Outside, the sun was bright and hot on the sidewalk and the leaves. I sniffed the air, as if to catch some scent of whatever it was that had happened. Half expecting to smell some trace of Mr. Murphy’s fleshy, death-touched odor. Wordlessly, Diane and I strolled past Sheryl’s house. The shades were drawn and the tire marks still fresh and violent.
I turned just in time to see my mother stepping through Mrs. Evers’s side door.
On the morning after the fight, I left Leela and my mother and little Jake in our kitchen and stepped outside, where Diane Rossi, Georgie Evers and the Meyer twins were already searching the sidewalk and street in front of Sheryl’s house. I knew precisely what they were looking for, and without comment I joined them. In each of our basements and attics, in grimy shoeboxes and old footlockers, in paper bags as limp as cloth, our fathers, we knew, had iron crosses and silver swastikas, tarnished medals marked with bright red suns, heavy foreign coins and black-and-white postcards fading to yellow and brown, and what we searched for that morning was in some way our own version of those souvenirs: mementos of a battle, a night of high drama we were not likely to see again.
As we searched, we discussed what had happened to Sheryl.
Diane said, “They got married secretly, her and her boyfriend. And when her mother found out, she sent her away.”
“To Ohio,” Georgie said. He crouched to touch a piece of mica that gleamed up from the road. He already held a small shard of black glass. I held another.
“They didn’t get married,” one of the Meyer twins said, his voice full of scorn. “She’s going to have a baby.”
“Yeah,” the other said. Both of them had long, thin, freckled faces and only the slightest brown fuzz of a crew cut. Their voices, too, were identical. “She’s pregnant,” he said.
The word alone startled us.
We were silent for a moment and then, together, Diane, Georgie and I said, “We know that,” although I’m not sure any of us knew it with such certainty until then. The night before, parents all up and down the block had offered their children short, contingency courses in the birds and the bees, just as my mother had done for me and apparently with as much detail and tact. They were of that generation who spelled the words they couldn’t speak and followed strict rules regarding what could be discussed in mixed company, so this morning, we, their children, were more confused than ever about just what was involved.
We studied the tire tracks on the grass by the curb and then crossed the sidewalk and stepped only one inch at a time onto Sheryl’s torn lawn. We were all thinking about sex.
“But they got married, too,” Diane finally added.
“No they didn’t,” the Meyer twins told her.
She paused and squinted at them. “Yesss,” she said. “My mother told me.”
They stuck out their chins. “Nooo,” they answered. “Your mother’s wrong.”
She put her hands on her hips. “How could she have a baby if they weren’t married?”
The Meyer twins stopped in their tracks and then slowly staggered backward, their hands on their stomachs, their mouths wide open. Then they threw their arms around one another and whooped with laughter.
Georgie and I moved closer to Diane. We knew she had made a terrible mistake, but we knew our own parents, in explaining Sheryl’s dilemma, had said an awful lot about marriage as well. (“When people get married,” my own mother had begun, “they do what Sheryl did …” as if it were Sheryl herself who had established the trend.)
“Don’t you know anything?” Mickey Meyer asked, still holding his stomach but bending now, as if her stupidity had given him appendicitis.
“How old are you?” Ricky cried. “Two or something? You don’t have to be married to have a baby, dope.”
“Yes you do,” she said weakly. She turned to me, “Right?”
Wanting to stay on her side but fairly certain she was wrong, I merely shrugged. This spun Mickey and Ricky around with delight.
“Two idiots!” they cried. I saw Mrs. Rossi glance out her window, and I told them both to hush. “I know you don’t have to be married,” I told them.
“You just have to go to sleep with someone,” Georgie suddenly added. “That’s all.”
But the Meyer twins were too delighted with our ignorance to let it go at that. “Oh yeah, sure,” Mickey said. He folded his hands under his cheek, closed his eyes and pretended to snore—“gnaa—shew, gnaa-shew”—then he opened his eyes and said in a high-pitched voice, “Uh-oh, I’m going to have a baby.”
