On July 28, Dr. Daughrety took me and Theresa to the all-new Pontiac Silverdome to watch Jon Goblin’s soccer team win the state Under-14 Division Games. Jon scored three times. At halftime, we got hot dogs from the concession stand and stood dazed in the air-conditioning, trying to figure out what this filtered air and weird blue light reminded us of. The answer, I think, was nothing. The Silverdome is the only place I’ve ever been that reminded me of nowhere. Returning to our seats, we spotted Barbara Fox with some friends a few rows away (I found out later that one of her friends had a little brother playing). All of us waved. I hadn’t known, until that moment, that the Daughretys even knew her.
After the game, we all went to the Oakland Park Cider Mill, which had opened early that year. The cider tasted too sweet. Dr. Daughrety said it still had too much summer in it and wouldn’t really be tart for another month. Theresa and I wandered into the wheel shed next to the main mill building and stood on the footbridge that ran the length of the room, among the usual cluster of kids watching the giant wheel crush apples. We listened to the water collecting overhead in the paddle at the top of the wheel as it pushed the wheel forward into the pile of cored apples at the bottom. We kept watching until the paddle with the hand-carved heart came around, where Richard and Grace, the only two teenagers ever to vandalize this place, had etched their names. None of us could ever figure out exactly how they did it.
Somewhere during those months, in all that heat, the Snowman drifted among us. He drove his blue AMC Gremlin through playgrounds and cul-de-sacs overflowing with children and did nothing. Drove on.
On the last weekend before that school year began, my parents got all spruced up and, on a whim, they packed Brent and me into the car and drove us to Greek Town in downtown Detroit as the sun smeared orangey-red over the rooftops. We parked five blocks away under the few working sodium lights and walked down the center of the deserted streets, past empty windowless hotels and rusted cars with shadows wriggling over the backseats like groping teenagers.
That’s why Greek Town, when we got there, burst upon us like a massive firecracker. Thousands of people leapt into being in a blaze of light and food smells. There were blacks and whites, parents and children, management and labor, Mentally Gifted Minors (that’s what they called us at school) and ordinary minors, everyone twisting and reshuffling, searching, it seemed, for the way they fit together through the smoke and shouts of “Opa!” Suddenly, the stories of downtown Detroit I’d heard all my life were just stories, nothing more, an elaborate scare tactic to keep out the timid and the weak, so that the last surviving explorers could party on forever in the wreckage of the Motor City.
Chapter 7 - 1994
“So,” Laura interrupts, having said nothing for almost two hours while I’ve rambled on over the phone about Scuzzie and the Bird and that long dry summer. I’m not sure her voice alone could have stopped me, but there are overtones in it I don’t ever remember hearing, and they make me wince, close my eyes, stop.
“So, Mattie, does this mean you’ve found what you wanted for your birthday? Since you decided not to involve me in the celebration, I was just curious, you know? Happy birthday, by the way.”
I glance at the clock-radio by my bed: 11:58. The time on Laura’s clock in Louisville reads 12:28. I know, because she keeps it half an hour ahead so she’ll panic when she wakes up in the morning and sees what time it is. That’s the only way either of us has found to get her moving.
“Got your Rolling Rock?” I ask.
“Are you going to answer my question?” I hear fury and hurt and something else, something so fundamental that I don’t recognize it for a while, and when I do I am stunned into silence.
“Are you?” snaps my wife.
Once before, on our wedding night, the moment the door to our hotel room closed and we were alone, Laura exploded into tears that continued well into the morning. The fury wasn’t directed at me, that time. It was about her brother’s death from cystic fibrosis at seventeen and the way her relationship with her parents had decayed in an all-new way after his death.
“They had no one to pound on and save at two in the morning. So the night after the funeral, they came to my door, stood outside it and listened, and when my breathing didn’t make enough sound, they got scared and burst into the room and woke me up. Before my brother died, they’d barely acknowledged I was there. They sent me to banjo lessons or sleep-away camp or pretty much anywhere to keep me out of the house. I hardly even knew my brother. He liked beef jerky. That’s what I knew. Seventeen fucking years, and that’s all I knew about him.”
Several times, I’d tried to hold her while she ranted. Once or twice, she relented, but mostly she just sat on the floor and slapped the carpet. She had the veil from her wedding dress in her lap, and she used it periodically to wipe her face. I had never felt closer to her.
Around me now, the motel walls seem to have tilted out of true like the sides of a collapsing shoe box. A little more pressure, I think, and this whole life-size diorama will bust apart and all the people populating both of our pasts will scurry out into the present.
I start to say my wife’s name, although I have no idea what I’ll say after that, and then I hear the hiss of her breath.
“Mattie, you bastard, come home.”
The hand I’m not using to hold the phone burrows into my sweatshirt, grabs at my skin. The calm I have always heard in her voice is exhaustion, I know that. She wasn’t made for the hours she keeps. But only now do I realize that exhaustion has been part of her strategy for staying married to me, surviving on what I’ve been able to give her, because I haven’t even begun to dig at the place where her loneliness lies. I’ve given her love, but not my love, somehow.
