Only Children

by Rafael Yglesias

  “You want to touch it?” Larry said. “You can touch it.”

  “No” from out of his little mouth, echoing out of the chasm of his past. “No,” he stammered.

  Larry didn’t argue. He took Peter’s hand and pulled it toward the impossible gravityless thing. “It feels good when you touch. People want you to touch it. Hasn’t your father ever shown you his? He’d like you to touch it.”

  “He said that!” Kotkin asked. She sounded outraged, amazed, disbelieving, disgusted.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he stammered. He had always been afraid to say. What was real, what was not? It seemed incredible even to him. People would be disgusted to know. He had never told details. Were they real?

  “You don’t know?”

  She wasn’t outraged, that’s in my head. “I can’t talk about it.” Sour and choking, bitter and lumpy, the memories churned in his chest, bubbled in his throat. Was it real? Why didn’t I say no the very first time he reached in my pants? Why didn’t I tell someone?

  But I did. I told Gary. Larry said he had done it to Gary.

  “Yeah, he plays around with it,” Gary had said. Or had he then? Was it years later? “Tell him you don’t like it. He’ll stop and give you a present.”

  “I don’t like Gary as much as you; that’s why I don’t touch him anymore,” Larry had said.

  He won’t stop with me.

  Did I think that? I pulled my hand away—even if this memory is false, even in the lie, I didn’t touch him. It. Red and pulsing, a blind face. Or is that the block? Did I touch?

  No.

  “What were your parents doing?”

  “They were divorced!”

  “I know,” Kotkin said with a trace of impatience. Or did she? “Where were they? Were they around? Had you been dumped at Gary’s?”

  Yes. No. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I should see Gary and find out.”

  “You’ve never discussed this with your mother or father?”

  “No.” Peter laughed.

  “An absurd question?” Kotkin said warmly. Or was it? Was it sarcastic?

  “No, I guess if I were healthy, that’s what I would do, I would ask the grown-ups what the hell was going on. I’d find how exactly old I was, where they were, and how much was done. The whole cast is still alive, just waiting for my questions.”

  “But you don’t want to ask them?”

  “No, yes, no, yes.”

  Kotkin chuckled. “Are you scared?”

  Flat on his back, peering into eternity. What was scared?

  Who am I?

  There was one time, the time when Larry invited Gary and Peter to a matinee of the road company of Hello, Dolly! Later, Larry took them to his office. Peter felt safe because Gary was with them and Larry had never touched Peter without sending Gary away and in the office that would be impossible—

  But Larry’s secretary needed a hand with some packages, just to carry them downstairs. Larry insisted Gary, just Gary, go. “I’ll help,” Peter tried to say, knowing, knowing. …

  Still stuck in his throat, hundreds of years later, lying on Kotkin’s couch, still forming in his mouth—“I’ll help too.” Peter’s eyes still pleaded with Gary: take me with you, take me with you.

  “What are you thinking about?” Kotkin asked.

  And during the fifteen minutes that the secretary and Gary were gone, Larry lowered my pants and put it in his mouth.

  “Are you remembering something?” Kotkin asked.

  “No. Yes.” The couch was heavy. Too heavy for the floorboards. Its dense weight cracked them, crashing down, down. I want to sleep. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Okay,” Kotkin said with the sweet, soft voice of forgiveness. “You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to. But you can tell me anything you want to. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “I know.” He wanted to cry. Somewhere, maybe below the couch, beneath the floorboards, were all his tears.

  “Do you feel you can talk about anything here without being judged, or made fun of, or—not believed?”

  “Yes,” Peter said, just rising above the pool of sorrows.

  “Good,” Kotkin said, like a mom pleased with her little boy.

  THE LOBBY was dreary. Its mosaic tiles were dulled by years of tramping feet and coarse mops. Low-wattage bulbs glowed through globes that were either heavily frosted or very dirty.

  “God, I used to think this was so big,” Eric said.

  “What, Daddy?” Luke asked.

