I made my way to the city dock where I found my older brother with the family boat and some of his friends. He asked if I was okay and I told him I was and asked if I could hang out with him. He looked at the other guys and grudgingly, he said yes. They were awkward with me there and didn’t say much and one by one they peeled away and left us.
“Climb out there and untie us,” Bill said. “How’d you get over here?” He started the motor and got us moving.
“Doug drove me. Took me to a party. We got separated.”
“Oh.”
“Did I mess up your party?” I asked.
“No, don’t worry about it.” I listened to the familiar thumping of the Evinrude and began to relax. The water of the bay seemed so peaceful to me. I looked at the sky.
Lisa and I drove over to the Capitol Grill and found a booth under an elk’s head. “Why do you like to eat here?” I asked her.
“I don’t know, something about all these boys making decisions.” She sipped her tea. “Okay, I’ve got one for you. You’re in a boat and your motor cuts out, but you’re in shallow water, but you’re wearing two-hundred-dollar trousers, but your ride to the airport is just about to drive away from the beach. Why is this a legal issue?”
I shook my head.
“Because it’s a matter of Row versus Wade.” She smiled a smile I hadn’t seen in many years. “Lame, eh?”
“Did you make that up?”
“I stay up late, what can I say.” Lisa looked about the room, then back at me. “It’s good to see you, little brother.”
“Thanks. It’s good to see you, too. You know, I’m really proud of you. Dad would be proud of you as well. That clinic.”
“It’s not very glamorous.”
“I don’t know what that has to do with anything.” I noticed a man at the bar staring at us. “Do you know him?” I asked.
Lisa turned to see and the man looked away. “Nope. Why?”
“He just seemed interested in you for some reason.”
“That would be nice.”
“I’m sorry about what happened with Barry. I always thought he was a joke.”
“You said as much way back when.” Lisa laughed. “Remember how mad I got at you?”
The waiter came and took our orders. He smiled at Lisa as he put away his pad. “How’s it going, Doc?”
“Fine, Chick, what about with you? Chick, this is my brother, Monk. He’s visiting from California.”
I shook the man’s hand. “Chick.” I watched him walk away and smiled at my sister. “He likes you.”
“Maybe, but I think he used to date Bill.”
“Oh.” We sat there thinking about Bill for a while until I felt I’d thought about him long enough and said, “I had a rather nice conversation with one of your patients. I didn’t get her name. She had a little boy with her and blue nails.”
“I know who you’re talking about. That’s Tamika Jones. Tamika Jones actually has two children. The little boy with her today is named Mystery.”
“Mystery?”
“That’s right. And her daughter’s name is Fantasy.”
“Mystery and Fantasy.”
“Named after their fathers. One was a mystery and the other a fantasy.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I wish.”
“I make up shit for a living and I couldn’t have come up with that.” The man from the bar was staring again, but when I caught him he got up, left the bar and headed for the door. “Sometimes I feel like I’m so removed from everything, like I don’t even know how to talk to people.”
“You don’t,” Lisa said. “You never have. It’s not a bad thing. You’re just different.”
“Different from whom?”
“Don’t get defensive. It’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s a good thing. I’ve always wanted to be like you.”
It used to be that I would look for the deeper meaning in everything, thinking that I was some kind of hermeneutic sleuth moving through the world, but I stopped that when I was twelve. Though I would have been unable to articulate it then, I have since come to recognize that I was abandoning any search for elucidation of what might be called subjective or thematic meaning schemes and replacing it with a mere delineation of specific case descriptions, from which I, at least, could make inferences, however unconscious, that would allow me to understand the world as it affected me. In other words, I learned to take the world as it came. In other words still, I just didn’t care.
When I was thirteen and my sister was sixteen, she caught me masturbating with a magazine in the front basement. When she asked me what I was doing, I said, “Masturbating.”
My response was so casual that it gave her pause. As I was fastening my belt, she said, “You’re a pervert.”
“I might be,” I said. “I don’t know what a pervert is.”
“Well, you’d better not let Mother and Father catch you doing that. That’s all I have to say.”
“I hadn’t planned on it. And what if they did? Would they take it away from me?” My point made, I turned my attention back to the centerfold of my magazine.
“Where did you get that?” she asked. She glanced up the stairs at the closed basement door.
“I bought it.” Then to make her relax, “Father’s at the office and Mother won’t come down here because of the spiders.”
“It’s normal,” Lisa said, as if suddenly concerned about my scarring psychically.
“What’s normal?”
