Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

“What’s just it?” I don’t think he knew he was shouting.

  “I wanted to know what was in my father’s head when he went over the edge. And then it happened to me, and…I mean, there was nothing there. My brain was empty. It was like…it just seemed like the right thing to do at the moment. And…I don’t know. That’s what it must have been like for him. No putting his life on the scales, no agonizing, just a stupid impulse and…gone.”

  Tom slammed the wall with one open hand. “I don’t put up with this kind of shit on my tours. You understand? I want you out of here, today, this afternoon. That’s number one. Number two, you need to get some professional help. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you are definitely one screwed-up son of a bitch. If I were you I would get on a plane this afternoon and go check in someplace where they would watch me around the fucking clock.”

  I saw then that he was more scared than anything else. I didn’t especially like somebody who beat up women calling me sick, but on the other hand I could see his point. My dad came from the same place. Keep your problems to yourself, and sure as hell don’t let them endanger other people. And if you sit on them long enough maybe they’ll go away.

  I wished I was in Southern California in 1966. Brian would have understood. Brian didn’t hide his feelings, Brian knew what kind of Pandora’s box you open up once you start treating your emotions like they’re important. I was about to get misty-eyed right there, which was not what Tom needed to see.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll settle up and get out. But I can’t go home right now. I promise I won’t go near the reef. That’s over. I’ll get a room downtown until Sunday.”

  “Shit.” I watched the fear and anger drain out of him. “You might as well stay here. At least I can keep an eye on you. But no more diving. I could pull your C-card for this, and I might do it anyway.”

  I nodded.

  He stood there awkwardly for a second, flexing his hands. “All right. You look like you need some rest. If you…if you start to feel crazy, come and get me. We can talk or something.”

  “Yeah, okay.” I barely heard my own voice. “Thanks.”

  As soon as he shut the door I kicked off my wet swimsuit and fell into a sleep that shut out the entire world.

  Somebody was knocking, barely loud enough to be heard. I got into a pair of jeans and stumbled to the door.

  Lori had already turned away. “I woke you up. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “I’m not.” She was in a plain white T-shirt and cutoffs. The sight of her was enough to wake me up. “Come on in.” I left door open and went to wash my face and rinse the stale sleep taste out of my mouth.

  I heard the door close. “Tom wouldn’t tell me what happened down there today,” she said.

  “Thank God for small favors,” I said. “At least he’s not spreading it around.”

  She was still by the door when I came out of the bathroom, arms folded over her chest. “So what did happen?”

  I sat on the bed, my back against the wall. “Apparently,” I said, “I tried to kill myself.”

  “Oh Jesus. You mean, like your father?”

  “That’s what it looked like.”

  “You sound like you weren’t even there.”

  “In a way I wasn’t.”

  She sat in the bentwood chair in the corner.

  “Where’s Tom now?” I asked her.

  “They all went into town. I’m supposed to join them. He thought my hanging around here was fishy as hell, as a matter of fact. I really can’t stay.”

  I nodded. “I guess—”

  “You guess what?”

  “I guess I’m really fucked up, aren’t I? I mean, that’s the thing that just surprises the shit out of me. I thought I was pretty normal. And look at me.”

  “That’s not what you sounded like the other night. When you told me about Brian Wilson? You didn’t sound like you thought you were normal then.”

  “That was weird, but it was functional. I came out of it with a tape. This is like nonfunctional in a major way.” I closed my eyes and leaned back until my head hit the cinder blocks. “My father always used to say, ‘You can’t complain about the way we raised you because you turned out okay.’ Well, guess what, Dad?” I was crying, for Christ’s sake. “I’m not okay. I’m fucked up. My marriage is in the toilet, I’ve been drunk for the last fifteen years, I’ve been in fantasyland for six months, and now I just tried to kill myself. So can I complain now?”

