They make up more rules to try to manage the reasons they’ve already made up, the reasons they feel so much pain—Ajax only goes to the movies, the Y, the stores in the suburbs; he only talks to women in his head, and he becomes compulsive about his ways, filling up his day with all these rules, trying to distract himself. He’s alone.
So is Peter. “You can see he’s already beginning to fail miserably in his relationships with others,” the psychologist had said about Peter way back then. And I told myself to remember that—it wasn’t because he hadn’t wanted to like people. It’s because if you keep failing, you give up; you don’t trust others, and you don’t trust yourself.
I think Peter’s given up on friends, but Ajax still tries really hard to make people think that he’s okay. When he started at the high school, he went out for football, swimming, and track all in a row, went to practices every single night and on weekends. He had something to come home and talk about, like he was part of the team. “We whipped them,” he’d say when they won, or, “The coach was pretty pissed,” when they lost. “We’ve got to get our asses in gear.”
I went to one of his swimming meets because I’m a swimmer too, and it was something for us to have in common. He looked very sleek and strong in his suit, but he swam badly. He swam with his head out of the water and couldn’t seem to coordinate his strokes. His coach was a woman, and I could imagine the time she had instructing him. He doesn’t listen to people; he doesn’t want to be told that he’s doing something wrong. He didn’t swim in the competition, just in an exhibition at the end. When he wasn’t swimming, which was most of the time, he stood apart from the other guys with his arms stiff across his chest. I kept waving at him but realized he wouldn’t see me without his contacts. So later I told him that I had been there, that he had looked very strong. This year he didn’t go out for any sports.
The last thing that was written on the Xerox the psychologist handed out at that meeting about Peter was that we needed to realize how each day the schizophrenic wakes up is like starting all over again. But it’s not the sort of cheery thing you think of when you read the bumper stickers that say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” It’s a hairtearing frustration for them because for some reason they can’t use all the days they have lived before this one to help them. The way they learn about life doesn’t take, in the way it does with other people. Like using bad paint—every day they paint the same wall with it; the wall dries, and you can hardly see where it’s been painted. I don’t know what to think about this. It’s a hard thing to think about. Maybe the best way is to believe that if you stick with it, put that thin coat on anyway, every day, eventually it will look solid: I mean you keep talking to them, acting as if they will be able to hold on to some of what they need to understand and use it to get better.
I listen to Ajax thump, thump, thump up from the basement. I’m laying two slices of bread in front of each of the lunch bags. I don’t turn around when he comes in, but I can hear the bitzy sounds playing out of the earphones of his Walkman. This is a way for Ajax to have solitude in a house full of people, and it’s his way not to think too much.
All of a sudden there’s a bang on the counter next to me. My elbows jerk a little. It’s a can of frozen juice he’s brought up from the freezer, along with a frozen block of butter and two loaves of frozen bread. This is another part of his daily routine, as is scrubbing the sink and sweeping the floor. Most nights after he brushes his teeth, he brings these things up to be defrosted for the next day. If he doesn’t, I always wait until he goes to bed before I do it myself. It offends Ajax when people do things that he has decided are his own jobs.
Some nights Ajax might forget, and then some nights he might just decide not to bring the food up. And since it’s a kind of favor to me when he does it, it’s hard not to take it personally when he doesn’t.
I’m still convinced that he doesn’t want to talk tonight, but I say, “Thank you,” and make a point of looking at him. I know this is the thing I should do, even though Ajax stares past me with a blank, sleepy expression. Then he leaves the room, and I can hear him slowly climbing the stairs.
No matter what, I feel that I should always keep a door open for Ajax, even if it’s only my porch door. To close him out wouldn’t just be unkind; my instincts tell me it would be dangerous. I’m pretty sure that I stand for something in Ajax’s eyes, and he stands for something in mine. I have to think that we’re both probably wrong about whatever that is. But still, it’s there. You know how it is when you meet someone who reminds you of someone else; even after you have known them a long time, it’s hard to shake. Maybe it’s just his name that reminds me of Sophocles’s play about Ajax, makes me think of the kind of hero that Ajax was—all pumped up and strutting his stuff and being crazy. How crazy that Ajax was in the end.
“It’s a love/hate thing,” Gail said when I told her how I never know what to expect when he comes down to talk to me at night, “just like he feels for all the women here.” But that didn’t explain anything or make it simpler. The only ideas that seem right are these instinctive notions, like how I need to keep the door open. This makes him less scary to me, because I get a chance to know what he’s thinking. And maybe this way, he gets to know me too, and can’t as easily make things up about me. Although he still does it a lot anyway.
He’s fairly regular now about coming down at night and talking to me while I cook. Once or twice a week he’ll be here leaning against the counter, still wearing his earphones, which is nerve-racking, because he can’t tell how loud he’s talking, and he ends up shouting everything he has to say. Sometimes, but only when he’s not touchy, I’ll tell him that I wish he’d take them off when he’s talking to me. But invariably he’ll say in an even louder voice, “I can hear you fine!”