“Masturbation.”
“Do you do it?”
“No,” she said and turned red, leaned to start up the stairs.
“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?”
“For telling me it’s normal.”
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s normal if you don’t do it, too,” I said.
I gave a long look at Lisa’s cheeseburger as she pulled off the onions with her fork and set them at the side of her plate.
“Still not eating meat?” she asked.
“I eat it occasionally,” I said.
“One burger won’t kill you.”
I poured the oil and vinegar on my salad and nodded. “I appreciate that you have to do everything here with Mother,” I said. “I know it’s not fair.”
“The way it worked out.”
“Can I help in any way?”
“Yeah, you can move to D.C.” She looked me in the eye and then smiled. “If I need you, I’ll call you. There is one thing.” When I looked at her, she put down her fork and remembered cigarettes. “Mother’s running out of money.”
“But I thought—”
“So did I, but it’s running out anyway.”
“I don’t have much. I don’t make anything on my books.”
“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “I was just letting you know.”
Now, I was feeling awful, like a failure, letting both my sister and my mother down. Living in my own little bubble I had never thought about these things. I felt myself sinking.
After lunch, my sister asked if I’d stop at a bookstore with her, said she wanted to pick up something for one of her staff who had just had a baby. I asked if she wanted to give her one of my books and Lisa said that she’d prefer to give the woman something she could read. Then she laughed and I guess I laughed with her.
While Lisa wandered off to the garden book section, I stood in the middle of Border’s thinking how much I hated the chain and chains like it. I’d talked to too many owners of little, real bookstores who were being driven to the poorhouse by what they called the WalMart of books. I decided to see if the store had any of my books, firm in my belief that even if they did, my opinion about them would be unchanged. I went to Literature and did not see me. I went to Contemporary Fiction and did not find me, but when I fell back a couple of steps I found a section called African American Studies and there, arranged alphabetically and neatly, read undisturbed, were four of my books including my Persian
s of which the only thing ostensibly African American was my jacket photograph. I became quickly irate, my pulse speeding up, my brow furrowing. Someone interested in African American Studies would have little interest in my books and would be confused by their presence in the section. Someone looking for an obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy would not consider looking in that section any more than the gardening section. The result in either case, no sale. That fucking store was taking food from my table.
Saying something to the poor clone of a manager was not going to fix anything, so I resigned to keep quiet. Then I saw a poster advertising the coming reading of Juanita Mae Jenkins, author of the runaway bestseller, We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. I picked up a copy of the book from the display and read the opening paragraph:
My fahvre be gone since time I’s borned and it be just me an’ my momma an’ my baby brover Juneboy. In da mornin’ Juneboy never do brushes his teefus, so I gots to remind him. Because dat, Momma says I be the ‘sponsible one and tell me that I gots to holds things togever while she be at work clean dem white people’s house.
I closed the book and thought I was going to throw up. My sister came up behind me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said, dropping the book back onto the stack.
“What do you think of that book?” she asked. “I read it’s going to be a movie. She got something like three million dollars for it.”
“Really.”
The reality of popular culture was nothing new. The truth of the world landing on me daily, or hourly, was nothing I did not expect. But this book was a real slap in the face. It was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars. 3 million dollars.
My sister offered me the loan of her car for the afternoon if I’d pick her up from work. I dropped her off in front. The picketers were back. They spotted Lisa and began to shout at her. “Murderer! Murderer!” they said. I got out and walked with her through the line and to the door, realizing as I did so that she did it alone everyday, that I wasn’t there to be the protective brother, that she didn’t need me. Still, she accepted my escort graciously and told me she’d see me later. I started back to the car, catching good looks at the wild, sick, raging faces. One man held a huge poster with the picture of a mutilated fetus. He shook his fist at me. For a second, I thought I saw the face of the man who had been staring at us from the bar in the restaurant, but then he was gone.
Story idea—a man marries a woman whose name is the same as that of his first wife. One night while making love he says her name and the woman accuses him of calling out the name of his first wife. Of course he in fact has called out the name of his first wife, but also he has called out his present wife’s name. He tells her that he was not thinking of his first wife, but she says she knows what she heard.
I drove around the city for a while, noting while doing so how it was possible to be comfortable inside an automobile. My sister had taken my compliment about her automobile as an offense and perhaps, in some way, that was how I had meant it. I had never understood spending so much money on a set of wheels. But I had to admit that it was comfortable, quiet and that it made sense that my sister would want to be able to unlock her car and turn on the lights from across a parking lot. Still, I felt out of place behind the wheel of the thing—what else was new. I drove through Georgetown, then up Wisconsin, then back across Massachusetts to Dupont Circle. I went to my mother’s house, wanting to catch her before her nap. That way I’d be able to leave because of her coming “down time” and because I had to pick up Lisa.
