by W. S. Penn
It seemed unfair. It was as though no matter what I said or did, she would feel that it was the wrong thing. Her grief made her need someone to feel it with her and her intelligence hinted that no one was able to feel it the way she did. That’s the trouble with old Mr. Grief: He comes knocking, punches you out, and then closes a glass door between you and everyone else; you can see them out there, a little misshapen from the dirt and grime on the glass, and when they speak to you all you hear are muffled sounds, inarticulate, insensitive. Only someone who has had a similar grief can press his nose up to the glass and speak loudly enough for you to hear him—even to laugh, in your sadness, at the funny way he looks with his concerned nose pressed against the glass.
Yvette took to walking around school, alone, her hands held out from her body, palms up as though in supplication, her lips moving in what could have been mistaken for talking to herself, the way mother did. Before long, I would understand, because of my own grief, how alone one feels, how one can resent someone’s even trying to say he’s sorry.
26.
I skipped that Friday night dance, and was up early Saturday morning. I washed both cars, enjoying myself as I hosed them down and then scrubbed them in sections which I rinsed before the soap could dry on the paint, the way father had taught me. It was mindless activity, and it felt good, made me happy partly for the activity itself, and partly because I knew how pleased father would be.
I was finishing buffing the wax off the second car when father came outside. “You’ve got a phone call,” he said.
“All that needs doing is vacuuming them out,” I said as I shook the dried wax from the towel. “Should I toss these towels in the washer?”
“No. Just hang them up,” he said.
“Okay.” I hung them from the open garage door, the way father liked. “Be back in a minute.”
The phone call was from Allison, wanting to know why I hadn’t been at the dance the night before. “I’d kind of hoped to see you there,” she said.
“Well,” I said, resisting the impulse to ask her what had gone wrong with the football captain. I knew what was going wrong between them. I was class president, and the football team had lost its last two games ignominiously.
“William was there,” she said. I said I was glad he was there, as he’d planned the dance. “He came by here with some other people, afterwards.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Listen, Allison, it’s nice talking to you, but I’ve got to go, okay?”
She laughed as though the two of us shared a secret. “Yvette showed up with some long-haired type. From Stanford. Boy was he creepy.”
“I’m glad,” I said as evenly as possible. “I’m happy that Yvette decided to get out and around, and have some fun. She needs some good times. Is that what you called to tell me?”
“No,” Allison said. “I assumed you knew that. No, I called because my father’s out of town, and my mother’s going out with some friends tonight. I wondered if you might want to come over and play some records. I’ve got some new ones. The Monkeys …”
“I hate the Monkeys.”
“I bought the new Rolling Stones album.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you going to do, then?”
“I don’t know. Go out with William.”
“When was the last time you talked to him? He just called and asked me if you were over here. I think you’re fibbing. You’re making up excuses …”
“Maybe I am. So what?” It seemed odd that William the Black would have phoned Allison’s house before he phoned mine.
“Please?” Allison said.
“Okay, I’ll think about it. I’ll call you this evening.”
“Promise? Do you promise you won’t just forget about calling me, like you did last time?”
“Okay, okay. I promise.”
Perturbed, when I hung up I stalked past mother in the living room, where she stood beside the fireplace with her eyes closed, alternately singing and blowing into an attachment to the vacuum, as if she were clearing or testing a microphone. There was no sign of the vacuum itself. On the way to the bathroom to bathe my sweaty face, I spotted Pamela dashing from the bathroom in her bright orange underwear to her closet, where she would spend the day reviewing her butterfly collection by flashlight, as if in the collection were the answer to a question I, being male, could never understand. After rinsing my face and eyes, I returned to father. He was applying a coat of wax to the first car.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You missed some spots. See?” he said, kneeling to look across the surface of the paint. “Here.” He put his finger on it to mark the spot, and then he applied more wax. “And here,” he said.
“I meant to do a good job,” I said.
“What?” father said.
“Nothing.”
“Why don’t you plug in the vacuum and vacuum out the insides of this car, while I check the other?” father said.
I picked up the end of the cord and plugged it into the socket.
Late that same afternoon, after I had mowed both lawns, front and back, trimmed them with the trimmer, and bagged the clippings, leaving them on the curb for the garbage collectors, I was shooting some baskets, concentrating on driving, twisting and turning along the baseline, laying the ball up softly on the reverse side of the hoop. When I grew tired, I paused to shoot free throws, a hundred at a time, trying to think only of what Coach Roach had said, “Free throws can mean the difference between winning and losing.”
William the Black dropped by. “Forty-seven,” he said. “Not bad. Not bad, at all.” He waved at the head of the driveway. “I was counting.”
Here,” he said, stepping up to the line and holding his hands out. I passed him the ball. He bounced it ten times, slowly, concentrating, then raised it on the crane of his arms, and shot. It swished through the net. I caught it, and passed it back to him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, dribbling another ten times. I stared blankly out at the vacant horizons of suburbia.
William missed. I rebounded the ball and dribbled out past the head of the key, and then started back in towards him, circling, turning, and hooking the ball up with my left hand.
