by Amy Bloom
Max stands on his hands, and his arms begin shaking.
“How long can you do that?” Huddie asks. When we knew each other and Larry was four or five, he timed and measured and reported every athletic moment in the boy’s life. Fifty-six seconds underwater. Nine flights of stairs in two minutes. Two goals in the last quarter.
“I don’t know. You can time me.” Max rubs his arms and flings himself up into the air again, hands pressing hard on the grass as he turns a few more showy, foot-waggling cartwheels that end in round-offs of the kind the little ponytailed professionals do as they come off the beam. His feet slam the ground, and he raises his arms above his head for another handstand. I hope he hears a stadium crowd screaming his name, wild with love and admiration.
I come outside, standing still long enough for the afternoon sun to warm the tops of my bare feet, long enough to realize I haven’t changed my clothes. Maybe he will think this is ironic on my part, that I have dressed “as” something, something like a housewife, although he can’t think I’ve bought a house and supported this child by staying home and dusting. Huddie won’t disappoint Max by taking his eye off the sweeping second hand, so instead of a solemn handshake or an affectionate embrace or even a sweetly tentative palm on the shoulder, instead of anything that we have a right to expect after fifteen years, we get another minute or two of oblique suspense and parental obligation. Huddie’s smiling, keeping his eye on the watch. I smile at Max’s pointed, quivering feet, at Huddie’s handsome, broad chest and his hands, which are graceful, even shapely, and wide as catcher’s mitts, and a familiar thorny stream washes under my lids.
I know my face is longer and his is wider, bulldog-wide through the temples, with darker-edged folds beginning above his eyebrows. We both have grey, but he can’t see mine because I colored it yesterday, and despite its sprightly, mendacious auburn, I spent an hour crying and wiping dark, intractable spots off my forehead and off the tips of my ears. Although I no longer looked as old and time-speckled, I didn’t exactly look like me. Already concealed, I was tempted to go for broke and did, with mascara and silver hoop earrings and clean, intact underpants. Actually, new underpants.
“Okay, Max. Maximus. Get upright.”
“Eighteen seconds. That’s good.” Huddie’s hand covers Max’s to the middle of his damp little arm. “I’m Horace Lester, old friend of your mother’s.”
“I’m Max. I’m eight. I’m small for my age, but I’m eight.”
“Good to meet you.”
I can hear Huddie thinking, Small, yeah. Small and then some. Just keep him out of my son’s locker room. My own thoughts about Max run so protective and so cruel I don’t give Huddie time to ask even the normal visiting grown-up questions. Maxie pulls his hand out, not rudely, and backs up for a series of handsprings. Huddie gives me the flowers, without ceremony, and I look inside for a vase to suit them, knowing I don’t have any. My impulses of the last eight years have not been toward the house beautiful. My mother had vases for every kind of bouquet and arrangement, and she had ideas about what suited which: glazed terracotta for wildflowers, tall crystal for tulips and snapdragons, short crystal for bunches of zinnias. I have a large peanut butter jar for most of Huddie’s bouquet and a spaghetti sauce jar for the rest. I long, as I have not once longed in all these downwardly mobile years, for a tall column of etched glass, for a handsome, wide-mouthed ginger jar. I wanted safety and quiet and books and have them, but now it feels less like simplicity or even the successful marshaling of extremely limited resources, and more like the road show of Grapes of Wrath. My teeth ache with shame. I want those vases. I want a big walnut table and Portuguese pottery. I want pretty things right now, and I want him to come in and see my inviting, welcoming home and long to be in it. I want a house of layered charm, from the shining wooden floors to the witty, incidental watercolors, not a couch whose surface is a mix of Astroturf weave and backyard crust. I want a house where things have form as well as function, where not every surface says make do and don’t notice. I wipe the Formica table (ten dollars for the table and three chairs at a tag sale) and put the jars on the counter. I cannot believe that I don’t own placemats.