“My Monksie is home,” Mother said again.
We sat in the kitchen and she made tea. “You’re looking great, Mother.”
“Go on,” she said. “I’m an old lady. I don’t know about this tea, sweetheart. This woman who used to be one of your father’s patients brought it to me.”
“That was nice of her,” I said.
“She’s a sweet woman, but, lord, she’s even older than I am. I can’t seem to get it through to her that your father has passed away.” She put the cups and saucers on the table.
“Where’s Lorraine?” I asked.
“She’s out doing the shopping.”
I looked at the calendar on the wall. It was from last year, but on the correct month. “Mother, that calendar’s out of date.”
“Lisa keeps telling me that, but I can’t remember to change it.”
“Tell you what, I’ll pick up a new one for you.” As I said it, I wondered what kind of grief I might cause Lisa by buying Mother a new calendar. Would the old lady go on and on about where it came from? I could imagine the months peeling by and Lisa having to endure, Would you look at that picture of the Grand Canyon. Monksie gave me that calendar. He noticed that the old one was out of date.
“Here you go.” Mother set the teapot down between our cups, then sat. “So, how was your meeting?”
“Fine,” I said. “The paper went well and now I’m done.”
“That’s good,” she said. She got up and turned the dial of the burner to off a second time, then sat back down.
“You should be careful burning things in that fireplace,” I told her. “It’s never been used. The flue is probably stuck shut.”
“It did get sort of smoky in the living room.”
“You shouldn’t use it at all.”
“I’m finished burning the things anyway.” She poured the tea.
“What were you burning?” I asked.
“Just some papers. Your father gave me instructions when he was in the hospital. He said, ‘Agnes, please burn the papers in the gray box in my study. Will you do that for me?’ I told him I would and then he asked me to please not read them.”
“So, did you?”
Mother shook her head. “Your father asked me not to.”
I looked at the counter and saw a blue box sitting there. “You’re not burning the stuff in that box too, are you?”
“That’s what I burned. It did make the living room smoky. I never thought about the flue. That’s why we never had a fire in this house. Because I’m afraid of fire.”
“I knew that about you, Mother.”
“Oh, I didn’t offer you milk. Would you like some?”
“No thanks.” I blew on the tea and drank some. “So, are you meeting with your club much these days?”
“Not so much. They’re all dying off. Young women aren’t interested in bridge anymore.”
“From what I gathered you ladies never play bridge anyway.”
“Is that what you gathered?” She laughed softly. “I suppose that’s right.”
I looked at her eyes and could see the fatigue. “Maybe you should stretch out for a while.”
“I do feel a little tired. Lorraine’s making dinner tonight. We’ll eat at seven, but you can come at six for cocktails.”
“Okay, Mother.”
Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language. No matter what is said, something else is meant and I knew that for all my mother’s seeming incoherence or out-of-itness, she was trying to tell me something over tea. The way she had mentioned the smoke in the living room twice. Her calling the blue box gray. Her easy and quick capitulation to what it was she and her cronies actually did at their meetings. But since I didn’t know the rules, which were forever changing, I could only know that she was trying to say something, not what that something was.
For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible. Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction. It wasn’t until I brought him a story that was purposely confusing and obfuscating that he seemed at all impressed and pleased. He said, smiling, “You made me work, son.” He once said to me in a museum
, when I complained about an illegible signature on a painting, “You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.” He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, though he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.
Lorraine had been the housekeeper since before I was born. She liked me as a child. She liked me as a young adult. But when she opened a book of mine and discovered the word fuck, she stopped liking me. From that point on she was polite, but curt, never overtly displeased by my presence, but clearly not anticipating any grief upon my departure. Lorraine, as far as I knew, never had a life away from my family. She had days off, but I didn’t know where she went, if she went anywhere. She even went with us to the beach in the summers. But she was not our nanny. If we had a problem, we went to Mother. If we needed rides someplace, we went to Mother. If we needed food or clean clothes, we went to Lorraine.
“Good evening, Mr. Monk,” she said as I entered the house with my sister.
“How are you, Lorraine?” I asked.
“Getting older every day.”
“You don’t look it,” I said.
“Thank you.”
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