,”

  “If I Needed Someone,” “Think for Yourself”—I loved all of them. There were plenty of great Lennon-McCartney ones too, like “Ticket to Ride.”

  So when my father laid the record on the turntable and put the needle down, I was surprised to hear the dazzling guitar opener of “And Your Bird Can Sing.” My father had started with side two. As soon as he went back into the kitchen, Hildy went over and cranked the volume up. By now Hildy had also heard Beatles records at parties and friends’ houses, and I wondered if she also noticed we were listening to the second side first.

  “I’ll be John, you be Paul,” Hildy shouted to me over the music. I did what came naturally from playing violin, and Hildy corrected me, explaining that Paul was left-handed, so I had to “strum” with my left hand and pretend to hold the neck of the guitar with my right. “Is this good?” I asked Hildy, and she nodded to the beat. Drew, having chosen drums, was tapping his hands on the coffee table as my father came back into the room.

  My father clapped and danced around, acting as if he liked the music. The clapping sounded forced and heavy, being on the downbeat, but I was so happy I didn’t care. He patted Drew’s curly head.

  “Don’t!” Drew jerked his head away and resumed his drumming.

  “Okay, Beatle boy,” my father chuckled. He resumed his clapping, an unlit pipe hanging out of his mouth. As the song wound down, he made his way back into the kitchen, twirling one end of his mustache. I heard my mother talking to Trish about how important it was to breastfeed.

  Next came the mysterious beauty of “If I Needed Someone.” I imagined a dark wood panel next to one of the Beatles’ beds, a telephone nearby. But wouldn’t you get in trouble for carving your number on someone’s wall? My father was back, clapping on the downbeat again. I tried not to wince. Not only was he ruining the syncopation; he seemed to expect credit for it. But Hildy didn’t seem bothered. She never seemed bothered by him.

  “Beatle boy,” my father said affectionately, patting Drew’s head. Drew grimaced, and then my father scooped him up like a baby, grinning and cradling him. He danced around the room with Drew, his pipe dangling from his mouth.

  “No! Put me down! I’m Ringo!” Drew shouted, but my father was smiling, laughing, swaying Drew’s body in rhythm to the song. “Dad, stop! I’m six!” Drew shrieked now, kicking his legs. “I’m Ringo! Put me down!”

  “Dad, put him down!” I called. I remember the music was starting to sound silly to me. The way it probably sounded all along to my father.

  Hildy chimed in. “C’mon, Dad, he wants to be with us!”

  We had only an instant to absorb the transformation of my father’s face as he put Drew down, the absoluteness of that change and the complete attention it commanded. A moment before, my father had been an irritation to us—well, to me and Drew, at least. Now veins stood out in his neck and his forehead, and his face was red with rage. His pipe clattered to the floor as he began pummeling the top of Drew’s head with his fists. When Drew tried to turn away, one of the blows landed above his left eye.

  Panic gripped the insides of my wrists, my intestines, my bottom. “DAD!” Hildy and I screamed, and Drew howled as we desperately tried to pull my father off him. My voice was an underwater echo in slow motion. My legs felt as if I were in a dream: I had to run, but I was waist-deep in wet sand. “DAD! It was my fault!” Hildy shouted.

  Screams, chaos. The clang of a Revere Ware lid in the kitchen as my mother dropped what she was doing and came running. Terry and Trish following behind. Terror, yes, but also shame: we should have known. We all should have known. Carve your number on my wall—stupid! stupid! The Beatles were stupid idiots.

  No! No. My father—he was the stupid idiot. “You big fat shithead! Stop it! Just stop it!” I screamed, and my father whirled around and slapped me across the face, hard. The blow—I say blow because it felt more like a punch than a slap—didn’t land right on my cheek. It was more on my left ear.

  Whenever I got hit, whether it was a face slap or fists pounding on top of my head or on my back, there was always a moment before my body seemed to understand that it should hurt. It was like a grace period before the pain started, and the tears. This time was no different. What I felt first was really a sound, the sound of ear cartilage crunching against my skull. By the time the pain in my ear and face set in, I was crying, holding my face, glaring at him. “Just because you hit people doesn’t make you right!” I shrieked. Weirdly, I could hear my own voice in the room, and separately, I could also hear it from inside my head. My father raised his hand to me again, glowering.

  “Jules!” Terry yelled.

  My mother was shrieking, “What are you doing, you son of a bitch!” and running toward us. Hildy was crying and dragging Drew away. Slightly behind them, I was trying to escape, but my father lunged after me and managed to fist-thump me in the back, the blow softened by my flight, before my mother got there and began screaming right into his face. “Stop it, you son of a bitch!”

  “I’ll do it to you!” He leaped at my mother and began attacking her now, punching downward on the back of her head, her back, her shoulders, with both fists. “I’ll slam you, Willa! I’ll fucking slam you!”

  For just a moment, everything was slow. Maybe I kind of left my body. Or maybe it was the opposite, that I was more in my body, because suddenly I realized I wasn’t hearing anything with my left ear. Instead, there was a kind of ringing, on a note somewhere between E-flat and E-natural.