Ricky threw himself on the edge of Sheryl’s lawn and rocked with laughter, touching his shoulder to one of the ripped places on the grass. His own marriage in another ten years’ time would be to a girl whom everyone, including his parents, had believed to be Italian until a prenuptial barbecue in the Meyers’ backyard had filled our street with cries of “Mira, mira,” and the Meyers’ lawn chairs with three out of five grandparents who were definitely not white.
“You better take No-Doz,” he told us now. In another ten years’ time he would leave his parents and their house for good—choosing to be dead to them, as his mother put it to mine, rather than give up the love of his mongrel girl.
Georgie looked crestfallen and I, too, was confused. We had both thought sleeping with someone was a valid enough explanation but the Meyers’ laughter filled us with doubt.
Diane had chosen to ignore them both and had returned to her search. She walked slowly along the edge of the curb, touching the toe of her sneaker to every pebble or bit of debris. Between her fingers she rolled what had been thus far the morning’s best find: the dark black earpiece to one of the hoods’ sunglasses.
Mickey Meyer was saying, “It doesn’t take more than five minutes. The guy gets on top of the girl”—he slammed his fist into his palm three times, imitating some adult—“and she’s going to have a baby.”
I thought of my parents and their breathless nights and early mornings. Of Leela’s ruined marriage. “Maybe,” I added.
“What do you mean maybe?” Mickey asked.
“Not always,” I said. “It doesn’t always work out.” From the curb where he sat, Ricky added, “Only if the guy sweats.”
We all turned to him, even Mickey. This was a new part of the puzzle.
“What?” Georgie said, returning some of the Meyers’ own scorn.
Ricky shrugged nonchalantly. “The guy’s got to sweat, and the lady’s got to drink it.”
Diane, who was still pretending not to listen, was the first to say, “Does not,” but we all quickly followed.
“Does,” Ricky insisted.
“Who told you that?” I asked.
“My father,” Ricky said.
“He did not!” Mickey cried.
“Yes he did,” Ricky told him calmly.
“When?” Mickey demanded.
“Once,” Ricky said, vague and arrogant with our attention. “When you weren’t around.”
Mickey squinted at him. “When wasn’t I around?” He said it as if the very idea of his ever not being around was ludicrous.
“Last night,” Ricky said regally. “When Dad got home from the police. You were sleeping. That’s when he told me.”
“Baloney!” Mickey cried.
Diane said, “That makes me sick just to think of it.”
Ricky shrugged. “Glad I’m not a girl.”
Georgie suddenly sat down beside him, chunky and puzzled, his round little mouth wide open and his brown shorts pulling against his white thighs. I recalled sometimes seeing light beads of sweat on his upper lip. “Is that what Sheryl did?” he asked.
“I guess,” Ricky said.
“She did not,” I told them impatiently. I knew the Meyers were notorious liars, but I also knew they usually collaborated on their tales. Their disagreement had given Ricky’s story new authority. “It doesn’t happen like that,” I said.
“How, then, Miss Smarty?” Ricky asked.
I was about to say they kis
sed each other and breathed a baby into life but knew even before I spoke the words that it was a weak and fanciful explanation. I recalled my parents’ voices, my mother’s desperate headstand, Leela’s tears and what Sheryl herself had told me. I knew something more difficult was involved.
Diane sighed loudly as if she hadn’t wanted to reveal this but could no longer resist. “It has to do with where you go to the bathroom,” she said quickly. “But you have to be married.”
Now Georgie, his face lightening, changed his allegiance once more. Yes, he said. Diane was right. When his mother had her babies they tried to get out her behind, but the doctor cut open her stomach and took them out that way instead.
Mickey Meyer, still subdued by the possibility that their father had told Ricky something he hadn’t told him, perked up a bit at this. “They cut open her stomach?” he cried. “Didn’t all the food fall out?”
