Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  When we moved across town to the new apartment, I switched Scout troops, which proved, unexpectedly, far more wrenching than changing schools the year before. Changing schools had been mere misery, but going to a new Scout troop made me deeply sad. Maybe it was the first thing of my own, the first thing I belonged to outside of my family, the first thing I had to leave, or felt like I was leaving a piece of myself. The new troop didn’t help. The meetings were dull. There was no tight-knit feeling in the groups—it was my introduction to life by committee. Advancement was all, climbing the ranks, notching as many Stars, Lifes and Eagles as possible. The troop had an excellent record of achievement. I dropped out within six months of joining.

  In my old troop, there was one Eagle and we were very proud of him, but that kind of success was almost beyond imagining for the rest of us. (In my three years of enlistment in the Boy Scouts, I climbed to the indifferent rank of First Class the same way I managed to get as far as John Thompson’s third book of piano instruction: mostly by showing up.) This was a troop of lower-middle-class kids, from families where the dads were firemen and gas-station owners. It was an easygoing bunch, but the dads who served as scoutmasters and assistants all knew stuff that seemed worth knowing about: how to build a good fire, how to repair a car engine, how to tie knots—the secret handshakes of manhood. They weren’t autocratic about what they knew, either. They didn’t hoard. They wanted you to know this stuff. And they made it fun. When we learned about treating wounds in first aid, one of the scoutmasters got hold of some mortician’s wax, mixed it with Karo syrup and red food coloring and then molded the still-wet wax to a kid’s bare arm or leg. He could make puncture wounds, lacerations—anything short of an amputation—all gaping and dripping, gruesome enough to make you flinch. The sooner we learned the proper way to apply a pressure bandage, the quicker he would conjure up a new horror. I never had better teachers.

  But the biggest change, not least because it was so sudden and unexpected, was the loss of the piano. Our new apartment complex, much bigger than the old one, sprawled over several blocks, and each building contained four apartments. Ours was on the second floor, and when the movers ferried our stuff across town, they took one look at the bend in the staircase and declared that no piano, certainly not one as big as ours, was going to make it to the second floor.

  I don’t know what happened to the piano; maybe Mother gave it to our new church, which was only a block away. I only remember her standing there in the chaos of unpacked boxes and misaligned furniture, crying, “What else can they take from me?” She sounded furious, although I wasn’t sure who she was angry with. I wasn’t even sure what she meant. It would take me a long time to understand that she and I, though we were closer then than ever, already saw the world in different ways. To me, we lived in a world where the tide had always been going out. But she could remember better times, when she was happy, when the world went her way and she was the apple of everyone’s eye and if she wanted to talk Mack Jones into marrying, who would stop her? Now, “I should never have married Mack” would be a constant refrain for the rest of her life. That’s where the trouble started. Now she was trapped in a world not of her making and not to her liking. But I think losing the piano hit her harder than almost anything else. If she could lose the piano—not just the very symbol of everything she was good at but her last physical tie to her home in South Carolina, the place she had been happy—this easily, on the spur of the moment, at the whim of some moving-van driver, then anything could happen. When she saw me staring at her, she caught herself and smiled. “I haven’t lost everything, have I, precious?”

  It is a measure of my mother’s mental state around the time of her divorce that when her lawyer told her she was entitled to ask for child support—would, in fact, almost automatically be granted such support—she refused to ask for it. I discovered this only years later while going through some of her old correspondence—she had the habit, whenever she cleaned out a drawer, of sending the contents, if it was letters or old newspaper clippings, along to me with no comment. The correspondence detailing the issue of alimony turned up in one of those thick envelopes out of the blue. The lawyer’s letter acknowledging receipt of her decision was cast in a tone of puzzlement bordering on outrage that someone would so willfully flout—not the law, certainly, but clearly any notion of common sense. I could see his point. So it was mostly out of incredulous curiosity that I asked her later why she had never asked for child support. The answer she gave left part of me wishing I’d left well enough alone. “I don’t know,” she said in a languid, noncommittal voice that I could not remember ever having heard. “I just didn’t.” For a split second, it was like looking straight back into that deadest time of her life, and understanding that some of that deadness was still in her.

