When they’d heard the door shut upstairs—it was Charlie’s room Grandpa stayed in when he came to visit, demoting Charlie to an air mattress down here—Dad said, “What your grandpa was trying to say, Charlie, is it’s not another adoption. Your mother is pregnant. We wanted to tell you, but it’s never a sure thing early on, especially at her age and with our history, and we didn’t want to upset you. Things have been touch and go; it’s why your grandpa’s going to be here until the babies come. Mom’s on bed rest …”
“But it looks like you’re going to have siblings, honey. Two of them. Twins.”
For a minute, Charlie hesitated. Twins. He felt like the needle on The Price is Right, when the big wheel goes around and around, different possibilities ticking past, the possibility that you’ve won big, won nothing, something in between.
“You know this doesn’t mean we’ll love you any less,” Mom said.
Charlie put his hand on her shoulder. He felt very calm now. The big wheel stopped. He had only to open his eyes to see where he’d landed. “Mom?”
“What, honey?”
“How do you think I should feel?”
Did it mean something that it took her a while to answer? “You should feel however you feel. But what I’d hope for you to feel is that this doesn’t change anything. The fact that we adopted, that should tell you how much we wanted you.”
“Okay, then, that’s how I feel.” He tested it; it felt sturdy enough to hold for now, and anyway, he hated it when she cried.
That night on the air mattress, though, he couldn’t get comfortable. Whenever he pushed down a lump, another surfaced elsewhere. He ended up spread-eagled, the blanket anaconda’d around his thighs, in light that reminded him of movies where they shot day through a filter and called it night. A toothy mass by the hearth resolved into fireplace tools. He could pick out the poker and the brush, and if he focused he could read, or imagined he could read, the word Harmony on the front of the upright piano. Houses made ticking noises at night, like cooling engines; he wondered what the physics of the thing could possibly be. Air escaping from wood? Continental drift? Mostly, though, he tried to suss out what was coming. On the surface, everything was the same, Mom and Dad and Grandpa sleeping upstairs. On the other hand, there was the great seriousness with which they’d told him, as if he was supposed to feel it had changed everything. He wondered how the Goy Messiah would have felt, when they’d told him he was getting a brother. He’d been adopted, too, in a sense. Of course, being perfect, he would have handled it perfectly. At some point, he heard the creak of the front stairs. It was his father, he was almost sure, watching him. He pretended to be asleep. And then he really was, and a hippie Jesus in a paper hat was smiling over the counter of a hamburger stand, asking could he take Charlie’s order.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN IMPORTANT that Mom was thirty-nine, because no one—not Dad, not doctors, not Mrs. Sullivan—seemed able to talk about the pregnancy without mentioning it. A blessing, was the other thing they all said. People at temple would start out talking about the Summer Olympics, or the new electric juicer they’d seen advertised on TV, and quickly it would lead to, “Well, you know, she’s thirty-nine … it’s a blessing.” A double blessing, Charlie thought, with two heartbeats. But he could feel the world rearranging itself, with the equator located somewhere along her expanding waist, on the sofa where she spent most of months seven and eight on bed rest, and Charlie way away at the North Pole.
In smaller ways, too, the terrain of his life was shifting. Dust began to gather on surfaces where she never would have let it before—the tops of towel rods and teakettles, the white knobs of the kitchen-counter radio. Nor did Dad ever turn it on anymore, even when preparing one of his specialties (tuna casserole, franks ’n’ beans, fish fingers) or the heat-n-serv pierogi Grandpa had brought back from a Polish market in the City. Finally, Charlie asked if he could take the radio up to his room. His dad, seeming exhausted all of a sudden, didn’t look up from the pot he was stirring, but said sure he could, which made Charlie wonder what else he could have gotten away with. Can I have the car keys? Can we get a dog? The next day was when you were supposed to bring your dad to school to talk about his career, but Mr. Weisbarger couldn’t come. “My mom’s due in a month,” Charlie told the teacher, borrowing his dad’s phrasing. “She’s thirty-nine. It’s a blessing.” So Grandpa came instead, and explained how to make shoes, until people were crying with boredom.
