by W. S. Penn
Running Dog’s ears rose and fell helplessly while she talked, as uncertain as I was whether he should be paying attention. During the ten weeks I’d been gone, he’d become independent in a funny way, jumping into my lap to be petted for about ten seconds and then hopping down in mid-pet, suddenly indifferent. Still, whenever I left the house, he went wild, barking, whining, and once even tearing the molding off the door’s jamb. While I knew that father would tease him, pulling his ears when he was sleeping, I also knew that I had to talk father into taking Running Dog because father would take good care of him. I set out to find father and to do just that, before I left for college.
Running Dog, alias Tanya (as father called him), would live out his life with father, confused by his own sexuality, but nonetheless happy and content. The last time I would see Tanya, he’d be crippled with arthritis and age. Hearing my voice, my person nothing more than the shadow of cataracts and nostalgia, he would manage to lift himself onto his wobbling legs—it would take him several minutes—and come to me and lick my hand with a tongue the dryness of which told me that he knew this was important because it might be the last time. (I have always thought it stupid, weak, and sentimental that I cry more easily over Running Dog than any person’s death—except, maybe, Pamela’s—and I know that when father, deciding to take Tanya to the vet’s to be put to sleep, said, “It was only a dumb dog,” he was hiding behind the courage he derived from “dumb.”)
Mother’s house was suffering from inflation. The women whose voices sounded like popping corn had linked reasons to their anger and now they gave out with bubbly effluvia, lending the house an air or an aura, depending on which person said what. Joined by two Italian brothers with heavy beards stippling their faces in a way that made them seem shadowy, ephemeral, their gossamer shirts unbuttoned to the tender curls between their pectorals and their alto voices that competed with the women’s, they made me feel not unwelcome but uncomfortable, rather like a sorry figure who had the misfortune to be male.
On Tuesday and Thursday evenings promptly at eight (heaven help the person who was late or absent when the Novallus brothers started in on them), these voices would be raised in a chorus of suffering and victimization and then would abate into a litany of emancipation. To me, who was consumed with the luck and love of just being alive, this was hard to understand. I liked one or two of these people when I had the chance to speak with them alone. But in a group, they seemed to me like any herd, butting up against the fences with which they’d surrounded themselves with the meticulosity of mother’s lights and locks, moaning about the world beyond the fence. That world was controlled by men.
“Heterosexual men,” Michael Novallus would add.
They read together, and they discussed what they read. With the surreptitious feeling I’d had sneaking Lady Chatterly’s Lover off Elanna’s shelves and reading it in search of an answer to the lack of fulfillment I’d felt with girls, I now sneaked Virginia Woolf’s essays off mother’s shelves and read them by flashlight when the house was dark and emptied of mother’s friends. I’d felt cheated reading Lady Chatterly. I never understood how Mellors’ constant use of the word “fuck” indicated anything other than a brain the size of a widow’s mite; weaving bouquets of flowers into pubic hairs seemed an unbelievable waste of time. Now I felt cheated because Virginia Woolf’s essays didn’t seem to support the language that was tossed around in the living room as I sat in the kitchen listening. Running Dog cowered at my feet (he was never one for anger; I was able to think angry thoughts at him and he would behave). I felt cheated, too, because I was being classed in absentia with men like my father or William the Black.
Years later, as I cried over Running Dog’s death by lethal injection, after William the Black’s mother had replaced my mother as leader of this group grown large, parking her Mercedes in her reserved space at the community college where they now met, I would think of Mrs. Schneider. Her speechless suffering seemed all the greater in its speechlessness; her answer, represented in my memory by “Stay for dinner,” all the more touching. She had gone on, and it was the inability of her son to go on that must have pained her most. But, by then, I had come to agree with Grandfather’s Dandelion Theory of the world. Everything was connected; follow one shoot down beneath the ground and you merely pop up somewhere else; only the particular flower differed.
“It’s a necessary first step,” Elanna said when I phoned her. “Why don’t you get out of there, come up and stay with me. Let mother do what she has to do.”
“To your mother, you are your father,” Mrs. Halkett said. She was one of mother’s group. “Try to understand that.”
I tried, during the final week, to convince mother that I was not father, even though I resembled him more than any son would have liked. Each morning, I quietly ate the half grapefruit and the toast I made in the counter-top oven which, having overthrown the tyranny of toasters, mother had purchased. Mother protested that she did not think I was like father, and to convince me of that, she often bought me expensive things I didn’t want and then spent the next few days asking me if I really liked them, forcing me to thank her over and over until finally I couldn’t contain the frustration of reiterated obligation and I would fight to control my voice, saying, “Yes, mother, I did thank you.” It ended badly with my begging her not to buy me anything at all, and that Friday she went out and got me a new typewriter.
On Saturday, I had plugged the typewriter into an extension cord and was sitting out back, typing, filling the pages with phrases that said what I was not.
I am not my father, I typed.
