Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “Listen,” my mother said. “We’ll go to Poppa.”

  “But I have school.”

  “That’s what we’ll do, okay? Just the two of us. We’ll go to Poppa and give him the news that Abe is coming home and I’ll talk him into coming to the party. Forgive and forget, right?” She reached toward me. “You’ll come with Momma, darling?”

  “I have school,” I said. “I told you.”

  “So I give you permission—how often in one lifetime does your uncle Abe get home from the war?”

  “Will you write me a note?”

  She smiled. “I’ll write you a note.”

  My father came into the kitchen, lit a cigarette, blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. Three tiny pieces of toilet paper were stuck to his cheek and chin where he’d nicked himself shaving. My mother put her arms around his neck, from behind, but he twisted away and pointed a finger at me.

  “You take good care of your mother while I’m gone, do you hear me?”

  “Oh Sol!” my mother exclaimed. “Sol darling—not now, all right? Didn’t you hear who was on the phone?”

  “I thought you weren’t talking to a good-for-nothing like me anymore.”

  “Life is so short, Sol. Why should we use it up fighting?”

  “So your brother is coming home and that makes everything jake, huh?” My father sniffed in. “Wonderful. Last night you told me I didn’t have a pot to piss in and this morning—”

  “Sol! Please—!”

  “—and this morning, now that your big shot brother is coming home you start in with all the hugging and kissing. Sure. Wonderful. Everything is hunky-dory as long as Abe is around.”

  I thought of how cold the radio said it was outside. I imagined the snow on the fire escape as being made up of millions of tiny white grains, like sand, and I felt sad that Abe was coming home now instead of in the spring or the summer. If he came home in the spring or summer, I knew, he would take me to a Dodger game at Ebbets Field. I thought of me and Tony and Marvin and the other guys sneaking into the bleachers and of how proud Abe would be of me for the way we did it. My mother was gone. My father was searching around on top of the table as if he’d lost something—he was too proud ever to ask me to help him look for anything—and what I saw inside my head was the lush green of the grass of Ebbets Field before a game began. I saw the men walking around the base paths, dragging the enormous pieces of weighted-down cloth they used to smooth the dirt paths. I saw Abe laughing his beautiful big smile and waving to people he knew in the stands and I saw how happy I was to be next to him. Now that he was back, though, I wondered if I could still stay friends with Tony. Tony’s father worked for Mr. Fasalino the way my father worked for Abe, and Mr. Fasalino and Abe controlled different territories. According to my father, Mr. Fasalino’s organization had been scared to go too far while the war was on and we were fighting against Italy, but now that the Italians weren’t our enemies anymore he figured Mr. Fasalino would try to move into our territory as soon as Abe got back.

  My mother set my father’s satchel down on the chair next to me, took out his set of clean underwear, laid the tops and bottoms on the kitchen counter, and folded them down with her hands.

  “For me this once, all right? Just meet us at Lillian’s tonight. Is that asking too much of a man I’ve been married to for fourteen years?”

  My father cocked his head to the side, and from where I was sitting below him the white of his blind eye was soft and milky. When the two of them got angry, my mother’s cheeks would fill with color and my father’s would go pale and gray. It was as if their fighting made him older and her younger. My mother’s hand was on the back of my neck, but I wasn’t sure she knew she had it there. I tried not to hear the words they said to one another—I hated it when he acted like a beggar—and I thought instead of the questions I could ask Abe, the ones I’d been saving up about what the war had been like, and who were the bravest soldiers, and whether the Australian Commandos were really the best of all, even better than our Rangers, and if he’d ever been scared he would die and what he’d imagined during a moment like that.