He would have a memory later of Grandpa’s arms scooping him out of a molded plastic seat in the hospital waiting room, like sherbet from a container; of expressway lights flicking past the car door against which he slumped; of waking up in the top bunk of Mickey Sullivan’s bunk bed. His bond with Mickey was already dissolving, and the adult orchestration imparted a weird flavor to what remained. They shot hoops in the driveway the next morning (or in Charlie’s case simply tried to avoid missing the backboard), but didn’t talk much, and when they did, Mickey was like a hostage reading lines on TV.
“My mom says sometimes it just takes longer when they’re older.”
“I know,” Charlie said.
“Must be some kind of vagina thing.”
“Okay, Mickey, I got it.”
“My sisters had scales when they came out. They peeled off everywhere. And gross black bellybutton stumps.”
The insistence from all directions that everything was all right gave him a terrible premonition that it wasn’t, but on the second day, Dad and Grandpa came for him, and four days later Mom was home with two wrinkled little black-haired people poking out of cowls of blue blanket. Boys, apparently. Moon men. He held his breath and kissed their heads, which were hot and tiny and faintly moist, like nostrils turned inside out. He wanted to please his mom, but didn’t want to breathe in baby-scales, or space-dust. It was the reverse Mom was worried about. “We have to be very delicate. I know you’re going to be a great protector.” Then it was time for them to sleep again. Them meaning everybody but Charlie.
His inconspicuousness now was like the proverbial wish you should be careful about; it went everywhere he did, and instead of sealing him in with his parents, it sealed him out. When Mom and Dad talked to each other or to him, it was about the babies, or through the babies. Every gaseous smile, every clutch of their miniature fingers, turned out to be full of meaning. “Look, Charlie. He loves you.” Even when Mom could return to the dinner table, she kept getting up to check the crib upstairs, where Abe and Izz reliably fussed.
Then one day his dad drove him to the electronics store and led him to the aisle of gleaming stereo equipment. They’d remembered! He almost ran to the Fancy Trax record players.
“Are you sure that’s the one, Charlie? Because I’ll get you whichever you want. Under let’s say sixty dollars.”
On carpeted plinths sat ranks of wood-paneled eight-track decks, chunky-buttoned built-in phonographs, Fisher brand tuners with their etched and glowing frequency stripes, all that luminous bandwidth. At least four radio stations could be heard. Fragments of light scattered off passing cars and went wide around him. But something held him back: the sense, perhaps, that he was being bought off. He would become a bystander in his own home now, and the stereo would be his only consolation.
On the other hand, he wasn’t so far beyond the cold compass of economics himself that he failed to see these were the best terms he was likely to get.
At home, they’d turned his room into a nursery and moved him down to the basement—had rolled a harvest-gold deep-pile carpet over the poured-concrete floor. An entire level all your own, was how it had been put to him. Dad now set up the new stereo—a Scott 330R receiver with five inputs and a headphone jack and switches that said FILTER, MODE, TAPE, and LOUD—near his bed, as he’d requested, and then went back upstairs to those other sons on whom his mind had clearly been. He’d see Charlie at dinner, he said, which Charlie knew would be Stouffer’s chicken cutlets, or breakfast for dinner, again.
As soon as he was gone, Charlie
lay prone on the bed, his arms stretched out like those of the savior in whom he wasn’t supposed to believe. The synthetic coverlet depicted stars and planets at distorted scales. It still smelled like the plastic it had come wrapped in. Above the ceiling, one of the twins started crying again, which made the other cry. He reached out and, having let the tuner warm up as the salesman had shown them, flipped on the speakers. There was a thunderous voice—the volume must have gotten jostled in transit—but when he turned it down, the frequency knob was still on the station it had been tuned to in the store. Over a majestic piano figure, the voice sang that Mars was no place to raise a kid. “In fact, it’s cold as hell.” The line shook something loose in Charlie. With his nose pressed to the space-age blanket and his arms now tucked under him like wings, he was crying, though not with such abandon as to carry over the music. This way he could tell himself that the reason no one came to comfort him was that no one heard.