  Lori stood up. It was like she was a toy, with one set of hands pushing her toward me and another set holding her back. The first two steps came hard, and then she was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Oh Ray,” she said. “We’re all fucked up. We’re all damaged goods. Every one of us. You have no idea. I have so many dark, ugly secrets…”

  She put her hand on my bare chest and I could feel the energy hum between us. I gripped her arm above the elbow and with my right hand I cupped her face and pulled her into a kiss. I felt her breath change, turn deep and shaky. So did mine.

  “Ray? Ray, I know where this is heading. You do too. I don’t know if I’m ready for it, can you understand that?”

  “Yes. I don’t know if I’m ready for it either.”

  She took my face in her hands and kissed me. “Thank you. It’s so easy to be with you. I never thought it could be like this.”

  “Me too.”

  “I really, really, have to go.”

  “Wait.”

  She pushed my hands away and stood up. “I have to meet Tom. He’s suspicious already.”

  “Something’s happening between us, it’s happening right now. I want to hear your secrets. I want to know everything about you. You can’t walk out on that.”

  “Yes I can. You don’t want to know, Ray. If I told you, it would change everything between us. Don’t push. Please.”

  “I want to push. I want to know everything.”

  “I have to go.” I saw that I’d done all I could. “I’ll be here tonight. Late. I’ll meet you out at the tables. Tom’s already started drinking, he’ll be passed out by ten.”

  I started toward her and she ducked outside. “Tonight,” she said.

  I ate in town at some hole-in-the-wall. There were no tourists there, just local men in fresh guayabera shirts and slicked-back hair, ready for Friday night. Afterward I walked for a long time, my mind empty.

  I was outside the dive shop before ten. Eventually Lori came, still in the T-shirt and cutoffs, wearing a black-and-white flannel shirt like a jacket. She led me to the water and then up along a ragged lava cliff. I took her hand, and once we were out of sight of the dive shop I kissed her.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

  “Please don’t start again.”

  “It’s about Tom, right? Look, Walker was down here last night.”

  “Oh God.”

  “He told me Tom hits you. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  She turned her back on me and sat on the edge of the cliff. I heard the water smash against the rocks and smelled the spicy odor of the brush behind us. The breeze played with her hair.

  “What happened to honesty, Lori?”

  “Okay. Yes. He hits me. Some of the time…I don’t know, most of the time, it’s my fault. I push him to it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You have this idea of who I am, but that’s not me. I’m not a good person. Bad things happen to me. Something about me makes them happen. It’s been that way all my life.”

  I sat down next to her. I gave her a couple of feet and didn’t try to touch her.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. You want the truth? Here’s the truth. I was molested by my grandfather when I was eleven years old.”

  I nodded. “I thought it was something like that. Can you talk about it?”

  “Sure. Sure I can talk about it. I spent a lot of time on psychiatrists’ couches so I could talk about it. You know what the irony is? My grandfather’s name was To
m too. Everybody called him T.J., but the T was for Tom.”

  We listened to the waves for a minute and then she said, “My mother’s family had this farm in Missouri. We used to go up there in the summer, and…I can’t tell you what it was like. All those memories, they’re just not the same anymore. But it was like…magic. It wasn’t a real working farm, Grandpa was this sort of gentleman farmer with a lot of land and a big brick house and all these animals. I always wanted a sister, and during the summer my cousin Sara would be there, her and her brother John, and we’d swim and play all day long.”

  Another pause. “When I was eleven we moved to St. Louis. Daddy couldn’t find a job in Tennessee and Grandpa hired him at his furniture store there. It was just for a year or so, till we could get back on our feet. We ended up moving back to Murfreesboro two years later. Anyway, it was summer, and Momma and Daddy would spend all week in St. Louis, Daddy working and Momma looking for a house, and they left me at the farm. Then we’d all be there on weekends. So during the day us kids would all go out with Grandpa on the tractor. I remember…we must have been pulling something, because John and Sara were riding on whatever it was we were pulling, and everybody got to take turns sitting up front on his lap and steering and shifting and stuff. And when I was up there he put his hands between my legs. I was just kind of…I couldn’t tell if he was holding me on the seat, or what. It struck me as odd but not really serious, you know?