  “If I hurt your feelings,” my mother said, “then I apologize right here with the boy as witness, okay?” She stroked my neck slowly and I didn’t move. “Look—I know you mean well, Sol, but what would be so terrible if we had a little extra money? I think it would be a terrific job, being a comparison shopper. Anybody meets me in the store, they would think I’m a regular shopper, like I’m supposed to look like. I’d get to move around a lot, from store to store. I could save us some money too. I—”

  “No wife of Sol Voloshin is gonna work so long as he’s alive. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you. But I’ll say it again, that I’m sorry and that at a time like this what I think is bygones should be bygones and we should be like a family. Like a family, Sol, all right? Do you hear me? Did I ever want more than we should be a real family together, the three of us, with no secrets? Only when we fight I get scared that it’s gonna be like Momma and Poppa all over again and you can’t ever understand that, how all I want is for us to love one another.”

  “Sure. I’ll love you and you’ll love Abe and Abe will take care of the whole world. Tell me another one.”

  My father touched his underpants, on the counter, but he didn’t put them back into his satchel. I was afraid to look directly into his face because I knew he might look at me in a way that would make me want to help him find the words he could use to make her stop being angry with him. But if he left her for good and never came back, would she be happy then?

  “And listen, Sol—I’ll try not to nag you about money no more either, so you can see that it’s okay by me if you go. Sure. Only if you go, Sol, you don’t ever have to come back, because do you know why?”

  I thought he might give her his old line about how when the war ended in Europe it would start in Brooklyn, but he didn’t. He just stood there, his silence making the look I’d seen a thousand times before begin to spread over her face—her eyes narrowing, the left corner of her mouth curling upwards, her neck going stiff—and I went rigid too, so that I could be ready for anything she might say. I wanted to get out of the room—to grab my schoolbooks and coat and galoshes and to slam the door behind me and leave them to scratch at each other with their words—but I knew that if I moved and tried to get away they’d only switch their attention to me.

  “And you say you love me,” my mother said. “Don’t make me laugh, mister. If you really loved me you wouldn’t talk to me the way you do.”

  “Not in front of the boy, all right, Evie? Please.”

  “Not in front of the boy. Sure. But if you want to rant and rave in front of him and I say not—if I get down on my knees for you to stop, like I been doing—that’s all right, huh?”

  “Look. If I’m there tonight, I’m only liable to say the wrong thing and take away from your good time. The truth is I don’t trust myself around Abe.”

  “Listen, mister, if you think a pip-squeak like you can take away my good time, then you got another think coming. I’ll tell you a secret,” she added, moving toward him. “You don’t make me happy and you don’t make me unhappy. You don’t got the power in you.”

  “Evie, stop already. The boy.”

  “He ain’t hearing nothing he ain’t heard before and if he don’t like it he can pack up and get out too. You think I need you two? What can you do for me that I can’t do for myself? Tell me that. Come on. Tell me.”

  My father slumped into a chair. The ashes on his cigarette were getting long and I was frightened they’d fall on his hand and burn him. I tried to make their faces go away by remembering war movies I’d been to—Guadalcanal Diary and Back to Bataan and Destination Tokyo— and I imagined going to them with Abe so he could tell me which parts were true and which parts were made up.

  “Whatever you want, Evie,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

  My mother laughed at him then and when she did I
felt that she was laughing at me too.

  “Sure. Now you’ll do what I ask, when it suits you, right? When you don’t want to be embarrassed in front of your precious son. You ain’t nothing, Sol. Did you know that? You’re less than nothing, if you want the truth. You ain’t—”

  “Stop it!” I cried out. “Stop it already!”

  My mother turned to me.

  “Well, well,” she said, mocking me with her eyes. “So look who’s butting in now? What’s the matter, bubula—you’re afraid your father can’t fight his own battles?”

  I stood and screamed at her with all my might to stop—to just stop it already, that I had said to stop it—and while I went on shouting the words I looked for something to grab on to, but the only thing I could see besides the radio was my bowl of cereal. There was still some Ralston in it, in a grainy brown crescent along the outer rim—so I lifted the bowl into the air with both hands and smashed it down on the table.

  “Now do you believe me?” I shouted. “Now will you stop it?”