I am not my mother’s husband;
I am not white;
I am not a full-blood Indian;
I am not Rachel, nor am I William the Black;
I am not Tammy or Bernie Schneider (I don’t even like Tammy);
I am not John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, or Martin Luther King;
I am not Running Dog;
I am not Custer;
I am not a power saw;
I am not a Kenmore washing machine;
I am not Allison or Mrs. DeForest;
I am not a Republican and I’m not a rich idiot;
I am not a kept woman or kept man;
I am not Laura P. or Louis Applegate;
I am not Johnny Three Feet (neither am I Sanchez);
I am not an elf owl or a Gila monster;
I am not Elanna, Pamela, or mother;
I am not very bright, but then I am not Dr. Bene, either;
I am not (I paused here long enough for the gardener to unload his lawnmower and roll it into the back yard) Grandfather.
I am not nothing.
“You see, mother,” I said when she came outside with some iced tea. The gardener unloaded his lawnmower and rolled it into the back yard. “I really like my new typewriter. I really appreciate it.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “I did something right, at least.” Mother invited the gardener over for iced tea before he began mowing the lawn. At first he demurred, but finally convinced by mother’s coy statement that she’d made it just for him, and besides it was an awfully hot day and she wanted to talk over plans of what to plant next year in the garden, he came over to meet me. I guessed him to be about fifty, with gray hair and a wide, open face, the face of someone unconfused, with organic notions of life and compost.
“Tom,” mother said, “This is my son.” Tom smiled and reached out to shake my hand.
“Nice lookin’ boy,” he said. “Big and strong.”
“He was big when he was born,” mother said. “Ten pounds eight ounces. Both my children were big.”
I fussed with the typewriter, trying to stay out of the conversation.
“That’s good,” Tom said. He seemed embarrassed, and at a loss for words. “Real good,” he said. “My own boy was a good size too. You should see him, now. Big as a tree and twice as strong.”
“Oh,” mother said. “I didn’t know you were married.”
“Was,” he said, running his index finger down the sweat on the glass of tea. “Widower, now, what they call a single parent.”
Listening to mother play twenty questions with the gardener disturbed me. I had imagined that grown people overcame the tendencies of teeny-boppers to use indirect cross-examination, their voices twittering all the while. Mother’s voice was like a sparrow’s when a crow is around its nest. I was the crow.
“Maybe you could use a good home-cooked meal?” mother said.
“That would be fine,” Tom said.
“What evening would be convenient?” mother asked, and when Tom said almost any evening, she said, “No, I mean for you,” and looked straight at me.
“As with Tom, with me,” I said. “I’m going to Elanna’s for a visit. In fact,” I said, closing up the typewriter, “if you’ll excuse me, I’d better go call her.”
In the kitchen, trying not to watch mother and the gardener slurp their tea on the patio, I called father to ask if I could drop off Running Dog. He wanted to speak with mother, and when I said she was busy, he wanted to know with what. “She’ll call you back,” I said.
“What’s she doing?” father demanded. “Is there a man there? She entertaining one of those fag Italian friends of hers?”
“Dad, please,” I said. “I’ll have her call you back.”
“I’m your father,” he said. “I want to speak with your mother.”
“I know that,” I said, “but my mother is busy. She’ll call you back.” I was beginning to believe that I, along with Pamela and Elanna, had been products of rape, though I couldn’t conceive of how a husband could rape a wife. With mom and dad, though, anything seemed possible.
“What’s his name?” father said.
“Look, she’s in the bathroom, okay?” I said. I hung up and went back outside.
“There’s a note by the phone for you,” I told mother. “I’m on my way. I’ll head straight for Clearmont College from Elanna’s. I’ll give you a call, first, if you want.”
“Try to do well in college,” mother said.
“See you,” I said. I wondered if maybe for appearances I ought to hug her goodbye or something. We weren’t a family given to public displays of emotion. Even Elanna and I sidled up to each other and sort of hugged sideways when we saw each other. In airports or train stations, it usually sufficed for me to put my arm around her shoulders lightly, Elanna nodding her head towards my shoulder briefly. Years later—for the rest of my life—it would amuse me in a perplexed sort of way that I would know from the way Elanna’s friends said, “So this is your little brother,” that she felt the way towards me that I did towards her, and I would hope that she would derive a similar conclusion from the way the women I had in tow cringed slightly in front of the Elanna they’d heard so much about. In a way, I suppose, both of us had the cool surface that was the tip of mother’s iceberg, beneath which lurked the molten frustration that was father’s.
“Nice meeting you,” Tom said. I nodded.
“Stay out of it,” Elanna said. During my visit, she was busy getting ready to leave on a two-year archeological dig in Greece. I helped her sort through papers and records and books. Some would go to storage and others to the trash. “Don’t get caught between mom and dad.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“It’s hard, I know,” she said. “But you’ve got to recognize mother and father as independent, sexual beings. Each of them has had a hard life.” She went on to tell me the hardness. In fact, in those days before college, I learned more about mother and father, about the world of men and women, than I’d ever known. I understood that mother’s flirting with the gardener, as well as her biweekly encounter group, were necessary first steps. What I failed to understand was how mother could write a check to pay a man she was having over to dinner, and how a man who dropped by mother’s house and ate her food could take that check. When I asked Elanna about it, she smiled and said, “That’s why people get married.”
