The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  By “our success,” I think Ma meant our safety. The year before, a neighbor of ours, Billy Covington, had been killed in Vietnam—shot down during a bombing raid near Haiphong. As a kid, Billy had walked to our house after school because his father had left the family and his mother worked downtown. Four years older than Thomas and me, he was unbeatable at tag and baseball and his favorite game, Superman. He owned Superman pajamas, I remember, and would pack them in his school bag and change into them before we played, completing his costume with one of our bath towels, which Ma would safety-pin around his neck. Billy would begin each episode of our play with an imitation of the TV show opening: “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive!” But if Billy seemed invincible as the Man of Steel, he was pitiable afterwards. “Poor Billy,” Ma would sometimes sigh as we watched him walk down our front steps, hand in hand with Mrs. Covington. “He doesn’t have a nice daddy like you boys do. His father left Billy and his mother high and dry.”

  Years later, Billy Covington was our paperboy—a lanky near-man of fourteen or fifteen whose voice alternated between baritone and donkey’s bray and who, from the street, could land a folded Daily Record at the base of our cement flowerpot with deadly accuracy. By the time Thomas and I entered high school ourselves, Billy had graduated and enlisted in the Air Force and become irrelevant. At his military funeral, I thought nothing about the meaning of Billy Covington’s life and death or the waste of the Vietnam War or even the implications for my brother and me. I focused, instead, on Billy’s fiancée, whose breasts shook tantalizingly as she sobbed, and on his black GTO (386 cubes, 415 horses). Maybe his mother would want to sell his “goat” dirt cheap so she could forget about him and get on with her life, I remember calculating in the very presence of Billy’s flag-draped silver casket.

  Although Billy Covington’s death failed to move me at age sixteen, it clobbered my mother. “Goddamn this war,” she said in the car on the way back from the memorial service. “Goddamn this war to hell.” In the backseat, Thomas and I looked at each other, jolted. We had never before heard Ma use God’s name in vain. More shocking, still, was the fact that she’d said it right in front of Ray, who had fought in both World War II and Korea and thought all antiwar protesters should be put against the wall and shot. Ma moped for days afterward. She found an old snapshot of Billy and bought a frame and put the picture on her chest of drawers along with the studio portraits of Thomas and me and her framed photos of her father and Ray. She said novenas on behalf of Billy’s departed soul. Her eyes teared over whenever she saw Mrs. Covington walking zombielike past our house. I remember feeling slightly annoyed by what I perceived as Ma’s mournful overreaction. It was only years later—well after the trouble with Thomas had begun—that I came to understand my mother’s strong reaction to Billy Covington’s death: four years our senior, Billy had been, all his life, a sort of living “preview of coming attractions” for her two boys. If Superman could be shot down from the sky, then so could his younger sidekicks. Vietnam could kill us. College would keep us safe.

  Ray hadn’t really signed our graduation cards with love and congratulations. Our stepfather had, in fact, opposed the idea of college educations for Thomas and me. For one thing, he said, he and Ma couldn’t afford twin tuition bills. He should know, not her. He was the one who paid the bills and managed their savings. She had no idea what they could or couldn’t afford. For another thing, from what he read and heard down at the shipyard, half the teachers at those colleges were Communists. And half the kids were on drugs. If he ever caught either of us messing with that kind of junk, he’d knock us into the day after tomorrow. He couldn’t for the life of him see why two able-bodied young men out of high school couldn’t work for a living. Or enter the Navy the way he had done. There were worse things in life than a military career. It was the draftees they were sending to Vietnam; enlisted men had choices. Or, if we didn’t want that, maybe he could get us in down at Electric Boat as apprentice pipe fitters or electricians or welders. Some of those jobs carried deferments. Building submarines might not be a fancy college-boy job, but it “backed the attack.” It put meat and potatoes on the table, didn’t it?

  “But that’s not the point, Ray,” my mother said one night at supper.