  “I grew up in this building,” Eric answered. He picked up Luke, and kissed him on the cheek. Luke was so beautiful these days that neither Nina nor Eric could come near him without bussing him. His face was in transition from the padded cushions of infancy to the elastic trim of boyhood. His blue eyes radiated curiosity and wonder. His bow-legged walk had straightened, his neck had lengthened, his recent haircut had shaped his straight black hair into manly layers, his fluted baby lips, although still red against his pale skin, had widened, and when he opened them to laugh, there were bright little teeth. The toothless smile had become a boy’s grin. His voice was musical—a relief to Nina that Luke hadn’t inherited her monotone—and he spoke into the air with unrestrained volume and excitement, a trumpet waking the world. Except for the constipation, his disposition was excellent: he was loving, smart, and compassionate. Still afraid, though, to say what he wanted in the face of opposition.

  Like me, relying on others to make him happy, Nina thought.

  “Remember?” Eric said to Luke. “I was a boy just like you in this building. I thought it was so big.”

  Luke smiled that smile, broad and full, showing all the happiness in his soul. “Because you were small,” he said.

  “Right!” Eric agreed. “See what a funny elevator they have, with a porthole like a ship?”

  Everything was so dreary. The elevator buttons were eroded at their centers by stabbing fingers; the doors shuddered when they opened and closed; the cables squealed; the whole thing sounded ready to collapse. And the smell. Billions of stews and soups and roasts were everywhere, especially in the hallway. The smells made Nina feel full.

  “They’re here!” Eric’s father, Barry, shouted from the door. Barry already looked ragged, his shirttail out, his forehead sweaty. He threw out his thin arms, and opened his long fingers to Luke. “There’s my grandson!”

  Eric handed Luke right to him, and that skinny old man danced in the tiny foyer, his arms made into a seat, and put his forehead on Luke’s, their eyes locked together. “You’re so big now!”

  Nina tried to imagine her father, Tom, doing this jig and she laughed. Somehow the contrast almost made her forgive Tom. It must be exhausting to be Barry, always full, and always emptying, never a still body of contentment.

  The apartment was hot with cooking. Voices, the loud, sour voices of old relatives, clanged down the hallway like rattling dishes. The relatives topped each other, in a hurry to remember the best part of the story first, competing to shout the greatest appreciation.

  “They’re peasants, that’s what makes them like that,” Eric once said to Nina. “It’s not being Jewish. My old neighborhood, I had two friends who weren’t Jewish. One Italian, one Greek. Same thing at their house. That’s when I knew. These people are all peasants.”

  “They’re very loving,” Nina had answered. She thought it again now, as a gaggle of the old folks, jewelry rattling, wrinkled masks hovering, gathered around Luke. Luke clung to his grandfather, averting his face, hiding in Barry’s neck, his eyes taking account of them with cold suspicion.

  “So beautiful!”

  “Look at his eyes!”

  “So cute!”

  They appraised Luke, as if Luke weren’t there, weren’t an intelligence. He probably understood more about the world than they; certainly his sensibilities were finer. There was something corrupt in growing old, something that got stuck in a groove. Luke showed what he felt w
ithout the civilizing dishonesty of adulthood. Right now he exhibited his loyalty to his grandfather, to Miriam, to Eric, and to Nina, unself-consciously, free of the pressure to pretend delight at the presence of others.

  “Come on, come on, I’m gonna introduce you to someone special,” Barry said.

  “Give him some room!” Aunt Sadie shouted, although she was the one most in the way.

  “This,” Barry said, “is your Great-uncle Hy.”

  “Great-great-uncle,” someone said.

  “Hi?” Luke said.

  “Not like hello,” Eric said.

  Everybody laughed, much to Luke’s confusion. He cringed at the harsh collective sound.

  Hy, only a few years ago, when Nina had first met him, had been a tall, strong old man, his back straight, his busy white hair neatly combed, his eyebrows black with passion. Now Hy was stored in a wheelchair, his shoulders bent, hands resting like dead paws, his hair dirty and shapeless, the eyebrows white.

  “Four generations,” someone said.

  Hy attempted a smile for Luke. His head bobbed with effort as he tried to bring welcome to his gaunt cheeks and scared eyes.

