Stan sat in the living room in the big chair by the picture window, sometimes holding a comic book, sometimes nothing at all, staring out at the street waiting for that first righteous glimpse of her on her walk home from summer school.
Naturally, she had him totally figured out and some days called him a baby and sent him off and so the days when she felt like putting up with him were extra special for them both. On those days she treated him like an equal, sort of, and took him down to the basement, which had been converted into a den by the first husband and decently appointed by the second.
Aunt Lisa had inherited the home from her mother. Aunt Lisa’s sister—Stan’s mother—had gotten the cash and Aunt Lisa had gotten the home. Aunt Lisa had never had doubts about who got the better deal, especially seeing as how Stan’s parents had pissed theirs away. The house still stood and still was hers. Men came and went, leaving their improvements behind as testament to the degree and duration of their best intentions.
There was a TV in the basement den and a nice comfy couch and a pool table even. Mandy would put on MTV just to have it on but she didn’t like to watch with Stan, who asked too many questions and didn’t get it. Having to explain why things were cool made the fact of their coolness less certain, and certainty was the rock on which she built. He was a summer baby, would turn twelve there, but in the meantime she didn’t need the grief. What he needed to do was learn.
They would stand behind the pool table, in the farthest corner of the basement, where there was no view from the stairs, where Lisa or Charles would come from if they ever came down to check on them, which neither ever had nor ever would. Mandy put her cool hands inside Stan’s clothing and touched him all over. “Let’s see what’s going on here,” she’d say. Or she’d put his sweaty hands inside her clothes and when she did that she said, “I’m going to teach you something today. When you’re older your girlfriends will thank me.” This was a variation on something a boy at her school—a senior—had said to her the previous winter, before teaching her something she hadn’t exactly wanted or not wanted to learn.
Stan didn’t understand how Mandy would know his girlfriends for them to thank her, since he didn’t actually live on Long Island. Wasn’t he going to get to go home—back to his familiar school and shouting parents? Maybe if he got married one day there would be a wedding and everyone would come. Mandy might go up to his bride on his wedding day and say, “You better thank me for what I taught your husband, Stan, back before you even knew him, that summer he stayed at my house.” Anything was possible with Mandy, who smelled sour in a sort of good way and that was only the tip of the iceberg of how she was strange. He tried to imagine what the thing he touched looked like based on what it felt like but everything he thought of seemed insane. It made no sense for anything like what he was thinking to be a thing that was a part of a person.
So he asked if he could see it. She said she’d show him, but that if she did he had to kiss it. He didn’t want to do that so he never saw. She got angry and called him some things that he didn’t know what they all were—but he got the gist anyway, and some of them he did know—and she stomped up the stairs. He stayed behind the pool table and cried and felt bad about everything, like what had just happened and Mandy being angry with him but also how he missed the predictable madness of his fucked-up parents and also news headlines that scared him and other stuff, too, vague huge stuff, because it had gotten to the point where it really was everything at once.
As he calmed down he began to hear the TV again. It had been on the whole time but he’d tuned it out for a while. It was reentering his life like a shuttle back from space. They were doing a special on a rock star who had killed himself in the spring. There was some footage of a crowd gathered in what looked like a park, and then they played a song by the rock star’s group. The dead person was the singer, and he dressed, Stan saw, sort of like Mandy. Distortion churned from the amplifiers. It was aggressive, messy music, but weirdly catchy—like someone had taken a Beatles tune and transcribed it for chainsaw orchestra. Stan thought that the rock star screaming was the most pure sound he had ever heard.
When Stan was seventeen he dressed like Mandy had when she was fifteen. Now Mandy had short spiky shock-white hair and raver pants. She was in college and had a gruff doughy girlfriend. Charles and Aunt Lisa had gotten serious, but never married, and in August Charles had died of a brain aneurysm. Now it was the High Holidays. Stan was staying in the basement. Same old couch, but a new TV. His parents were upstairs, in his mom’s old bedroom. Aunt Lisa wasn’t much on synagogue. “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” she’d always say, with cautious certainty, as if coming to the realization for the first time. But this year she fasted and even stayed at ser vices through Yizkor.
