“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. And then, because she didn’t want him to inherit the WASPy indirection that hobbled her, she cribbed a line from the analyst’s playbook. “How does that make you feel?”
He paused to consider. She had an urge to turn and sweep him off his perch, cover him with kisses. But he was passing into that age where mushy stuff embarrassed him. His arms and legs seemed every morning to have grown another half-inch, and his posture was suddenly awkward. Soon patches of unaccountable hair would bloom on his blemishless body and strange yearnings would seize him like giant fists. It was a bittersweet fact that made her want to kiss him. She felt, though, that even as he became a man, the earnestness he’d been born with would not desert him, and this allowed her to keep her back turned, her hands clunking around in the warm, soapy water. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “Bad for Carl, I guess.”
And that was when he asked her, point-blank: “Are you happy, Mom?” The honest answer was No. But she could hear through the flatness of his voice an anxiety that made her feel she’d failed him. Which only went to show the limit of Dr. Altschul’s vision: If expressing herself meant hurting her children, how could she? She turned, her hands still slick with dishwater, and crossed the room to the stool where Will sat and put her hands on his cheeks. She tilted his face so that it caught the light from over the sink, on the assumption that the better she could see him, the better he’d be able to see her. “I am happy, honey,” she said.
He raised the cuffs of his sweatshirt to blot his cheeks. “Ew, Mom. Food water.”
She flicked more water onto his face and grinned. “You make me very happy.”
“Gross!”
HERE WERE THE ORIGINS of magic, or religion, or both: there were certain words that, when you spoke them, had the power to create the thing they depicted. For Regan was happy that weekend, wasn’t she, in her own limited way? It would certainly seem so, later. She was happy to take her kids to the zoo on Friday, happy not to cook dinner that night, happy to have the annual chance to use cold mashed potatoes as a sandwich condiment, and happy Saturday morning (she would tell Dr. Altschul), as she watched her husband and son put on their jackets and head out for Will’s jujitsu practice. Happy right up to the point when the mail arrived.
It was lying as usual in a little explosion on the foyer floor; the doormen sorted and distributed it within the building. Magazine, catalogue, bill, catalogue, catalogue, solicitation … but then she saw a business envelope with no postmark, or even address. There was something uncanny about the way her name sat alone on the long, white rectangle.
She had to have already known, then, what was in it. Had to have noticed, on some level, how often Keith called to make excuses for being late, or came home when she was pretending to sleep and headed straight for the shower. That angle he’d sat at at Thanksgiving dinner, one leg to the side, as if at any moment he’d have to spring up to block the doorway, or turn off the ringer on the phone. Or why else would she have locked herself into the bathroom to read it?
Held up to the light, the envelope revealed a single piece of torn loose leaf. She already felt like giving in, making herself sick, letting go in less than a minute all that she’d so painfully built. But now she could hear Will and Keith returning from jujitsu, unzipping jackets, their shoes hitting the welcome mat where the mail had been fifteen minutes ago, back when it had still been possible to pretend her life had not changed. She sat down on the edge of the tub, tore off the end of the envelope, blew on it, tipped out the paper. This is what it said, in lowercase type that did not sit quite neatly on the line:
he is 1ying to you.
69
LEAVING KEITH IN THE GRAVELED PARK above First Avenue four days before the holiday, Sam had felt so jittery she’d almost tripped over the stairs. Freedom! By nightfall, though, she realized she was the one who’d been left. So had she been, to him, just some dumb teen? Was all he wanted—all any man wanted—a surface to reflect back the self he wanted to see? She found herself wondering again that Wednesday, when Nicky Chaos tried to talk her into spending Thanksgiving at the Phalanstery. A true Post-Humanist would treat it like any other day, he said. Think about it: the subjugation of land, of animals, and of the red man, rolled into a single orgy of consumption. But an orgy of consumption sounded like exactly what Sam needed right now, and so, before the dorms closed for a long weekend, she crammed a backpack full of clothes and took the train out to Flower Hill.
