by Sandra Kring
I shift in my seat. I want to like Uncle Clay, so I hope he doesn’t ruin it by being mean.
I look at Milo, who is draining the last of his milk. “How long are you going to keep this up, anyway? Um, until after Grandpa Sam is dead?”
Milo springs to his feet. “Seventy-two seconds,” he says, and bolts for the bathroom.
“Leave him be, Lucy,” Mom warns.
“Why? I didn’t want to be in there either. At least not yesterday.” I glance from Mom to Uncle Clay. “But Grandpa Sam needs his family now.”
“Mind your own business,” Mom warns. Mitzy strokes the back of my hair, then pats my back.
SOMETHING STRANGE and unsettling is happening in the house. I can feel it. And I’m not just talking about the fact that there are ghosts in Grandpa Sam’s room either. I’m talking about the tension that’s building. It feels like everyone in the family is holding an emotional rubber band between their thumbs and stretching it back. Call me psychic, sensate, intuitive, or what have you, but I have a strong feeling that when Grandpa Sam lets go—if not before—everyone is going to let go too, and those rubber bands are going to start flying all over the place, and somebody is going to get stung.
chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN
I GET UP from my half-eaten food, and Mom stops me before I can even scoot my chair in. “Upstairs for a little rest,” she says. “It’s going to be a long night. Set your alarm, if you’d like, but I want you to sleep until at least five-thirty. We’ll wake you if anything happens before then.”
“I don’t believe this. You’re going to let Milo recite numbers around the clock, but you’re not going to let me stay up to sit with Grandpa Sam on what is probably going to be his last day here?”
“Just close your eyes and rest a little,” she says. “Now, march.”
My back teeth are gritted so hard that I can almost hear them cracking. “It’s not fair! Just because you don’t want to sit by Grandpa doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be allowed to!”
Uncle Clay gets that my-kids-wouldn’t-talk-to-me-like-that look, and Mom gets all the more headstrong. “What you’re doing is more stressful. Milo’s relaxing himself. Now, go. One hour, at least.”
I stomp up the stairs and flop down on my back, my ankles crossed. I’m good and mad at Mom now. So mad that I think when I grow up and she ticks me off, I’m going to pretend I don’t have time to call her either.
Brave in my anger and determined to get Mom back one way or another, I go straight to the trash can, which I never emptied because there was nothing in it but for that wad of slightly-crunchy-from-dried-tears Kleenex, and I pull out my memory stick. I take it into Mom’s room, plug it into her computer, and lift her latest entry. The one she wrote in the middle of the night—just like I thought. I upload it on my computer and start reading:
I can’t believe Lucy went to Maude Tuttle’s house! Maude Tuttle, of all people. She’s an ex-hooker, for crissakes. And she probably knows every grain of dirt on every family in this town.
I wonder what Maude told her. It was something, you can bet, because Lucy’s got that preoccupied, haunted look about her again. Damn it to hell, why can’t people leave my past alone?
But I can’t obsess about what Lucy might be obsessing about. Not tonight. I have my own shit to deal with. Dad’s dying. And although I know I should feel something, I don’t. Just the tension that comes from having to listen to someone gasp for air for hours on end. I wish he (or someone) would clear his goddamn throat!
I can almost see my karma veering into a curve now, ready to fling itself back to me. Not just for those words, but for the thoughts that go with them. I’m glad he’s dying. It’s awful to admit, but it’s true. I’m glad because maybe it will put an end to this agony that has been with me for most of my life. I just want it over!
“And what is that ‘it’?” God, I haven’t seen that shrink in years, and yet her voice—high-pitched like a drill—still bores into me at times like this.
Even with Dad practicing for his final death rattle downstairs, the kids upset, Ma burning spices in everyone’s faces, I think of him. I think of him, and I miss him.
He called me the minute I got back home, that first day we met, to ask me if I believed in love at first sight.