They all broke the fast together at sunset and then the older folks went to bed, so Stan, Mandy, the bullish girlfriend, and Jeff—Charles’s son from a previous marriage, who Aunt Lisa had insisted join them for dinner—decided to go down the road and have a drink at the Hi-Tone, where nobody ever got carded. “I think I started coming here, like, the school year right after that summer you stayed with us, Stan,” Mandy said to her cousin. “If anyone else says they’re sorry,” Jeff said. They were a few rounds in. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t believe them, I mean of course they are, but how much can you take, you know?” He seemed to be waiting for one of them to answer him. When they didn’t, he said he was going out front for a smoke and the girlfriend asked if she could bum one and went with him. Mandy and Stan sipped their beers.
“I am sorry, you know,” Mandy said to Stan after a while, “about.” Then she didn’t say anything. She looked up at the front door. But then she looked back at Stan. She said, “I mean it was kid stuff. Stupid.”
Stan didn’t know what he wanted to say, or what he was going to say, though he knew he was about to say something. The truth was he hardly ever thought about the summer he had spent playing touch with his punky cousin. He was older now than she’d been then. He’d slept with a few of the girls and one of the boys at his high school and was mostly happy. His grades were nothing special, but then neither was he.
“Is Darcey a heavy sleeper?” he asked her. Darcey was the girlfriend. He thought about the words he’d just said. He thought to himself: that’s what I just said.
She said nothing, only stared ahead. Was she mad? Had she even been listening? He didn’t like her staring like this. He touched her leg under the table: the knee and then the fullness of the thigh, then his hand was floating in space and that meant she had either jerked away or opened for him, he didn’t know. He finished his beer in one long pull, then stood up. He had gotten tall. He fished a couple quarters from his pocket, went over to the jukebox and punched in the number for his favorite song of all time, which he supposed she’d recognize. He couldn’t decide if he was changing the subject, making some grand statement about it, or just doing whatever he wanted. He went up to the bar and ordered fresh drinks for everyone. The other two would be back any minute. It was a cheap place but that hardly mattered. His parents had gotten their shit together and he could have sprung for that round of drinks if it’d cost twice, three times what it did.
It wasn’t his play on the jukebox yet, but all he had to do was wait. All he could do was wait. When he heard the opening chords—certainly, at the latest, by the bridge—knowledge would rise up inside like water seeping into a basement or an unfurling rose—or better yet, it would arrive in his mind fully formed, ex nihilo, like how when somebody calls you with the bad news your first thought is always “I already knew that, I have always known.” The words a lie at the moment you first think them, they immediately become true and stay true forever, just like the lyrics to any song.
WHAT WAS ONCE ALL YOURS
I was a few months shy of eighteen when Ma got religion. Hard to say what changed for her, exactly. I used to blame her father’s death for it, on account of how devout he was his whole life, and raised her h
imself. She took his passing about as hard as a person can. But I don’t know that I ever totally believed that explanation, even though I was the one who made it up. Maybe what makes more sense to say is I never believed it was the full reason, and that what I really think is this: sometimes deep down in a person is a switch waiting to be flipped, and nobody knows it’s there, not even the person, until one day—flip. And whatever light that switch controls pops on, starts to shine.
It was church every Sunday, all of a sudden, and some weeknights. Socials. Bible study. Whatever there was to do down at the church Ma meant to do it and have us all alongside her. The God stick whacked her so hard it seemed to have shook her brains loose, and I took to thinking of this as her “condition.”