  “See?” my mother said, her voice suddenly gentle again. She came to me and got down on her knees next to my chair. She started to stroke my hair and my cheek. I couldn’t move. “See what we’re doing to the boy? Oh Davey—what are we doing to you, darling? Tell me what we’re doing to you, my baby—”

  “I’m not your baby,” I said, and I backed up against the icebox. “All I want is for you to just shut up. The both of you. Just shut up shut up shut up—” Once I started screaming I couldn’t ever stop myself, and even though we’d been through scenes like this before, while it was taking place and I was screaming my lungs out at them the strangest thing was I felt at the same time that I was outside the scene too, watching it all happen as if somebody else were throwing the tantrum—as if I couldn’t figure out how a boy like me could ever get so crazy.

  “My poor baby,” my mother said. “My poor little Davey.”

  My mother took my father’s hands away from his face. She lifted his cigarette from his lower lip and set it down in the ashtray.

  “For him, Sol,” she pleaded. “For him—it’s for him we gotta stop all this crap.”

  “Crap is right,” he said. “Sure, Evie. Whatever you say. Sure. So listen. I stopped already, in case you didn’t notice. Didn’t I stop? Did I stop or did I stop?”

  My mother kissed my father on his forehead, came toward me. When she smiled at me this time all I saw was her mouth, like the heart on a Valentine’s card, bright red wax and enormous, as if it were triple its regular size, with a dark opening in the middle for her tongue, and what I wanted to do more than anything in the world was to have a baseball bat in my hands—a beautiful Louisville Slugger—and to be able to swing it around and smash through her lips and teeth to the back of her skull.

  “My sweet little Davey. My little baby. Your Poppa and I stopped our fighting, see? Didn’t we stop, Sol?”

  She was still smiling, and when she tried to put her hand on mine I leaned back into the windowsill, frightened that she might tell Abe about my tantrums.

  “Stay away from me,” I said. “I’m warning you. Do you hear me? Stay away from me.”

  My father stood in the entranceway to the kitchen in his good winter coat, the soft black one that was part cashmere.

  “I’ll go straight to Lillian’s from work.”

  I stayed where I was, my fists opening and closing at my sides. My father pointed a finger at me again.

  “You calm down and listen to your mother, do you hear? You’re only making things worse.”

  I fought to control the rasping sound that came from my chest, but I couldn’t, and I wanted to smash his head open too for switching and taking her side, for doing her dirty work for her. Didn’t he know that this only made her despise him more?

  “We’ll all be away from each other the whole day, we’ll feel better,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  “But do you see what we do to him? He won’t even let his own mother touch him. Remember when he was a baby and he used to hold his breath? Didn’t I tell you then?” She clucked inside her mouth. “Someday. Someday, Sol—didn’t I warn you enough times?—someday Davey’s gonna kill somebody with that temper of his and I won’t be responsible. That’s all I got to say.”

  The front door closed. I imagined the way my father would look, slouching down the stairs from landing to landing. My mother moved around the kitchen as if nothing had happened. She cleared the table and put away my father’s satchel and picked up the little white chips from the broken plate with a damp cloth, and what seemed craziest of all to me was that she actually seemed happy again all of a sudden, as if the scene had somehow given her what she wanted. When she talked to me her voice was sweet and relaxed. It was almost as if she were talking to herself. She went on and on the way she did sometimes, while I stood there, frozen.