  A second later, I snapped back into the frenzy. “Stop it! Stop it!” I screamed at my father, trying to pull him off my mother. “You are just pathetic!”

  “JULES!” Terry roared, finally pulling him off. My mother collapsed onto the living room floor, sobbing and somehow alone, her arms still flailing away in self-protection even after my father flew out the front door.

  Slam!

  “Are you all right? Willa?” Terry asked, drawing a handkerchief out of the back pocket of his slacks and wiping his brow. “Kids?” he asked, turning to us.

  My teeth ached, and there was too much saliva in my mouth. I could hear myself wailing. I could hear it from inside my head, and I could hear it from outside my head. It seemed impossible that I had ever loved my father. I had hated him all along; I’d just forgotten it for a while here and there. I tried to fix the hatred in my mind permanently now, so I wouldn’t be swayed ever again. Never, even if he dyed a hundred pairs of white cotton socks with hot tea.

  Incredibly, the record was still o
n. “We Can Work It Out” blasted through the living room, and it seemed almost criminal that we’d so confidently cranked up the volume only minutes ago. “Turn it off,” Hildy moaned, grasping the side of her face. Drew was in her lap on the floor. My mother needed me, but dizzily, noisily, wiping my nose on the sleeve of my shirt, I veered past her, back toward the record player, because I couldn’t stand the music for one more second, either. I forced my shaky wrists to hold still and removed the needle from Yesterday And Today. Somehow, I was unable to be careless about it.

  Every detail was clear. The searing ear pain. The secondary pain on the right side of my upper back. The whitish lump standing out just above Drew’s left eye. Hildy rocking him back and forth. My mother’s belly rising and falling as she sobbed. My father’s pipe on its side on the floor, with little flecks of tobacco and ash nearby. Terry looking bulky and inept; Trish looking similarly ill-equipped. The fan-shaped gleams of light on the record. The putting on of side two instead of side one—the bastard must have assumed the sides were interchangeable. Dreck being dreck.

  Stupid! What a stupid idiot I was. It would never matter that we had heard side two first. We’d never listen to the record again. We’d never brag to our friends that we could get Beatles albums for free. I wouldn’t even tell Brett, ever.

  I left the disc exactly as it was and then switched the turntable to the “off” position so we Goldenthals could cry without the intrusion of ignorant songs.

  “I’m okay,” Drew insisted over and over, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with Hildy and me gathered around him on the tile floor, taking turns holding an ice-filled dish towel over his left eye. My mother didn’t believe in putting ice on a wound. She said it was too cold for the human body. But Drew liked the ice, and I knew my mother was too upset to give a damn.

  Hildy’s cheek was still red, and Drew’s eye was swollen. It had taken him a long time to stop counting by fours. Now that I had a moment, it occurred to me I could put my finger in my right ear to see whether I could hear out of my left ear. I could—but not very well. What I could hear was a ringing, somewhere between an E-flat and an E-natural.

  “Let’s try to clean it now,” Hildy said to Drew, running warm water over a washcloth which she wrung out and spread tenderly across his puffy, smeared face. “Sorry, Drewy,” she said as he grimaced. “How ‘bout another M&M?” She fished one out of the packet, and Drew opened his little mouth like a bird and crunched down on the cheery green pillow. His nose was shiny.

  Terry and Trish had stayed with us for a little while. Terry tried to help my mother settle down while Trish tried to comfort us kids, but she didn’t seem to have any idea what to do. For some reason, I thought of an airplane-crash movie Stephanie and I had seen on TV at her house. Trish was like that one dumb stewardess whose crisp uniform and matching hat couldn’t begin to mask her personal terror.

  Then Terry and Trish slipped out. They liked us; they wished us well, but they couldn’t really fix things for us. I knew my mother would hold it against them.

  Now, an hour later, she was in bed, and we kids were in our customary huddle, trying to learn, and teach one another, what had happened. We all touched pinkies, our way of comforting each other without saying anything. But it was hard to ignore my mother’s sounds. She’d left her door open: people shouldn’t be ashamed of their emotions! Hildy closed the bathroom door to shut out the noise. My mother was too busy suffering to get on our case about how children didn’t need privacy and how we should never close our bedroom doors, or the bathroom door either, because there was nothing to hide—and besides, what if there was an emergency?

  “We shouldn’t’ve tried to pretend we’re the Beatles,” Drew said.

  “I’m the one who wanted the goddamned record,” Hildy said. “If anything, he should have come after me.”

  “He did,” I reminded her.

  “Maybe he was mad because we cranked it up too loud,” said Hildy.

  “That doesn’t mean he can just start hitting us for no reason,” I said. “He is just pathetic. No one else has such a pathetic father.”

  “Don’t say that, Martha!”

  “You guys—” Drew begged.

  “Why not? He doesn’t have any self-control whatsoever. It’s an embarrassment just to have him as a father. Anyway, why are you defending him? He slapped you across the face.”

  “Which Mom does, too!” Hildy pointed out. “Dad just lost his temper.”

