Implosion

by Elizabeth W. Garber

  He pantomimed the officers instantly slipping their guns back into their belts, awkwardly stepping back and saying, “Er, uhm... excuse us, ma’am, we had a report of excessively loud music. There doesn’t seem to be a problem now. Sorry to disturb you. Good night.” Wood slapped his thigh. “What a great moment!”

  This was my mother’s apartment, where I came home on Christmas break from Harvard in 1975. Jo had been evicted twice in the last six months. The landlords didn’t like my brother’s long hair, his black friends working with him on cars in the driveway, the loud music, or his penchant for running upstairs on all fours barking loudly. She’d finally told my brother, “You find us a place,” and this was it. When they moved in the heat had been turned off, the water heater was broken, and snow drifted in under the windows. She called the landlord again and again; his secretary said they’d send someone over, but never did. They heated the kitchen with the open burners on the gas stove. My mom said, “This is what I used to see when I interviewed mothers on welfare in the projects.”

  Two days after they moved in, I arrived home for Christmas. When I saw a dumpster piled high in front of the house, I asked, “What’s all that?” My mother sighed, “That’s the junk we had to take out of the house before we could move in.” I stood shivering with my hands over the stove looking around the kitchen. Layers of grime, grease, and dried lumps of food caked the grey linoleum. I said, “How about I clean the kitchen floor?” I went to work in a corner with a bucket of hot soapy water I’d heated on the stove and a scrub brush. Half an hour later, I called my mother to look at one linoleum square. “It’s white with some cute little turquoise specks. Nice!”

  We set up the record player to keep playing as we worked. Wood argued for The Who, Iron Butterfly, and Led Zeppelin. I wanted Joni Mitchell and Carole King. My mom groaned. “I can’t take any more Carole King.” We traded off every other record and I filled in my side with the Beatles. For the floor, I figured out a system, a spatula to dig off the first layer, then a hard brush, then a sponge. Jo, Wood, and friends filled holes in the plaster, pulled down filthy wood paneling. They taped plastic over the windows and hung blankets for curtains. All Christmas week, I worked on that kitchen floor. When Chuck came to visit, he scrubbed with me and told me about the gay bar scene in the city. He’d come out the night Nixon resigned.

  Wood, at nineteen, had been let go from the garage. He came home nights blackened with soot, his face grey. The winter was so cold, train cars arriving to unload at the coal-fired electrical plant would open their bottom doors but the load of coal was frozen solid. Wood had been hired to climb into coal cars with a sledge hammer to loosen up the lumps of ore. The grate was open to a butane burner below. He had to get the coal to drop through and not fall in himself. When he came home at night, he couldn’t get warm.

  Our father allowed our youngest brother, Hubbard, to visit for one lunch that week, and timed my brother’s visit to the minute, as he had for years, before he returned in a rage to confiscate Hubbard from Jo’s reach. Hubbard often arrived pent-up and restless, unable to sit or talk. Jo created a ritual. As soon as he arrived they loaded up the car and drove to the recycling center where there were huge dumpsters for cans and glass. Jo gave Hubbard the month’s worth of wine and beer bottles in bags and boxes. He set to work with a vengeance smashing them into the dumpster. Six foot five since he was fourteen, he was tall enough to climb down inside. He slipped precariously, grabbing more bottles and smashing them against the thick rusted metal walls around him. When he finally climbed out, he was grinning. “I’m hungry!” Jo would bring him home and they’d have a great visit, until our father pulled up in front in his BMW and sat on the horn. Hubbard dashed down the stairs.

  Jo got a call from a woman who screamed at her, “I’m freezing!” Jo calmed her down and figured out she was another tenant trying to reach the same landlord. They realized he was giving out his tenants’ numbers so they’d yell at each other instead of him. This lady didn’t have heat or hot water either. My mother got mad. She called the landlord with her telephone book in front of her and said, “I’m a probation officer. If my heat isn’t working in the next twenty-four hours, I am going to call city hall and report you to...” She started listing off every social agency she could think of. The furnace was repaired that day and they delivered a new water heater the next. My mother was the first person in her family to get a divorce or live in an apartment. When she talks about that time now, she says, “We had been very privileged. Parker Street was when we all hit bottom. We didn’t know about poverty or surviving. We had to learn.”