  Of the time in which the lawyer’s letter was written, I could recall nothing that corresponds to this sleepwalking image of my mother. Was she upset? When was she not? I could not remember that far back. And being accustomed to my mother’s unhappiness, I had in time become oblivious to it. Several years later, our neighbor from the apartment across the landing said to me, “Your mother certainly has come a long way since you all moved in.” I just stood there staring, baffled to silence by what she’d said. Clearly, I had adjusted to my mother on the verge of a nervous collapse and then adjusted to whatever had taken its place. Clearly, there was a lot I wasn’t telling myself. After the divorce, after we had moved and resettled and life was just the two of us, Mother took up what would turn out to be a lifelong habit of quoting the dead and other living family members not present as though they were there in the room with her. She had always filled her conversation with references to the past, but now the line between past and present was erased altogether. She never went so far as to speak directly to her mother or father, but she invoked their authority as though she were merely translating. “Daddy said Mack’s daddy—I think he inquired about this—was supposed to be no’count. He didn’t approve of me marrying Mack.” Whenever I asked for a Coke, she wouldn’t say no. Instead, she said, “I’d stand there at the fountain in Daddy’s drugstore and ask for a drink, and he’d always say, ‘How about a nice cold glass of water?’” Even the living became stuck in time. Whenever we ate at the K&W cafeteria and ran into a couple who had once, decades earlier, been parishioners at Uncle Tom’s church, she’d look at me while they approached with their trays and say, “You know what Uncle Tom would say: here comes old Skip-to-My-Lou.” That was Charlie Holt, who hadn’t called a square dance in twenty years. Gradually, imperceptibly, the past became our present. The details with which she furnished this shadow life were often inconsequential, and while some of them gave her solace—”I can just see Daddy now, coming down that sidewalk from the store”—others were brought out in a litany of complaint that never varied, as though she could change the past by railing against it if she just did it often enough and furiously enough—”Melita would stand at that sink all night, doing I don’t know what. You couldn’t get her out of there for love or money.” Sometimes she seemed to want to invoke the missing simply in order to underscore that they were no longer there.

  Even my father got a mention now and then. “If Mack were here, he’d have that tree in that stand faster than you could say Jack Robinson.” “If Leenie were here, she’d gnaw that chicken bone until there wasn’t anything left.” But even there, the past was the standard by which all else was judged, and found lacking.

  We always had a full house, even though there was never anyone there but my mother and me. Officially, we lived at 2321 Ardmore Terrace, Apt. C, but our real address, as far as we were concerned, was that rambling old one-story house shaded by live oaks on Cleveland Street in Kershaw, South Carolina, where she had grown up. She was so happy in that world, and I was happy there with her. So, without a qualm, I became her willing accomplice. We dined with the dead. “We’ll have our hot meal at noon, and something cold for supper. Tina would always set the foo
d out for supper in the dining room last thing before going home.” My grandparents’ church routines were the standard by which ours were judged. “Mama and Daddy were the first ones there every Sunday. They opened the doors.” Our apartment lacked anything so grand as a front porch, but almost every night we sat in the twilight with Mother’s daddy, rocking in the porch swing. “If there was a boxing match on the radio, I’d listen with him. Mama couldn’t stand it, but I loved the fights as much as he did.” Even if Mother had not been such a persuasive fantasist, I would have bought into her vision, because the picture she conjured of her youth—of hayrides and ukulele serenades and a town so small that everyone addressed you by name when you passed on the street—was so seductive, so much more vivid than our pale life in an apartment where nothing ever happened: “It was Melita, if you can believe that, who took me out on the back porch and taught me how to dance the Charleston.” When she evoked these scenes—and sometimes it was only a mention, a sentence or two, no more—her face would light up with the memory so fiercely that I was convinced that I, too, could see the little girl with her big sister on a porch that had, years before I was born, been closed in when the kitchen and back bedroom were added on to the house. “I don’t know why Daddy never just bought a new house instead of tacking rooms on that old place that never was much to begin with.”

  This was where our flight had taken us, not just across town, from one apartment to another, but thirty years or more back into the past, where there was no divorce, no drinking, no unhappiness. I suppose we were both driven a little mad at the time, she because all her dreams of what life would be were finally, irrevocably dashed, me because I was an awkward, lonely boy whose every foray into make-believe had been nursed and encouraged with the well-meaning goal of protecting him from the harsh realities of alcoholism and life with little or no money. Imaginary worlds were my meat. That might explain why this one began to collapse after only a year or two, as soon as I began to see that there was no place for me in the fantasy Mother was so intent on cobbling together—no place for the me, that is, who rode beside her in the car, sat across from her at the cafeteria or walked with her back and forth to church. Time had gotten stuck in Mother’s mind, and I had gotten stuck with it. Whenever I did something that displeased her, I was “not the Malcolm I know,” the Malcolm she knew being, as far as I could see, about five years old—forever.

  Melita and Tom froze me in time, too. To my aunt, in particular, I was not just five forever, I was perfect. But she was so sweet about it, and so purely devoted to that ideal little boy that it didn’t bother me. There was nothing there to take personally, because her image of me diverged so radically from the original that there were no grounds for comparison. I could have stepped to one side, and she would never have noticed. There was nothing coercive about it, either. She didn’t seem to mind when the evidence right under her nose contradicted her faith. With Mother, it was different. She insisted on her vision.