His conversation is disjointed the way you’d expect it to be when someone’s thoughts play bumper cars with each other. He’s hard to follow. “Say!” he’ll say, then he’ll put his chin in his hand and look down, smiling about something. I’ll have no idea what it is, so I’ll keep shredding the cheese or whatever I’m doing, waiting. “Ah, no.” He’ll straighten up, put his arms across his chest, act normal, manly. “Yep, went to Fire Explorers tonight.”
“How was that?” I’ll ask. His long-range goal in life is to be a fireman. Even he knows his chances of passing the civil service exam are nil. But he’s determined. The Explorers is a teen group supervised by the fire department, sort of like 4-H is for farming.
“Good,” he’ll say, “real good.” And there’ll be that optimistic side of him that he has about 25 percent of the time. “Looks like I might be elected Junior Chief. I mean, if they vote for me,” he says. I just go along with that as if that could happen—maybe it will. “And the women are great,” he says. “Some incredible women.” If they’re in his group, I expect they’re about fifteen or sixteen years old. He’s seventeen, but he’s always a couple years behind in his classes.
Then it gets a little more difficult. “Jennifer.” He’ll smile and roll his eyes up to the ceiling. “Jennifer Katz, wonder what’s on her mind?” he’ll say. “You know, she has these little loafers, you know, the real soft surburban kind. Every single day last fall”—he’ll get excited—“she didn’t wear socks in her loafers. Don’t tell me she’s not asking for it.”
This is where I have to be careful. “What is she asking for?”
“You know.” He’ll roll his head, smiling, and then he’ll stop abruptly, straighten himself up, get normal, manly. And I’ll hear the little noises from his earphones like his thoughts scratching together. “No,” he’ll say, crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t know if she’s loose or not. I saw her smoking a cigarette once. Not at Explorers—outside, near school. I was on the bus.”
Maybe if it seems like a good time, if he’s not too defensive, I’ll say, “You know, Ajax, sometimes I don’t wear socks in my loafers, and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a
style.”
“But it’s the fall.” He’ll get excited again. “In the summer, yeah, but in the fall. I know what’s going on.”
If this same subject comes up a few more times, I’ll say, “You know, Ajax, sometimes when you feel attracted to someone, it’s just because you do, not because they’re trying so hard to make you feel that way.”
Most nights, it’s just this on-and-off talk and quiet. Sometimes he even asks about me, as if he wants to start out the conversation politely. He’ll say, “Say, so what did you do today—make movies, go swimming, the usual?” But he doesn’t listen really hard. I’ll stop talking, and the next thing he says has nothing to do with what I’ve just said. It’s one of those bumper cars coming in and bumping the thought I had been following completely away. Yet there are certain things that I know he’ll always ask. It’ll be quiet for a while, and he’ll say it softly. “Say, so what do you think of me—as a person, I mean?” Or he’ll ask, “Say, do you ever see me married? I mean, do you ever see me as a fireman with a wife and kids?”
It’s always hard to answer. “I think you’re good-looking,” I’ll tell him, “a hard worker, you have a nice voice.” And to the other question I’ll say, “If that’s what you want Ajax, I want it for you too.”
Sometimes when it’s quiet, and I’m cutting an onion or a carrot, and there’s a gentle rhythm to that, it won’t be until I look around that I realize he’s already left and gone to bed. I’ll feel very relieved then and realize that the whole time he’d been there it hadn’t been peaceful at all. I had only been acting as if it were peaceful. “Soothing the beast,” you might call it. Just acting very calm and gentle so he would feel that way too. I’ll realize I’d even been willing the knife in my hand to look harmless. I don’t like using them when he’s around.
He isn’t much taller than me, I know, because that’s one of the things he does. It seems like at least once a week he steps up to me, close, and he says, “How tall are you anyway?”
“Five, five and a half,” I always say. “What are you, about five, eight? That’s taller than most of my brothers,” I throw in so he doesn’t get down about it. Otherwise, everything about him is powerful: the bass in his voice, the muscles, even the whiteness of his teeth. He has incredible teeth. He’s beautiful really, but he doesn’t think so, because as he puts it, he’s “not white.”
He was adopted by a large, white, liberal, Catholic family (like mine) and grew up in a small Minnesota town. He didn’t realize at first that he wasn’t the same color as his brothers and sisters, not even close to a single other person in his town.
Once a ditzy young woman interviewed for a counselor’s position and had dinner with the whole group here so she could get to know them. She made what I would call the “ingenuous” mistake of asking him what his nationality was. He had just been getting up to take his plate out to the kitchen, and he leaned over, “got in her face,” as they say here, using his voice as lethally as he knew how, “Indian, Mexican, black, Chinese,” he boomed, “everything you can be that’s not white.” He did this so eloquently that the guys and the counselors at the table applauded. That was the end of her.
He has thick, black, curly hair and his eyes are slightly oriental or Indian, you know, and the wide cheekbones. His color is mocha, with just a little yellow. Still, he has a hard time not thinking of himself as white. Who wouldn’t if all your life all you saw was white, except in the mirror. Wouldn’t that make you crazy? Nobody is sure what he is. His parents adopted him in the sixties when his father, who’s a doctor, was volunteering in the California migrant worker movement. Maybe it was a way for the doctor to leave there and feel okay about leaving. His birth mother was Mexican, and she left him—that’s all they were fairly certain of.