Back outside, watching Max, standing so close to Huddie I smell his wheaty, wild onion scent and feel the faint heat of his back and chest, I see my mother, propped up on her twin bed, in her small, spare apartment (most of her money gone with her only really bad mistake, a light-fingered, slew-footed boyfriend after Aaron Price died), saying in her most fluting and therefore most furious voice, “Of course, one makes a virtue of necessity, my dear. What else? At least we have the pleasure of fooling others.” And she made herself over once more, into an admirer of the simple life, a Zen devotee, as she had made herself domestically suburban, and then professionally successful, and then a desirable woman of leisure and a certain age, when not one of these things spoke to her own wishes; she made herself pure and died between rough cotton sheets, her bald head on a pillow as harsh as a bag of rice. I squeeze my eyes and conjure the kindest, most virtuous portrait of myself: a sensible, literate woman of limited income, a devoted mother who’s chosen time with her child over professional advancement and a safe neighborhood over service for eight. Please see that.
The sky is the bright unchanging dusk of summer night; the tulip trees darken and fill until suddenly there is no light at all coming through them. We have to go in, both of us as reluctant as Max, as if there are no mosquitoes, as if tomorrow will be no good, as if this, this handspring, the one he can’t do in the velvety dark, is the one that must be done tonight.
The porch light sends Max’s shadow across Huddie’s light grey pants and Huddie’s across my porch steps, onto my feet, and I think, It will be all right if I die tonight. After I touch him.
I hand Huddie a glass of cheap wine and direct him to a quiet corner. While the kitchen is briefly under siege, I am the commander in chief. I hold on to the last two inches of Max’s T-shirt and clean his ears and his neck, wiping off the three dripping circles of boy-colored stucco beading his lily throat. My shoulder’s pressing the phone to my ear so I can promise brownies for the Great Gator bake sale. (Great Gator is the mascot of Max’s elementary school, and his snarky, omnivorous green presence is felt almost every week, since I in fact moved here, to this nothing-special house I can barely afford, because the school takes its mascot and its honor classes and its after-school program so seriously. Yes, two trays of brownies, and don’t make me mad by explaining that the kids prefer homemade.) I shake zucchini, peppers and garlic in my oldest, favorite pan, so old scorch marks tiger-stripe the original fifties-kitchen yellow. I know how I look, moving; around the kitchen in double time. It impresses and intimidates men who want to be married. Also young single women. Married men, with children (who show up periodically with bottles of wine when our children have all gone to bed), don’t care for it much, since they see it at home all the time. It must be as charming as leg hairs in the sink. And other mothers, the few who have been in my home (a six-week friendship between Max and the boy across the street; the neighborhood cancer drive; the new neighbor), don’t watch, don’t think about it, they don’t even put down their wineglasses as they set the table for me. They have all they can stand of their own necessary, gratifying agitation, whirling through their own kitchens like dervishes, scattering silverware and instructions and things to be defrosted and things to be frozen, feeling absolutely necessary to every movement and every living thing.
* * *
Huddie finishes his glass, a thin, sugary white, and wishes again that he’d brought decent wine instead of those irises, now bending in half over the jars she’s jammed them into. He puts a splinter of raw zucchini in his mouth and thinks of all the great meals he’s made, all the hot, oily bits, melting disks of fat and sugar he’s needed, to fill the space this short-tempered, weary woman left in him. Reaching for a fallen bottle of oregano, Elizabeth looks for a moment like June’s white twin. Muscular women, one plush l
ayer over a wide back and hard legs striding until the last march. Bobcat wrestlers, point guards, piano-moving women. Stand in their way and be moved, fool. Elizabeth straightens up. He has misremembered. She has five inches on June and none of her broad curves. But her girl-arrow shape widens now to a protective, unshakable stance just like June’s, what love light there is shines only on their children’s faces. Except something else crosses Elizabeth’s face, opening and closing like a night rose. Her young face was two curved blades pointing to her square chin. Now there are soft velvet pleats along the jaw, a row of faint, sweet ridges he would like to touch as she lowers her head to check the vegetables. And as she bends over awkwardly to get a roasting pan for the little pink potatoes, not the practiced kneel of stewardesses and office ladies, all of whom know that men are always looking, Elizabeth bends her knees only a little and her ass juts out, hips low and wide, her waist calling for his hands, her ass pressing toward him in those old jeans with their white, pulling seams, and Huddie thinks that it was for this that he has lived so long. Lead me on to that light, Lord, lead me home.
