Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  That night, the doorbell rang. My mom wasn’t home, so Al answered. It was my attacker and another older kid, a friend or brother, at the door. The boy had a big red gash on his forehead where I had pounded the rock into him. They asked Al if I could come out. Looking at the two of them under the glow of the porch light, Al sensed that something was very wrong, but he called me to come over. I didn’t say a word; I can’t imagine how I looked. I was scared, even terrified, but I knew that I could not show it. I knew they were both there to exact revenge. Instead, I just looked at that teenage boy. I stared at him and refused to turn my eyes away. I wanted him to be as afraid of me as I was of him, to think that I would tell my mom or even tell Al what he had tried to do to me. The kid must have seen something in my eyes that made him believe that I was going to talk. I think he sensed, standing there on our doorstep, that there would be no revenge that night. And I think the fact that I never backed down from him ensured that he never tried to approach me again, as he had done in the woods.

  But things did not end there. This kid had a lot of friends, and he began making up lies and bad-mouthing me to them. Every day, they would chase me home from school, the Maplewood Elementary School, a low, tan brick building with rectangular windows over on Laurel Street. I had no choice but to outrun them, even though it was over a mile and a half home, much of it uphill. They were bigger and stronger; they could move with a quick, ground-covering stride. If they caught me, I knew what would happen. To this day, I can still see the flash of that knife blade in the woods and the thirteen-year-old boy with his pants down. I was a fast kid, but I pushed myself to be faster. I ran down Laurel and turned left at Salem, followed it along to Broadway, where the street was busy and traffic whizzed by. I stayed on Broadway until it became Temple and then ran up Elwell Street, which was an almost vertical incline. I was sucking wind; my heart was in my throat. And every few yards or so, I turned my head to look back. I looked around every corner and glanced behind me, to catch sight of them coming. Sometimes, I cut through the black family’s yard and scrambled up the rock face behind Al’s house, hauling my books and myself into his backyard.

  Those boys should have gotten me, but they never did. I became a runner then, and every afternoon became a race that I had to win.

  Chapter Five

  Cousins

  One day we were living in Al Di Santo’s house, and the next day we weren’t. When third grade ended, my mother moved out of Malden and back to Wakefield. We did not go back to my grandparents, but to an apartment on Albion Street. Two Hundred Ninety-three Albion Street had been an old New England Victorian, with a few bits of gingerbread trim above the covered porch and an octagonal add-on at the sides—the type of house that might have been conjured by Charles Addams or later Stephen King. Farther away from downtown, the train whistle was only a faint sound. The place was a carved-up hodgepodge of rooms, up a long flight of stairs from the busy road. Our apartment was three rooms, a sitting place in front, a bedroom with a fake fireplace, and a kitchen at the rear. I slept on a cot in the bedroom, pressed up against the false fireplace while my mother slept with Leeann in the bed. I spent most of my time outside on the porch, waiting for something to happen.

  Al showed up on our doorstep a few times and tried to reconcile, begging my mother to come back. He apologized and promised to be more accommodating. But my mother was done. After the last time that Al left, I never saw him again except for one quick, curious visit when I dropped by his house completely unannounced after I was grown. I needed to see if what I remembered was true, if the way I remembered things there, and even the neighborhood, had stayed the same. He lived in that house in Malden until he died of cancer, tended to by a nephew. His own children, in California and Hawaii, were too far away to come home for long. He wasn’t, in retrospect, a bad guy. He was not violent, and despite the fighting and frustrations, he was generally nice to my mom. But Judy Di Santo, formerly Sullivan, formerly Brown, née Rugg, had decided to move on.

  I was moving on too, though I didn’t know it then, when the meager boxes were unpacked and I unrolled a scratchy wool blanket where I had bundled up my things. That summer, after a few weeks of a Christian sleep-away camp on Cape Cod, which my grandparents paid for, and a visit to Rye Beach with Gram, my mother packed my suitcase and announced that I was going to visit my cousins. My mother’s older sister, Nancy, lived in Wakefield. She had married not too long before my mom. But they were not close. They had always been very competitive. Early on, my aunt assumed the mantle of the older, responsible sister, a bit frumpy and staid, while my mom was the young, pretty one. Even well into adulthood, their roles and images remained. I have a hard time imagining them ever sitting up at night, trading secrets in the small bedrooms upstairs on Eastern Avenue. And there was the fact that my grandparents seemed to prefer my mom. Partly it was that she was far more needy, and not just for money. But even with her three marriages and her disconnected life, there was something about her that they responded to. It was not the same with Aunt Nancy.

  Of course, as a nine-year-old boy, I didn’t know any of this going in.

