He cocked his head to show he was listening. "We know you want to be independent, you want an apartment or something when you get out, that's what the doctor said, and we agree. We want you to be on your own. But you should never feel that you can't come here whenever you need to."
His mother looked sad and old. It was the first time he'd ever considered his mother old. The thick makeup did not cover the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth and all of her features, taken together, made her appear tired, resigned to something.
"I'll always be here," she said. "This is our home, your home. . . . I know I'm not supposed to say anything that might upset you and if I do just say so and I'll shut up. But you need to know." Her voice took on the quality of a counselor and her words came more deliberately. "Your father's been having some sort of trouble lately. I don't know if it's work, or if he's sick, or if it's me." She took a deep breath. "He's been so far away, so deep in thought. He's even talked about moving out for a while."
She looked up. "Am I upsetting you, sugar? I don't want to upset you." Randy shook his head, said softly, "Go on," and his mother gave a tiny crooked smile for the spoken words. Reaching up, she touched his hand on the back of the chair.
"You know you were always his favorite don't tell any of the others that but you were. You were so small when you were born, and so sickly, and I had my hands full with Teddy and then so soon after you came, here came Janet and you just became your daddy's boy. He took you everywhere and loved you so much. And then when you grew up so strong and quick and smart it just seemed like, somehow, my God, we were blessed. He loved to watch you play ball and, you know, he coached your team that one year."
She cut it off with a little gasp-like sob, as if she wanted to cry but couldn't, or wouldn't. She looked at the table top, at the basket of fruit in the center.
"And then when you went away and didn't come home she wasn't such a bad girl, she had a good disposition, even though we all knew it would never work for you. Do you see that now, that it would have never worked? I mean she was so much older than you and with the baby and all well, your father just went kind of crazy. He always wanted so much for you. I think he got mad at you and then when we found you and you looked so, so, sort of beaten up, and you were so quiet, like now, and whenever you looked at us it just felt like you were looking right through us. And he got even madder. He thought you were blaming us for something. . . . Were you blaming us for something?"
Her upturned face was pathetic. He took a step toward the kitchen, but she reached out and took his hand. The walls of the cavity inside him quivered. She said: "Did she hurt you, darling? Did she hurt you bad? I know how women can be. They catch a man and then hurt him, like they're paying back that one man for every bad thing that's ever happened to them? They cut the man out and make him feel cold. Is that what happened? Why don't you say anything? Why won't you talk to us?" He tried to pull his hand free.
She said, "I'm sorry, I'll shut up, but I thought you should know that your father loves you, we all love you and want you to come home now . . . for a while. It's time for you to come home now so we can get everything straightened out."
Randy ripped his hand free and started toward the kitchen.
"All we want is for you to say something to us," she said. "Can't you just talk to us? We can work everything out."
He walked through the kitchen to the door and when he glanced back he saw his mother blowing her nose into a Kleenex.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The cool day was like a salve on his skin. The air smelled fresh and lively with wood smoke. He looked up at the chimney and wondered why his father hadn't made a fire. Always before on holidays, when it was cool, the fireplace in the den had been the center of activity from early morning till late at night.
He walked through the yard. The flowerbeds were still brimming with green things but the trees had turned; they were bright with the colors of autumn. On the stone path he came to the bed of geraniums, soft reds and pinks. A fall bloom, he observed, but it won't last with this cool weather.
The inside of the garage was neat and clean. Tools of various kinds hung on the walls. In the back was a big wooden trunk that his father had built to store sporting equipment. Next to it sat a dusty bag of golf clubs and an old pair of water skis. From the box rose the fumes of his past. He found a basketball and a football and his father's faded catcher's mitt. Every summer afternoon when Randy was a boy his father used to catch his pitches. The outside wall of the garage served as backstop.
He picked up the mitt and rifled the box for a hardball. The leather of the ball was yellowish and crisscrossed with scratches. He remembered that he'd been given the ball as a trophy after pitching a one-hit shutout that sent the team to the play-offs his senior year. That was the year he met Jean.
He started popping the ball into the mitt as he went out to the yard. He tossed the ball high above him and leapt to catch it. He threw it onto the roof of the garage and waited for it to roll down. For several minutes he threw the ball onto the garage and caught it, until he was tired. The illness had made him weak. He sat down on the concrete bench near the geraniums.
The blooms were big and whole. He leaned over and plucked one and held it to his nose. It smelled metallic, pungent, musty, not bad, and he slipped the stem behind his ear. He sat there for a long time then until an image of his mother's face formed in his mind. The face caused a pain at the opening to the cavity. He didn't want to feel the pain, but the image had taken over.
The face told him what he had known for a long time that she was looking for love. She was looking for it in everything and everyone. That's why her face was sad. That's why she could laugh and smile and even joke but still have a sad face. And he knew that she understood nothing. She knew nothing of herself, her children, her husband. He saw that she knew only pain, a specific pain that picked at that place in her chest where her heart should be, but that she knew nothing of her heart. She knew and he saw it now she knew only that when she felt the pain she was feeling love. He had felt the same pain for many years, and he knew what it was, for the only time he felt the pain was at those times when he saw or thought of those people he thought he loved. And there was something sickening about it. The pain came when he saw what it was about them that he loved. He could see now something about each of them that made the pain in the cavity in his chest, and he allowed these things to play through his mind. They were some of the same pictures he saw when, in his room at the hospital, the sounds of ambulances coming and going in the night outside, he felt the emptiest.
