by Alan Cumyn
“It was good to see you today, son,” Ron said. “I’m sorry to surprise you like that. I just saw the . . . ad, for the bus fares —”
“Does it get any better?” Stan blurted. Was that his question?
More breathing at the other end of the line. Stan thought he could hear noises in the background. At the bus station? Was it open this time of night?
What time was it?
“Does what get any better?” Ron asked.
“Getting an erection for some girl on TV,” Stan said. “Thinking about it all the time. Sitting at the table at breakfast over cereal and being hard as a poker in your pajamas over nothing. Nothing!”
Not a word. If anybody knew about this, it would be his father.
“What are you talking about, Stan?”
Off. Off with the phone.
—
Stan smelled smoke on his way up the stairs and back to bed. He remembered that he hadn’t replaced the battery in the smoke alarm from the burnt pancake episode, but this wasn’t house-fire smoke. It was coming from a cigarette.
From the back porch, in fact. The smell grew sharper as Stan crept back through the kitchen. In the years since his mother had quit he’d grown more sensitive, so that now the smoke from a single cigarette seemed to fill the whole house.
His mother was smoking again. She was on the back porch in the dark, her head resting against the screened window, the orange bead of the cigarette perched in mid-air. Her hair was loose and long and looked as though she’d been bunching it in her hands.
He watched her from the open doorway. She was letting the cold into the house, letting in the smoke. He’d grown up with it but Lily hadn’t. Somehow it seemed to him that Lily ought to be protected from the dangers.
He stood by the open door. It would be the easiest thing in the world to turn around, slip back up the stairs. He could make sure Lily’s door was shut against the cancer.
Janine’s mother had cancer. He’d be meeting her tomorrow night. Tonight, actually, since today had morphed into Saturday.
Stan stared at the orange bead, at his mother in shadows gazing into the backyard where the winter’s chill was already in the air even though that season was technically still a few months away. He could feel it on his face, in his feet.
Surely she knew he was there? She used to know every thought in his head, every hand snaking into the cookie jar. Every nightmare.
She was wrapped in her old brown robe, and her feet were tucked up beneath her.
Stan heard himself say, “I sank a shot against Karl Brolin today in the wind on a bent rim way too far to even try it.”
She didn’t startle or drop the lengthening ash on the cigarette. Stan wished she’d put it out. But she just turned her head and smiled a little bit.
It was the middle of the night. They might have been in a dream. But everything felt normal somehow.
“Who’s Karl Brolin?”
Stan went out and sat on the wicker loveseat opposite her and pulled a blanket around himself. It smelled of the damp, of outdoors. He told her about the whole improbable basketball game and she listened, in her way. Tossing a ball into a hoop was as unlikely an event for her as knitting this blanket would have been for him. (Was it even knitted? Crocheted? What was the difference?)
And then somehow he was telling her about Janine Igwash. He told her about the belt loop, about the invitation to the dance. About Janine’s mother.
“Breast cancer?” his mother said.
The cigarette was out now, squashed into a little plate she must have brought out. There were no ashtrays left in the house. She must have a pack, but Stan couldn’t see it anywhere. Only one stub and its ashes littered the plate.
Silence strung between them like the smoke. Stan rubbed his cold toes and waited.
“I had a boyfriend once whose mother had cancer,” she said finally.
“Really?”
It was the middle of the night and the normal rules of disengagement seemed suspended. He wanted to hear about that boyfriend.
“I was in university and he was a sergeant, I think.”
“What, a cop?” Stan said. His mother practically broke out in a rash whenever she saw policemen in the street.
“No, in the military.”
His mother, the pacifist, with a soldier? His mother who wanted all arms banned from —
“He was staring at me in a store. A liquor store. I was just old enough to buy my own booze and there was this older man — he was probably all of twenty-seven — with the darkest eyes. He looked like Omar Sharif. He wasn’t in uniform or anything. But you know a military man. You can see it in the way he holds himself. In his haircut, too, of course. But —”
“What was his name?” Stan felt like he was learning more about his mother in just a few minutes on this freezing back porch than in his whole life so far.
“I think it was Pete.”
“You think?”
She was talking about some guy she used to love — some guy she probably had sex with and still thought of all these years later — and she didn’t even remember his name?
“He stared at me across the wine rack. His eyes just . . . stared. Maybe I smiled at him. My face went baking scarlet. I remember that. Then when I was at the checkout he was right behind me. He smelled . . . like an animal. Like he wanted to bend me over the counter right there.”
It helped, maybe, that Stan could barely see her. He could feel her looking straight at him. This might be a dream.
“So what did you do?”
“Tuesdays, after sociology and before dinner at the dorm, I met him at his friend’s apartment about a twenty-minute walk from campus. The apartment hadn’t been cleaned in months and I was never sure about the sheets. Often we didn’t bother with sheets. He lived on base. I forget how he could get off for fifty-five minutes on Tuesday afternoons.”
“Fifty-five minutes?”
“Everything was precise. Except when the clothes came off.” She hesitated, and Stan could see that she’d been drinking wine, that most of the bottle on the table by the window was empty. She wasn’t drunk, but maybe she wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning?