  “Then that weekend Momma and Daddy came down. The routine for the children was that we got to play in the yard all morning, have lunch, and then go swimming. Momma had two younger sisters. One still lived in Missouri and the other brought her kids home for summers. Real close, right? The perfect family. Anyway, you had to have a nap between lunch and swimming.

  “I was upstairs, and they had us in separate bedrooms, so we’d at least pretend to sleep. I was in Grandma’s bedroom, which was at the top of the stairs, and he came in and put his finger to his mouth and said, ‘Shhhh,’ like maybe he was going to let me get up or something, I don’t know.

  “Then he molested me.

  “He did things he shouldn’t have done. He touched me between the legs, he put his finger inside me. And I was very scared and very quiet until it was all over. He had these huge hands. He was such a big man, with these great, huge hands.

  “As soon as he was gone I went to the bathroom, where I could see him come out of the house and go to the barn. Then I went downstairs to Momma and told her everything that happened.”

  “He did it with your mother right there in the house?”

  “Her and at least one of the aunts. But wait. Grandpa was bad enough, but Momma was a hundred times worse. The first thing she said was not to ever mention it to anyone. We would talk about it later. I had to promise her never, ever, to tell Daddy, because if he found out he would kill Grandpa. And she said it was up to me to just stay away from Grandpa, to not let it happen again.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “She wasn’t even drinking much then. That came later. What was weird was that she didn’t ever disagree with me, she never actually questioned me about what had happened. She just took it all in stride. I didn’t figure that out until a long time later.”

  “You mean, he’d molested her too.”

  “You got it. We figured it out when I was in therapy. This was later, when I was in college in St. Louis. I told my shrink all about Grandpa and he thought it was weird too, for her not to have been flabbergasted and go, ‘Oh my god, no! You must have misinterpreted.’ It was my shrink who first brought up the idea that maybe this was a generational thing, that Momma had herself been molested. I finally got her to admit it one night when she was drunk. I don’t know about the other sisters.

  “It was so important to the sisters that our family look perfect from the outside. The same with Momma, she had to be the perfect mother, and she told me from the day I was born that I was the most important thing in her life, that we had the perfect family. She would do anything to hold the family together. Grandma was absolutely not interested at all, not in housekeeping, children, or anything else. There were cooks and maids and things, but it was Momma who ran things. And I guess she had an investment in keeping the sham alive, to prove that she’d done the right thing by her younger sisters in helping raise them. Grandma and Grandpa were always fighting and threatening to leave each other and get a divorce. Momma sure didn’t want that when she was young, she had too many burdens as it was without one or the other of them being totally gone.

  “It wasn’t until both Grandma and Grandpa were dead and buried that this supposed closeness of the sisters came apart. First one sister was the bad guy and was excommunicated and then another. They went to court over the will and nasty, horrible things were said, and it finally all fell apart. I mean, it was a farce.”

  “Did you ever go back there, after it happened?”

  “Are you kidding? Every summer. Momma made me go back every summer, for like a month at a time. When you first got to the farm there were these big white gates and a sign saying SHANGRI-LA. Can you imagine? The land of eternal youth. Huh. Finding out no one’s ever going to take care of you or protect you makes you grow up very fast.”

  “And your grandfather?”

  “Grandpa tried to touch me again a couple of times but I got away. When I told Momma she acted like it was my fault, that I was responsible for keeping away from him.

  “I tried to talk to her about it, years later, after I was grown up and out of college and everything. When she wasn’t drunk, of course, I could never talk to her about anything when she was drunk. I went to her and said, ‘Look, I’m really, really mad and I want to know why you did this. I was eleven years old. I was supposed to be the most important thing in your life. How could you have been more concerned with protecting your father than protecting me? How could you make me go back for all those years? How could you, how could you, how could you?’

  “Well, all she would say was, ‘I did the best I could at the time.’ And shit like, ‘Well, we didn’t know back then the things we know now about sexual abuse and counseling, it never occurred to me to get counseling for an eleven-year-old child. I did the best I could and there’s nothing more to talk about.’ She could always shut down a conversation with just one of her looks.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I can see why you might not be too keen on going back and staying with your mother.”