“Stupid,” Diane whispered, and Ricky once more commanded center stage. “That’s how they get out,” he said. “But I’m talking about how they get in.” He leaned forward and made each word emphatic. “The guy sweats and the lady drinks it, I swear.”
“They do not,” Diane said again, and Mickey suddenly leaned closer to her. He wore that look he got whenever he had something disgusting to show you: a blackened fingernail, a festering cut, a green opaque marble that he could hold in his nostril. “Maybe it’s not sweat she drinks,” he said, leering as effectively as a nine-year-old can leer. “Maybe it has to do with where you go to the bathroom.”
We all cried out at this, suddenly moving around as if our revulsion were physical. Georgie stood and walked halfway up Sheryl’s lawn. Diane and I stepped up on the curb and then down again and then, to show our true indignation, crossed to the curb on the other side of the street. Georgie then skirted Ricky, who was crawling along the grass pretending to choke, and joined us. Mickey danced after him (Diane and I shouting, “Get out of here,” all the while he approached) and then Ricky followed.
Now Sheryl’s house was before us and we held our small mementos in our hands or rested them on our bare knees. Sitting on the curb, we began again, slowly and more seriously now, trying words the way a locksmith might go through a large set of keys. I said womb and seed and conception, and Diane contributed kissing, petting and blood. Ricky insisted on repeating sweat, and Mickey would not give up bathroom, although it had been Diane’s contribution from the start. (I recalled my parents’ hollow voices, the swish of tub water.) Georgie tried bed and sleeping a few times but then conceded them when I said car and darkness.
We stretched our legs, bare and summer-brown, out into the street before us. We touched each other at our elbows and shoulders as we tried words as we might try key after key. Across the street, the ragged lawn and the drawn shades had already become for us just one more desolate sign of that household’s manlessness, and it was Mickey Meyer who first said, “I wonder if she’ll have a boy.”
We paused to think about this for a moment, realizing for the first time, I think, that whatever difficult and extravagant feat had to be performed, whatever painful acrobatics, whatever horror, we, the children, were after all the end, the desired result—the culmination of our poor parents’ most difficult task, their very motive.
Georgie said a boy would be the right age to play with his youngest brother. Diane and I said we’d soon be old enough to baby-sit. Although we’d heard it a hundred times, the Meyer twins began to recount for us the elaborate story of their surprise birth, how in the first minute of life, according to their father, they had both spat in each eye of the doctor, who had failed to predict twins.
Slowly, we began to see what poor things our parents’ lives would have been had we not, after their urging and acrobatics and pain, agreed to arrive, stumbling as we did upon the one consolation it seemed no one had yet offered Sheryl: a child as marvelous as any one of us would be born.
TWO
It is only after a certain age, twenty-five or so, when the distance between the child you were and the adult you have become has grown great enough to breed wistfulness, that lovers feel the need to bring one another home. Or perhaps it is only a dare. We have by that time become aware of and even resigned to what part of our parents we will never shake—the receding hairline, the petulance, the inability to say and sincerely mean, “It’s only money,”—and maybe we bring home this stranger who has claimed love and fidelity simply as a test: Love me, love my parents; love what I come from and what I will, with no more choice or volition, become.
But teenagers know better. They choose parking lots and movie theaters and public playgrounds for their meetings. They do most of their courting in the historical void of a moving car. Fresh from the frustrations and humiliations of parental I-know-all-about-you-but-it-doesn’t-make-any-difference love, they do all they can to preserve, unsullied, this newfound land, this blank slate of a girlfriend or boyfriend. They pretend, until history and memory once again bind them to their age, to be reborn at sixteen.