  Everywhere I turned in that apartment, I ran into my much younger self coming around the corner. Words that I had misspoken as a toddler were now permanent parts of my mother’s vocabulary (macnana for banana, baving suit, kenis for penis—that one didn’t get trotted out much), along with all the many hilarious ways that everyone from my little friends to the woman who did our laundry mispronounced my name (Malkin, Maclum, Michael). If I mentioned Aunt Melita, she would correct me, “You mean Eda,” my childhood stab at pronouncing my aunt’s name. The sight of a pumpkin always prompted a recitation of my mangled version of “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater”: “put her in a pumpkin shell, and there she is, very much.”

  There was no sudden break, no single moment when I decided I didn’t want to be my mother’s imaginary playmate any longer. But the rift between us only widened. We were like two children who found that they could no longer play together but had nowhere else to go. Everything I did—and everything I didn’t do—seemed to rub her the wrong way. I was in junior high by then, and my grades in math and science had started going south. I took up the violin and then the guitar and then just as quickly abandoned them. I stopped drawing and painting. I stopped watching television with my mother after supper. Instead, I spent most of my time in my room, reading, listening to the radio or playing records on the same little phonograph I’d had since I was four, the kind that looks like an overnight case until you pop open the lid to expose the tiny turntable just big enough for 45s.

  The one activity I kept up that pleased my mother was singing in the choir, although I will never know if I did it for her or for myself. I did like the singing. I liked hymns, and I liked being part of a chorus. Everything about choir was familiar, from the easy key signatures on the sheet music to the robing up on Sunday before the service. Most of what we sang was music I’d been singing all my life. It was a relief, as well, to be able to do something with my mother that we both enjoyed. Doing it in a crowd made it just about perfect, because there was no chance there would be any personal friction between us.

  Things went along like that for several months. We were uneasy around each other, as though we were waiting for something to happen, but we didn’t know what. It wasn’t long in coming. One Sunday in early November 1967, there was smoke in the air, and if you hadn’t known better, you might have mistaken it for the smell of someone burning leaves and not from one of the hundred fires set off by the rioting that had consumed the city for four days after a black man was killed in a struggle with the police. We had come home from church and immediately turned on the television to see if anything new had happened. “I didn’t see Red Benton this morning,” Mother said. The mayor, a member of our church, had been negotiating all weekend with leaders in the black community. We watched the news in silence, and when it was clear that nothing new was happening, that things seemed under control, Mother turned the set off and started for the bedroom to change. Walking past me, she said, in a tone so deliberately conversational that I knew it meant trouble, “I heard some boys gave Bill Moser a terrible time in Sunday school this morning.”

  I kept my head buried in the funnies.

  “Do you know about that?”

  “Mr. Moser’s stupid.”

  She turned and looked at me as though I had just spat on the floor.

  “He started it!” I said.

  “That’s not the way I heard it.”

  “He said the Flood and Adam and Eve and all that were real, that that’s the way the world began.”

  I had a vision of all the kids in the Sunday-school class laughing and Mr. Moser, our new teacher, standing in front of the class and getting so flustered that he put his hands on his hips and got chalk all over his black suit. The memory of the white chalk and his white hair and the perplexed look on his face made me giggle.

  “Are you deliberately trying to hurt me? Why do you want to do these things? This isn’t like you. I’ve never been so embarrassed.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” I said to her back as she went into her bedroom.

  “It has everything to do with me, honey,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m your mother. People judge me by the way you behave.”

  I went back to the comics. Staring into the beautiful, boring world of Prince Valiant, I could hear her at her dresser, making a show of slamming her earrings and necklace back into her jewelry box. I waited for a break in the clatter.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Anything wrong?” She came out into the hall in her slip. She still had her heels on. “Do you have any idea how upset he is? They say he was shaken.” For no good reason, I hated it when my mother used words she didn’t normally use. Shaken was not a word in her vocabulary. I knew as soon as she said it that she was parroting what she’d heard in the hall at church. Still, what she said slowed me up. My brain felt muddy.

  I tried to reconstruct what had happened in the class that morning. It started when two of us said we wanted to talk about the riots. It was all anyone i
n town had talked about for four days. Our old Sunday-school teacher had often used current events in her lesson. But Mr. Moser said no, we should stick to the lesson. We argued with him, but he wouldn’t budge. “You should pray,” he said. “You should pray for the police.”

  “How about the man who got killed by the police?” someone asked. “Shouldn’t we pray for him?”

  Mr. Moser didn’t answer. Instead he opened his lesson book and began talking about Noah and God’s promise to never again destroy the world.

  “Who can tell me what that means?” he asked without looking up. No one said anything.

  “Why do you think God caused the flood in the first place?”

  Again, no one answered.

  Now he did look up. He was a thin man with wiry, grizzled hair framing a face that seemed to be collapsing in on itself, like a piece of withered fruit. Peering up from his book with his neck stuck out, he said, “Well, who can tell me how long ago this happened?”

  Three of us in the back row looked at each other and laughed.

  “What’s so funny back there?”

  “You mean in real years or Bible years?”