New Jersey Me

by Ferguson, Rich;

  Most days the place was quiet: faded tombstone quiet. Wilted flower quiet. All that quiet recalled an old Irish saying my old man had once told me while we were admiring a winter night sky: “The stars make no noise.” My house was even quieter than those stars. And when it wasn’t, it creaked and groaned. Maybe those noises were due to the water pipes or the house settling. But back then I thought differently. There were ghosts roaming the halls. No matter how high I cranked my sonic walls I could still hear them. They let it be known they were there to stay.

  I did my best to battle the ghosts.

  Within a few days of Mom’s leaving, I began dusting, vacuuming. Even put lemon pieces through the garbage disposal, and made that nasty paste of cream of tartar and water to clean the porcelain. It was all so time-consuming. What I’d normally seen Mom do in a few hours took me almost an entire day, not including feeding my old man and myself.

  So I put out a call for reinforcement.

  The very next afternoon—a Thursday—my grandmother showed up. Sturdy, broad-chested, refreshing: a beer keg with appendages. She was armed with a load of dust cloths, towels, colorful plastic buckets, sweet-smelling cleansers, and other supplies. Once plopping them down in the front hallway, she gathered me into a huge hug that reeked of menthol and bacon grease. Her black wool coat scratched at my face. Her shoulders clicked when she hugged me tighter. Those sky-blue, lined, and wizened eyes of hers sparkled a hello behind librarian-style glasses. She asked in that sandpapery Irish brogue of hers: “How are you, sweetie?”

  Not only had it been another day of battling ghosts, it had also been a day of battling school. Mainly math. I could only muster a shrug.

  Grandmother swiped a kitchen timer from one of her plastic buckets. “We’re gonna play a game to help cheer you up.”

  I told her unless it was called Get the Hell Outta Blackwater it probably wouldn’t do much good.

  “It’s called Beat the Clock,” she said. She tossed her coat over the living room sofa, then spied the surroundings—the white shag carpet, the Hummels, the grandfather clock, and other items—some belonging to Mom, some to my old man. As she focused on Mom’s furniture pieces her forehead creases deepened. Maybe she was imagining how to properly clean them, or recalling past run-ins with Mom. Whenever they’d gotten together, they were all pleasant smiles at first. But those decayed far faster than the half-life of uranium. Grandmother would attack Mom’s mothering skills, railing on how she was far more absorbed in housecleaning and Mary Kay than me. Mom would say she was nuts. That she should mind her own business. Whether or not Grandmother was recalling those fights, all she said was: “How long do you think it’ll take to clean the room?”

  I recalled my past cleaning ventures, how time-consuming they’d been. With Grandmother helping, I figured we’d achieve much better results. “Four hours?”

  Grandmother cracked her knuckles. Made a sound like her bones were tap dancing. “Let’s cut that in half,” she insisted. The excess fat under her arms shook as she flashed me double thumbs up.

  All I flashed back was a smirk. “You’re nuts,” I half-laughed. It was the first time I’d uttered anything close to the sound of happiness in days.

  Grandmother winked. “That’s why you love me.”

  I retrieved the vacuum from the closet. We laid out the Pledge, Windex, Woolite carpet cleaner, and other items. Before we set off, Grandmother said: “We need some cleaning music. Something upbeat.”

  I immediately flashed on Springsteen’s Born to Run. I retrieved it from the pile of records in my room, slapped it on the living room stereo. Cranked it.

  Grandmother set the timer and off we went.

  I began vacuuming. She began scrubbing at the rust-red blotch on the carpet; the puke stain I hadn’t been able to totally eliminate after Mom’s leaving.