The first thing she did there was check the mailbox, in case there was some warning from the registrar waiting for Dad. This is to inform you that Samantha Cicciaro has not attended … Right. Like anyone really cared how she occupied herself; the whole concept of in loco parentis had been vaporized in some kind of national encounter session circa 1973. And when she trudged around back to see if her actual parent was here, the yard looked as if it hadn’t been touched in months: rusty TV aerial and forsaken treehouse, grass lifeless as the sky, L.I.E. mumbling behind the trees as it had every day since she was three. The truck was gone, the bulb above the workshop door inert. You wanted so badly for things to change, and then you didn’t. She dug in her pocket for her keys and touched the touchplate on the jamb, an old reflex, like dipping into holy water before entering a church.
The space inside had been immaculate once, polished valves and ordered intricacies of tubing. Now all lay in disarray. Lengths of black hose gaped, disconnected from anything. A shotgun was being used as a paperweight. Silver nitrate dusted the floor. It was the workshop of a man losing his livelihood. Yet it was also a chance to grant the favor Nicky had asked when it became clear she wasn’t going to spend her holiday with him, eating beans from a can. “He’s the fireworks guy, right, your dad? Do you think you could nick us a little something while you’re out there?”
Why? she’d said. So he could blow up some trashcans? Tie rockets to the tails of cats?
“Give me some credit, Sam. Or are you still sore about that church? I thought we’d moved on.” Nicky had seemed edgier than usual, rolling a piece of old fruit around in his hands like Silly Putty, but he had indeed moved on. He was taking one last shot at getting Ex Post Facto back together, he told her (though aside from tales of long-ago jam sessions with Venus de Nylon and Billy Three-Sticks, there was little evidence the band had ever been his). A reunion gig had been booked for New Year’s Eve. Talk about an arbitrary holiday, she said. This shitty world’s a year older; what’s to celebrate? “Yeah, but Billy was always funny about it. I remember he used to say, as goes that first night, so goes the rest of the year. He swore to play every New Year’s, at the stroke of twelve, until he died or the world ended, whichever came first.” Nicky’s plan for the reunion show was to make some flashpots to light off at the end of the last set—something really spectacular. “I’m thinking a kilogram of black powder would do it,” he said, but he was clearly shaky on the metric system. A kilogram would obliterate half the East Village if you weren’t careful, and anyway, Dad would never keep that much lying around Flower Hill, even in his days of distraction. She decided she would take just a pinch of the slow-burning polverone instead, and hope that, with the mess, Dad wouldn’t miss it.
It lived in an airtight box at the back of the shop. As in a dream, she watched herself tamp one, two, three grams into a test tube, cork it, stash it in her backpack. And now some stars, for flash. As a little girl, she’d had to memorize the contents of the thousand inch-square drawers that lined the east wall, like entries on the periodic table. The sorcerer’s apprentice, Dad had called her, and she’d relished the jealous look she always got from Mom when the two of them walked up the hill at dinnertime. Later, after Mom left, Sam had renounced the family trade, but the names and cautions had stuck with her. Potassium—Keep away from water. Silver arsenic—Fatal if ingested. She spooned some nitrates into a troika of tubes and wrapped each in a tee-shirt to keep the glass from breaking. After a final survey, she turned the lights off and ambled up
to the house. No one was around to see. She sort of wished, in fact, that Dad would get home already. But as the sky outside her bedroom window went dark, he didn’t come, and didn’t come. Hadn’t she told him she’d be here for Thanksgiving? The whole point was not to have to feel alone.
IN THE MORNING, though, she drowsed as long as she could, and then found a million things to do in her room. What if Dad had been down to the workshop at dawn and discovered the theft? But when she finally went out to face him, he was still in his undershirt, watching some Fourth of July festivities from the early ’70s on videotape. The volume was low. From the hi-fi came late Sinatra. And maybe he really had forgotten she was coming, because he asked if she could go pick up a turkey for dinner. “You mean because you’re so busy.” A dryness bordering on sarcasm was one of their shared idioms, but the joke had teeth; she was getting the impression that his work these days largely involved rehashing old glories for that never-ending magazine profile.