  “Lost his temper? Had a cow is more like it.” Lost his temper was for other fathers, the kind who felt bad afterward just for raising their voices. The kind who said they were sorry. The kind whose wives apologized, too, when they did something mean, and who didn’t think it was phony-baloney to think about other people’s feelings.

  “Don’t fight!” Drew cried.

  “Okay, okay,” Hildy and I both soothed.

  Hildy pulled out another M&M for him. “Drewy, should I go downstairs and get you fresh ice? I’ll wrap it up in a towel and come right back up, okay?” She opened the bathroom door.

  My mother was still crying and blowing her nose. Drew and I looked at each other. We both knew what needed to happen. I took care of my mother; Hildy took care of everything else. Red, blue, green, yellow. In the quiet, I could still hear the E-flat/E-natural ringing in my ear, but it seemed to have lessened. Drew nodded at me, and I patted his curly head before turning to go.

  “Mom?” I knocked on the open door and came in at the same time. “Are you all right?”

  “How could I be all right?” she shouted. “That louse. He’s like a bomb about to go off any minute. How can anyone live with that? You kids have no idea how hard it is.”

  If I said, “We do so, Mom! He hits us, too, haven’t you noticed?” my mother would tell me I didn’t understand. Or she’d argue that it was proof of my immaturity, thinking my own suffering was more important than it really was.

  “He can drop dead, for all I care,” she went on. I could hear Hildy wrestling with the ice tray downstairs as I perched on the edge of the bed and straightened my mother’s headband. She pulled away from me; the side of her head was hurt. A roll of toilet paper that she’d taken from the bathroom was lying on its side next to her. I put my finger in my right ear again just as Hildy dropped an ice cube on the kitchen floor. My hearing was better already.

  Even with the door open, the room felt airless, as if my mother’s misery were a solid. The smell of her and the stale bedding and the already-worn clothing draped carelessly over chairs—it all made me want to gag, or weep.

  Or hit. I wanted to hit my mother, I suddenly realized. Was that my actual nature? My father’s nature? Shrug.

  No. No. Even if I felt like it, I would never do it. That was the difference.

  “I’m kicking him out of here. Once and for all.”

  “I don’t blame you, Mom,” I said, adding, “I hate him, too, you know.”

  My mother looked at me and started crying again. “You know, you’re the only one of the lot of them with any insight!”

  10

  headache

  Now that my father was out of the house for good, my mother spent most of her time in bed, cycling through talk shows and KQED programs on the television set she’d recently bought with money her parents had sent her. My mother was always talking about how intellectually “limited” her parents were, how lacking in insight. They’d named her Gladys because of a character called Gladys on some God-awful radio melodrama that my grandmother just loved. (My mother found the name so repugnant that she’d changed her name to Willa when, as a young teenager, she picked up a book by Willa Cather in the library. Not sure if she ever read the book.) Also, my mother would talk about how sick her parents’ relationship was, since my grandmother was rarely sober, and my grandfather never did anything about it. My mother said her natural instincts had told her to move as far away from that pathetic situation as she could. When her parents sent her money, she’d spend it on stupid th
ings like a “gorgeous” antique chair that, even if it had been comfy, was too rickety to sit on. Then she’d complain about her parents some more, so we kids would understand that her love couldn’t be bought.

  The TV was black-and-white, like the small one in the kitchen, but it included a gadget called a remote control which my mother could aim at the television, her flannel arm extended, changing channels and turning the set on and off without having to get up. A brown hardback with a faded woven cloth cover sat on the bedside table, but I don’t think my mother ever opened it. Wads of toilet tissue were strewn across the bed, because she didn’t believe in wastebaskets. Sometimes she’d stick used toilet paper clumps into the lacy elastic wristbands of her nightgown and, when she started crying, pull the wads out and unfurl the congealed paper to look for an unused spot, sending tiny white particles into the dead air.

  My mother didn’t believe in keeping a lot of canned food in the house, because it wasn’t good for you. But she didn’t seem to believe in fresh food either. Hildy put meals together for me and Drew from whatever cans were lying around—Heinz baked beans, Riviera minestrone soup, Dole pineapple chunks—and figured out how to un-stale Triscuits by heating them in the oven for a few minutes on a cookie sheet, and then cooling them to crisp them up. But there were limits to Hildy’s creativity.

  Often Hildy would go to Smoke and Records after school and my father would give her money to go down Telegraph to Hunan Village, which Hildy and I always called Human Village, or next door to Joe’s for a burger and fries. Drew became a fixture at one of our neighbors’ in the afternoons and, often, for dinner.

  I was anxious about how frequently I was eating dinner at Stephanie and Brett’s, even though Sylvia didn’t bring up the fact that my mother basically never invited Stephanie to eat at my house—or that during school, Sylvia had been supplying me with lunches for the past two years. My mother didn’t respect Sylvia anymore, since Sylvia’s divorce hadn’t been a “necessary divorce” like hers: Morris wasn’t a louse, and this business of playing around sexually with other women went against nature. Real sex, between a man and a woman, was natural, and it was a very beautiful thing. I shouldn’t let myself get confused about the beauty of sex just because my father was a goddamned bastard.