William batted the ball away, blocking the shot. “So,” he said, dribbling out towards the end of the driveway. “Where were you, last night?”
“Home,” I said, watching the houses beyond our split-rail fence shimmer and turn pink, and brown, and purple. They looked, for a moment, like little castles built on the quick-sands of whim. I felt dizzy.
“Should of been there,” William said. “I’ll tell you, it was something. Place was packed out. Everyone was there. Allison brought along her little boyfriend.” He made a jump shot from about fifteen feet out; I returned the ball.
“I heard Yvette showed up with a new guy,” I said.
“If you could call him that, yeah. She was there. The guy was some dip from those socialist meetings she goes to. Man, I’ll tell you, he’s one fellow you don’t have to worry about. He was so covered in buttons and pins, he looked liked he was wearing armor plate. Maybe he was a friend. A cousin, maybe, or somebody she just feels sorry for. You sure as hell don’t have to worry.”
“I wasn’t worried,” I said. “Who’d you go with?”
“Nobody,” he said, shooting again. He stopped and grinned, and even against his light skin, his mouth was all pink and white. “Boy, am I glad I didn’t take some girl.” I let the comment pass. William didn’t. “I got laid,” he said.
“Never been a weapon invented that wasn’t used,” I said.
“Not exactly a new invention,” William said. “But I’ll tell you, it sure can feel new sometimes.”
“And afterwards,” I said, “it always feels old.”
“Hey, Alley,” William said. “What’s eating you?”
“Nothing. Skip it.”
“I won’t skip it. Something’s chewing
you up. Listen, if it’s that Yvette was at the dance with somebody else last night.…”
“It isn’t. I don’t know what’s eating me. I just don’t feel right, don’t feel like I’m myself. Forget it, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. We shot around some more, and then he stopped again and said, “Don’t you want to know who it was? You want to hear some details?” I shrugged. “Guess,” he said.
“Betty?” He had been dating a girl named Betty off and on during the year, having met her on one of our forages into Stanford University. She was a freshman, and only recently had found out that William was still in high school.
“Nah. Come on. You can do better than that. Who’s the last woman you’d think of? The last woman, mind.”
“Outside of Yvette and my sisters, I don’t know any women.” I pretended to think a minute. “I give up,” I said.
He tossed me the ball. “Hang onto it,” he said. “You ready?” I nodded, feeling more bored than dizzy. “DeForest!” he said. He grinned broadly, and his teeth looked to me like two files of little white Indians, all in rows.
“Allison?” I said.
“No,” he said, still grinning. “Mrs. DeForest!”
“Allison’s mother?”
“It was just there,” he said. “Like Baskin-Robbins. Like Mount Everest. I dropped by Allison’s house after the dance. And things just went from this to that; Allison went to bed after everyone else left, and Mrs. DeForest stopped me at the door while I was putting on my jacket and asked me if I didn’t want another little drinky. That’s what she said, ‘drinky,’ and I figured, what the hell, a drinky can’t hurt.” He looked up and down the street, from house to house as if he were issuing a challenge. “Think of it!” he said. “A white woman. I’ve got a little datey with her again tonight. Well,” he said, finally, “what do you think of that?”
I stood there, the basketball round and heavy in my hands, running a backward search on my dreams. The dream I wanted to find, the dream I wished for, the one predicting a man the color of William who would tell me that nigger was not a color but a state of mind, that prediction slipping to little more than the memory of a memory, painful in the way it seemed neither to add nor subtract anything from the pressing weight of the basketball.
Not many years later, William the Black would be drafted by the middle class. Statistically, he would go to Stanford University, where he would play center for the basketball team and learn to say, “The poor keep themselves poor. Buying Cadillacs. Color televisions. Brand new babies. It’s their own fault.” The sentiment resembled one that mother expressed. I could forgive mother, since by then to have her say anything to me, regardless of its logic or truth, would be gratifying.
“It’s a wonder any of us lived,” William would say, peering backwards in time as he stood outside his all-white fraternity house at Stanford, squinting hard, as though the time between had been decades and not years, as though he needed a jeweler’s loop to see the flaws in our friendship.
“Yes,” I would say, thinking of the nights William and I had raced about the streets and alleyways of Stanford in our dangerous game of lose and catch. The game was chasing or being chased by another car piloted by friends, headlights off, through unlit streets. The pursued car got fifteen minutes to lose the chase car before the game switched, and the chaser became the chased. I never lost. I would skid into alleyways at any speed, missing parked cars that loomed up like ducks in a shooting gallery, making William the Black whistle through the gaps in his clenched teeth, leaving a trail of transmission oil and gear filings.
“Yes. It is a wonder,” I’d say, hurt a little but laughing, too, inside. I made William nervous, afraid that I would ask him to invite me inside of his all-white fraternity. William was not considered to be Black by his brothers. He was, after all, the star of the basketball team. Perhaps all that jumping up and down had jarred the color out of him. Perhaps it was his pale-skinned girlfriend, or some philosophical astuteness on his fraternity brothers’ part, that made them see that in principle William was Black, but not in practice.
