by John Fulton
“Are you going to fight?” I asked again. “Are you going to do something?”
He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he only looked at me. “Something’s different about you,” he said. “It’s your arm. Your sling is gone. Look at that, Jenny.”
“Yeah,” she said.
I took my coat off then and looked down at myself, swinging my injured arm back and forth. It was skinnier, bonier than my other arm as a result of all those weeks just hanging at my side and doing nothing. “I guess I’m better,” I said.
“Good for you,” he said.
“You fought over this,” I said, lifting my skinny arm up. “You made sure things worked out.”
“Did I?” He looked down at his glass. I wished that he’d at least look at me. “This is complicated, Steven. We might not get what we want this time.”
I understood then that something had already happened, that an agreement had already been reached, that my father had somehow already made the decision to stop fighting, that he had already quit. “I slept too long,” I said. “I shouldn’t have slept so long. Someone should have woken me up. Why didn’t anyone wake me up, Jenny?” She didn’t say anything. “Why is Jenny so quiet? What’s wrong with Jenny?” I asked.
“I’m not so quiet,” she said.
“So tell me why nobody woke me up,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said, raising her voice. “Stop asking me so much.”
“Why are they outside talking?” I asked my father.
“I’d guess they already have secrets to keep from us,” he said.
“What secrets?” He shrugged, though I had a feeling that he knew and didn’t want to tell me. “Where are Curtis Smith’s kids?”
“They’re at their aunt’s house,” Jenny said.
“What secrets?” I asked again.
“Ask your mother,” my father said. It was the first time in our conversation that his voice had risen from resignation into anger. He looked out the giant window in front of us and said very quietly, “A million-dollar view.”
The front door opened and closed, and we heard Curtis and my mother hang their coats up and stomp their feet and walk into the living room. Their faces were red from the cold outside. My mother was no longer wearing makeup, and her eyes were swollen. She’d been crying again. “Why don’t you sit down, Steven?” Curtis Smith said. I hadn’t really noticed that I had been standing until he said that. So I sat down next to my father.
Curtis and my mother remained standing behind the couch opposite my father and me. My mother had neither looked at me nor said a word since she had entered the room, not so much as a “Hi” or “How are you?” or “Did you sleep well?” She just stood there looking down at the carpet. I don’t know how long my father and I sat in that very uncomfortable silence. “I’m sitting down now,” I finally said. I wanted everybody to see that I was behaving, that I was done throwing tantrums. I thought that would help. I thought that might make a difference.
“Would you like more water?” Curtis asked my father.
My father looked at the remaining water in his glass. “I think we should go ahead and get this over with,” he said.
“What’s happening?” I asked. It was uncomfortable looking up at them. “I wish everybody would sit down,” I said.
Curtis sat down next to Jenny, but my mother didn’t. “Why don’t you sit down, Mary?” he asked her. She finally sat down, and as soon as she did, I noticed the aluminum finger cast on her right hand, which she’d kept behind her back until then. She laid that hand delicately in her lap and let it rest there. You could tell that it still hurt her.
“Oh,” I said. “You went to the hospital?”
“Yes,” my mother said. She looked at me now. “We did.”
“I did that?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” Her voice wasn’t exactly angry. It was baffled, confused. “You swung a bat at me, Steven.”
“He said he was sorry,” my father said. I could tell that he wanted to protect me.
“I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t.” My mother looked down at her lap.
My father put a hand on my shoulder and nodded. “We know that you didn’t mean to,” he said.
I was beginning to understand what was happening to me, and I guess my father saw this in my face, since he looked away from me and out the window at the city below. “Why’s Noir here?” I asked. “Why did Dad bring Noir? Is he going to live in this house, too?” Curtis Smith sat directly across from me, staring down at the glass top of the coffee table. It was obvious to me that nobody in the room would look in my direction.
“I thought you might like to say hi to him,” my father said. “I thought he might make things easier.”
“What things?” I asked again. “Somebody please tell me.”
“Your father is here to take you home,” my mother finally said.
“Oh,” I said. My father and I looked at each other then. Despite his exhaustion, his paleness, the small, tender scabs on his cheek and chin from having shaved himself too closely, I saw clearly in his face what he wanted from me. I saw that he wanted me to be happy about what was about to happen. I saw that he needed me to be with him.
“Curtis and I have been talking,” she said. “We think it might be best if you didn’t stay here for now.”
“I have to leave?” I asked.
“You don’t seem to want to stay here, Steven.”
“I said I was sorry.” I couldn’t speak for a minute. “What if I want to stay here?” I asked. “Maybe I want to stay here. Maybe I do.”
“You don’t, really,” my mother said. “We don’t think you do.”
“I want to stay,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself from saying that.
“Listen to that,” my father finally said. He slapped his hands down in his lap. “He wants to stay here, Mary.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. But we all seemed to hear the falseness in my voice. “Jenny is staying here?” I asked. “Are you staying here?” I asked her.
Jenny didn’t look up from her lap when she said, “I guess. For a while.”
My father looked at my mother. “This,” he said, “is one mess I didn’t make. Don’t you ever hold me responsible for what is happening in this room right now.”