After a silence that seems long, even for us, Laura mutters, “At least I finally understand what that freak was doing at our wedding.”
“He didn’t used to be quite so much of a freak,” I say, wincing at the memory of Scuzzie bursting into a tuneless song-and-screech straight out of Chinese opera in lieu of a best-man toast. Last I’d heard, he’d attempted to open some sort of post-race nightclub in Saratoga, featuring half-naked stable-girl burlesque reviews and free body piercing for the kiddies.
“He stuck his foot in our wedding cake,” Laura reminded me.
“Kind of an in-joke,” I murmured. “Not even a joke.”
“Mattie, why don’t you draw anymore?”
I can’t tell whether it’s the question itself, the bite in her voice, or something else entirely that makes it feel like an accusation. “I’m not an artist, and I don’t want to be,” I snap back. “It just happened. Once.”
“I’d like to have known you then.”
“I wasn’t any less....” I’m too tired to search for words. “Muddled.”
“Mattie, I need to know if you’re in trouble. Are you going to hurt yourself?”
The question yanks me off the bed to my feet. Seconds later, it’s still buzzing in my ears. “How can you even—“ I start, but she’s talking again.
“I mean, Jesus Christ, it’s your birthday, you’re in some motel room a thousand miles away babbling about things that happened ten—twenty years ago, and you sound so small. You sound so small, Mattie.”
There is a sliver of window visible between the drawn curtains and just enough light in the room that I can see half my face reflected there. “Laura. This is less pathetic than it looks. Really.”
“You mean it feels less pathetic than it is?” my wife answers, and when I laugh, she does too. The laugh doesn’t last; it feels good, but not good enough.
“Last question, Mattie.” She has not softened. “Are you telling me this—me, specifically—or would anyone do?”
“I don’t know,” I say, wanting to get it right, to be truthful. I owe her that. “I think it’s you. I want it to be you.”
“You’d better find out.” I hear her shift on the bed and realize she’s about to drop the receiver into the cradle.
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“Don’t hang up like this,” I say in a rush, and when she doesn’t, I hold the phone tight. “Do you want to come here? Experience firsthand Mattie’s Quest for Peace?”
“You’ve made it pretty clear this is a solo thing.”
“When? I don’t remember being clear about any of this.”
“Hmmm,” Laura says. My invitation apparently surprised her less than it did me, but it also seems to have soothed her a little. She’s strumming her banjo again. I can hear it this time. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your focus or anything. Hell, you’ve already given me the real explanation for the corpse hand we’ve had hanging on the wall all these years.”
“It’s not a corpse hand.”
“That’s what you told me: They’re images of people that have become ghosts. Remember? I do.”
At least her hostility is aimed at my drawings now instead of me.
“I never knew you didn’t like those drawings.”
When she speaks again, her voice has become gentler. There is love for me in it, or at least the affectionate disregard that both of us have perfected and that has, until the last year or so, made most of our nights together impervious to the pain we’re quietly causing each other.
“What’s to like, Mattie?”
She strums her banjo. I sag back onto the bed and listen as the strumming subsides. Our familiar, comfortably constricting silence settles around us once more.
“Good night, Laura,” I say. When she doesn’t hang up, I say it again, even more softly.
She hangs up.
A few minutes later, the wind is flinging chunks of snow at the window. I stay under the covers, rooting around for a memory powerful enough to transport me somewhere else for a while.
Louisville, Kentucky, Saturday, May 6, 1989. The year of my one and only gallery show, before I started designing subdivisions for money. Days before, Laura, at age twenty-three, just eight months younger than I, had abandoned her home and her parents’ memory of her brother for a studio efficiency. To celebrate, she took me to the Derby at Churchill Downs.
She’d had a cold and her voice, for the first time in the four months since I’d known her, was not her voice but a variation of it, and its scratchy familiarity seemed the most intimate thing we’d so far shared. Already, she had touched off a physical desire in me more profound than any I’d yet experienced. She represented my first sustained emotional contact. I was drawn to the artist in her, the way she bent over her banjo like a welder, molding notes to notes, building marvelously complex musical models from scores dug out of folklore libraries and shared among friends. The intensity in her craft both calmed and aroused me.
That day, though, it was the light as much as Laura. Thunderclouds were rising in waves beyond the stables, and lightning bolts flickered within and between them like streaking schools of fish. The track was raked flat, the infield a ferocious blue-green. Laura stood next to me in a sun hat and a long gauzy dress.
It happened when she leapt out of her seat at the start of the first race, and again when she folded back. Halfway between sitting and standing, the light and the color transfixed her in the air like a hovering butterfly, something you could almost hold. Her hair snapped free of her hat in the wind, the hem of her dress rose just above the ankle, and the skin on her back shaded itself into unpredictable patterns, as though creating camouflage for shifting shadows.