  “What do you mean it’s not the point?” His fist banged against the tabletop hard enough to make the dishes jump. “I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is, Tweedledum and Tweedledee here have been living high off the hog all their lives. The two of them know nothing but take, take, take, and I’m getting goddamned fed up with it.” He got up and slammed out of the house. When he came back, he was speaking single syllables to Thomas and me but nothing at all to Ma. He gave her the silent treatment for days.

  After that, there were arguments and tears behind my mother and Ray’s bedroom door. Ma threatened to go to work if she had to in order to get us the money for school, and when Ray told her no one would hire her, she called his bluff and filled out an application for a maid’s job down at Howard Johnson’s. She was petrified at the thought of working outside the home—afraid of taking orders from a boss and making mistakes, scared that she might have to make small talk with strangers who would look at her funny because of her cleft lip. Howard Johnson’s called her for an interview and offered her the job that same afternoon. She was to start the following Monday.

  On the morning of her first day of work, Ma stood at the stove cooking breakfast in her uniform, distracted, her hands shaking visibly. From his seat at the table, Ray taunted and bullied her. People were pigs. There was no telling what they’d leave behind for her to clean up. A while back, he’d read a story in the Bridgeport Herald about a maid who’d found an aborted baby wrapped up in bloody sheets. Ma clunked his dish of eggs down in front of him. “All right, Ray. That’s enough,” she said. “I’ll clean up whatever I have to. These boys are going to school and that’s that.” Only then—when the threat of a working wife stood before him in a yellow acetate uniform—did my stepfather agree to cough up four thousand dollars for Thomas’s and my college educations and allow my mother to stay home. No wife of his was going to clean toilets for strangers. No wife of his was going to do nigger work.

  Relieved to be spared the outside world, Ma was nevertheless ashamed not to show up at her new job. She made me drive down to Howard Johnson’s and surrender her uniform on a wire hanger. The man at the desk made a joke about it. Holding up the uniform, he called into the empty collar. “Hello, Connie? Yoo-hoo? Anybody home?” I made no objection on my mother’s behalf. I might have even smiled at the joke. But I was so pissed off that when I got outside, I kicked the tire of Ray’s Fairlane, hard enough to break my toe. It was Ray I was kicking, not the tire or the stupid fuck of a desk clerk. With Ray’s four thousand dollars and our student loans and the money we made from our part-time jobs, Thomas and I now had the funds to go to school. But he had made Ma beg for that money—had taken his usual pound of flesh and then some. Over the years, he had taken so much of her that it was a wonder she wasn’t an empty uniform.

  As a high school senior, I had hungered for a clean break from my entire family—a reprieve from Ray’s bullying and Ma’s overindulgence and from the lifelong game of “me and my shadow” I had played with Thomas. My grades and SATs were decent, and my guidance counselor had helped me envision how I might turn my work as a YMCA swimming instructor—a job I loved and was good at—into a career in teaching. Duke University had rejected me, but I’d been accepted at New York University and the University of Connecticut. Thomas had applied only to UConn and been accepted. At first, he didn’t know what he wanted to be, but then he said he wanted to be a teacher, too.

  When cost made it impossible for me to distance myself from my brother, I lobbied hard for separate dorms, separate roommates at UConn. It was time for each of us to become our own person, I told Thomas. It was the perfect opportunity for both of us to make the break. But Thomas resisted the idea of my cutting fr
ee, offering a number of reasons why separation was a big mistake. By summertime, his main argument centered on our joint ownership of that typewriter. “But it’s portable!” I kept screaming in exasperation. “I’ll deliver it to you when you need it.”

  “It’s just as much mine as it is yours,” he shot back. “Why should I have to wait around for someone to deliver a typewriter I already half-own?”

  “Keep it in your room then!”

  Sensing Thomas’s gathering panic about our separation, Ma appeared out of the blue one afternoon at the YMCA pool while I was working. At the time, I had a crush on the head pool instructor, a woman in her twenties named Anne Generous who was married to a sailor. At night, in the dark, I’d sometimes lie in my top bunk and pull down my underpants, pretending to pull down Anne Generous’s black one-piece bathing suit with its YMCA insignia. I’d imagine her swimsuit-trapped breasts popping free, Anne Generous fondling one in each hand like a woman in a dirty magazine. I’d stroke those long, wet legs of hers as I lay there stroking my own boner and let go inside of Anne Generous the stuff that spilled onto my chest and belly. Below, in the bottom bunk, my brother slept unstained.