He lay on the bench and looked up at the soft blue sky.
His mother is laughing at a joke. She has told the joke many times before and she always laughs. They are at a restaurant and everyone else at the table is smiling or making faces, and someone says, "We've heard that a thousand times," and he sees bubbles of spittle at the edges of his mother's mouth. With her napkin she wipes the bubbles away then glances to either side.
The contrail of a jet formed on the sky, way up. He watched it become more distinct, linear, tracking across the great openness; then it disappeared into the glare of the sun.
His father is dressed for work, hurrying about. "Important meeting," he says. It's early morning, all the children are at the breakfast table. His father walks in, smelling of aftershave, leans across the table for his orange juice, and there, in the folds of his fly, under the points of his vest, is a safety pin. Before he leaves he looks down to be sure it's still fastened.
There was something on the wind. Someone was cooking steaks. He heard voices, a conversation, roll by him as if someone had turned up the volume of a radio and then quickly turned it down.
Teddy in a sweatshirt. A touch football game in a neighbor's yard. Teddy is screaming at Randy for doing something stupid. There has been a scuffle, almost a fistfight. Randy sees himself on his knees on the ground, feeling stupid, and Teddy, very angry, almost kicks him. "You ignorant shit," Teddy ye
lls and one of the other boys says, "Yeah, you ignorant shit." Teddy turns on the boy and says, "Shut up or I'll push your nose in."
The contrail appeared on the other side of the sun.
Janet, crying, her face taut and wrinkled and ugly, stained with tears. She's telling their mother something serious between her sobs. The two of them are sitting on her bed. He can see them through the narrow slit of the barely open door. "I told him not to," she says. "I told him I didn't want to. . . .
These images had locked themselves into the cavity. And they churned up waves of other images until something caught and, like a short movie, a series of pictures rolled through his mind.
His father, gray-haired and business-suited, with a woman. He sees them eating together in the restaurant of the old Plaza Hotel near the university. At first he assumes the woman is a client of his father and he almost goes over to greet them. But something makes him stop. They appear so familiar with each other, side by side in a booth, and, for that reason, he takes pains not to let them see him. He makes an excuse to his friends and leaves the restaurant as quickly as possible.
He had tried to forget it, telling himself it must have been business, but there were the wine glasses. The way they held them up, as if toasting each other, intimated a greater closeness, perhaps even love. He had never considered his father a "lady's man." Handsome, yes, perhaps even charming in a rough-hewn way, but always the homebound type. He wanted to laugh at the idea of his father having a mistress. The word itself seemed ridiculous when applied to his father. It seemed ridiculous until the memory of that day juxtaposed itself with the memory of his mother's sad open face. He went searching for that face.
And then he could see the reflection of his mother and a little boy in a shop window. He was the little boy and he had to look up the window to see her face, she was so much taller then. A music store? Yes. There were trumpets and guitars and violins. And then another reflection in the window, a man, a man his mother seemed to know and like. The man bent and shook Randy's hand and patted him on the head. The man and his mother talked for a long time about places and people he knew nothing about. They kept saying, "Remember. . . ." They said it so many times that they forgot about him. They forgot about him and he wandered away, went to the hobby shop across the mall. He sat on the carpeted floor in the back of the store and turned the pages of a book about rockets, toy rockets. Soon his mother was standing above him. She said, "I'm sorry, sweetheart, but the store is closing. Can we come back tomorrow and pick out a rocket?"
Now a stronger picture crowded in, a more recent picture.
His mother in her apron, the apron he and Teddy and Janet gave her when they were children. It must be Christmas-time. Dinner is over and the bottle of sherry is on the table. Small stemmed glasses, some still partly filled with the dark wine, stand among the dishes and platters. His mother's eyes are large and shiny, her lips set in a smile, and she has been "chattering about her silly life," as Teddy calls it. "I think I'm tipsy," she says and turns up the glass to finish her sherry as all the children laugh. His father leans over and says something into her ear. Her smile disappears. And, averting his eyes from his mother's face, Randy sees a stain it must be grease on the apron's pink heart. She gets up and clears the table. In the kitchen he sees the stain is faded, as if she has tried to rub it out with a damp rag, but he says, "You've stained your apron," and he shows her where. She glances down and says, "Oh that, that's been there for years. It won't come out." She pats him on the chest and quickly goes to the sink, stares into the sink for a long time before she starts rinsing dishes to put in the dishwasher.
He put the catcher's mitt under his head. He had to adjust the flower behind his ear so it wouldn't be crushed. The white smear of the contrail stretched all the way across the sky now.