I smile as I read this. That’s Peter for you—an ENFP on the Jung-Myers-Briggs personality test I took on his behalf when Mom’s endorphins were still raging and I was sure he’d be my daddy. A Champion Idealist, the test showed. Extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving. Only three percent of the population is an ENFP. More proof that Mom is making a disastrous mistake if she lets him go, because the chance of finding someone else just like him isn’t going to be all that easy—as I tried to tell her once. Just reading about him makes me miss him more.
It was explosive, right from the beginning. I saw him first in class: History of Ancient Philosophy 320. How could I not notice him? He was animated. Engaged. Brilliant.
I don’t recall how it was we paired off in the hall after leaving class, but a half hour later we were in his beat-up loft apartment, where books on Socrates and Plato were strewn here and there, wedges of unopened envelopes thrust between pages he’d marked. How I noticed these ordinary things, with that wall staring at me, I have no idea.
“Your wall,” I said, and laughed, as I fell into one of the two mismatched recliners facing it like theater seats.
He scooted stacks of books, a bong, and empty tuna and fruit cans out of the way with his sandaled foot, so he could better reach the black wall. Simple shapes and scribbles drawn with sidewalk chalk ran nearly the entire length of it. “What is it?” I said, still laughing. “Your cave drawings?”
He got so excited, so animated, when he told me that that’s exactly what it was. “It’s the wall from Plato’s The Cave!” He asked if I knew what he was talking about, but he didn’t wait for my answer. He grabbed a torn sheet from the black wall, not bothering to remove the tack first, and shoved it into my hand. “From Great Dialogues of Plato: Complete Texts of the Republic, Apology, Crito Phaido, Ion, and Meno, Volume 1, page 316,” he said. He asked if I was familiar with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
I told him I’d taken Theory of Forms in my freshman year and that, if I remembered it correctly, Plato likened people unschooled in the theory of forms to prisoners chained in a cave who aren’t able to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave, where images made by the puppeteers behind them are casting shadows on the wall. They think the images ARE the objects, even though they are only shadows cast by the objects. When I finished, I asked him how I did, my voice deep and flirty.
He became on fire then—obviously thrilled that I knew of The Cave, and his excitement excited me, though not in the same way as him.
Maybe his fire ignited my passion because I’d felt dead inside for so long. I don’t know. But as he rattled on, scribbling more images to illustrate the points he was making, I watched his ass under his jeans and the way his T-shirt stretched against his shoulder blades with each chalk stroke he made. I watched his mouth when he turned to look at me—full, slick, inviting—and waited for glimpses of his tongue, rather than listening to his words. I wanted to feel his tongue against mine. To feel it flicking across my nipples, then edging down to find the lips I hadn’t yet allowed anyone to kiss.
And right in the middle of his animated lecture, I got up and went to him. I pushed him backward until he fell into the chair next to the one I’d just left, giggling like a porn star, for crissakes. The back of the chair was broken, and with a thump we fell back until we were almost vertical with the seat. I climbed on him, straddling his lap, and ran my fingers through the short bristles of his hair and opened my mouth to his to take in his words, his breath, his fervor.
I can feel my cheeks flush when I read this. And I know I should skip ahead, but then I tell myself that I am feeling crampy these days, which means I’ll soon be a woman and I’ll need to know these thin
gs. I promise myself that I’ll stop and skim if she talks about Peter’s penis, though (because I can’t even think of him having one, much less read about it), then look for my place on the document.
But before I can find it, I stop.
Mom took Milo and me to Peter’s apartment for a cook-out once, shortly after they met. While Peter grilled steaks on the balcony, I snooped at his books. I took one down from the bookcase to examine it, then set it on the end table when Mom came inside to announce that the food was done. Mom scooped it up quickly. “He’s a neat freak about his books, if not about anything else,” she said, and she slipped the book back in its original place. Peter’s hair wasn’t in a rubber band that day, and it hung down long enough to touch the arm seam of his shirt.
My heart begins to pump hard in my chest, because I realize that Mom isn’t talking about Peter. She’s talking about him.