* * *
“Sylvan,” Max says after dinner, looking out at the yard, his legs stretched out from the couch to the coffee table, like Huddie’s.
Huddie says nothing. Don’t mock my child. Do not say “Sylvan?” like it’s a sissy ten-dollar word. Do not say “You mean green?” like no real boy would say anything else. Say “You are a faggot, Max.” And then I’ll have to kill you, and my grieving, delicate boy will be shuffled from foster home to foster home, bullied by no-neck monsters, made to wear polyester clothes that will so madden him he’ll run away at the age of fourteen—I can see him with blond down on his cheeks, little gosling tufts—and find himself go-go dancing in some big-city Combat Zone, stripping down to a sequined, bulging G-string to the strains of “Over the Rainbow” for sticky dollar bills from the hands of vile middle-aged men.
“Yeah, it is,” Horace says.
“I love that,” Max says.
“Yeah.”
Huddie and Max sit on Max’s bed. This is the beautiful room in my house. I held his little biscuit feet in my hands, in this room. And beneath those feet, my hands, which I had always admired for their smoothness, were as worn and rough as cedar bark. Ivory angel feet, with opal nails and satin soles. And my hands became his steps, my body his playground, and my whole past was dissolved into his immediate, inescapable now.
Max’s bedroom walls are the elegant Parisian yellow my mother would have chosen, and the ivy stencils from floor to ceiling are also her kind of thing. It was my last unnecessary effort. We came home to this house and three barely furnished rooms and nine drifting, cocooned, and expensive months together. We lived in baby time, where if you’ve cleaned up the spilled talcum and gotten to and from the grocery store, you’ve had a day. I had no other life than Maxie’s, and I could neither remember nor imagine one. A leisurely shower elated me. Tiny red sneakers on sale with matching red and white teddy-bear print socks thrilled me. Burned toast and puddles of zwieback filled the kitchen and I swept it all into the garbage whenever I had the energy. I saw people only as they saw Max, and so I was inclined to love them. My father sent several thoughtful but not excessive checks and a stuffed pink panda, so gaudy and lush I could only assume his new wife had picked it out. He did not send a ticket to Oregon, and I thought, He’s seventy, he’s got a fifty-year-old wife with two college-age kids, her elderly, forgetful mother lives with them, fair enough. Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms. Sol had found the right family, finally, including a stepdaughter who screamed good-naturedly at him in the background, “Sol, Jesus fucking Christ, I’m waiting for a call, you know. Tell her Max is gorgeous, send her a crazy big check, and lemme talk to Kenny before the concert’s sold out.” I thought that when she dropped out of college and got tired of Kenny, I might persuade her to babysit Max. And me.
The apostle spoons went on the shelf over the changing table, and Max had every bath in the company of gospel greats. Greta found me and sent a painting of crows and snakes, which I put back in its crate and hid in the attic, beneath zipperless luggage and winter clothes. My mother was dead but showed up in dreams so hilarious and realistic I had to believe that her soul had migrated to my subconscious, from which it was now directing late-night cinema. In my dreams, we discussed breast and bottle feeding, the right age for solids, wheat allergies, and the ways in which Max was clearly superior to the little white lumps we’d bubbled next to at the YMCA Tot Swim. We agreed on everything, and when I wavered in my own convictions, my mother, in the pale, pale lilac charmeuse evening dress she wore when I was nine, assembled experts from Anna Freud to Oscar Wilde to reassure me.
Huddie puts his hand out to smooth Max’s hair, spread out on the pillow. He has done this a thousand times, and always with pleasure, but not to hair like this.
“I go to Hebrew School. I’m in Hey. Last year, I was in Daleth. That’s practically babies. We carpool with the Shwartzes and the Manellis. I hate her. She’s really, you know, she stinks.”