I did not touch her. We did not sneak off to make love in the car. As I remember, we went straight to the Secretariat Club, which was packed with horsey people, because Laura had a gig that night and she wanted to drink away her ten-dollar winnings before she strapped herself to her banjo again. It was the first time since the WANTED drawings that I had thought about painting. If there’s a logic to longing, I sometimes think I glimpsed it there.
Later that same evening, I introduced Laura to my visiting parents...which reminds me now that I need to call them too. Doing my best to hold on to the sensual languor that memory has draped over me, I lift the phone once more and dial. My mother answers on the second ring. She has not been sleeping.
“Where are you?” She was always blunt, and once she gave up dyeing her hair she became blunter still.
“Louisville,” I tell her. “Midnight bowling.”
She has to know I’m joking. Even I don’t baffle my mother anymore. But when she speaks next, her voice cradles a flicker of hope I haven’t heard in years. The last time I heard it, I realize with a start, was the day we left Detroit.
“Oh, Mattie,” she says. “Really?”
“I’m in Troy, Mom.”
“You had to go.”
“You know I did.”
“I know you’re a fool. Let me get your father, he’ll want to hear this too. He’s almost as big a fool as you. Wait till you hear what he’s doing.”
The line goes quiet for a few seconds. Too soon, they’re back.
“Okay,” says my mother.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Mattie?”
“What are you doing?”
“Oh. Building a Tyco track out of a box I found in the garage. In honor of your trip, I guess. I think I might be able to get it to work.”
“Jesus,” I mutter, imagining him in his dungarees at his workbench, playing Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. He always plays Romeo and Juliet when he putters. He says it helps him think and not-think in just the right combination. So tonight he is thinking and not-thinking about my being here, while my mother probably has not stopped fretting over it since I
announced I was coming last week. I wrecked this place for her, and she’s convinced it wrecked me, having finally accepted, seventeen years later, that she couldn’t have accomplished that all by herself.
My parents’ Lexington house looks and feels pretty much the way our old Detroit house did, so much so that until I started school the fall after our expatriation, I wasn’t sure we’d moved at all. Piles of gutted stereo equipment continued to coagulate in closets and corners. Books, mostly science and psychology, lined the walls in no order. My parents still have the same chairs with the same coverings coming loose at the same old dining table. In my entire life, I have seen my parents purchase only one major piece of furniture: a porch swing. They rock in it together on nights when they are peaceful, which is most nights now, as far as I can tell.
“It’s Detroit, you know?” my father says. “You being there. I just wanted to see if I could make your cars work again. You don’t know where your cars are, do you?”
I have no idea where the cars are, but I do know how my being here is affecting him. If he thought his wife wouldn’t garrote him with speaker wire, he’d probably be here with me. Not all of my weirdness is my own. Some of it, at least, I inherited.
“Remind Mr. Morelli to pick up his cleaning,” says my father.
I jerk upright in bed, almost smiling. Sometimes, very occasionally, I am startled by the connection I still have with my parents, in spite of everything.
My father used to take me to the Detroit Institute of Arts every Saturday. After my drawing class, we’d wander through the exhibitions and eat hamburgers at the cafe, but we always wound up by the giant Canaletto. The painting takes up a whole wall, a Sunday-morning scene with hundreds of completely individualized people racing through or gathering in a piazza in the center of an old Italian village under a sky full of rain clouds newly burned apart by the sun. Each week we’d pick out a different group from the perpetually milling crowd and study their faces, trying to imagine where each figure was going, what he did for a living, whether he’d race slot cars or build stereos from scratch if he lived in Detroit.
The one we’d named Mr. Morelli resides in the right-hand corner of the piazza. He has a dog tugging him one way, a small child another. He looks harassed and happy. His house, my father and I always believed, would be a total mess. I don’t know why we liked him best.
“What’s it look like?” my mother asks. She doesn’t sound accusatory or e
ven worried about me, just sad, and the sadness may be as much for herself as anything else. For all her misgivings, she is not immune to nostalgia.
“Looks like Detroit,” I tell her gently, feeling suddenly fond of both my parents. “Dark and snowy and industrial and ruined.”
“Birmingham looks ruined?”
“I haven’t seen Birmingham. It was dark when I got here.”
“Will you eat an Olga’s?” my father asks.
“Oh,” says my mother.
“Of course,” I tell them both.
“Will you go to Mini-Mike’s?”
“It’s gone, you idiot,” my mother snaps.
“Oh, right,” says my father.
Tonight will not be one of their peaceful nights, I’m thinking.
“Will you please call your brother?” my mother asks me.
“Oh, Mom, what for?”
“You ripped him out of there too, you know.”
I wince. My mother almost never says things like that. She almost never blames me, not to my face anyway. “He doesn’t like talking to me, Mother.”
“He loved you, there. He loves you still.”
This is the one and only fantasy my mother perpetuates. She understands as much about me as anyone does, but she doesn’t understand this—or won’t. She needs to have my brother and me settled with each other too much.
“I doubt I’ll call. I might.”
“Call him.”
“I have to go to sleep,” I say, and sigh, settling back. “I’m tired. I love you. I’ll wave to Avri’s for you.”
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