  “You can’t imagine. By high school she was really drinking heavily. I think that led to my being real shy in school, not having a lot of friends. There was no way I could possibly bring anybody home. I’d walk in the door, Momma would be drunk, it was something I just couldn’t deal with. And she would pick at Daddy, just keep nagging and picking and nagging and picking until he’d turn around they’d have an all-out fistfight.”

  “Fistfight?”

  She nodded. “I remember once getting up in the night, I guess I was a senior in high school. I walked in the front room in time to see Daddy throw Momma across the room. And then he turned to me and apologized for it. I mean, neither of them ever laid a hand on me, but I saw things a child should never see. I saw Daddy dunk my mother’s head in the toilet to try and sober her up.

  “After Daddy left her, I tried to keep up some kind of relationship. That same urge, I guess, to try and pretend we were a real family. And we’d go out shopping or something, and have a great time, and we’d come home and then she’d start getting drunk, real fast. I’d never see the liquor. To this day I don’t know where she hides it. We’d just be sitting there and she would get drunker and drunker and drunker. It was so…heartbreaking, to get this taste of what it was like to have her back and then lose her again, in the space of maybe half an hour.”

  “Do you think the business with your Grandpa, I mean, do you think that was why she drank so much?”

  “Who knows? I know Grandpa has haunted me all these years, maybe it was the same with her. There is a kind of epilog to the Grand
pa story. When I was in college in St. Louis and going to this shrink, he wanted me to go back out and look at the farm, see what else it might bring back. It had been sold to these other people, and I was just amazed at how wrecked the place was. It was utterly, utterly destroyed. It was so strange because now the outside was as ruined as all my memories were. Anyway, after I drove by the farm I went out to the cemetery where Grandpa is buried. On the way I stopped at the store and bought a can of black spray paint. I was going to go to his grave and black out his headstone. I thought it would be like blacking him out of my life or something, I don’t know.

  “When I got there I started to lose my nerve. I mean, if anybody was there they would see my car, and the Tennessee plates, and there wouldn’t be any doubt about who did it. I walked around for a while and the sun started to go down, and then I walked over to Grandpa’s grave. And I found it was all coming back. I mean, how truly, totally sick that man was. How that sickness destroyed everyone around him. How he ruined my childhood—retroactively—and screwed up my teen years, and how he’d ruined my momma’s life in a completely different way. And I thought about his funeral, when I looked at him in the coffin and was scared that he wasn’t really dead, like he was some kind of vampire or something. And I just thought, ‘You…son…of…a…bitch.’ And so I wrote that, just wrote S.O.B. in big drippy spray paint letters on his tombstone.

  “And I drove back to St. Louis and I felt a hell of a lot better.”

  The night was turning cool. She had both her hands knotted together and it seemed like a bad time to touch her. “Did you ever tell your father?”

  She nodded. “Oh jeez. That’s another can of worms. Haven’t you had enough for one night?”

  “We’ve come this far. I want to hear all of it.”

  She was quiet again for a while, gathering herself. “I told you I was seeing a psychiatrist in St. Louis, at college. The reason is I was raped, senior year. And I just went into total isolation afterwards. I wasn’t leaving the house except to go to class or see the shrink, I didn’t answer the phone, my finances were all screwed up and I was bouncing checks and stuff. Daddy started calling and yelling into the phone and leaving nasty messages, and finally I sat down and wrote a letter addressed to him and Momma both, telling them about the rape, and that I just couldn’t cope with the world right now. And when my father got the letter he immediately got on a plane to St. Louis, and like the next thing I knew he was there at my door, carrying this bottle of Drambuie. He must have stopped on the way to the airport because he knew I liked Drambuie, like that was going to make everything all right. It was just ludicrous. And we sat there on the couch, drinking brandy, and I was crying and he was crying, and he said, ‘I can’t understand’ because this was literally months after it had happened, ‘why you couldn’t just have told your mother, if you couldn’t tell me.’