Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  Rose’s boss has threatened to take away her job because she allows the workers to stay in her house. If he does, Dwayne asks, will she let the S.N.C.C. legal staff take up her case? She fans herself with a paper fan—“Imperial Funeral Home” lettered on it, in black and purple—and shrugs, sullenly. What does she think about all day, all those hours in the sun while she works? Would she be willing to go down with some of them to the town hall, to try to register to vote? Would she like to go to school the way her children do? Does she know where her husband is? What does she think about the three civil rights workers, two of them white and Jewish, who were killed down in Philadelphia, on the other side of the state?

  “I’ll tell you what,” she says. “I’ll let you take one of my children back up North with you—you choose anyone you want—iffen you get me a TV set in exchange.”

  Nobody laughs. Aaron puts a hand on her shoulder and looks into her eyes, to see if she is joking. He thinks of Billy’s eyes, shining up at him. He has been living in her house for over three weeks, yet he can never tell whether she is serious or whether she is putting them on.

  “One child for a regular set, two for color?” he asks.

  “That’s okay too.”

  George, a sophomore economics major from Yale, ever serious, asks her what she felt when they were dragging the Mississippi River for the three missing civil rights workers and found, instead, the bodies of two Negroes, one of them cut in half and decapitated. Rose shrugs, shows no surprise. She didn’t feel anything because she didn’t know them.

  What if one of the bodies was one of her own children?

  “Then I’d have four left,” she says.

  Dwayne talks bitterly about the fact that you can find a dead Negro anytime you drag a river in Mississippi—that most of the time the parents don’t even report them as missing, for fear of retaliation from the law. He curses and walks off, begins whacking at a tree with a board, the way he does whenever he is upset. Aaron tells them that he and Nicky are going into town, to the shopping center. Does anybody want to come? Nobody does. Rose says to watch out for the night riders, who can come up to you in the dark and steal away your children.

  “My children are all up North,” Aaron says. “They’re all safe in their beds by now.”

  “That don’t matter to them none,” Rose says. “They can be meaner than you think round here.”

  “Do you mind if I hold your hand?”

  “No.”

  They are out of the car, walking across the unlit parking lot.

  “How’d you lose your two fingers?”

  “Horsing around when I was a kid. We had kitchen duty—grinding up old bread for meat loaf, and one of the old guys shoved my hand in. We’d been fighting a lot—throwing stuff at each other.”

  “Brr. I like to touch the stubs—you don’t find that strange, do you?”

  “No. Susan does it too. So do the children. It’s been a long time since I was embarrassed.” He holds open the door of the Walgreens Pharmacy. They step into bright fluorescent light, aisles of brilliant color—reds and blues and pinks and greens and whites—and he squints. It is as if, he thinks, they are living within a movie that has suddenly switched from black-and-white to Technicolor. He felt the same way, he realized, when Nicky came into his room earlier—as if he’d been living in a world of muted colors, dull grays and browns and greens, until the moment when she first touched him, when she sat beside him on the bed, when his head began to clear.

  “I made the best of it—threw a mean curveball, a natural forkball. Like Three-Finger Mordecai Brown.”

  “Was he at the orphanage too?”

  They walk toward the rear of the store, where there are three phone booths.

  “Three-Finger Mordecai Brown was a baseball player who lasted thirteen seasons in the majors with four teams, from 1903 to 1916. He also played a stint in the old Federal League, which was a kind of outlaw league some of the players jumped to, like the Mexican League after the Second World War. The Dodgers and the Giants—those were the teams we rooted for—they lost a lot of players to them: Luis Olmo, Mickey Owen, Sal Maglie, Ernie Lombardi, Danny Gardella….” Aaron smiles. “No Yankees went south of the border. Nobody in the orphanage rooted for them. The Yankees were always a rich man’s ball club. But Brown—Three-Finger Brown—he wound up winning 239 games, lifetime. I kept a picture of him on the wall next to my bed.”

  “You know a lot about baseball.”

  “It kept us alive—dreaming about becoming stars. It was a way for kids like us to believe we could join the rest of America, I guess.”

  She slips into the phone booth. She smiles. Her left front tooth, chipped, looks like a giant white apostrophe. “Is this America?” she asks, repeating the question civil rights workers have been asking one another—a running joke—ever since their training school at Western College of Women, in Oxford, Ohio.

  “This is America. You bet your sweet life it is.”

  “Babe Ruth was an orphan, wasn’t he?”

  “No, but people thought he was. We thought he was. Some people thought he was Negro too.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s possible. I once read a book that tried to prove it. I mean, think of his face—the moon shape, the fat lips, the squat, pushed-in nose, the downward folds of his eyes, the way he loved getting black in the sun all summer long.”

  “Let me call home. Stay here, though, okay? Don’t go away. I like talking with you.”

  Aaron stays. He watches the shoppers, glances in at Nicky every now and then. She bites her lip, rolls her eyes. He hears her yelling, taps on the glass, cautions her to cool it. He sees three men staring at him from the entrance. One of them wears a sheriff’s uniform and hat. Aaron does not smile at them, nor does he look away.