“When his clothes came off he was more like a dancer. A really good dancer, as much an animal as an artist. His body . . .” She sighed, blew out as if she were still smoking. “We should all get to love a body like that at least once in our lives.”
“Weren’t you in university when you met Dad?” Stan asked. The question just slipped out, a product of the darkness, the hour. When she hesitated again — when she looked at him finally with her sad, sad eyes — he wished he could have taken the question back, reeled it out of the night air.
“It felt like . . . Tuesday afternoons, for fifty-five minutes, I got to be somebody else entirely. I didn’t have to talk. I didn’t have to wash. I didn’t have to . . . follow any of the natural laws of the universe. There was only . . . the law of desire. Everything else . . .”
The night seemed to have quietly drained her store of words.
“I would carry the taste of him,” she said finally. “On my body, in my clothes, on the edges of my fingers, for hours afterwards.”
She looked at Stan then, as if suddenly aware of what she was saying, of who they both were.
She had a Tuesday-afternoon lover the same time she was with the guy who was going to be her husband.
“You said his mother had cancer,” Stan said quickly.
“She was dying of it. I never met her.” She leaned forward — a small almost-ready-to-go movement. “I think maybe Tuesday afternoons he visited her before getting to me. And that’s why he was so . . . hungry. I never felt entirely as if he wanted me so much as life. He was . . . starving for life . . .”
She stood then but had to lean against the porch frame.
“My leg’s fallen asleep,” she said, the wine glass in her hand.
She wasn’t leaving yet.
“I wish I knew what to
say to you. You are such a beautiful boy. So beautiful.” She ran a hand through his hair as if it were hers — bunch and release, bunch and release. “Be careful with this girl. Everything is in hot coals right now for her. Her feelings, her reactions. She’s going to . . .”
Stan’s mother stopped messing with his hair. She tipped her glass to sip the last few drops.
“Actually, I don’t know what the hell she’s going to do,” she said. “I have no idea what anybody’s going to do. Your father showing up today . . . he really rattled me. I didn’t think he could anymore. But he wants something. He’s not telling us the whole story, not by a long shot. He wants something and I don’t know what it is.”
His mother shook her head wearily.
“Years from now,” she said, “when you’re in therapy trying to sort out your life, and you’re cursing me and your father for what we did or didn’t do . . .” She put her face in her hands. “Oh, Jesus.”
“What?”
“I know I’m a rotten mother. But I have tried to protect you from the worst of the shit. And at least I’m not a liar. I haven’t told you the half of it, and I won’t. But whenever you’re dealing with your father, just remember. You can only trust a sliver of what the man says.”
She hugged him hard in the dull light.
“And I don’t believe I’m just being bitter when I say that.”
11
Stan had a memory of driving with his father. When was that? Some years before it all fell apart and Ron left for Kelly-Ann and his new life. They were in their old van, back when it seemed that every family had a van. Stan used to sit behind the dashboard on the passenger’s side pretending he was in the cockpit of an airplane.
That van had throat problems. It rattled even when it sat in the driveway.
And Stan’s father had a smell that day. Was he drinking? He smelled dangerous, somehow. Stan remembered watching his father’s hands on the wheel. It must have been a Saturday. His father wasn’t at the office. Stan wasn’t at school.
They were driving somewhere Stan had never been before, down to the river in an unusual part of town to go fishing. Stan’s father seemed jagged and sharp around the edges, like a piece of glass your hand finds in the water when you’re reaching for something else.
Did they say anything?
Finally they were there. It was sunny, not early morning by any means — when the fish had their breakfast — but maybe they would catch something. They walked together across a park and down to the public dock that jutted out over brownish water. It smelled vaguely oily, and the sunlight only penetrated the first few inches.
“If you cast over that way,” his father said, pointing stiffly to a spot beyond the reeds, “I think you might get some bass.”
A strange thought now popped into Stan’s head: that his father had spent the entire car ride rehearsing this brief speech.
“Did you go fishing here before?” Stan asked.
Where was Lily in this memory? She must have been very small. Maybe she was home with his mother.
Stan’s father didn’t answer the question. He set up Stan’s line with a bobber, with a hook and a rubber worm.
“See if you can hit that spot,” he said. “Do you want to try my rod?”
It was a big one with a spin-caster reel. Stan did want to try it.
It took a couple of efforts. He wasn’t used to releasing the line with his finger at just the right instant. But on the third or fourth cast, the bobber splashed somewhere near the quiet, deep spot his father had pointed out.
“That’s it. That’s good!” his father said.
They had brought two rods, but the second rod — Stan’s little one — stayed on the dock.
“I’m going to be meeting . . . an associate,” his father said. Associate sounded like someone important. Like someone a lawyer might have to meet on a Saturday morning instead of fishing with his boy.
Was Stan really recalling this properly? He remembered the word associate, and then his father was gone — disappeared somewhere into the neighborhood across the park.