  Hy’s eyes were pale blue, Nina realized. That’s the recessive gene that made Luke’s blues possible.

  Barry offered Luke to Hy like a pet. Luke squirmed, looked away, his body fighting, but the protest was silent.

  “Oh, he’s scared,” Aunt Sadie said.

  “Okay, Barry,” Hy croaked. “Don’t frighten him.”

  “Daddy,” Luke peeped. Eric took him.

  “What’s that?” Luke asked, pointing to the wheelchair.

  “It’s a chair,” Eric said.

  Tell the truth, Nina thought. “Like a walker, Luke. It helps Uncle Hy get around.”

  “My legs aren’t so good,” Hy said to Luke, again trying to lift the tired muscles of his face into a smile. He wanted so badly not to frighten Luke.

  The gaggle froze in their positions, now silent in unison. What are they scared of? Nina wondered. That Luke might realize Hy is dying? That Hy will? Surely they both, in their hearts, already know.

  “I’m the oldest Goddard,” Hy said. “You’re the youngest.” Goddard was Hy’s name, the blood relationship was through Miriam, Eric’s mother.

  “Not for long,” Aunt Sadie said. “Julie’s pregnant.” That started them up again. Sadie had mentioned the branch of the family that had made good. Julie’s mother had married well, to a national shirt manufacturer. They lived in California, and the rest of the family, left behind in relative poverty in Washington Heights, talked about them the way their ancestors in the shtetl might have spoken of those who had gone to America. Sadie, who kept up with the shirt manufacturer’s brood, came back tanned from visits to L.A., speaking of Rodeo Drive as though it were a temple, and she sneered at any improvement in the lives of the Washington Heighters by citing better possessions in Los Angeles. Nina saw Eric’s face darken at this new one-upmanship. She could hear Eric think: so now even my son is shit ’cause Julie’s having a kid.

  Did he marry me because I come from a rich Boston family? But Eric didn’t know how much, if any, money my father had. Did he marry me because I was a Wasp? Julie’s mother had married into money, but the man was a vulgarian. Nina remembered him at their wedding, taking out thick folds of cash and deliberately selecting large bills to tip the waiters. “Get a bottle of imported champagne,” he said, making the point that Tom had skimped on the liquor.

  “The schmuck doesn’t know that less is classier,” Eric had said later about the incident.

  “My father’s cheap,” Nina answered.

  “No, he isn’t. He isn’t new money, that’s all,” Eric answered.

  He hates his own people, Nina thought, watching Eric hunch his shoulders against Sadie’s attack. “Julie’s got such fancy doctors,” Sadie said, “she already knows the baby is a girl. Can you imagine that?”

  “Everybody’s got that!” Aunt Rose answered. “Nothing to do with fancy doctors. They do that with everybody now.”

  “You didn’t have that!” Sadie argued to Eric.

  “That’s cause my wife isn’t over thirty-five,” Eric answered, laughing cruelly. “If it hadn’t taken Julie so long to find someone to marry her, she wouldn’t have needed amnio.”

  “Eric,” Nina said to stop him. She knew he didn’t mean any of that. He just wanted to fight Sadie with like weapons.

  “Julie’s very beautiful,” Sadie protested, with her peculiar logic.

  “Especially with that nose he bought her,” Aunt Rose answered.

  “That was years ago!” Sadie said. “She was a little girl.”

  “Stop,” Hy croaked. He looked agitated. One paw had lifted from its cushioned rest. The bent fingers trembled. “Sadeleh,” he said to Sadie, in a tone of command. “You talk too much about money.”

  “Hy,” she complained, tossing her head. “I’m talking about medicine, not money.”

  “Don’t talk about medicine either. I’m sick of both money and doctors.”

  He still has his brain. Nina worried for him. To be stuck in that broken body with a clear head must be awful. “How do you like where you stay, Hy?” Nina asked him, kneeling beside his contraption. The huge wheel came into her vision, reminding her of the paddle wheel on an old steamboat ride that ran the river Charles one summer.

  “I don’t like it,” Hy said quietly.

  “They take good care of you,” Sadie almost yelled at him.