Ajax has a dry sense of humor, which isn’t the case with most of the guys in the house. Peter has one too. That’s the cut: both of them are MI, and the others are MR—mentally ill or mentally retarded. We hardly ever talk about them that way, even among ourselves, let alone to people outside. It’s too clichéd—people conjure up this idea right away that we’re not talking about people. They think everybody that’s retarded is mongoloid, drools, and is always happy. They don’t even want to think about the mentally ill. The MIs can have just as hard a time in school, because it’s so difficult for them to concentrate. But there is this sophisticated humor; they’re able to recognize certain ironies in their lives that I never hear from the others.
One night Ajax was resting his head against the hood of the stove while I stirred a pot of spaghetti sauce. “I have never been happy for a minute,” he said.
“Not even for a minute?” I asked.
He looked out, then his cheeks dimpled, and he said, “Well, maybe for thirty seconds.” Then, after thinking some more, he said, “No, maybe only as long as a puff on a cigarette.”
“That would be about two or three then,” I said.
“Two or three,” he said. “That’s about right.”
The humor is a family trait. One of his older brothers (they’re all older) is a comedian in the area, playing small dinner clubs and the like. He’s very kind to Ajax when he comes to visit, and very funny. “I’m the one that nicknamed him,” he told me one morning when he was waiting in the kitchen for Ajax to come down. “My parents adopted him around the time that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated—that was their reason for naming him Robert. But even as a little kid, he wanted to be someone else. He wanted us to call him Mr. Clean after that muscle-bound, bald-headed guy in the commercials—thought the guy had it made, the way he could vaporize and reappear in different ladies’ kitchens. But my mother hated the name, so we came up with the compromise: Ajax.”
“So you named him after a cleanser,” I said. “Here, I’ve always thought it was after the Greek hero. But it makes sense, either way, I mean, considering his cleaning fetish.”
“What about the hero?” he asked.
I’m always glad when people ask me about what I know, especially in situations like that where I’m standing in my apron and my aqua rubber gloves cleaning the oven. Most of the time I just have to let it be; you can’t always be setting the record straight, telling people when they walk in to meet you, “Look, this isn’t the only thing I do: clean ovens and pack lunches. I’m also a filmmaker and a deep thinker,” and so on.
I liked this guy—maybe there was even a glimmer of an attraction. We were similar types. We both had our scruffy tennis shoes, peg-legged pants, oversized jackets, soft, faded, clean shirts. The warehouse-district look, the artsy, not-much-money look.
“Ajax was one of the heroes in the Iliad—in the same league with Achilles and Odysseus. After Achilles was stuck in the ankle and died, his mother had a contest for his armor. It was basically between Odysseus and Ajax. The rub was that though Ajax was the strongest…”
“Right,” the comedian said. “I remember now—Ajax was the kind of all-star wrestler type.”
“Right,” I said, “but Odysseus was smarter and, so they said, had the favor of the gods.”
“Ajax was the one that lost it, wasn’t he?” the comedian said. “I mean not just the contest, his marbles. He’s the one that rounded up all the livestock, the sheep, cows, dogs, and slaughtered them, thinking he was killing the enemy.”
We could hear our Ajax upstairs, opening and closing his dresser drawers. Both his brother and I felt uncomfortable then, because we hadn’t begun the story with any conclusions in mind. But the comparisons were sitting there now; they were hard to avoid.
The brother looked up at the ceiling and at his watch, as if he was getting a little impatient. Then he looked at me and said, “Does he scare you?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“My mother leaves when he visits. She still can’t face him.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Since the assault—she was just so blown away.”
“You mean the girl he pushed down the stairs at his high scho
ol?”
“No.” He looked at me strangely. “Since his assault on her.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes. Why don’t you know this?”
“I just don’t, I guess. I mean, Ajax told me that he’d pushed a girl who had teased him at school. And I read the psychologist’s intake, notes on him that mentioned a sexual incident at home, but it wasn’t specific. It left a creepy feeling, kind of in the back of my mind.”
“Maybe they didn’t make a big deal of it because he only went so far.”
“How far?” I asked.
“I hate this,” he said.
“I really would like to know,” I said.
“He was fifteen. I really think he was too naive about what to do—he’s like that—but it was an attempt. They were home alone; he’d been diving in the pool all afternoon. That was one of his compulsions at home, over and over—he would do that sometimes when he was mad or had something on his mind. My mother didn’t even hear him come in. All of a sudden he was just there. He had his suit down, just enough, I guess, and he pinned her against the wall, pulled her skirt up, but, like I said, it only went that far.”
I had started wiping the stove and the countertops when he began the story. I suppose it was my way of not looking upset. But in fact, since nothing needed wiping, I probably did look upset.
“He felt terrible after,” his brother said. “It only lasted a few seconds, and then he ran away. My father and the sheriff didn’t find him until the middle of the night, out in the field behind our house. He was still in his swimming suit, and he went with them, no trouble.”
House of Heroes Page 10