  Innocent of our nighttime flings, Anne Generous told me one afternoon at the pool that I was a sweetie pie but too shy for my own good. She kept goading me to ask out a fellow instructor named Patty Katz. Patty was a junior at our school. She was cheerful and patient with kids and had purple acne on her back and a swimsuit that was always getting stuck in the crack of her ass. “Patty’s crazy about you, Dominick,” Anne confided. “She thinks you’re the greatest.”

  When Ma showed up that day at the Y pool, Anne Generous and Patty both shook her hand and said they were pleased to meet her. They directed the kids to the other side of the pool so that my mother and I could have some privacy. Ma told me that she was sorry to bother me at work but that she really needed to speak to me about Thomas when Thomas wasn’t around. The two of them had had a little talk, she said. He was nervous about being away from home; living with me would make him feel more secure. And he was upset about the typewriter. She told me she just wanted everything to go right. It would be easier if the typewriter stayed put in one room, wouldn’t it?

  I stood there, saying nothing, watching the tears in her eyes.

  “I know he gets under your skin sometimes. But could you just do me a favor and be his roommate? He’s just feeling a little unsure of himself, that’s all. He’s never had your self-confidence, Dominick. Things have always been harder for him than they’ve been for you. You know that.”

  “Things have been plenty hard for me,” I said. “Growing up in our house.”

  Ma looked away. She said she knew one thing: that deep down, no matter how it seemed, our stepfather loved us very, very much. Ignoring my snort, she said that all Thomas needed was a little boost.

  “And what about what I need, Ma?” I said. “What about that?”

  She had interrupted a game of water tag when she’d arrived, and now several kids drifted back to our side of the pool and began calling my name. One of the boys cannonballed into the water and accidentally splashed my mother. I swore out loud at him, I remember, and everyone just stopped—treaded water and stared. From the middle of the pool, Anne Generous looked at me with a mixture of pity and disapproval.

  “All right, fine,” I told Ma. “You win. I’ll room with him. Now would you please get out of here, for cripe’s sakes, before you get me fired? Your skirt’s sopping wet. You’re embarrassing me.”

  After work that day, I stayed in the pool, swimming laps and sputtering curses and arguments into the chlorine. I hated my brother almost as much as I hated Ray. If I gave in, I’d never get free of him. Never. I swam until my eyes burned and my head ached—until my arms and legs were leaden.

  When I got out of the Y, Patty Katz beeped at me from the front seat of her parents’ station wagon. She knew I was upset, she said. She was a good listener. Her mother drove her crazy, too. Why didn’t I let her buy me an ice cream?

  When we got to the Dairy Queen, Patty got out of the car and got my cone so that I could sit and sulk. I studied her as she waited in line. With her hair dry and her clothes on, she wasn’t that bad. She was passable. She got back in the car and handed me my ice cream and an inch-thick stack of napkins. “What am I, a slob or something?” I said, and she blushed and apologized and said she was the slob—she was a klutz and a half.

  On the long drive we took, Patty told me she thought that I was right to insist on a new roommate and that I should stick to my guns. She said she knew who Thomas was but didn’t really know him; they’d been in a study hall together, that was all. She said she could tell us apart with absolutely no problem: I was cool and my brother was a little on the finky side, no offense. A lot of people at school thought that about us. I’d be surprised.

  We ended up on a dirt road out by the Falls, with the station wagon’s backseat flopped down and my tongue down Patty’s throat and her hand on my crank. She was eager to please but inexperienced, yanking away as if she’d gotten hold of a cow’s udder. “Faster, faster,” I whispered, and guided her, my hand over her hand. When she got it about right, I closed my eyes and came to the wet inside of Anne Generous’s mouth, to my hands on Anne Generous’s breasts, to Anne Generous’s hurried stroking.