On her way back from the grocery, she killed an hour or more cruising somnolent sidestreets, while the turkey thawed on the passenger’s seat beside her. She had half a mind to go see Charlie Weisbarger but didn’t know where his house was. She returned to her own to find Dad still in his lounge chair in front of the TV, now in one of those fuzzy, faintly sulfurous wool overshirts that were what the word “home” made her think of. Had he made it farther than his not-so-secret beer cooler on the patio? Was he onto her? Impossible to say. When she told him she’d found a good bird, his grunt might have signified pensiveness, or absentmindedness, or stifled rage.
She moved around the kitchen sick with nerves, which was no way to cook, and then bounced back and forth between there and her room, but the turkey that emerged from the oven three hours later, impaled on its plastic thermometer, looked credibly brown. Dad sat across from her at the little table in the kitchen, staring at it, his fork and knife clutched Neolithically in his hands. “Let me ask you something, Sammy.”
Oh fuck, she thought. So he’d been out there after all. “Fire away.”
“When you got home yesterday, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“Uh-uh.” She had to take a gulp of water before she could ask why he asked, when the real question was: Had he called the cops? But of course he hadn’t. Generations of Cicciaros would have risen shrieking from the ground, come after him with pitchforks and torches.
He muttered something to himself.
“What?”
“I said, they’re not going to stop until they’ve taken every last thing I have.”
“What’s going on, Dad? What are you talking about?”
He was talking about the competition, he said. These little acts of industrial espionage. They obviously wanted to send him a message. But then it was as if the outward form of the meal, the proximity of the mashed potatoes to the Platonic ideal on the box, called him back to the present. “Listen to me running off at the mouth, when you came all this way. Forget I mentioned it.” His hand, scrubbed pink with lava soap, took hers. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re thankful.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, baby. What are we celebrating here?” It was a thing Mom used to make them do. Gratitudes, she called it. But what was Sam supposed to be grateful for? Keith would just be sitting down with his wife and kids. Nicky was probably at this moment in the throes with Sewer Girl, who’d been servicing him behind Sol’s back since at least October. Poor Charlie was still grounded. And Dad, only two feet away, remained remote, cut off by the vials in her backpack. Stealing, dishonor, disobedience, two or three sins in a single stroke. Or did she have it backward: was it the remoteness that caused the sin? The candles she’d found under the laundry-room sink glimmered. A single, hot tear slinked down her cheek.
“You all right?” he said, as if she’d stubbed her toe.
The tear reached her mouth, salty. She sniffed. “Yeah. I’m all right.”
The fatty smell of the bird filled her nostrils, making it hard not to think Nicky had a point, at least so far as animals were concerned. But to notice that she barely touched her dinner would have been to have to speak about it—so Dad tucked in, and then so did she, wondering all the while, who am I?
THE NEXT DAY, her dad drove into the city to talk to Benny Blum. The best revenge, he’d decided, was to get his contracts back. As soon as he was gone, she walked over to the tattoo parlor on Main. The place reeked of cheap incense, and sheets of blue cellophane affixed to the windows gave the light a morgue-like tint. The tattooist was thirtyish, limp as a noodle, with a few discrete bristles of moustache. On the plus side, he didn’t ask for proof of age, and the prices started at fifteen bucks. She’d sold her semester’s meal card to another student back in October. Much of the cash had gone to pay for movie tickets and cigarettes, but enough remained for a design the size of a fifty-cent piece. On a prescription pad that was for some reason lying on the display case, she sketched what she wanted. “Right there,” she said, and put her finger to the spot, just below the occiput.
The tattooist led her to a backroom even creepier than the front—a room for porno shoots or child abduction—and pushed her face into a leather ring like a padded toilet seat, and doubtless as sanitary. She could feel his breath on her neck, but didn’t make a sound when he touched her hair, or when he cranked up the Floyd on the stereo, or even when the first needle went in, though he scolded her for tensing her muscles. It felt exactly how you’d expect a hot spike driven into your neck to feel. Still, pain sometimes could be clarifying.
WHEN THE MAGAZINE GUY CAME OUT THAT AFTERNOON in search of Dad, she had an impulse to show him what she’d done—to say, Fit this into your story. But it was only the next day on East Third with Sewer Girl that she would brush the hair back from her neck, peel off the Snoopy band-aid she’d told Dad was for a bug bite. She was hoping for an admiring whistle, or, failing that, an expletive meaning whoa. Instead, she felt hands on her shoulders, steering her into stronger light. “What’s that supposed to be?”