  “Listen. If you want to turn into a statue, Davey, you can keep standing there—it’s all the same to me—or else you can show how really smart you are and go wash your face and comb your hair and put on a nicer shirt, for visiting your grandpa. So you won’t go to school and I’ll write you a note. What’s the big deal, a smart boy like you? In the meantime I need to get dressed and do my eyebrows, so you got time to think over what happened. It wouldn’t hurt to apologize either. You don’t want to come with me to visit Poppa, I won’t force you. The same goes for Abe’s party. You want to come, come. You don’t, don’t. Only I know you want to see your uncle Abe a lot, don’t you? I mean, even though I know that deep down your father loves me, if he talks to me the way you seen him do it makes me feel he don’t and the feeling spreads everywhere inside me so there’s no room for anything else, and I get scared, and he gets more scared, and then you see the way things get out of hand, yeah? I mean, I told him right on our honeymoon that I knew he loved me—let’s face it, he worshiped me, who didn’t know that?—but I told him I was just a funny kind of girl that way, that I needed to be told it every day of my life and in the right tone of voice or else I get—well—sad was the way I put it back then. I do get awful sad sometimes, Davey. Like when you were born and your father came to me in the hospital with his hands full of the most beautiful yellow roses and you were lying on my breast under the sheet, and I asked him if he still remembered what I said to him on our honeymoon and he promised me he would never forget. But he forgets. I mean, he forgets, don’t he? You’re the witness. He forgets all the time….”

  Beau Jack was shoveling snow from the sidewalk when I got downstairs. His dog Kate was tied to the fence with a chain, and I took off my mittens and brushed her fur behind her ears. She got up on me, her front paws against my chest, and I put my arms around her neck and let her lick my face the way she liked to. She was part Labrador and part basset hound, with black fur like warm silk. Some people made fun of her because of the way she looked, her top half sleek and long and her bottom half slung low to the ground, with big front paws that went out sideways, slue-footed—but I loved Kate and I visited Beau Jack in the cellar sometimes just so I could feel her fur and let her lick me.

  “My Uncle Abe’s coming home from the Army,” I said. “We’re gonna have a party for him tonight at my Aunt Lillian’s.”

  “That’s real good,” Beau Jack said, but he didn’t smile at me. He leaned his shovel against the fence. His Dodger baseball hat was set at a slight angle on his head, tilted down at the right side where the ear was missing, from a war injury. What he had instead of an ear looked like a little brown mushroom cap. “I like to see the boys come home.”

  “I mean, he’s not coming home today. He came home yesterday, but the party is for tonight.”

  Beau Jack’s skin always seemed dusty in the winter, as if coated with a thin layer of dried-up salt spray from the ocean. I’d been thinking of trying to draw him for a while, but I was afraid because I couldn’t figure out how I could get the color of his skin—the exact shade of brown showing through the pale white—onto paper with just my pencils.
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  “Listen, Davey,” he said, leaning down toward me. “You want to see the most beautiful thing in the world?”

  “Sure.”

  “You come on with me then.”

  I followed Beau Jack into the building. I liked being close to him because even in the winter he gave off a wonderful fragrance, like peanut oil that had been frying for a while. On the fourth floor he stopped.

  “You go on in first. But be quiet.”

  He unlocked the door. The foyer smelled like fresh paint. The walls were bright yellow and the room was empty.

  “You go on,” he said. “Go on now.”

  He closed the door behind us. I went into the living room. It was empty too, without furniture or carpeting, and the Venetian blinds on the two windows were drawn up to the top so that the room was full of bright white light. In the middle of the ceiling two wires hung down from the fixture, tied together with little plastic caps on them. The parquet floor gleamed as if it had a thin sheet of glass on top of it. I smelled the wax. The walls were bare, painted in a soft powdery gray, and where the electric wall fixtures had been there were round cones sticking out that looked like women’s breasts.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked.

  He drew me with him, out of the living room and into a bedroom. The bedroom was bare also, painted in the same gray, the color the sky was sometimes on a cold day before snow came.

  “Spent lots of hours getting it ready, but it was worth it, don’t you think? Oh yeah. If you ask me I think there’s nothing more beautiful than a home that’s all clean and empty and fresh-painted and ready for some new family to come live in it.”

  I went into the kitchen with him and admired everything: how white and shiny he’d gotten the refrigerator and stove and sink, how he’d put shelf paper in the cabinets, how crystal clear the windows were. I told him that I had to go, that my mother would be waiting for me.