In the year Sheryl dated Rick, she went to his house only three or four times and only when he had forgotten something, a jacket or a bottle or a ten-dollar bill. He never asked her inside. Pulling up to the curb, opening his door and putting out his leg even before the car had fully stopped, he would mumble, “Be right back,” and leave her, the engine still running, the radio going. She would sit still in the middle of the seat, or occasionally lean over to tap the gas pedal with her foot when the engine began to stall.
It would never occur to her that he should invite her in, introduce her to his sister and his father, and his mother if she was there. She would not have seen any point to it.
On a dull afternoon during the single winter they spent together, Rick stopped at his house for cigarette money or a stack of quarters to use in the pinball machines at the alley. It had been raining, that gray, unpoetic rain of midwinter in a dreary suburb. The sky was a high and solid mass of featureless clouds, the rain steady but unenthusiastic: Sheryl could barely hear it on the roof of his car. There were small streams of water running along the ragged curbs, and the shingles on some of the houses were stained like blotters with dark waterlines. At school that morning, the yellow lights of the classrooms had shone dirtily into the rain and the parking lot and she’d been tempted to skip, the sight of them so exhausted and discouraged her. But she knew Rick would be inside waiting for her by her locker.
The sound of the engine reared and the car shook a little. Sheryl touched the wheel and stretched her left foot to the gas pedal. She saw a white plume of exhaust rise into the rear-view mirror and watched it dissipate in the rain. Rick took longer than usual and she glanced toward his door. It was still partially open, as he had left it. She hoped his father wasn’t delaying him with his unending requests for another pillow or another station on the TV, a glass of milk, answer the phone, and why can’t he bring his books home with him just once? Her own father, she thought, had been kind and forgiving and funny—everything she did, it seemed to her now, had pleased and amazed him. She tallied, as she had been doing since his death, one life for another, who would have been missed more, her father or Rick’s. Rick’s was even older, she knew. He should have died so her father could have lived. No one would have felt that bad.
She looked toward the house, considered touching the horn, but instead reached again for the gas pedal. The exhaust cloud, pale gray but lighter and brighter than the air and the sky, filled the rear-view mirror once more and continued to grow, rolling and smoking as she pumped the gas again and again, the engine yelling, threatening, wanting to get away. She watched the rear-view mirror: the street and the black trees and the houses behind her were nearly obliterated by the exhaust. They reminded her of a child’s botched pencil drawing, now erased and made new again. Here, start over. Her father was alive and Rick’s had died, and since she hadn’t met him yet, she didn’t even know it.
She took her foot from the gas and sat back to watch the vapor slowly ri
se and disappear, the colorless street once again growing clear. Rick was at the front door, but he was turned away, talking to someone. When he stepped out of the house, she could see that he was angry. And then a woman stepped out behind him. She was small—Sheryl had always imagined that Rick’s mother would be tall and powerful, thick and ungainly dead weight—and dark, like Rick. She wore a raincoat that she held tightly closed at the waist and she ran after him in short, merry little steps. Rick ignored her until he got to the car and then he pulled open the door and said, “My mother wants to meet you,” quick and sullen. He got in and slammed the door—for a second Sheryl thought he was going to pull away—and then leaned forward to turn off the engine. He slumped behind the wheel. Sheryl touched his leather jacket, spattered with rain. There was no time for her to move to the far side of the seat.
The woman bent down to the window and smiled in at them. “Hello,” she called as if they were a great distance from her. “You’re Sheryl.”
Sheryl nodded and said hello. Rick stared at the windshield.
“Well, I’m Rick’s mom,” she said. She said it proudly, as if she’d just been awarded the title. Despite her illness, she looked younger than she was. Her straight brown hair was pulled off her face with a velvet hairband, but the ends of it fell over her cheeks as she leaned toward them. Her eyes, Rick’s eyes, were dark and wide-spaced, obviously weak and yet somehow alluring. Only the deep vertical line between them, as dark as a scar, and the raw yellow patch of psoriasis on her forehead, as if to indicate the source of her troubles, reminded Sheryl of where she spent her weekdays.
That Night Page 10