“To get their lawns mowed?”
“To have their meals cooked,” she said. “It’s all a matter of your point of view.”
“I’ll miss you,” I said.
“There,” she said, snapping the latch on the steamer trunk. “Now we have to store the rest of this junk and we’re done.” To me, she looked like an Indian princess. “You’ll be okay?” she asked.
I nodded. “As soon as I straighten out my point of view,” I said. We laughed.
CHAPTER NINE
38.
With Grandfather sinking into the singsong of commercial jingles, it was tough to get through to him from Clearmont. Only on days the dome of smog blew out from the City of Angels and amplified his voice did I hear him say things like, “Untested, as gold by fire.”
“As soft as lead,” I replied. Whether Grandfather was referring to me or to the boys doing boyish things around me, I didn’t know.
Except for two token freshmen who kept to themselves like Siamese twins, there wasn’t a Black person for miles around. The only Chicanos I had seen were Mexicans sneaking up the desiccated riverbed toward the outlying citrus groves, playing their game of hide and seek with the immigration authorities. Periodically, a green helicopter would hover above the groves, and men, women, and children would drop to the ground, scramble into unpicked trees, or run. Most would be caught, placed inside the green cars and vans waiting for them, and driven back across the border. Within the week, they’d be back to finish the harvest. No one took the game very seriously. The growers liked the cheap labor that no one could organize. The Mexicans needed the money. And the authorities had nothing better to do than drive Mexicans back across the border in their air-conditioned cars. It was as though the game had existed since time immemorial, the rules written by economic accident, and it never crossed anyone’s mind to alter the way the game was played. Sooner alter the rules of Bingo that the old folks played every Friday night in the Clearmont Inn: the fury that that would generate was predicted in the hatred that the growers felt for Chavez’s rocking their landlocked boat floating on subsidies of $250 per acre-foot of water—a fact my economics professor liked to point out, leaping onto the desk in the front of the room and shouting, trying to stir the minds and hearts of the boys who were either dozing or staring at the one girl in the classroom. She was always a daring girl who had crossed the street from either of the two women’s colleges, and she would sit with the pretense of intellectual curiosity, enjoying the attention she received by default as the boys drooled like apes at feeding time. It was she that Proctor Tompson competed with, declaiming and pacing and hopping onto his desk—performing his Shakespearean comedy of economics in front of an audience that was too lazy to throw tuppence or tomatoes.
I liked Proctor Tompson, but I was not very good at economics. To me, the curves of supply and demand may as well have been bio-rhythms, and mine were always critical. Try as I might on exams, I rarely understood why there was any demand for the products supplied in the questions. It was in economics, however, that I finally began to see, to actually visualize Sanchez’s genius in understanding how money spent itself.
Proctor Tompson liked me, too. I touched a nerve. I listened. He almost wept, the times he returned my papers and exams, and for half the semester, I thought his teary eyes were caused by the way my scores so lowered the mean score that nearly everyone got A’s or B’s. It wasn’t until he handed me my second midterm and gently tapped my head, saying, “What’s inside there, anyway, sawdust?” that I realized he cared about me personally. I was as mystifying to him as economics was to me.
Father had always grown angry when, as a child, I failed to explain properly the Specific Theory of Relativity (the General was easier because I could visualize the pilot in the plane and the stationary man on the ground gazing up as the plane flew over—both men embodied for me by my uncle in different times). Proctor Tompson was curious and slightly bemused, as though my inability to understand was less a pro
blem with me and more a problem with economics, and for the first time I felt the faint stirrings of a desire to do well.
To Mrs. Tompson, whenever they invited the class to tea, I tried to explain Dr. Bene’s experience of me—I didn’t want the same thing to happen to the Proctor. Sitting in a corner of their living room, sipping the sherry she shared with me in her teacups, I got along famously with her, so well that one day as we were talking politics I felt free enough to summarize for her what I had learned in my Theory of Politics seminar.
“The world is all fucked up, as far as I can tell,” I blurted.
“Isn’t it, though,” she said. Waving her cup at the boys gathered in bunches like grapes around the girls who had been included in the tea party, she would toast “the getters and spenders of the future,” calling these lads the “have gots” and “will gets,” categories from which she seemed to exclude me, whether out of kindness or her own innate ability to forecast the future on the basis of choices I had already made beneath my cloud of unknowing.
Delia Tompson wanted to know about me. I told her what I could in fragments and anecdotes, leaving out or skipping over events such as Pamela’s impregnated death, trying to amuse her, not depress or sadden her. I told her about mother and her serial toasters, ending with mother’s editing her life and final testament. I told her about uncle and his wife, the Vegomatic, about my cousin and his political tilt toward groups like the Weathermen. I tried to tell her about Grandfather, mentioning father and Laura P. in the process. I told her as much as I could, each time the subject came up. I made her laugh, and when I failed to make her laugh, I changed what I was telling her, modifying it until she did laugh. With each anecdote, making Delia Tompson laugh became more difficult and trying for me, not because of me but because the more she heard, the less she thought was funny.