  After I dropped out of Harvard in March, I carried my books and clothes up to the unheated third floor room in my mother’s apartment with a view to the city far below. I painted everything white, walls and floors. I found a white coverlet, lined up my books but then I didn’t know what to do. My brief elation from leaving school was over. Now what would I do with my life? I was lost, floating around the house, looking out the windows.

  Wood had a group of friends, mechanics, guys who rode up on their motorcycles and girls who spilled out of an old Toyota. Wood and his friends partied, the bathtub filled with ice and beer, loud rock and roll, pot passed around, and Wood telling stories that left everyone doubled over laughing. I didn’t fit into that world. I hid in my attic room. I read under the covers until three in the morning to finish Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, making comments in the margins on favorite passages. Sundays I took The New York Times Book Review up to my room. I didn’t know what else to do but read.

  I helped around the house and made meals, but I was having a hard time with Jo. She worked hard, fixed up the house, and was angry. Her women’s support group from Glendale was invited to have dinner at her new apartment. She cooked all weekend. At the last minute, one of her friends called, awkwardly saying she had a conflict and couldn’t come, but wanted Jo to know none of the others were coming either. She said, “They’re too scared.”

  My mother was furious. “Scared of what?”

  “Well, your lifestyle. You know, being divorced, and, well, working, and...” her voice trailed off. “Sorry, I’ve got to go.”

  After my mother hung up, she threw her coffee cup at the wall so hard it shattered. Wood was impressed. “Hey Jo, you vaporized that cup! There’s just a light dust hanging in the air.”

  But Jo was furious, slamming pans on the stove. “They aren’t comfortable coming in here because I’m fucking poor. I’m actually making a damn living and not living in some nice big house.” Her voice was sarcastic. “They’re too scared to come! Poor babies! How scared do they think I am every god-damned day?” She picked up a plate. “I’ve never liked this plate.” She smashed it against the floor. “Where is another?” She started going through the mismatched pile of plates she’d been buying at a used furniture store up the street. She smashed another and another.

  She growled, “When you live in Glendale that long you get all la-ti-da!”

  Wood brought in a bottle of gin and another of vermouth. “How about a martini, Jo?”

  “Good idea.” She smashed another plate.

  I’d never known my mother to get drunk, but she was drinking more and getting madder. I leaned in the doorway and watched my mother yell and swear. I knew she was breaking out of being so good, but I was scared. She turned to me, looking irritated. “Do you want a drink, too?”

  I was a little scared to shake my head no. I said, hopefully, “How about we eat some of that good dinner?”

  She said, “I’m not hungry, but you guys go ahead.” I served Wood and Chuck, who’d just arrived.

  “Fuck ‘em!” Chuck said cheerfully about Jo’s friends. “What great lamb curry they are missing out on. And I’ll join you for a drink.” He also reached over and took my hand, saying quietly, “You okay, sista?”

  I nodded, adding, “I’d really like to go for a walk after dinner.”

  By the end of dinner and after several drinks,
the conversation was off Jo’s friends to the topic it always circled back to, my father. Sometimes I hated him as much as they did. But I still tried, having dinner at his house, or meeting for lunch in town. Sometimes I had such a great time with him, I would almost forget how bad it had gotten before we fled the glass house.

  One time my father had called to say I must come and try out his latest, “real” French bread. When I drove up the drive, the transparent house blazed with light at the crest of the hill. He threw open the door, sweat rolling down his face as he handed me a wine glass sparkling with a new Spätlese he was nuts about. His voice boomed, “Sugar, you have to excuse the heat! The bread is rising! I’ve been up with it since six this morning.” He had special-ordered French bricks for the oven, and the best stone-ground flour. He conferred with the recipe and the temperature gauge in the oven like a mad chemist.