First it was the Baptists, which was bad enough, but that romance proved short-lived. Ma joined the Assembly, and not one of us—Dad, Kyra, nor myself—was prepared to follow her there. So she let it be known that anyone who failed to join her in prayer would like as not fail to join her up in Heaven, and could hardly step out to the Walgreens, much less the church itself, without shouting up from the bottom of the staircase about how it might be the last time we ever beheld the countenance of one another forever.
Dad left a note that said we could reach him down at his brother’s in Corpus Christi if we needed to, and that he’d send some money when he could, but the gist was good-bye and good luck. “You’re old enough to understand this,” said a part of the note that was addressed to me. I still don’t know whether I think that’s so.
With him gone, it was as if her last anchor to earthly things had been cut, and her condition quickened. She was crazed, fervent, and implacable—a real banshee for Christ.
It’s scary when a person you have always known becomes a raving stranger before your disbelieving eyes. But there was nothing I could do. Time passed—crawled along, it seemed like—and I had my birthday. Legal finally to vote, smoke, and buy porno—not that I had a lot of interest in the first or much keeping me from the other two. I had my job at the grocery store and there were girls, Cass mostly, and drinking at the lake with my best friend, Joe Brown. Between all that and school I was hardly home, and Ma tended to go after whatever was right in front of her, so I was spared a lot, though on occasion she’d dial me up on my cell just to say that maybe I thought I could fool an old woman but there was One whom I sure could never fool.
All I ever said back to her was “Ma, you ain’t so old.”
My sister had a harder road. Ma used to just about torture Kyra, who was extra pigheaded on top of what comes naturally with being fifteen—that age when your situation seems like a life sentence, so you always act like you’ve got nothing to lose, but also no hope of ever winning.
Kyra took to rebelling, and snuck out and got caught sneaking in and shoplifted and got herself kicked out of the high school and generally drove Ma to distraction any way she could, which for a time seemed to about make them even, until the night Kyra nearly died. Fistful of downers some boy told her were a real good time. Probably he’d hoped to feed her a couple, maybe diddle her with his fingers after she passed out, but she swiped the whole bottle from his backpack and brought ’em home. Joke on him, right? Me and Joe Brown found out who it was from her friends, went by his place and had a long talk with him, you can bet you. But that’s not this story.
Like I was starting to say before, I was spending a good bit of my time with Cass. She was junior to my senior at the high school, a chicken-legged brunette with acne scars on her cheeks, hairy forearms, a perfect behind. She was a known slut, and the most serious student in our whole school, for she understood that grades could be a ticket out, and was only ever stumped by one question, which was why nobody else seemed to understand the same. She had a decent singing voice but didn’t use it. When we did it drunk she liked to be called things.
Cass encouraged me to keep up with my schoolwork, but if I didn’t—I didn’t—that was my own lookout. She let me hang around while she was working, so long as I didn’t put the TV up too loud. I liked this arrangement. I liked to be right there when she finished with her studies. “Okay,” she’d say, closing the day’s last book, and I’d look over her way, grinning, knowing it was finally time.
Which brings me back around to Joe Brown, one of maybe three guys in our school who Cass hadn’t ever fucked, or at least rubbed off in the lunch room through his jeans just for something to do. Joe Brown was breathless around Cass. It was stammering, moon-faced love. He didn’t have to hide it from me and made no effort to, even though she was my girl. That’s the kind of brothers me and Joe Brown were.
“She don’t even know I exist” was the type of thing he’d say about her, which was obvious garbage since everyone knows everyone in a high school, besides which shit towns like ours don’t have strangers. In fact she knew him plenty well, and couldn’t stand him. She was disgusted by his love, the sight of how she made him weak. She figured he’d eventually harden himself up or die a victim of his own witless yearning, and she expressed only the mildest curiosity—certainly no preference—about which one it might be.