After graduation from Stanford, William would take an offer from a legal firm in San Francisco instead of huge, short-lived sums from professional basketball teams. “I hate basketball,” he’d say. “Ten niggers jumping into the air every ten seconds.” William would choose to play for a legal firm; and he would play very well until he injured his knee jumping for a partner at an office party.
I saw all this the day William stood at the end of father’s driveway, issuing his silent challenge to the barons of lawn mowers and duchesses of vacuums ensconced in the private plywood and mortar castles that lined Emerson Street.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve gotta run. Give me a call tomorrow, eh?”
“Sure,” I said, hearing the far-off cry of crows laughing, their fragile black heads nodded together over the beginning of the end of William’s and my friendship.
27.
Grandfather maintained that everything was connected like dandelions. Although it was a notion that I sometimes resisted in defense against Californians with sad vegetarian faces, there was a connection between Mrs. DeForest’s porking William and mother’s talking to toasters or coming all dressed in black into the garage to sing “In the Great By and By” a capella for her dying Kenmore.
“You’re drunk,” Allison said, when she opened the door.
I smiled as best I could with one eye swollen shut. “I know,” I said. “I’ve just killed mother’s Hoover.” Removing the filter bag, I had taken it outside and vacuumed up gravel that father had strewn around bushes and trees. Allison lacked any philosophical grounds for or against war, but the idea of me killing anything attracted her like the glint of light off a policeman’s shield.
“What happened to your eye?” she said, touched by the badge of my courage.
“It put up a fight. Hoovers don’t take a fall easily,” I said. “And this one’s under warranty.”
“You’re nuts,” she said. “Come in.”
“Mumsy home?”
“I promised you she’d be out,” she said. Her voice had a generic seductiveness.
“What can I get you?” Allison asked.
“Mulberry leaves,” I muttered. I didn’t want to be there. I’d had to get drunk even to come.
“What?” Allison said.
“Scotch,” I said, “will be fine. Or gin or vodka or wine or beer.”
“Choosy,” Allison said. “Aren’t we?” She went to her father’s liquor cabinet and found the bottles that could be topped up with water so her father wouldn’t notice.
“Evidently not,” I said.
I accepted and drank the drink Allison concocted out of shots from every available liquor in the house. Then Allison dragged me down a plain corridor of words to her bedroom, where she sat in a half-slip and flimsy pullover shirt on the bed, inviting me with gestures learned from kiddie porn to violate premises formerly occupied by the captain of the football team.
“Why don’t you come over here?” she said, petting the bed, stroking the coverlet with the palm of her hand while running her tongue around the inside of her lips, poking it out briefly like a snake or an old, sleeping dog.
I stayed where I was.
“Please?” she said. “I promise, it’ll be worth your while.” She slowly drew her shirt over her head and sank back on the bed with calculated abandon. She looked like she was doing a late night television commercial for adjustable beds. I went to her, kissed her, following my hands with my lips and tongue around her body. Gently, she pushed the top of my head down until my chin rested between her thighs.
“Put your tongue in me,” she said and I did.
“Deeper,” she said. Had my tongue not been fastened relatively firmly in the back of my throat, I might have lost it.
Allison was silent. As silent as a priest in winter. Not a moan or sigh came from her lips, only stage directions in a play that might be titled “Six Girls in Search
of an Orgasm.” It was then that I began to know—not understand—love without abandon. Over the years, there would be a kind of girl whose idea of lovemaking resembled a traffic cop’s, more pleased with the orderly ebb and flow of the vehicles than with the sloppy disorder of gridlock.
“What are you doing?” Allison asked, when I began to unzip my pants. At the moment, I knew what I was doing and, angered and frustrated as I was, I was determined to bring the play to its logical conclusion, replacing my fingers with the painful need of release.
Something stopped me. Possibly, it was the thought of mother, or the sound of William the Black dribbling up the driveway outside the house delivering Mrs. DeForest to her door before heading home to call me and crow. Maybe it was the telephone, calling Allison to the kitchen. By the time Allison returned, if she did return, I was dressed and out the window.
I took a good look around my neighborhood, looking for Death skulking in the corners of darkness unlit by street-lamps or kneeling behind bushes in ambush. Then I stood there in the night wondering if I hadn’t been the one who was unwilling to accept the fact that Allison and I were through, she as dead to me because of Yvette as Yvette was to me because of her brother. I wondered how many children are conceived out of psychological necrophilia—people, unwilling to accept the death of their loves or likings, sleeping with one another with all the impassioned joy of a memorial service.
Death was so harried, during that time, that his lips developed an uncontrollable twitch, making him look comically inept as he raced from pillar to post, collecting bodies. He was forced to hire bleak and wasted little helpers and the times I saw him weave past me in his splay-wheeled Corvair, bringing home a broken but living body to the families of friends, I could hear him grumbling about how hard it was, those days, to find good hired help. Walter’s father was added to the body count and a former track star from our school hopped home to Palo Alto minus a leg.