Sam wanted to believe that all of this—the squinting, the withholding of judgment—was a put-on, but though Sewer Girl was full of many things, guile was not among them. Anyway, one unforeseen effect of the tattoo’s placement was to make it virtually impossible for Sam to inspect it herself. The only reflecting surfaces in the house were in Nicky’s basement, and she would try, through various conjunctions of the cracked glass on the wall and the mirror he used for cocaine, to catch sight of the logo he’d shown her back in July, but all she saw was a blurriness that may have been a function of the tattooist’s clumsiness or her own shaking hand. Then a miniature Nicky, doubly reflected, appeared in her palm. “Who dragged you through the briar patch?”
“Thanks, asshole. Not everybody has a sugar daddy uptown to keep them looking fit.”
For a second, his gaze went flat. Then he recovered. “Seriously, though, did you already get into my stash? Your eyes are like rose-colored.”
“I’m in some pain.” She uncovered the tattoo.
All he said was, “Cool. Hey, did you get my shit?”
It took her a beat to remember what he was talking about, and when she did fetch the test tubes from her bag, he seemed disappointed at how puny the polverone looked, clumped there at the bottom. She promised it would be more than enough to wow a small crowd.
“There’s the rub. I don’t want to wow a small crowd.”
“You understand an explosion is geometric, right? Kilos would be, like, this to the thousandth power. Anyway, what you’re after’s not a powder burst, but a steady burn that will ignite these babies at intervals.” She showed him the stars, walked him through the handling instructions. The nitrates needed to stay dry, and though she’d taken the least volatile ones, reds and oranges and a little green, you wanted to keep them wrapped in some kind of padding, so they didn’t jostle too much. “And be super-wary of static electricity. If I’d gotten you my dad’s special formula, you’d have to worry about off-
gassing, but the worst that happens with polverone is you set yourself on fire, rather than blow yourself up.”
His attention seemed to have moved on to that other powder he was cutting on the table. “Well damn, you’re the expert, I guess. Want a bump?”
She and Charlie had had a gentleman’s agreement to stay away from the hard stuff. It was supposed to save them from the fate of the scarecrows who populated this part of the city. Just an hour ago, she’d seen one half-squatting in the middle of Second Avenue, blocking traffic, entranced by the cherry-red popsicle melting in his hand. But were these arbitrary rules not another form of dependency? To hell with it, she thought, why not?
AND THIS IS HOW, as the Bicentennial year drew to a close, the loss of Keith Lamplighter sent her back into the ambit of her friends, albeit numbed somewhat to the consequences. It became second nature: the rolling of a bill, the shielding of a nostril, and then snow flying into the head, cooling everything. The alkaline drip. The white powder. The bill slackening on the mirror.
Nicky, not coincidentally, was a dynamo. Band rehearsals in the little house out back could stretch to three or four hours. The new players included D. Tremens on lead guitar and a person named Tutu on bass. Sometimes one of the Ph.D. candidates with whom Nicky liked to wax philosophical came over to manipulate tape loops. Sam couldn’t help imagining a review of these practice sessions for her ’zine. A toneless game of Telephone. All the Ex Post Facto fury with none of the sound. Then again, what was “good,” anyway? She would have liked to volunteer for the second-guitar slot herself—the Fender around Nicky’s neck seemed purely decorative—but he’d already appointed her Ministrix of Information, which mostly involved taking pictures of him striking Iggy Pop poses with his shirt off. Between songs, Sewer Girl shot Sam dirty looks. It was clear now who was the favorite.
In general, the level of jealousy in the house was higher than it had been in the summer. As a form of personalized paranoia, this was understandable—they were all smoking hellacious amounts of grass, to come down off the blow. But it had started to infect even Nicky, despite his having rapped so persuasively about the end of property, the illusion of individuality. One day, when he and Sam were getting high in the basement, he’d looked up from the mirror between them. “You realize why you returned to the fold, right?”
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