Huddie gives the blanket a tug and sits down, moving two black velour gorillas (one with red bow tie, one with peelable banana in paw) to the foot of the bed. In the language of parents and children, Max knows this means his time is almost up; Huddie anticipates the last sleep-defying whoosh of conversation, Max’s long day swirling out in a cloud of words and coded feeling.
“Are you Jewish?”
“No, I’m not. I go to church from time to time.” The ten years he was a deacon are a flat dream, a life built from the outside in: deacon, Chamber of Commerce president, New York Produces Man of the Year, County Youth Basketball coach, good father, good husband, as far as the job went.
“Some people convert.” Max says this into the foot of an eyeless Raggedy Andy doll. “Our snack lady was born Catholic.”
“Uh-uh. There will be no conversion, Mister Max. I think being Jewish is great for you and your mom. But I’m not Jewish.”
“I don’t think it really hurts that much,” Max insists. Huddie winces and wonders if that is really Max’s point, to say “I know you have one. I have one, too. And we are not alike and if I could I’d get the men who are like me to cut yours off.” Max shows what Huddie recognizes as a full-court-press smile: both dimples and the upper lip slightly lifted to reveal the shining white incisors. He is not without weapons, after all. Max raises his arm, and for an insane minute Huddie thinks Max will rest his small hand on Huddie’s groin. The boy takes a headless Ken from under his blanket and tosses it into the garbage.
“Three points. Good night, little man,” Huddie says.
“Good night.”
“You can call me Huddie.”
“Huddie. You can call me Max.”
“Good night, Max.”
“Good night, Huddie. Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, ducky!” This last is yelled like a football cheer.
Huddie turns out the lights, smiling, and wonders who the father is, who’s been fucking her for the last fifteen years. Apparently, the wish to possess that hit him when he saw the undersides of her white thighs long and harshly flattened out against the oak bleachers has not gone. For the last fifteen years he’s believed he was not a jealous man and it turns out he just didn’t remember.
Max’s sound sleep makes us nervous. We shift around on the couch until we are far enough apart to look directly at one another. Huddie’s stomach presses over his belt in a powerful, endearing slope, and his arms are as big around as small barrels, filling his shirtsleeves. If I cut him, he will open brown, red, pink, down to white bone, small petals of blood rising on his skin. But he puts his arm on the back of the couch, and now I want his fingers to brush against me so much I walk to the foot of the stairs and pretend to listen for Max, who has slept through the night since he was three months old.
“How are your folks?”
“My father’s all right, re-remarried. My mother died nine years ago,” I say. I have considered myself an old orphan, not a heartwarming one, but an orphan nonetheless, ever since.
“I’m sorry. Did it get better between you?”
It got enormously better, as we both saw her death zooming up like the next and necessary exit. We entered her terminal phase like lovers in the shoddiest dime romance: reckless, breathless, selfless, you name it, we threw it out the window. We styled what was left of her blonde hair, and when that was pointless, I spent six hundred dollars I didn’t have on a platinum bob and an ash-blonde pixie cut and found myself defending the Gabor sisters against their bad press. We created the River Styx Beauty salon (my mother named it) and made up a gruesome menu of services sought by the decomposing but still-fashionable clients of our high camp owner—“That’s M’sieu Styx to you,” she’d snap at the other customers, waiting on our side of the bank.
“It got much better.” And then I got pregnant and had to miss her all over again, just as if she had been the best mother in the world. “And Gus?”
“Oh, baby. They’ll have to drive a stake through his heart.”
“That seems fair, for all the heartache he caused us,” I say, and then see that I shouldn’t have. No matter how old, no matter how bad, we are the only people who can genuinely and expansively bad-mouth our parents. Huddie shakes his head slowly, and I think that I have, with one careless, sincere remark, revealed all my enduring shortcomings.
“You still talk about fair. You’ve been in this world for forty years and talk about fair. I love that,” he says, as if I’ve shown him my childhood bear collection.