  Nina looked into Hy’s eyes. They were so old, the white almost yellow, but in their large, peering worry, open and curious, blue and fragile, they could be Luke’s. She wanted to cry. It was unfair. “I’m sorry. We’ll visit you,” she stammered.

  “Too much trouble,” Hy said. “Your baby is beautiful.”

  “Let’s get started,” Miriam said.

  Uncle Bill leaned into Barry. “I hope you’re going to do the short version.”

  “Is this the baby’s first Passover?” Sadie asked Nina. They almost bumped heads when Nina got to her feet.

  “No, we were here last year.”

  “Are you raising him Jewish?” Sadie went on. “Because Israel doesn’t think he is. They say it doesn’t count if it’s just the father.”

  “They’re a government,” Hy said, his voice disintegrating, the sounds crackling like bad radio reception.

  “The religion too, Hy,” Sadie said. “He may even have to convert.” Sadie peered at Nina. “You plan to have him bar mitzvahed, don’t you?”

  The guests were in awkward positions, half out of their chairs, partially out in the hall, en route to the dining table. So Sadie’s equally awkward question, stiffening the group in their uncommitted postures, hung in the air, causing both physical and intellectual paralysis.

  “He’s two years old,” Miriam said, and laughed. “Can we worry about this some other time?”

  Sadie abruptly grabbed Nina by the elbow and pulled her down (Sadie was a very tiny woman) to kiss Nina’s cheek with a loud, wet smack. “Just a question, dear. I ask a lot of questions because I want to know everything.”

  “Me too!” Luke said in his piercing voice.

  Everyone turned to look at him, surprised by his existence.

  Luke ducked his head in Eric’s chest and hid.

  “WHICH ONE?” Daddy asked.

  “Here.” Luke showed him, 6A, that was Byron’s apartment. “Don’t you know?”

  “Daddy’s never been here,” Mommy said. “You visit here with Pearl when you have a play date with Byron. This is our first visit.”

  Luke felt good. He knew more than Mommy and Daddy about something. “I’ll show you,” he said, and took Daddy’s hand. Luke pulled him to the door. “You push the button,” he told Daddy.

  Daddy looked funny. His face was sad, no smile. Daddy looked at the door. Then at the button. Daddy pushed his pants legs down. “I’ve got to get these let out,” he said.

  “Ring the bell,” Mommy told him. />
  “Yeah!” Luke told him. The hallway’s no fun.

  He heard Byron. “Yah, yah, yah, it’s Luke. I’m here, Luke! I’m here!”

  The door opened. Byron came right out, almost through the door. “I got Castle Grayskull!”

  “Uh-oh,” Mommy said.

  Castle Grayskull! Luke ran with Byron, past legs and books. There!

  “See the trap,” Byron showed him. Skeletor fell right through!

  “Daddy!” Luke called.

  “No,” Byron said. “Don’t.”

  “Daddy, look!” Daddy’s face came down from the ceiling, right next to him.

  “So this is it, huh? Fantastic.” Daddy likes toys.

  “See the trap?”

  “Can you believe this horrible stuff,” a deep voice said. Luke leaned against Daddy and looked up. A smiling man was above him.

  “Introduce your friend, Byron,” Byron’s mommy said.

  “My daddy,” Byron said. He reached for Luke’s hand. “Let’s take Castle Grayskull to my room.”

  Where are we? The hallway.

  “And what’s your friend’s name?” Byron’s Mommy said.

  “My name is Luke,” Luke told her. She forgot?

  “You’re supposed to introduce him,” Byron’s Mommy said to Byron.

  “Hello, Luke, I’m Peter,” said Byron’s daddy. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Let’s go to my room,” Byron said.

  “Yes, take Grayskull to your room. Brunch will be ready soon.”

  “Don’t wanna eat!” Byron said. “Right, Luke? We don’t want to eat.”

  “Yeah, I’m not hungry,” Luke said.

  “Of course, you have to eat,” Diane said.

  Byron pulled Grayskull. The weapons rack fell off. The trapdoor went crazy. It was going to break. Luke wanted Byron to stop.