The bobber bobbed and the minutes slowed. Two rods but one fisherman. A man was painting fence posts near the road — not the red fence itself but the posts, which were white and thick and high.
Stan reeled in slowly, then recast. He was getting better at hitting the spot. The bass must have wondered about so many rubber worms splashing overhead with red and white bobbers attached to them. The fence was red and white. So were the bobbers, so was the fishing box.
Stan didn’t have a watch. Where was the sun? He couldn’t remember where it had been when he started. But the fence posts were slow work. Maybe fifteen minutes a post? And the man had done two and a half already.
More than half an hour.
When the man had finished eleven and a half posts, when the fence was almost finished, Stan felt a huge tug on the line and he dropped the rod, then nearly kicked it into the water in panic. When he recovered, the line felt heavy, as if he might be pulling some monster from the deep.
A black waterlogged branch floated reluctantly to the surface. But half the rubber worm was gone, bitten off by something exciting, Stan thought. If you looked closely at the remaining portion of the rubber worm, you could see the teeth marks of the vicious fish.
At thirteen posts the fence was done. Stan climbed a willow tree, sat in the shade over the water and held his stomach where he was getting hungry.
The van was still there. But maybe the associate was a murderer? Maybe his father’s body was in the basement of one of those houses by the park by the river. Maybe . . .
Maybe if he just waited a little longer, everything was going to be all right.
12
Saturday morning was for chores. It was a routine established by Stan’s father long ago, one of the few things that had survived the separation catastrophe.
Stan tidied, dusted and vacuumed the living room, the front hallway, the kitchen, the stairs, landing and his own bedroom. His mother handled both bathrooms, the laundry and her room. Lily dawdled and played in the den and in her own room, turned on the vacuum for some seconds and, when yelled at, straightened up a few things, then collapsed in exhaustion while Stan wiped a layer of dust from the television and straightened the pictures on top of the piano that no one played.
Stan had taken precisely two lessons, at gunpoint practically, and then was not forced to continue after Other Events intervened.
Stan remembered his mother pulling down the curtains for some reason — lurching in a screaming rage and pulling them off the rod. What was that about? They were white with wavy stripes, and she had sent Ron out to get them and he’d taken all day. So he must have been with Kelly-Ann, and that must have been the day his mother found out and that was why she was pulling the curtains down and shrieking like a wounded animal.
Where did these memories hide year after year? Why were they spooling out now?
Stan gathered up the week’s mostly unread newspapers and took them downstairs to the recycle box.
Maybe his mother should have sold the house when Ron moved out. They should have started fresh somewhere. Because everything here had a memory still tied to the catastrophe.
There was his father’s workbench, where he used to putter for hours in the gloom away from everybody. What did he do down here? He sanded things, and hammered and cut other things, and arranged his tools on their special hooks. How could he be so quiet and patient working on his own projects and turn into such a swearing wreck out in the light of day? Stan remembered him fighting with the downspout when it came loose from the side of the house after some rainstorm. He was trying to fit a new piece, but the jagged edges of the aluminum cut at his hands like an enemy.
Did he lose it just because Stan was watching? Where was his mother in that scene? Had they just fought?
How could this bleeding, angry klutz now make a living as a carpenter?
The phone rang mid-morning.
&nb
sp; “Hey,” Janine said. “There’s something else I need to tell you about tonight.”
Stan waited. He was leaning against the stove trying to have a private conversation on the last phone in the world that was connected to the wall by a cord, and Lily was banging on the piano in the den instead of cleaning it.
“You really aren’t very good on the phone,” she said.
Clank, clank, bang, crash, crash went the piano.
“That’s my little sister,” Stan said. “She’s teaching herself to become Mozart.”
“Is she?” Janine said. “I really can’t tell if you’re kidding.”
Stan held the phone to the open air so Janine could hear.
“She should take lessons,” Janine said.
“Nobody in our family takes lessons,” Stan said. “We’re all self-taught. That’s why we’re all —” All what? “We’re all a bit tilted.”
It wasn’t such a bad word. Wasn’t the planet tilted?
Silence from her.
Was she tilted? The way Jason Biggs meant?
Another thought intruded. He really liked talking with her. He was terrible on the phone but he really liked talking with her.
He didn’t want to hear her say anything to ruin that.
“What about tonight?” he said.
“Uh . . . this dance.” Her voice was tight. “It’s . . . well, the whole group is, uh . . .”
Clink, clank, slam, clatter . . .
“Lily!” Stan’s mother called out from the bathroom. She had her hair roped back and she was wearing the tired purple sweatsuit she always wore for housecleaning.
“ . . . they’re a bit weird,” Janine said. “It’s just . . . I wanted to warn you. There might be some . . . parents there.”
More silence. “You said your parents were organizing,” he said finally. “So I kind of figured they’d be there.”
“And that’s okay?” She sounded relieved.
“Sure,” he said. “I think I already knew.”
“I just wasn’t sure if I told you,” she said quickly.
“Lily, stop it!” Stan’s mother screamed. “Stanley!”
“I’m on the phone!” Stan yelled. He pulled the cord around the corner into the dining room.