His mother seemed silly to him sometimes, silly and sad, but then so did his father. The things they did and said, it seemed, were part of a never-ending show in which they had no choice but to perform, their lines and actions written for them by someone who wanted to watch them squirm. They were caricatures, every movement grand, every word fraught with message, every sentence the completion of one begun by the other actor, their eyes always seeking cues, asking, Did I say that right? What now? He couldn't imagine them with separate lives; they were merely Mom and Dad, always together. The word "marriage" even seemed silly in relation to them, as if they had come into the world joined in body and mind and had no distance over which to view themselves as separate. They were an animal with two heads, like something in the circus, the eyes of one always gazing into the distance, the eyes of the other always following the gaze. The earnest, beseeching gaze, like a photo of a soul-warmed couple on a religious calendar. They didn't know they were silly, had no way of knowing. He couldn't imagine his mother ever wanting to know, for fear, the fear of knowing. His father? Maybe. And he wondered, was it his mother's silliness that made him think it possible his father knew another woman, or was it her sadness? Can you hate your own sadness? And can that make you silly? Perhaps she did see her sadness and, hating it, turned away, sought relief.
Perhaps she knew another man? She had once. And a new image came to his mind of his parents with lecherous grins on their faces as they chased each other, on a beach, grabbing and prodding private parts of their bodies. How silly.
He told himself to stop it, turn it off. He thought he should do something to turn it off. But he wasn't sure he wanted to go back inside and he didn't know where else to go. So he lay on the bench and watched a small cloud ease across the sky.
The four of them, his family, are standing in muddy-white water at the edge of a beach. A jetty of jagged rocks angles away behind them. They are a blurred portrait until Randy focuses the camera. Each of them is red from the sun and dressed in a swimsuit. Teddy has a fishing pole over his shoulder and his father is holding a net. None of them likes to be photographed and so they are cutting up. Janet, who comes only to her mother's waist, is making clown faces. Teddy is hopping as if he has springs on his feet. His mother's hands are on her hips and she is talking, trying to calm everyone so the ordeal can be completed. His father suddenly reaches behind the others and loops the net over his mother's head. Randy pushes the button to get the picture. When he takes the camera down he sees his mother, standing apart from the others, struggling with the net and kicking at the water. His father and the children are laughing at her. She frees herself, throws the net down. She slogs out of the water, her head down. She says, "Give me that camera," and he does. She walks back to the water and heaves the camera out into the waves.
Lying there he thought he knew now why he had left college and the house and gone away with Jean to live on her aunt's farm and why, after that had ended, he had come back to the city and worked at a vegetable stand and why he had lived for weeks in a dirty hotel room down the street from the vegetable stand until one day he couldn't get up in the morning and he lay in that bed for three days before the manager told him to leave . . . and the next thing he remembered was the face and white-clad shoulders of a doctor leaning over him and the faces behind the doctor were those of his parents and when he saw the faces he felt the pain in the cavity of his chest and screamed, "Get them out of here!"
Randy stood up from the bench and went into the house. His mother was still at the dining table. She looked around and smiled the smile of someone who wants to hear something sweet and pleasant but fears the sound of something harsh and cruel. He walked up to her, took the geranium from behind his ear and gave it to her. He said, "Here, you wear this. It'll look nice."
She smiled up at him in thanks and tried to put her arms around his waist but he turned and walked away. He went to his bedroom and lay down on his old bed.
2
Secret Exposures
There was a rumble in the attic. The furnace had cycled on. From the vent over the bedroom door blew a gust of warm air. The brown fringe of the bedspread on the top bunk fluttered in the breeze. He l
ay still on his bed and watched it flutter.
He had dozed for a while, waking, sleeping again. His mother looked in on him once; he had heard the door open and close, as when he was young. Then the others came home. Voices rattled the house, shoes thumped the floor. Now he could tell that someone was in the utility room down the hall: the door to the clothes dryer banged shut and here came the machine's soft rotating purr. His scalp tingled. They were in the hall just outside his room. He heard voices, his parents, whispering, arguing again.
"It might be juicy but you can't stuff a barbecued turkey."
"It's not barbecued, it's smoked."
"Big difference." Her voice boomed.
"Shhh. They'll hear you."
"That's why I wanted a Butterball."
"How was I supposed to know that?"
"I wanted stuffing and gravy, and so will they."
"Then do your own damn shopping from now on."
"Shhh. Bud's trying to sleep."
"Oh."
So it was the turkey. His father had been carrying the brown bag when Randy and Teddy and Mary arrived from the hospital. He had met them outside on the sidewalk his blue Ford bounced into the driveway just after they parked at the curb and Randy had thought it odd that his parents had only that morning bought the turkey. He sensed they had been arguing about it all day. His father had acted nervous. "Your mother's cooking up something really good," he kept saying in the yard. He'd say, "Gosh, it's good to see you, Bud," laughing awkwardly. He had given Randy a Sports Illustrated that he must have picked up at the grocery store. "Thought you might like some reading matter, Buddy." Randy seldom read Sports Illustrated, though his father had been buying it for years. His father had wanted him to play pro ball after college but that all ended when Randy was hurt. When he quit playing. Quit everything. And everything changed.
Memorial Day Page 8