  “You won’t believe this Julia Child recipe. It goes on for two days. It’s a tyrant, but it’s worth it!” My father cooked like he was sailing into a typhoon on his racing catamaran. “My rush now is in timing this last rising with dinner.” The sink was filled with a mound of asparagus from the garden. He had standing rib roast to go in one oven and bread in the other. “Don’t mind me, I’ll do my figuring. I’ll yell when I need help.” He pulled out his yellow legal pad and began shooting words and numbers across the lines. I headed for the calm of the orange womb chair across the room and watched the life I’d once lived. He was a blur under the line of copper pans, vats, skillets, and lids gleaming red in the spotlights.

  Of course, I still loved him. When he was like this he was the most alive person I’d ever known. Daily life paled in comparison to this luminous house blazing with Dave Brubeck’s piano and Gerry Mulligan’s sax playing “Blue Rondo à la Turk.” The theme song of my childhood, the comfort of familiarity, my father calling me by my old names.

  “Lilibet, I need you!” He flung open the oven door and I was prepared to slide a heated axe head into a pan of cold water. The bread had to be engulfed in steam at that precise moment of cooking. But in the balancing act, the axe slipped out of my grasp and crashed to the white kitchen floor, melting a harsh brown burn in the plastic. “No problem!” my father reassured me. Grabbing the axe, he hurtled it into the oven. Steam exploded and he slammed the oven door shut. We grinned at each other and toasted with our wine glasses.

  He had been steadier since the return of his first daughter, Linda, whose mother had taken her away when she was eight. In her thirties, only after she had children of her own did she realize what it must have meant for my father to have lost a child. When he received a letter from her with photographs of his grandchildren he was delirious with joy. He had celebrated her return with a magnificent dinner party with family and friends for his prodigal daughter. Ten years older than me and having grown up in the South, she and I were from different worlds when we smiled at each other awkwardly. He called her regularly and reported to me all about her. Mostly I was relieved: another daughter helped lighten a responsibility I still felt to support his happiness.

  Over dinner, he told me his plans to sell the house. “It’s become a dead weight on my shoulders.” He couldn’t keep up the gardens. It was time to move on. He was going to do what he’d always wanted, to sail around the world. He was researching his options. Should he buy a boat and hire a captain to teach him? Should he sign on with someone else’s boat as crew? He was in his mid-sixties, strong and healthy. “I’m going to have the time of my life,” he predicted. He slathered butter onto slices of a heavy tough-crusted bread. I never told him it wasn’t anything like “real” French bread.

  Back in my chilly white room in the attic of my mother’s apartment, above my brother’s booming rock and roll, I imagined my life after he sold the glass house. I couldn’t imagine it not being ours, but when I closed my eyes, the house was there. I could walk through every room and see it in all seasons. It would live in my mind’s eye as it had been, at its best, for the rest of my life. The way it had looked as he baked bread that night or the way it looked when I sat with my model of Villa Savoye on the dining room table and watched our family mirrored in the glass walls. We didn’t have to own it. The glass house would live on in me, untainted.

  Sometimes I was lonely and called him, but he could turn on me with a barrage of fury against my mother and brother, trapping me to the black receiver. I couldn’t say a word. Sometimes at my mother’s kitchen table when she and my brother raged on and on about what a monster he was, I felt they were attacking me too. I almost wanted to defend him. Looking back at myself living in my mother’s apartment, even though I knew she’d saved my life, at the same time I was still my father’s daughter. I cleared the table and washed the dishes as they lambasted him. My brother cursing, “That son of a bitch.”

  I think only Chuck understood the pull I felt between worlds. The night my mother’s support group dumped her, he asked me, “Hey, how about that walk?” I grabbed my jacket and was ready to walk down the stairs. My mother was drying off the white enamel coffee pot as she said angrily to me, as if I was somehow to blame, “If your father was Jewish, he’d at least have paid your tuition.” Her words slapped me.

  In that moment, my old sarcastic mind leapt into action. As I started down the stairs, I tossed back at her, “Well, if you were a Jewish mother, you’d at least ask me what I studied.” The coffee pot whizzed down the stairs after me and slammed against the wall in the hallway. I was stunned.