My father.
Howard Smith.
We made love so many times that my crotch burned, but still I reached for him again, stroking, cooing, trying to spring him back to life because I wanted him to crawl up inside me until he became a part of me. I wanted to stay feeling alive forever.
Mitzy called me a “lucky shit” when I called her the next day and told her that the insides of my thighs were chafed. Brian was coming home from work so beat that she was lucky if she got a quickie.
In four months’ time, though, Mitzy stopped calling me lucky.
“I don’t know, Tess,” she said one night as we talked on the phone, even though neither of us could afford long-distance calls so we’d promised to write letters only. “There’s something not striking me right about him waiting outside your classroom like he did again yesterday. It seems he’s been doing that a lot, claiming that he can’t wait to talk to you until your last class is over.” She asked me to please not get offended, but to her, it seemed like Howard considered his studies, his grades, more important than mine. “I hope he doesn’t do that when finals roll around,” she said.
I was defensive when I told her that he wasn’t doing it often, but I didn’t admit to her that he’d done it again that very day. Actually knocking on the door during my journalism class and lying to the professor, saying there was a family emergency, when the “emergency” was only that he still couldn’t find a slant for his latest essay.
Mitzy drilled me to find out if I was giving up too much of my life for Howard. She brought up Lou and Lacy, and how she hadn’t heard me mention them in ages. “Didn’t the three of you used to hang out together at Starbucks and study almost every day?”
I told Mitzy that Howard was just intense, that’s all. I didn’t admit that Lou found Howard arrogant and Lacy suspected that he was bipolar and a tad on the homophobic side when it came to Lou. “He’s just going through a rough time right now. He needs me,” I explained, then added that I didn’t have a hell of a lot of time to spare, with my schoolwork and my job, and how I preferred to spend what little time I had with Howard.
“I’m not sure that’s good, honey,” she said.
I felt my insides clench. Mitzy had had a father all of her life. Cozy and familiar as an old sofa, he asked her how her day went every night at dinner and never let her leave the house without pulling a couple bills from his wallet. And after she moved out, he brought over two chocolate éclairs every Saturday morning so they could have coffee and catch up while Brian was working some side job or other. What did she know about being a dried-up sponge that had just been dipped in water?
She asked me what Howard’s rough time was about, and I struggled to put it into words for her. How could I make her understand the angst of a thinking man? Brian, nice guy that he was, didn’t think beyond what Mitzy was making for dinner and who the Packers might trade. “Look, I’m happy. Just be happy for me, okay?”
And I was happy.
For a time.
Howard was horrified when I told him I was pregnant. He scraped his hands through his limp blond hair—grown down over his ears, even though he once couldn’t stand the feel of hair on his collar—and he paced.
I assured him that everything would be okay, that we could get medical coverage through social services, and reminded him that we were only three months from graduation. I’d get a job so he could enroll in grad school, and we’d plan our schedules so one of us was home with the baby. I’d work on my novel in what spare time I could find, and when it sold, we’d have it made.
He looked at me as though I’d gone stupid. “Are you fucking nuts?” he said. “Is that what you think I’m upset about? How we’re going to fare financially?”
He spread his hands to encompass our ratty apartment, with crates still turned on end for chairs from when his friends Leon and Ian visited the night before, while I was at work, to smoke weed and argue about life’s meaning. “Look around, for fuck sake,” he said, as he kicked over an empty ravioli can (about all he ate anymore, cold, and straight from the can) and sent it rolling across the floor, scattering cigarette butts as it went. “Do I look like someone who gives a shit about having material things? About making it?
“You want to bring a kid into this totally fucked-up world?” He started ranting then about the things I’d heard him rant about countless times. How democracy was dying, and fascism rising. How we were going to obliterate ourselves, and how mankind had gone blind to what was real. “Is this the world you want to bring a kid into?” he asked.