“Okay, Billy,” my mother said. She turned to me. “It’s not just my decision. Other people are involved here. Curtis doesn’t know you yet. He thinks it might be best. Just for now. He’s worried about his kids. You scared them yesterday. You even scared your sister.” She was shaking her head now, and I guessed why Curtis’s kids had gone to the aunt’s house. They would stay over there—at a safe distance from me—until I had left. “To tell you the truth, you scared me. You really did, Steven.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I faced Curtis Smith, who was still too nervous and too much of a coward to look at me. He was lightly drumming his fingers over the coffee table. “You’re letting him kick me out?”
“I’m sorry, too,” Curtis said, his voice very calm. “We don’t know what else to do at this point.”
“I can’t promise Curtis anything about what you will or won’t do next,” my mother said. “I have no idea what to expect from you myself.”
“First you want me to stay. Then you make me leave.”
“In a while,” she said, “you can come back and we can try this again, if you want.”
“A while? What does a while mean?”
“It will depend on you. It will be when you’re ready. When you’re not so angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“You were angry yesterday. You were out of control, Steven.”
“I’ll behave,” I said to her, trying not to raise my voice, trying to show her that I was in control. “I’m behaving now. Aren’t I behaving now?” She didn’t say anything. I looked over at my father, who just sat there in his oversize suit staring at that stupid wa
ter glass in his hand. I hated seeing him like that. I hated knowing that she had been right the day before when she had called me my father’s son. I hated knowing that she saw me as she saw him: We were too much trouble to love, too dangerous and unpractical to love because finally, as she had said, love didn’t change anything. “Do something,” I told my father. “You need to do something. You have to.”
My father reached out and put his hand on my back. “You need to calm down, Steven,” he said.
“I am calm,” I said. And I was calm. I was showing everyone that they could trust me, that I was done going crazy. “Jenny’s going to stay here?” I asked again. I was trying to imagine what living without my Bilmorette sister would be like. I was already somehow missing her, imagining the quiet in our house without her, the quiet that had been so unexpected to my father the night before.
“She says she wants to,” my mother said.
“When will we see each other?” I asked. Jenny just sat there, looking down at her lap.
“That will be worked out,” my mother said. She closed her eyes and then opened them again. “This will all get easier later on. You’ll see.” I couldn’t tell what she was thinking or feeling, though I knew that she no more believed that things would become easier than I did. “We went shopping today,” she said, gesturing at a cream-colored Nordstrom’s bag beside the couch. “I got you some new clothes.”
“Those aren’t my clothes,” I said. I lifted the white garbage bag at my feet. “These are my clothes.”
“You’re going to freeze in this weather. You only have those terrible pajamas on.” I heard the sadness in her voice—too much sadness. “You’ll be able to come back soon. This will only be for a while.” It would not just be for a while, though, and I half knew it then; I half suspected then that I would stay with my father, that that would be my part in all of this. “Okay?” she said.
“Okay,” I said, because I knew she wanted me to say that. Then we all just sat there in silence, and the calmness of that room bothered me. It wasn’t right to sit quietly at a moment like that. Somebody needed to do something. That’s all I could think. Somebody needed to act. We couldn’t just say and do nothing. But we did, until my father finally looked up from his water glass and said, “I think we need to go now.”
Eight
MY FATHER WAS TOO distracted that afternoon to ask for change when he handed the cab driver a fifty. I could guess where that money had come from, and half wanted the driver to have it. But I also knew we’d need every last dollar of it, so I demanded the change as soon as my father headed for the Buick. “You’re supposed to leave me a tip, kid,” the driver said. He looked like he might strangle me if I didn’t, so I gave him the two dollars that I’d taken from the table at Dee’s. “That’ll do,” he said, and drove away.
Noir was his usual unrestrained and happy self, and for the first time that I can remember, I hated him for it. When we let him out of the cab, he jumped on me and howled and yelped and wanted to play. His eyes were so goddamned joyful and he kept looking at me as if I were the same person he knew from the day before and the day before that, as if nothing at all had happened. I wanted those stupid, expectant eyes to stop looking at me. Inside the Buick, the air was freezing, and my father and I sat without talking. The blank white of the frozen windows surrounded us. For some reason, my father didn’t get out and scrape. Instead, we sat there for what seemed like hours as the defroster slowly melted the ice away and revealed that huge, obscene house. When Noir refused to stay in the back of the Buick, and leapt into the front, where he too greedily begged for affection, I kicked him. “Shut up!” I yelled, kicking him again.
“You kick him once more,” my father said, turning toward me, “and I’ll give you something you won’t ever forget.”
My father had never cared much about Noir, who lunged again into the backseat where he lay on the floor, whimpering and hiding from me. “He won’t shut up,” I said.
“I brought him,” my father said, holding on to the steering wheel with both hands, “to make this whole thing a little easier for you. That’s why he’s here. He’s not here to be beat up by you.”
“It’s not any easier,” I said.
“Don’t kick him again. You got that?”
“Yes,” I said.