Knowing all this about him, and about her, there was truly only one thing I could do, which was to describe in perfect excruciating detail every moment of every instance of my penetrating Cass to Joe Brown while we drove around the lake road, drinking our beers. It broke his heart to hear these things, and made him nauseous with longing, but if I’d stop he would beg and beg for more. He didn’t know it, and it didn’t seem to be exactly working, but I was giving him tough, fierce love, which is the best kind. I wanted to see him beat this thing. I did not want for him to spend the rest of his life a sweaty mouth-breather who made girls laugh uneasily, shake their heads, and walk away.
We didn’t have money to buy more beers, so we went to Joe Brown’s uncle’s place, where there was always a selection. His uncle’s name was Connie, but everyone called him Judge, since the night several years back when he got in a bar brawl that ended with him head-stomping an out-of-towner who’d been accused—by Connie, mind you—of looking down his nose. “Who’s judgin’ now?” he screamed over and over at the man who was bleeding and curled up fetal on the floor. Cost Judge his badge, but earned him his nickname, and probably we were all better off with him having the one and not the other. Judge loved his name. He loved his nephew, and let Joe Brown come over and do as he pleased. This was very lucky for Joe Brown, and therefore for me, too, because Judge was a bad man. He even kept two women, who wore stretch pants and had lousy blond dye jobs. He was quick to beat either. One had a pair of identical boys, nine or so years old, and they were considered fair game, too. He listened to the kind of talk radio that makes your brain shrivel up like a salted slug. He hated Jews something awful, but respected Israel for its military balls. To sustain decency for five consecutive minutes would have been beyond his capacity, besides which he didn’t have two friends in ten who’d have known it for what it was. He ran a sideline business selling illegal fireworks, was the kind of man who’d swerve toward an animal in the road, and generally speaking he needed nothing so badly in this world as to be run through with a great hot knife.
Judge has nothing to do with this story. He wasn’t even at home. We let ourselves in, swiped a six-pack from his fridge, and went back to Joe Brown’s. Judge is simply a character on whom I can’t help but dwell some. Something pulls my thoughts back his way. He inspires a loathing so pure, to be silent about it seems no less a crime than denying love.
So we were at Joe Brown’s, down in the basement, which was his room, drinking Judge’s beer. My phone buzzed. I almost didn’t look, since I wasn’t going to answer anyhow. It was bound to be Ma on another psycho Jesus tear or else my damn sister wanting a ride home from some party out in the sticks. But then I realized it had been just one buzz, two pulses, like, he-ey, and so I looked. It was a text from Cass: COME OVER RITE NOW.
I showed the phone to Joe Brown. “Now what do you suppose this could be?” I said.
“Shit,” he said. “How am I supposed to know what that girl’s thinking? I’d give anything to get inside her head.” This was just a little yearn, a passing thing, like a stringy cloud. And yet I could not let it pass me by.
“Well,” I said to him, “maybe you need some inside perspective. Like do something she does so you can think the way she thinks.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“That’s easy,” I said. “I can’t even believe I never thought of this before.”
“What, Troy? What is it?”
“Well Cass’s just about favorite thing in the whole wide world—”
“Yeah?”
“—is sucking me off. So you better get to it.”
“Aw, you motherfuck,” said Joe Brown. He looked punched, then gathered himself and lunged forward to punch me. I hopped up from my seat and out of his range. We were both laughing. I hated and loved myself. I got us a couple of fresh beers. They hissed our truce. I flipped the phone open and dialed.
“Are you on your way over?” Cass said. I’d been planning to kid her for a bit, since I was already on a roll. I figured she was just looking to hook up, and there was no reason that couldn’t wait—let her get even more worked up, right?—but I knew as soon as I heard her voice that kidding was the last thing on her mind, and that sucked the kidding right on out of me. “I’m a little drunk,” I said, “over here at Joe Brown’s place. What’s up?”
“Then buy a coffee,” she said, “on your way over. And do not under any circumstances bring your girlfriend along with you.” She was gone.
“All right, honey,” I said into the dead phone. “That sounds real nice. I’ll be there just as soon as I can.”
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