  I cleaned myself off with the Dairy Queen napkins. Patty Katz said she had never done anything like this before. It wasn’t that she regretted it. She wasn’t sure how she felt. Her voice, her crying, were like the sounds of a girl in some other car. I got up, got zipped, got out of the car for a walk.

  When Patty dropped me off at my house, she said she thought she loved me. I thanked her for the ice cream and told her I’d call her the next day—a promise I doubted I’d deliver on, even as I was making it. After she drove away, I stood there in the front yard, looking up at the light behind the shade in Ma and Ray’s bedroom. It was after midnight: Ma was up there worrying. It wasn’t as if she ever asked for much, I reminded myself. Or got much, either, for that matter—from Ray or from my brother and me. I had put up with Thomas for seventeen years at that point. What was one more friggin’ year?

  I didn’t call Patty Katz that next day. And the following week, when I suggested that she and I go for another drive out by the Falls, she told me she’d rather go to a movie or go bowling or do something with other people. Did I know Ronnie Strong from school? He and her girlfriend Margie were going out. Maybe we could double. Yeah, maybe, I told her. But I didn’t want to date Patty; I only wanted to screw her. So I was cool to her for the rest of the week and got a little chillier each week after that. Anne Generous, too, had lost some of her allure. She had large feet for a woman her size. She could be bossy. By the middle of August, I was hardly speaking to either of them.

  But here’s the funny thing: after the big stink Thomas had made about that typewriter, he hardly touched the damn thing all during our freshman year. Hardly ever cracked the books, either. He’d been a pretty conscientious student in high school—had worked harder for his B’s and B-minuses than I’d worked for my A’s. But at UConn, Thomas couldn’t sit still long enough to study. He claimed he was too distracted. The dorm was too noisy. His professors were impersonal. Our room was too hot; it bothered his sinuses and made him sleepy whenever he tried to read. He was always walking out to the fire escape for gulps of air, or squirting Super Anahist up his nose, or talking about how miserable he was—how much he hated all the jerks and losers and skanky girls who went to our stupid school. Instead of studying, he watched TV in the lounge, drank instant coffee all day long (we had an illegal hot plate), then stayed up half the night and slept through his morning classes. He resisted making friends and resented the friendships I made with some of the other guys on our floor—Mitch O’Brien and Bill Moynihan and this senior named Al Menza who was always looking for a game of pinochle or pitch. Thomas would get a bug up his ass if someone just knocked on the door or asked to borrow something of mi
ne or wanted me to play some pickup basketball. “Am I invisible or something?” he’d huff. Or mimic. “Is Dominick here? Where’s Dominick? Everyone loves Dominick the Wonder Boy!”

  “Hey, if you want to play some hoops, then just come out on the court and start playing,” I told him. “What do you expect, an engraved invitation?”

  “No, I don’t, Dominick. All I expect is that my own brother isn’t going to stab me in the back.”

  “How’s my playing a game of basketball stabbing you in the back?” I asked, exasperated.

  He sighed and flopped facedown on his bed. “If you don’t know, Dominick, then just forget it.”

  One afternoon, Menza asked me in the middle of a pitch game what was “with” my brother. Instantly, I felt the cards bend in my hand. Felt my face get hot. “What do you mean, what’s ‘with’ him?” I said.

  “I don’t know. He’s a little off kilter or something, isn’t he? You don’t see him all day long and then you get up in the middle of the night to take a leak and there he is, wandering around the halls like Lurch from The Addams Family.”

  The other guys laughed. O’Brien was one of them. I forget who else was playing with us. O’Brien said he’d gotten up one night and seen Thomas running laps around our dorm. After midnight, this was. The middle of the frickin’ night. I said nothing, stared hard at my cards, and when I finally looked up, all three guys were looking at me. “Jesus Christ, Birdsey, you’re blushing like a virgin on her wedding night,” Menza said. “Someone pop your cherry or something?”