  As for Bruce, he began with “Thunder Road.” It started out slowly at first—just piano and his voice. While he was singing about Roy Orbison singing for the lonely, I cleaned beneath the coffee table and around the sofa, careful not to clank the nozzle too harshly against the pristine furniture legs. The whole time my eyes remained on the cleaning, but my ears were tuned to the song. The drums kicked in all mellow at first while Bruce continued singing about staying hidden beneath the covers and studying pain, making crosses from lovers, and throwing roses in the rain. Though I’d heard those words countless times before, right then they sounded different. Sure it was cheesy as hell, but it seemed like Bruce was singing directly to me. Something like a wake-up call or warning. So when the drums kicked in full throttle, and Springsteen said the night was busting open and the two lanes could take us anywhere, I took that as a direct cue. Latched onto the Electrolux, zoomed across the living room. Suddenly, that vacuum didn’t sound like a vacuum anymore. More like a high-performance engine. The power nozzle banged into Mom’s grandfather clock, my old man’s La-Z-Boy recliner, and the liquor cabinet. It wasn’t like I was trying to hit them. But it wasn’t like I was trying to miss them either.

  Over Springsteen and the vacuum, Grandmother called out: “That’s the spirit. We’ll be done in no time.”

  She was right. We finished all our cleaning, were even able to take a snack break a good half-hour before we heard the timer ding.

  Then, like she’d often done before, she assisted me with math homework. She’d studied the subject in college. Had even continued challenging herself long afterward. While on walks around the neighborhood, she’d pull a pad and pen from her purse, jot down random house addresses—add, subtract, multiply, and divide them. Would take note of all the geometric shapes. Stop sign: octagon. School zone: pentagon. She knew all about functions and derivatives. Factoring and algebraic expressions. No matter how often Grandmother tried passing her math gene on to me, the end product was usually zero.

  That most recent tutoring session involved a word problem—something about a six-foot tall guy named Joe that cast a five-foot-long shadow. He noticed that the shadow cast by his school building was thirty-feet long. Given that, I needed to figure out the height of the building.

  Before even knowing how to solve the problem, my mind was already spiraling off on a Tilt-a-Whirl daydream powered by those words. That name Joe recalled all kinds of Joes: the singer Joe Jackson. Shoeless Joe Jackson. Joe DiMaggio, which led me to Marilyn Monroe. Pills and death. “Candle in the Wind.” All kinds of winds: breezes, gales, hurricanes. “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” What about that building of unknown height? Buildings got me to cities. “Detroit Rock City.” “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City.” There’d also been that mention of shadows. “Moon Shadow.” Also Dark Shadows, that vampire soap opera I’d seen in reruns. It had featured zombies, werewolves, and ghosts. Ghosts and shadows brought me back to Mom. With or without sunlight, her shadow spread far and wide throughout my home. Once my brain had spun through that entire thought process, I didn’t give a shit what the height of the damn building was, and I told Grandmother so, only in slightly kinder words.

  She sat me down at the kitchen table, pulled her pen and math pad from her purse. Flipped through a few of the small lined yellow pages that had random numbers and equations scrawled all over them. Once she landed on a blank page she drew a stick figure of Joe and labeled his height—six feet. Then she scribbled back and forth, creating his shadow—five feet. Next she sketched a building with a question mark next to it. Afterward, she scratched its shadow: thirty feet. She stopped there. “Know what to do next?”

  I made a couple lame attempts to figure out the answer. But no matter how hard my tongue drilled the roof of my mouth, I couldn’t figure it out. I flashed Grandmother a look. Code for: I have no fucken idea what to do next.

  So she continued. She drew a line from the top of Joe’s head that extended to the end of his shadow. Then she drew a line from the top of the building that connected with the tip of its shadow. That’s when she asked: “Wha
t do those look like?”

  Didn’t need to tongue-drill the roof of my mouth to answer that one. All those extending and connecting lines began taking shape in my brain. “Triangles?” I said.

  Grandmother peered at me over the top of her glasses perched low on her nose. “Exactly!” she said. “Know what to do next?”

  Again, I made a couple futile attempts to solve it. And again I shot her the look that made her continue on her own.

  With her pen, she traced down the length of Joe, then along his shadow. Did the same with the building and its shadow. She explained how they both had right angles, and since the shadows were cast at analogous angles, the angle-angle postulate proved they were similar. Then, as if I weren’t lost enough already, she said something about six is to X as five is to thirty. Then six times thirty: one-eighty. After she’d spun that ball of confusion into a tangled web of bewilderment, we were left with the following equation:

  5x = 180

  “What next?” asked Grandmother.