I don’t know why I didn’t see it until that moment. How his jeans bunched at the belt, and how his face had thinned. And how long had it been since he’d slept for more than twenty, thirty minutes in one stretch? Just the week before, a noise woke me and I opened one eye to see him working on the wall opposite “the cave.” He had taken down the paintings his former girlfriend had done in acrylic on cardboard—ghouls in priests’ robes, Uncle Sam in camouflage, the American flag with swastikas for stars and red stripes that ran like blood over the white—and he was opening a black paint can with the tip of the screwdriver. He was animated, as he often was, but this time his explosive energy looked like madness instead of passion.
I rose up on one elbow, and I asked him to stop. The apartment was too dark as it was, and the fumes from the paint were making vomit rise and sour the back of my throat.
He looked at me with haunted, sunken eyes and started bitching about my lack of understanding of forms. How I was a slave to my chair, an idiot played by puppeteers. Couldn’t I see how dumb I’d become? How my pregnancy was making me want to nest and fall in rank and file with the rest of the mindless fools?
It was the word dumb, more so than his crazy ramblings, that hurt. And after a lengthy argument that drained me, I grabbed my purse and my car keys and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” he asked, his face and body liquefying. He pressed himself between me and the door, closìng it with a click. He reached for me.
I was crying when I told him not to touch me.
He lost it then and begged me to never forbid him to touch me again. He looked down at his paint-stained hands and said, “Don’t say they’re bad.”
He looked like a stranger, and at that moment it dawned on me that he was. What did I know about him, beyond his beliefs on philosophy and government and that he was brilliant? Who was his family, and where did they live? How old was he when he stopped believing in Santa? Did he ever have a paper route?
He wrapped his arms around me, pinning my arms to my side. He nuzzled his face against my neck, and his cheeks were hot and damp. “Don’t ever leave me, baby.” Just that. “Don’t ever leave me.”
I sit here writing this today, and I wonder where in the hell my mind was back then. Even Mitzy saw the red flags. How had I missed them? And why, once I saw them, did I continue to ignore them until they were flapping so violently that I could feel their wind chilling my skin?
I woke up each morning convinced that my belly had grown overnight. My skin had stretched so taut by the time I was five month
s along that my belly button protruded through the cotton of Howard’s T-shirts like a nipple.
I waited until I felt the life inside me jabbing my ribs before I went to the doctor on campus. I walked out of her office with my packet of sample multivitamins and stood at the desk waiting to schedule a follow-up appointment while the receptionist talked on the phone.
There was another student there, her belly still flat, her hand clasped with her lover’s. They laughed as they made up potential, silly names for their baby, and just listening to them made me want to cry. Howard wouldn’t be with me for the ultrasound the doctor had ordered. He wouldn’t be there when we proved what the doctor already believed: that I was carrying twins, just as Ma had, even though their position made it difficult for her to pick up a second heartbeat. And maybe he wouldn’t even be there for their delivery. He didn’t acknowledge my ever-growing belly, even though we had to make love while lying on our sides by the time I was four months along.
I didn’t tell Ma about my pregnancy. She had enough shit on her plate, because, of course, within a month or so after she left Marie’s and went back to Dad, things returned to their usual hell, and she crawled back into her bottle.
I didn’t tell Mitzy either, because we’d stopped talking. I told her I didn’t have time to write letters anymore, being neck-deep in schoolwork, and that I was already a month behind on my phone bill. I promised her I’d get in touch soon, though, but I ignored her letters. After a month of silence, she sent me a card from Hallmark with some corny verse on it about being best friends forever.
The first time Howard physically hurt me, I had just come home from the hospital after having my ultrasound. I was slipping the X-ray image into a frame that Mitzy had sent me for my nineteeth birthday, right over the top of the photo of the two of us taken on graduation night, both of us glassy-eyed drunk, our hair mussed, our arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders as we giggled over something too stupid to laugh about had we been sober. I was only too glad to cover it up. It was nothing but a photo of two girls who were too ignorant to know that adult life was going to be a crock of shit.