  “Oh shit,” Nicky says when she comes out of the phone booth. She chews on her lower lip, forces back tears. “They don’t understand anything, Aaron. Not anything!” She begins to lean against him, her forehead to his chin, but he steps back, keeps her at a distance. “Oh shit and double shit. If they lived down here they’d be worse than the damned peckerheads.”

  “Peckerwoods,” he says softly. “They call them peckerwoods here.”

  “Peckerheads. That’s what I said. Damned peckerheads.”

  She slips her hand into his and squeezes until his fingers hurt.

  “Be careful,” Aaron says, nodding toward the door.

  “Why? We’re both still white, aren’t we?” She stops. “Go make your goddamned phone call, okay? I’ll get over it. Just shit and double shit is all.” She sucks in her lips, screws up her eyes, mimics her mother: “‘Now Nicky, why don’t you just let them little pickaninnys alone so that…’”

  “Shh,” he says, and tries again to get her to acknowledge the three men by the door. “Come on now—”

  “They think the only reason I’m here is to make them angry. How can people be so small-minded, Aaron? I mean, can you believe my mother going on and on about shopping with me for a fall wardrobe for college while…” She stops, looks down. “They’re proud of me for going to college, I guess. They grew up poor and dumb and all they want is for me to be happy. I know all about it, only—”

  “Hey,” he says, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “Get hold of yourself. We’ll talk later, okay. This isn’t the place.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Well. A parent is still a parent, I guess. No matter how far from home you stray, you keep on searching for the love you never got from them.”

  “Yes.”

  “How would you know? You were a goddamned orphan.”

  “I had parents. I just lost them early.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I already did.”

  He leaves the door of the phone booth partly open, for air. He dials, and while his children talk to him, from different extensions, he thinks: sometimes we know things most by not having them, by
desiring them. Had he ever imagined having children like those he actually has? The children have just returned from two weeks at a sleep-away camp and they want to tell him about it—about the raids and the food and the counselors, about the jokes they learned and the field trips they took and the friends they made. Carl says that he received lots of flying-wedgies, and explains that a flying-wedgie occurs when an older guy picks you up by your underpants and flings you. Larry interrupts to ask Aaron if he knows what “no-slugs” means, if Aaron will be home soon. You say “no-slugs” after you fart, or else the guy who says “slugs” can give you one punch for each second he counts off. Aaron is amazed—that they are so happy and excited merely to talk to him.

  “I like your articles,” Jennifer says. “At camp they posted them on the bulletin board in the social hall. We had a rap session one night based on what you wrote and my counselor said she wished she was where you are instead of up here.”

  “I like the drawings a lot,” Larry adds. “You sure can draw niggers good, Dad.”

  “Negroes!” Jennifer corrects. “Good God! Did you hear that? How would you like it if somebody called you a kike?”

  “They already do.”

  Susan cuts in and tells the children that she wants to speak with Aaron privately. The children say good night. Aaron tells them that he loves them, that he thinks of them constantly, that he will see them before too long. He hears clicking sounds.

  “Susan?”

  “I’m here.”

  “What did you want?”

  “To know if you miss me or not. Do you miss me, Aaron?”

  “Sure. But—”

  “How much?”

  “What? Now listen. I—”

  “Oh Aaron, I’m sorry to be this way, but I’ve been so worried about you. Would you just tell me, for a minute or two, how much you miss me—would you tell me about when during your days there you think of me, about what pictures come into your mind? I want to be there with you and I’m scared that if I’m not—” She stops. He is surprised by the intensity of her voice. There is a slight raspiness to it, like that of a teenager’s voice shifting ranges. “It’s just that I’ve been so worried ever since they found the three bodies. Are you being careful, sweetheart?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you considered coming home early?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be angry with me for asking. But listen to me for a minute. I was having a drink before—two drinks—and I went down to your studio after the evening news so that I could feel we were together, and I looked at your sketches and I found myself wondering if the truth wasn’t that I was so worried about you since the three workers were killed just so I could think about getting you to come home, so I could have a legitimate excuse. What do you think?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It’s possible.” She laughs. “Oh Aaron, you’re wonderful. Do you realize that this is the first time in the eight years of our marriage that we’ve been apart for more than a long weekend? I mean, isn’t it crazy—two independent beings like us? But if we are so independent—if there’s truth to the pride we’ve taken through the years in not being one of those couples that sits on a love-seat-for-two that’s really only your run-of-the-mill throne-of-judgment—then why am I feeling so forlorn and lost with you gone?” He thinks of telling her that it’s because she loves him as much as he loves her, but he decides not to say nothing. He is annoyed with her for talking this way, for laying even a small guilt trip on him, and he’ll be damned if he’ll tell her what he knows she wants to hear. Then, too, he senses that if he admits how much he misses her he’ll be more vulnerable than he can afford to be—as if merely acknowledging the feeling may somehow bring harm to him. The times he has spoken to Susan about his dreams, about being able to stand inside dark rooms without fear, she has said that she has never doubted his ability to face fears and dangers; what she has wondered about is why he insists on imagining that he must do so alone. “Your drawings are splendid—the best you’ve ever done,” she says now, “and the letters are wonderful, especially the parts about the children you work with. But they’re addressed to me, Aaron, yet there’s never anything personal in them, and I—”

  “Listen. We agreed before I left that if the newspaper thought they were good enough, I’d let them run the stuff.”