ELTON JOHN BEGAT QUEEN, and Queen begat Frampton. How Charlie would cringe, years later, to think back on the Frampton concert at the Long Island Arena to which he dragged his father—the memory of Dad pretending not to smell the pot-smoke wafting up to the frightening nosebleeds. Of trying almost desperately to make Dad see the magic that had happened when Charlie was alone: the small Englishman down there on the stage literally making his guitar talk. And Frampton begat Kiss (the singer had grown up on Northern Boulevard!), who begat Alice Cooper, who begat Bowie … who, for a long time, begat only more Bowie.
By then, the storm of puberty had descended, turning his basement room into a kind of loamy lair, laying waste to his body, from which pimples and hairs and all manner of protuberance swelled, and filling his ribcage with feelings oddly shaped and too large to fit inside. Abe and Izzy could go for a few minutes without being held, restoring some of his mother’s autonomy, but neither she nor Dad came downstairs much, maybe on account of the smell. Not that it mattered, in the cosmic scheme of things. The planet was dying, said the ugly scary friendly androgyne staring up at Charlie from the Ziggy Stardust sleeve. Five years, that’s all we’ve got. And the album had been out awhile. According to Charlie’s calculations, the year that all the fat-skinny people and all the nobody people would cease to exist was 1977.
This wasn’t to say it was all apocalyptic gloom, his Ziggy Stardust period. When they weren’t crying or monopolizing his parents, he loved having brothers. He loved watching them spit up on different relatives at his bar mitzvah in June (and loved the chance to make Mickey Sullivan as uncomfortable as Mickey’s first communion had made him). And fear of Grandpa aside, he’d always loved French-speaking Montreal, where the Weisbargers went again the following August, squeezing all five of them into the wagon. That was also the year Grandpa started showing him a strange and special solicitude—the winter they snuck off to Radio City.
It was his close hot solitary hours in the basement he would dwell on later, though. Turning the music up loud and stripping naked and watching himself in the mirror hung on his wall among the posters and album covers he’d tacked to the millimeter-thin wood veneer. Despite Mickey’s claim that he himself never did it, that you got seven years in purgatory for each infraction, Charlie couldn’t keep his hands off himself. He pressed his midsection to the mattress and saw big dreamy tits like ice cream bells. He would try to come without touching himself, thinking that might lighten the penalty, but at the last minute his will would give out. Every time, he felt more and more excited and then, suddenly, so ashamed. Which should have been his confirmation that Mickey was right. And the week after the first of David Weisbarger’s two heart attacks, Charlie would realize that the penalty had been visited not upon himself, but upon his father. It was as if each little handful of pearl jelly he brought out of himself had cost seven years of his dad’s life. Or—let’s be honest—seven weeks.
Again, Grandpa had come to stay, though this time it was Dad and not Mom in the hospital, and Charlie stayed home. He preferred Grandpa’s silence to being sent to the Sullivans’, where Mickey was mostly interested these days in lifting weights in the garage. And he preferred either to the hospital and its lunchroomy smell, green beans, bleach, which he now knew to be the smell of death. With the plastic tube running to his nose, like the tubes of Mickey’s older brother’s bong, Dad looked faded, all his color sucked away into the machines. And at night, through the basement ceiling, Charlie heard crying he knew was not the twins’.
THE MONTH AFTER THE FUNERAL, Charlie would feel as if something huge and mechanical was bearing down on him—as if the sky itself was just one dull plate of a vise too vast for him to have noticed it before. As if all the music had gone out of the universe. It was hard to get out of bed in the morning, and hard to keep his head off his desk in second period Chem. Shel Goldbarth and Tall Paul Stein knew his dad had died, of course, and went easy on him, as did anyone whose folks read the paper. To the anonymous jocks and preps, though, he was just the same freak kid. Sorry, they kept calling him. Sorry Wastebucket. He wasn’t about to tell them why he deserved better; he didn’t care, really. What hurt is the way Mickey Sullivan didn’t say anything when they used the name in front of him. The way Mickey had withdrawn his protection.