  My aunt Nancy and my uncle Alban had two children: Kenny, who was older; and Wendy, who was about my age. Wendy and I never really liked each other; it was a kind of wary coexistence, but that didn’t matter quite so much because I slept in Kenny’s room. He had the left side of the room and I had the right. My bed was pushed up under the eaves and I stored my suitcase underneath. Our window overlooked the roof of the garage. I had a dresser, but I don’t even think I filled it. I didn’t have too many things. I stayed for a few nights, expecting my mother to come and get me, to take me home. But she never came. It was probably my aunt who told me that I was now going to be living with my cousins, in their tiny Cape-style house with three bedrooms and two baths on Redfield Road. It was a foursquare house, with a living room in front and dining room on the other side, a kitchen behind the dining room, and the master bedroom on the first floor in the back, instead of a den. Upstairs, there was space for only two rooms, Wendy’s and Kenny’s—one side of which was now mine. Busy Route 128 ran above us at the end of their street, and I could hear the rush and rumble of cars even with the windows closed. I went to their school, Walton Elementary, and every morning, I rode my bike up the steep, winding hill to the fourth grade.

  To this day, I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know why my mother sent me to live with them, by myself, without her and Leeann. I don’t know if she decided that the Albion Street apartment was too small for the three of us. I don’t even know for sure where she was living the entire time that I was on Redfield Road. I don’t know if it was too much to have someone care for Leeann and me, if Leeann went to my grandparents, or what happened. It’s been over forty years, and still, I have no explanation.

  I do know that my mother paid my aunt and uncle to keep me in their home, like a boarder or a ward. They frequently took the opportunity to remind me of just that fact. At mealtime, when I wanted seconds, my uncle or aunt would say, “Your mother doesn’t give us enough to feed you.” For my part, I would later retort, “I should be able to have seconds, you’re getting paid.” And I remember hearing them discussing the payments and the money, although I never knew where the money came from. Perhaps my mother earned it; perhaps my grandparents gave some of it to her to give to them. But I knew that I was a transaction. I always felt like a poor cousin who came to visit. Never was that more apparent than at dinner.

  We ate our meals around the table in their kitchen, and I would always be served last. My aunt would make a plate of hamburgers, and I would be starving. The plate would go around to the four of them, and then come to me. I got one burger, and then would have to wait while each of them had seconds. It did not matter if
I ate fast, cramming the food into my mouth, or slowly, chewing each bite fifty or one hundred times. Very rarely was there a second helping for me; my aunt usually made only nine, and of course there were five of us gathered around. I still remember the sight of those hamburgers, juicy ground chuck soaking ever so slightly into the soft white buns, and how much I longed to reach over for another one. I knew too, from the living room talk, that they did not lose money on me while I lived with them.

  But in retrospect, I have to be grateful to them, because when no one else would, they did take me in.

  My mother did not come around much when I lived with my cousins. She did not disappear for stretches as completely as my father, whose face was so diffuse in my brain that I sometimes struggled to conjure the details of him, the color of his eyes, his nose, what he looked like beyond his blinding smile and imposing size. But my mother had also gone missing. She might take me out on a Sunday and listen to me complain about how miserable I was, about how I wanted to come home. Mostly, though, she stayed away, as if to come to Redfield Road were trespassing.

  I don’t really remember if my father came at all. But he must have shown up sometime, perhaps that summer, in between Al’s house and the move to Kenny’s room, because I had learned to play basketball, and I didn’t learn that from my cousins. My uncle had put up a hoop in the driveway, and on the black tar, Kenny, some neighborhood kids, and I went at it all the time. I was always competitive, and he was my closest competition. I would beat him at hoop, stealing the ball, rising up on my toes to take the shot. I had started to grow, rocketing up past five feet, which was gigantic for a nine-year-old back then. My cousins were smaller, red-haired and freckled, and although Kenny was a good player, I had inherited my dad’s dark hair and athletic frame. I was lean and I could move, angling my body in different directions. And I was fast, fast from all those afternoons racing home in Malden.

  My cousins and I competed not just in basketball, but in all parts of life. In the winter, my uncle built a hockey rink outside in their backyard, laying out two-by-fours, spreading plastic sheeting, and then filling it with water and waiting for it to freeze in the cold and sullen winter evenings. Wendy skated, and we played hockey, facing off with our sticks on this homemade, frigid pond. In her living room on Eastern Avenue, my grandmother knit us thick wool socks to wear inside our skates and scarves to wrap about our necks.

  Kenny was a Cub Scout, and my uncle enrolled me as well. My aunt was the den mother, and my uncle was the pack leader, overseeing a bunch of boys who gathered in his living room to listen to his instructions. We spent our weeks in meetings earning our badges and building race cars for the Pinewood Derby.

  In addition to badges, the Cub Scouts gave out ribbons. There were red and blue ribbons for winning first place in races and other competitions. I wanted those ribbons. I collected them, and when I won blue, Kenny and our other friends sometimes had to settle for second and red. I might be an intruder, an interloper in their family—with its kitchen table dinners and a long list of strict household rules for eating, for keeping your room clean, for the exact minute when you had to be home—but in the driveway underneath the hoop or on the playing field, I was growing into my own man. Even though I wasn’t too sure what a man was or should be.

  Like my grandfather, my uncle went to an office each day. He also worked in some kind of technology industry or as an engineer. He liked to pontificate and on countless topics was content to suggest that he knew everything. I quickly gave up trying to have a real conversation with him. He did love to fix things. The basement of the house had been turned into an orderly workshop with every conceivable tool: jigsaws and table saws and circular saws, drills, hammers, and screwdrivers ranked by size. He kept the screws and the nails also organized by size in old coffee or vegetable cans. Everything was laid out with the precision of a surgeon’s instruments. My uncle was good at fixing things—the entire family was—and he seemed particularly happy whenever he was wielding a tool in his hand.