  For a change, I thought I knew. My old man—taking a rare break from his mountain of paperwork—had once assisted me with that very type of problem. “Divide both sides by five so X is by itself?” I said, with a slight rise in my voice at the end of that question.

  Grandmother flashed another double thumbs up. “Now do it.”

  Once I’d completed my calculations, I said without any sign of question or hesitation: “The building is thirty-six feet tall.”

  Grandmother didn’t have to say a word. Her huge smile said it all. That smile split her face wide open and gave the wrinkles around her nose, mouth, and cheeks their own wrinkles. Screw Mom’s Mary Kay products to make those wrinkles go away. Grandmother’s smile was a blast of pure light. Chased away all the ghosts and shadows in my home, if only for a little while.

  Chapter 4

  Over the next couple weeks I did my best to build upon that happy home Grandmother had helped to create. Cooking. cleaning. Was doing it even when I wasn’t doing it. With Springsteen as my soundtrack, I had nightly dreams of scrubbing the toilet and cleaning tracked-in dirt stains from the carpet. Dreams of boneless chicken breasts, lemon juice, and olive oil. Those were just a few ingredients in Mom’s prized Mother’s Day Lemon Chicken recipe.

  Through it all, my old man doled out an occasional thank you, but was generally oblivious to how hard I was working. He was so buried in paperwork, and studying old photos of him and Mom in their younger, happier days that he’d become almost as much a ghost as her.

  Then there was that one Saturday morning, nearly three weeks after Mom’s leaving.

  I’d just awoken from dreaming my same old dreams. I slapped on a U2 War T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Then I flipped on my lava lamp. Staring at those glowing blobs of red wax for hours on end had always allowed me to feel stoned even when I wasn’t. Once I’d caught a buzz, I sparked up the stereo. While Hüsker Dü’s Everything Falls Apart soared through the room, I engaged in that morning ritual—facing down my Darkness on the Edge of Town poster. Tried mastering Springsteen’s hands-in-pocket relaxed but solid stance, that don’t-fuck-with-me look—one eyebrow slightly raised, mouth somewhat open, gaze unwavering. Imitating Bruce Lee was even trickier: knees slightly bent; evenly balanced between ball of left foot and right; left shoulder back; right arm—loose, relaxed, extended; hand out and up, but not so far up that it blocked my vision. Some days, when I’d almost mastered the Springsteen stance, Bruce Lee would be a total car wreck. Other days when I’d almost perfected Bruce Lee, the Springsteen stance would look like I’d gone Code 10-24: intoxicated. It was all so involved and demanding, that morning ritual. But that was the kind of shit I needed to do back then to get along.

  Another thing that helped: my Ouija board. I’d often referred to it whenever faced with problems. Sometimes it was way off. Like once it told me I’d marry Farrah Fawcett. Other times it was spot on. The day before Mom left, when I’d asked the board what that Sunday would bring, it spelled out: T-R-O-U-B-L-E. I laid the board out on my bed, placed the inverted heart-shaped pointer between my hands, then asked: “When will everything be okay?”

  The pointer didn’t move right away. Just hovered on the word GOOD BYE. Then it gradually wobbled upward, past 5, over R, finally landing on E. It then wiggled upward toward the smiling moon, but sailed back down to rest on A. Then it glided down across the O, alighting upon 2, but then immediately floated back up, sharply to the right, finally coming to land on T.

  E-A-T. What the hell did that mean, I wondered. All I’d been doing for the last couple weeks was cooking or dreaming about it. The last thing I wanted right then was food. I stuffed the board back in my dresser, stumbled down the hall. Everything was cold and shadowy—my home bitter home’s version of Jimmy’s Dark Side of the Moon.

  I peered through my old man’s slightly ajar office door, spotted him at his desk.