  “But you could add something, couldn’t you—on a separate sheet? Not for publication? Oh God, I know I’m being childish and selfish and petulant, and you’re being noble and heroic and grown-up, but do you miss me at all?”

  “Sure. It’s just—” He decides to tell her about how he felt when he woke from his nap, but before he can begin he glances sideways, sees that Nicky has her face pressed against the glass, her nose and lips squashed flat, her eyes bulging, crossed. He laughs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. One of the young workers is cutting up a little. The tension gets to us and—”

  “A female worker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh Aaron.” She sighs. “Listen. I love you and I guess I’m getting horny.” She laughs, awkwardly, and he imagines her brushing her hair from her forehead, smiling easily, relieved and happy to be able to talk to him this way. Had he ever imagined that a woman as beautiful as Susan would be so willing to show him her childishness, her needs? “Let others idealize me, all right?” Susan says. “I can’t hide from you, Levin. The truth is that one part of me is proud as hell of you, but there’s another part that simply longs to be near you, to be touched by you, to be loved. Is that all right? The newspapers and TV are so full of stuff hinting at all the sex going on—everybody arm in arm and hand in hand, black men and white girls—”

  “That’s bullshit,” he says sharply. “And I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Don’t be angry with me. I’m only—”

  “Didn’t you read what I wrote from the orientation school the first week? Damn, Susan! All the fucking media people care about is sex—they’re worse than the white trash down here, hoping to catch some young blond in bed with a big black buck. Can’t you see through that?”

  “Of course I can. It’s just that I miss you terribly. Can’t you understand that? I worry about you too. I’m in pain for you, Aaron—for what you’re doing. I wish I were doing it. And the way I deal with that—same old Susan—is to cover up my pain with anger. We’re not so different, after all. And how do I get myself angry with you? By imagining that you’re playing around or flirting. Then I have cause to reject you—in my mind you’ve betrayed me—and I don’t have to worry so much, or hurt for you, or hurt because I miss you. Preemptive rejection. Susan’s best defense.” She stops. “Oh Aaron…”

  “It’s all right,” he says, comforted to hear the sadness enter her voice. “It will be all right. I love you. I wish you were here too.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But try not to let that other stuff get to you. It’s just the same old story—sex and violence, violence and sex—only that’s their story, don’t you see? All they’ve really been waiting for is to have one of us nice middle-class whites killed and chopped up, and if those three poor kids hadn’t been murdered, I think CBS might have flown in some actors and corpses and staged a damned killing, they wanted one so bad. Well. Now they have it, goddamn them. Now they have it. As if all our work existed so that one of us could become a stiff for five minutes on their fucking TV show. The way people use people, Susan! As if—”

  “Oh sweetheart—calm down. I’m not against you. This all started because I said I missed you, remember? Don’t be angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Not much.” She laughs, but with affection. He imagines her above him, her golden hair falling on his face, dusting his chest. “Same old Aaron—nick him and he bleeds in V’s—venom, vengeance, vituperation….”

  Her voice shifts, the sarcasm dropping away. She would be there with him if she could, she reminds him, but they agreed tha
t he would be the one to go and she would be the one to stay home with the children. Still, their agreement doesn’t stop her from feeling frightened and frustrated, from telling him what she feels. If he weren’t so upset and frustrated himself, she says, it might even occur to him to be flattered by her jealousy.

  The store lights flash on and off. Nicky taps at the glass. Aaron tells Susan that he’ll call her again soon, that she should try not to worry, that he loves her. He’ll write to her in the morning, he promises. Not for publication.

  Aaron and Nicky leave the store, get into Aaron’s car and drive out of the parking lot, onto the main road. Nicky leans her head against his shoulder.

  “You’re nice with your kids. Your voice gets so warm when you talk with them,” she says. “If I were one of them I’d just want to rub against it and purr. You like being a father, don’t you? I mean, it’s very important to you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You like family life.”

  “Sure. Doesn’t everybody—everybody who has people in their family they love?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But your wife—Susan—is she good to you?”

  “Most of the time.” Aaron laughs. “We like each other. That helps.”

  “Do you still love each other too?”

  “Yes.” Aaron turns off onto a dirt road, checks the rear-view mirror. How can he explain it to Nicky—how lucky he feels to have found Susan, to have the life he has? He sees a pair of headlights turn in behind them. “You’d like Susan. She’d like you.”