  I got out of the house as much as I could, within the rules. I would head over to the old water department building at the end of the short block, to a concrete retaining wall that held up one side of the highway. I’d take a piece of chalk, draw a catcher’s mitt on the concrete, and throw the ball against it and catch each pitch on the bounce back, straight into my glove. I could time the thud of the ball, its sting into the leather, to the rumble of engines passing and wheels thundering over the asphalt. It was a rhythm of catch and release, arcing it back into the air. I counted how many times I could hit the target, in the center dead on. Whatever number I reached, I wanted more. If I could hit it a thousand times without missing, I could leave Redfield. If I hit one thousand, I would up the number to five thousand. I could play that game of fooling myself: if that, then this. I could do it for hours, confident that Aunt Nancy or Uncle Alban wouldn’t come looking for me. They were no doubt as happy to have me gone as I was.

  Redfield Road was a neighborhood full of kids, the second wave of families who had moved into these postwar Cape houses, living stable, suburban lives. I never thought of how it must have seemed to my aunt and uncle to have to introduce me to their neighbors, and the behind-the-back glances that must have passed whenever they explained that “Scott is staying here with us for a while.” Wendy would remind me of it to my face. She loved to get under my skin by saying, “Your mother isn’t even here. She didn’t want you.” Or sometimes she’d ask, “Where’s your father?” each word spoken in a singsong, slightly mocking tone.

  I spent a lot of time at school as well in the afternoons and on weekends, flicking baseball cards outside along the back wall—the way I had flicked matches, but with far less bodily risk. We had a game where we used to ride our bikes up to the school and flick the cards against the brick. Each player would stand a certain distance back and snap the card. It required the perfect angle of finger and thumb to send the card spiraling through the air so that it would arc down and land just where the cement met the wall. The person with the card closest to the wall would win. I could get my card to land on an angle just leaning up against the wall, one edge on the concrete, another on the brick, and then I would collect an entire hand of Topps baseball cards.

  As the months wore on, I stopped simply roaming through the neighborhood and began running away. The only destination I knew in Wakefield was my grandparents’ house, which was a few miles away, past the 128 underpass, with the highway roaring in my ears and the tunnel ceiling vibrating overhead. Then I would head out along Elm Street and over the railroad tracks, around the bottom tip of Lake Quannapowitt and up the slow incline of Salem Street, before I could turn left at the leafy end of Eastern. I’d ride over there on my bike, thinking that perhaps if I kept showing up at their door eventually they would take me in. Sometimes I’d stay for dinner, but in the end I would have to return to my cousins’ home. For that whole year, though, my grandparents were very loving. They talked to me and took an interest in me in a way that they never quite did with my cousins. To my aunt, of course, it must have looked like déjà vu, my grandparents choosing me over her children, just as she thought they had chosen my mom over her. But my grandparents also knew that I was more of a lost soul, drifting from place to place and house to house.

  It was my grandmother who finally collected my Cub Scout ribbons and other awards and pasted them into a scrapbook, who celebrated my accomplishments when no one else seemed to be paying very close attention. On the first page she wrote in large, even, schoolteacher print, “Record of Achievements! Scott P. Brown.”

  I have that scrapbook to this day. For years, when I’ve needed to find some balance in my life, I get out the scrapbook and look at Gram’s proud, hopeful writing and the careful way she filled the thick pages. The leather cover is separating, some of the cardboard backing is visible underneath, but those pages remain a home for so much of my life. They are my memory chest, even now.


  Not long after the school year was over, my stay at Redfield Road came to an end, although I did not know how or why. I still don’t to this day. My mother simply drove up one afternoon and I put my suitcase in her car. A few other odds and ends like Cub Scout trophies I wrapped in a blanket and dumped in the back as I got in. I don’t know if I ever said thank you to my aunt and uncle, or if I so much as glanced back down the block as my mother hit the accelerator and the car sped on.

  After nearly four years of being a guest in other people’s houses—my grandparents’, Al’s, and my cousins’—my mother, my sister, and I had graduated to living in rentals, floating among leases in Wakefield. Each time we moved, my mother doused the air with scented spray fresheners to get rid of the smell of the last tenants. Most of the rentals had two bedrooms, and I usually slept in the same room as Leeann. I was ten and she was four, but I had missed her that year when I had lived with my cousins. I liked the feel of us under one roof again, even if the places where we lived were more like dumps. “Shit holes,” my mother sometimes called them.

  My father had started coming around again, in bits and pieces. Mostly, he took me to a diner for a quick meal or a drive, stopping to check in with business associates or friends, or he’d take me out to Newburyport, where he unceremoniously stuck me with my half siblings, expecting us all to be immediate friends. I detested those trips, but I still made them. And I took to waiting for my father’s irregular visits on the stoop in front of whatever place we happened to be in.