  My mother stood at the top of the stairs, my brother glaring down at me. She screamed at me. “Who sued your father and took him to court to pay your tuition? And I lost! That judge said, he couldn’t believe a father wouldn’t sell everything he had to put their daughter through Harvard. I sold my god-damned diamond ring for your tuition!”

  She was breathing hard, and starting to cry. Wood comforted her. “I don’t understand anything about Greek and Homer. I feel dumb and stupid when you talk about school. But I’ve done everything, do you understand me? Everything. To support you. Don’t you get that?” Now she was sobbing. She walked back into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Chuck sternly took me by the hand and said, “Let’s take our walk. You need to wake up, girl.” He took me down the steps and we walked for an hour, past one paint-peeling, broken-down house after another, junk cars parked in driveways, cars driving by blasting a heavy bass. We walked around the university. He gave me a good talking-to. But I didn’t hear a lot of it. I knew what my mother had done for all of us.

  What I realized that night was that I had to give up sarcastic retorts. I had been cruel and hurtful to the person who had saved us. I couldn’t let myself hurt her or anyone that way again. I had developed my sarcasm, like a child whittling a stick. It was a tool I sharpened every day to stab out at my father, to show I was cool at high school, to make myself different and better than other people. I grew up in a place that lived on being better. Now I was humbled. I’d failed at Harvard. I’d dropped out. I didn’t know where I was going or who I was anymore. But what I discovered that night was that I was someone who would not be cruel or hurt people. I had to go off sarcasm, cold turkey. No snide remarks, nothing said to harm other people.

  I went home that night, crying as I apologized to my mother. “I’m so sorry, Mommy. I never meant to hurt you. I won’t do it again.” We hugged and cried before I went to sleep. But I was scared. Without that sharpness I was sure I would be as boring and dull as oatmeal.

  My brother Wood decided to take charge, telling me, “You have to get out of your rut. It’s time you got yourself a car.” I had a house-sitting job that summer in Maine. “How will you get there?” He looked at me sternly. “Think about it.”

  My mother had divided her divorce settlement of $40,000 equally between the three of us kids and herself, so we would have money for school. We invested our money with an old family friend. We all wanted to save it until we really needed it. What we wouldn’t know for a fe
w years was that our friend lost our money and his children’s hard-earned savings in the stock market. A few years later, he would die from a rapid illness, sick at heart, unable to tell anyone. When my brother Wood heard our money was gone, he said, “Good riddance. It was cursed money. We’ll be just fine on our own.” We let go of it. It was just money. What meant the most to us was that our mother had divided everything she had between us. She taught us generosity.

  There was much discussion at the kitchen table about what I should do. My brother advised me to spend a chunk of my invested money on a sensible, sturdy car. But I only took out $600 for a black 1963 MGB sports car I couldn’t resist. I drove home with the top down and pulled up in front of Jo’s house. My brother stood on the curb, took one look and shook his head. “It’s a piece of junk.” He pointed out the cheap bodywork already cracking away from extensive rust, and the garish red carpet that had been stuck down to cover the floorboards. But I loved it, the rev of the engine, the comforting rumble, the leather seats, and driving close to the ground. I had bought my first car on my own. But it needed work. The accelerator was sticky. The engine had already begun to chug and sputter climbing Clifton Avenue hill and almost didn’t make it to Parker Street.

  Wood said, “Don’t look at me to fix it for you. I’m not going to help until you can ask me an intelligent question.” He walked back in the house.

  Fortunately he had a steady stream of friends coming by after work and on weekends, who took one look at his sister standing over the engine of the MGB roadster and then looked under the hood as well. “Hey, what’s happening?” The simple four-cylinder engine was irresistible. They assured me it was something a non-mechanic could learn to work on. I tried to find anything familiar. Deep on one side I found the dipstick. Cool. I could check the oil. Wiped it off with a rag, put it in, pulled it out. Ugh. Really low and dirty. Okay, I needed to learn how to change the oil and the oil filter.