  He was studying a photo of Mom. It was a picture of her at nineteen: doe-eyed, ruby-cheeked. At the time, she was working as a waitress at a seaside North Carolina diner. That’s where my old man had first met her. Once that Jersey-raised, twenty-three-year-old, rough-and-tumble Marine, newly released from Camp Lejeune, first heard Mom ask whether he wanted his eggs scrambled or sunny-side up, he was hooked. After just two dates, he was already promising her a home, money, and stability. Then it was back to Jersey, where he enrolled in the police academy. Not long afterward, he gave Mom a ring, a City Hall marriage, then me kicking around in her gut. And while the pressures of marriage and family had them continually growing further apart, they’d always shared something in common—in their own ways, they’d both wanted to clean up Blackwater. I knocked on my old man’s study door. “Can I come in?”

  He turned from the photo, snatched up a pile of papers. “Make it fast. I’m busy.”

  I stepped inside. Plastered all over the walls were his photos: one of him in the Marines, brandishing an M16 marksman rifle; another of him receiving Officer of the Year award; still another of him receiving a gold medal of valor. There were others: him after passing his sergeant’s test, lieutenant’s test, captain’s test, and finally being sworn in as Police Chief. Those photos were a constant reminder that no matter how Bruce I became, I’d never add up to my real-life-hero old man.

  Another thing about my old man.

  Normally, he resembled that badass Sergeant Carter on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.: gravelly voice, buzz-cut brown hair, intense blue eyes. But with Mom gone, he’d changed. The hair around his temples: grayer. The starched beige button-up, which he’d worn for the last couple days: sweat-stained, wrecked. Equally as wrecked: his face. The lines across his forehead and around his mouth—lines that Mom had once said the underlying collagen holds a memory of in each crease—were even more pronounced.

  My usual hatred gave way. “You all right?”

  My old man could see that my whole body was a billboard for worry: muscle tension, tired eyes. Also a few extra zits; nowhere near as many as those poor socially awkward First Lakers possessed. “Yeah,” said my old man. “What about you?”

  I shrugged. Spotted a few boxes on the floor containing Mom’s Hummels; Mary Kay awards, outfits; and other prized, personal possessions. Written across each of those boxes in my old man’s meticulous print were the black magic marker words: Sylvia’s Items. “Taking those to Mom?” I asked.

  “At some point.”

  “Need any help?”

  “Sure you want to do that, Mark?”

  That’s when I recalled the note Mom had left my old man and me. It reminded me of certain caves in North Jersey. Legend had it those caves were filled with all kinds of primitive paintings. A dragon here. A centipede-looking creature there. Some stick man hauling ass from a blood-red bull. That’s how Mom’s note had been—as cryptic and unable to prove true as those paintings. All she’d said was she was sorry for leaving, but needed to be on her own to find he
rself. She ended it all with the word: Love. “You’re not gonna stop her,” I said to my old man, “are you?”

  In a voice sounding more dead than beat-down, he said: “Nope.”

  That didn’t surprise me. Like Jack Lord on Hawaii Five-O, my old man was a tough Irish cop that had served warrants, tracked down criminals, and directed investigations. When it came to Mom, though, he had little authority. Suddenly, I wanted to curse and scream. Demand what he’d always demanded of me—to be a man. That’s what we most needed at home right then: a man. But I was afraid if I started yelling, I’d never stop. Next stop: Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.

  “I just don’t get it,” said my old man. He tried to say more, but couldn’t. Instead, his hands did all the talking: those fingers clenched into fists then relaxed. Fists, relaxed.

  I studied my old man’s hands. Those were the hands that had beat on tables, beat on me, and had held Mom. Those were the hands that had fired guns, collected trophies, and dragged criminals to jail. Those were also the hands featured in that dreaded photo on his study wall. It summed up our relationship. Snapped only hours after my birth, the picture featured my old man’s beefy hands frozen in the moment of handing First Born Me back over to Mom.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  After more hand clenching, and brow furrowing, my old man said: “We’ll have to pull together to make things work around here.”

  It had been tough for him to say that. It was equally as tough for me to say: “I know.”

  That’s when I got an idea, right after I’d spotted a photo on my old man’s study wall. A photo just above the one of him handing me back over to Mom. This other photo featured a younger version of him during his marksmanship training at the police academy. “Let’s go shooting tomorrow out in the Dump,” I said.

  “Not another one of your bright ideas, Mark.”