One night, he went to the kitchen phone and mashed the familiar digits for the Sullivans. Of course, the odds against getting Mickey in his large and intact household were 7 to 1; it was Mickey’s mom who picked up. For a second, Charlie was paralyzed. “Hello?” said a woman who used to cut the crusts off his sandwiches and remove the sweaty yellow square of supermarket cheese he wasn’t allowed to have on his bologna. “Hello?” He hadn’t thought this far ahead. There were the old standbys, refrigerator surveys, Prince Albert in a can, but in this intimate intracranial buzz, they seemed less hilarious than they did at the lunchtable. Plus Grandpa was watching TV in the next room. What was the term? Heavy breathing. He exhaled into the receiver’s mouthpiece, left a fine mist of condensation on the plastic. “Hello? Who is this?” He hung up.
The next night, he got Mr. Sullivan, who said this was not funny at all, that whoever this was, he would find out, and when—
Except it was funny, actually, the way the most random compulsion could become something to live for. The last few periods at school began to lengthen uncomfortably, like a telescope turned the wrong way. The entire day was a narrowing funnel leading to this one moment, just before the hang-up, when the Sullivan on the other end would know it was the Unknown Caller, and know the Unknown Caller knew they knew.
Then one night came the knock on the door. Maybe it was the timing that tipped Charlie off, because no one knocked on the Weisbargers’ door these days except Mormon missionaries or women from Congregation Beth Shalom bearing casserole dishes—it was too sad a house for social calls—and they would not have come at night like this, in the rain. No, this was the other shoe, coming to stomp out his life like a bug’s. He stole upstairs to his old bedroom, now shadowed with cribs and playpens and toy shelves from which stuffed animals watched and disapproved. He dared not turn on the light: it might be seen from the sidewalk below, and he didn’t want to wake the twins. On cat’s feet he made it to the window, lifted the shade. He was too late to see whoever it was on the stoop; he caught only an arc of black nylon, cut off from the rest of its umbrella by the chord of the roofline. It trembled a vigorous accompaniment to words Charlie couldn’t make out. He could hear their melody, rising into frustration. A man’s voice, which was interrupted by another man’s—his grandpa’s. “Why don’t you leave the poor kid alone?”
Grandpa would never mention the visit to Charlie; nor, evidently, to his mother. But the next day at school, Mickey, newly huge, found him near the loading dock behind the cafeteria and silently, dutifully—almost apologetically—pummeled him. And that was the formal end of the friendship.
But was it really the end of the Unknown Caller? Back in the good days, Charlie used to have this intuition that timelines were a fiction. That time seemed like an arrow
only because people’s brains were too puny to handle the everything that would otherwise be present. He’d tried to explain it to Mickey once, when they were bullshitting ideas for their own comic book—for parallel universes and so forth, but also for how to fit the simultaneity of things into the relentlessly forward-moving frames. His theory led pretty swiftly to ridicule, but was a private comfort. Now, though, he saw why Mickey might have wanted to defend himself against it. Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you’ve ever tried to outrun. And then how to know—the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table—which you, specifically, is the real one?
UNLESS CHARLIE WANTED TO TAKE THE SCHOOLBUS—and he rode the same route as Mickey—he had to walk the half-mile home. In March on the Island, the ground was still too hard for planting, so the people who were home stayed indoors. Underdressed, because in muzzy post-sleep he’d mistaken the brightness outside the basement for warmth, which anyway wouldn’t have survived the afternoon’s clouding over, he jammed his fists in the pockets of his coat and did his best to lose himself in the empty sidestreets. It was impossible, of course; they were a perfect grid. He passed the ballfield where he’d played pee-wee league, co-sponsored by the Jaycees or Kiwanis or something. When the wind kicked up, the loose cord from the yardarm made a racket against the flagless metal flagpole, an alarm that made his heart tense up like something was about to happen. Which was ridiculous, because what ever happened on Long Island, except people being born and people dying? Still, he decided for once in his life to be a mensch. He hopped the fence and trotted out to right field, blowing on his hands for warmth, and secured the cord to the cleat at the bottom of the pole. Coming back across the dead grass, he stopped. Someone was watching from one of the dugouts.
It was a girl, he realized, when he’d moved close enough to see into the gloom under the tin roof. A tall, slender girl with brown hair to her shoulders. She had on enormous headphones, with an antenna. Her army jacket and the tallboys of beer next to her on the bench could have been a drifter’s, but her posture was pure Amazon. And the voice—the voice, hoarse with cigarettes, absolutely killed him. “Good Samaritan, huh?” She didn’t take off her headphones.
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