We pulled out of the driveway. The roads, which had frozen overnight, were dangerous. A few times as we made our way down the Avenues, the Buick seemed about to lunge off the asphalt. We fishtailed and once turned sideways—the whole car seeming about to careen into a tail spin. It felt as though we were traveling on air, as if the road had disappeared. But the car straightened out, and neither my father nor I was scared, a fact that seemed to keep the very real danger away. “She’ll come back to us,” he said. “You’ll see. She will.” But he said that without any enthusiasm, without any of his mindless, belligerent optimism, betraying the fact that he himself did not believe those words. I just sat there, next to my father, trying not to think and looking out at the blue sky and white sun, the bright afternoon that did not at all reflect the freezing temperatures that would fall into minus double digits later that night and somehow shatter the window of my bedroom so that, waking alone in the dark the next morning, I was cold, afraid, and unable to comprehend how the wind could be blowing through my room, scattering my school papers over the floor. I’d had a dream, and couldn’t stop seeing the picture of that huge propeller from the Bone Yard being carted away through rows and rows of dismantled aircraft. “This is where the planes come to die,” the air force guide, a blond man with a permanent smile on his face, kept telling my father and me. The guide wore aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses behind which he seemed to hide some terrible knowledge. I tried to break through the confusion of that dream, of that sudden waking. I tried to understand where I could be and who I was and what had happened, until finally I saw that I was in bed at home, that my window had broken, and I was able to walk around the shattered glass and wake my father, who taped a garbage bag over my window and put me back in bed and said, even as the wind beat against the taped plastic, “Go back to sleep, Steven. Everything will be all right.” He had said the same thing that afternoon as we drove over the invisible danger of black ice. “Everything will be all right. You’ll see.” He had said that many times before. He had said that after my shoulder had been injured, and I had believed him then. But after that day, I could no longer believe in the power of my father to make things right. And neither could he.
When we arrived home late that afternoon, I opened the white garbage bag, the smell of shit wafting into the air before I could throw my clothes into the washer and close the lid. “What’s that?” my father asked. But he saw in my face that I could not answer him, and he let it go. The next day, when I took my clothes out of the washer, I would see that my blue jeans were a ghostly shade of blue because I had used bleach instead of soap. I wasn’t yet very good at the sort of household duties that would soon be mine. But I was good enough. At the very least, the smell of shit was gone.
In the cupboards, we had four boxes of mac and cheese, a loaf of white bread, a packet of Kool-Aid, a can of cranberry sauce, a can of mixed vegetables, and sixteen cans of oil-packed tuna. “I’m not hungry,” my father said, playing with his food and taking a bite now and then. The macaroni that I had prepared was underdone and crunched a little as we chewed it. Slowly I came to realize that I was hungry, starved—I hadn’t eaten since the day before in the restaurant—and my father slowly gained his appetite, as well. Soon we bent over our plates and ate ravenously. The grape Kool-Aid made our mouths look bruised and swollen. I let Noir stay inside that night, and he lay under the table, shamelessly begging until I lowered a spoonful of mac and cheese, then another and another, and he licked greedily at the food, instantly forgiving me, instantly trusting me again.
“You smell a little,” my father said, looking at me funny. I lowered my head and smelled myself, realizing then that the dead man was at th
e table with us—the smell of him, anyway. My father didn’t ask me to leave the table or wash. He was too exhausted to do anything more than make the comment, and I was too exhausted to let the smell bother me much. I had to think of Oak Groves, though, of Mrs. Smith and her crazy endless dinner that seemed to make her so insanely happy. I was sorry for ever having hurt her. She had just been living out a dream in a place where, without dreams, you would have died in a few minutes. That’s all she’d done. And I wished then that my father and I had all those strange dishes, half of which I’d never eaten or even seen before—pumpkin soup, butternut squash, collard greens, grits and cheese, chutney, goose, partridge and pheasant, wild rice, and giblet gravy. I wished we’d had them if only as an excuse to talk to one another, to be polite, to say please pass this and that, to say thank you and you’re welcome, and to say how delicious everything was in a genuine tone of voice that we hadn’t even used a month before while eating so many foods for which we had no taste and ended up throwing out. But I couldn’t imagine how expensive a dinner like that would be, and I remembered the large, empty round table at which old Mrs. Smith, gone in the head, sat asking for things that weren’t there. At least the things we had on our table—the saucepan of mac and cheese, the Kool-Aid and mixed vegetables, the loaf of Wonder bread, the butter on a plate—were all real. I looked up at those things and said to my father, “Please pass the bread and butter, if you wouldn’t mind.”
He looked at me, a little confused. “It’s right in front of you,” he said. Our table was very small.
“Please pass the bread and butter,” I said again. He hesitated; then he did as I asked. “Thank you,” I said. When he said nothing, I insisted, saying it a little louder, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, for God’s sake,” he said. You could hear the anger in his voice. It wasn’t anger at me. It was anger at everything. I knew it was that kind of anger because I felt it, too, anger and something like fear, and every word I said was alive with it. Nonetheless, I asked for the mixed vegetables, the mac and cheese, and the pitcher of Kool-Aid in the same polite way, and without looking at me he slowly reached for these things and put them down in front of me.