But what Paul thought was that his mother looked strange, startled, and that her face, which could be so nice, did not look nice now, looked buggy, red, and her neck was tilted unnaturally. Paul thought that Clover said mean things, and said things having nothing to do with his mother but which she took as compliments. For example he said, “They say the eyes are the window to the soul, but I say it’s the mouth,” and Goldie said “Thank you,” her voice very soft. Then Clover said, “This isn’t some porn now, Goldie,” and she laughed as if flattered. Clover said he’d like to get some shots of her out in the world, among people, with music playing, maybe at that new club over in Milltown? Would she like that? Would she like to go out there with him? She got her coat. She kissed the tip of her son’s nose. She whispered he could go ahead with the cake now. She knew, after their talk, he would understand.
6
He had written Janice’s name in his margins. He had studied each letter, each little workaday letter, which, placed together in this peculiar arrangement, as if by some enchantment, became her name, became her. On their second date she gave him a round piece of sea glass, the wave-polished bottom of a bottle, pale, watery green, a color he could find speckling her irises if he looked hard enough. He looked hard. He prayed that she’d stay, that she’d soften, become nicer, over time. He was willing to give it time.
When she found out she was pregnant she’d threatened to hurt herself.
He said, “You don’t have to have it.”
“My mother would kill me!”
“She wouldn’t have to know.”
“It’d be all over me. She’d know. She’d read it on me. She’d know.”
Her mother was magic, omniscient, cruel, and also the only one Janice could turn to to recover from the world’s cruelty. It was her paradox. She wore olive eye shadow, heavy foundation, magenta lipstick—makeup so deeply and evenly applied, so opaque, it reminded him of a coroner’s work. It was as though she was already dead and therefore could never leave them—another paradox.
“I want to hurt myself,” she whispered. “I do.”
“No, baby,” he said.
“No baby,” she said.
It was an irony, he thought, that she who so desperately relied on her mother, who knew so well the savage connection to one’s mother, would one day abandon her own child. She couldn’t herself bear being one, couldn’t bear holding the mother’s power, for Janice herself wanted no power. She wanted only whim. She wanted only a few naked Polaroids of her mole-speckled body to admire, those cute juice glasses, some Zeppelin to crow along with.
Thomas watched Goldie walk toward the car with the photographer. He was a tall hippie guy. Somewhere on his body was a bell, maybe attached to the strap of his sandal, so he jingled faintly as he moved. All those guys wore bells, little signs of their lightheartedness. He deserved to be punched. Seeing them, seeing the guy’s easy loping strides and Goldie’s careful, high-heeled totter, the guy’s primer-gray car with the feather on its antenna, Thomas wanted to spit. She could do infinitely better! From behind a clot of shrubbery, he watched her gasp a little in the night air, her shoulders rising. He heard her admire the creep’s ramshackle car, saw her wait for him to open the door for her, and then open it herself, and climb in. The car puttered down the gravel road. She was gone. She left the kid. She could do so much better.
He moved back to the window. If he couldn’t watch Goldie he could watch the boy. It wasn’t the same, not at all, but there was still a satisfaction in watching the kid. He held certain clues. It was like getting a look into her medicine cabinet. The boy remained at the table. One of his huge slippers had fallen off. Still his face was blank, his head slightly tilted, like a ventriloquist’s doll on a hook at night.
“I’ll have it,” Janice had said. “I’ll have to have it. I will.”
“You’ll be a good mother.”
She winced. “Please don’t talk like that. I didn’t say I’d be a mother. I’ll have it, okay? Can we just leave it at that?”
He didn’t know what she meant, where they were leaving it.
Her face was pale. He loved her with unbending passion. He said so. He uttered a few more sentiments, and then she went to the bathroom to be sick again.
7
They drove along Route 22. On the radio a voice was saying: The Lord our Savior won’t accept excuses. The Lord our Savior doesn’t care a lick if the babysitter’s got a rack like a—and he turned the station dial until he found banjo music, cheery bluegrass, and then leaned back, nodding along. “That’s sure some strumming.” He whistled through his teeth, darkly, like a cowboy.
“I appreciate this,” she said.
“No need. It’s a pleasure. Though I feel kind of bad about your kid.”
“Oh, he’ll be fine. He’ll put himself to bed. Like I said, he’s an independent boy. He likes to be on his own.”
“Good thing to be, independent. There’s no better talent.”
“He’s wise beyond his years.”
“Yeah?”
“Plus his math skills. He’s been asked to be a tutor for another boy—a boy who happens to be in the grade above him.”
“Well now.”
“His scores are very high.”
“People used to say that about me—wise beyond my years. Can’t say it’s always great fun. I mean it can be a burden. No question it pays off, but wisdom’s tough for a kid.”
“They said it about me, too,” she said, but this wasn’t exactly true. What they’d said was: You’re too big for your britches, Goldie. You keep up this way and you’ll be knocked up at fourteen. She knew it wasn’t the same as wise beyond one’s years, but it was the version girls got sometimes.
The banjo slowed. Now someone plucked the sort of tender, sleepy melody she associated with against-the-odds weddings. It felt like a gift, that this sweet song should find this car out here on this road, should find this radio, them—that they were a them tonight was itself a gift and a surprise. How, after everything, did she end up in a car with an artist? His wasn’t a pickup, or a red Camaro swamped by musky pine deodorizer. It was a piece of shit and it didn’t matter; he didn’t need a good car to stand for his manliness. Inside it smelled stale, a bit like body odor if she was honest, and it needed paint. He didn’t care about paint. His was a life of the mind. A life of the camera. A life of the beauty underneath the beauty, he said. He had called this incandescence. All of it, the ugly car, his words, the tiny bell, made her feel nearly certain that life could find a way to redeem anyone who was remotely decent.
Inside of her she carried, in a small tough nut, her days at the Lady Parade and a few other bad things she’d done. But this nut was small. And around it was everything else: her good smile, her devotion to her child, her style, her hope. Mister Clover had seen these other things. More than that: he’d wanted to take their picture.
The slow, sweet song was winding down. It would end soon. Its slowness had the opposite effect on her body: she became revved up, impatient, her feet tapped a little, her knees shook. She felt a kind of thrumming in her stomach, like having drunk some milk that had begun to turn. She stole a few glimpses of his profile as he drove—he was handsome, if a little pretty. He had a girl’s round, pink mouth, but the rest of his face absorbed its femininity—the dark and jutting brow, the fuzzy underchin, the big ears. His hair was uncombed and coarse, gray-brown, long enough to tuck behind his ears.
“Tell me about yourself, Goldie,” he said.
It caught her off guard. She shrugged. “I have a simple life. You saw it.”
“I saw it,” he agreed. “But what’s underneath it all?”
“Well, my parents.”
“Yeah, I imagined something like that.”
A misty rain had begun and his wipers squeaked across the windshield. She was silent for a moment. Her father’s buddies had called him “Dappy.” He was an electrician who drank alone in the attic most nights, who occasionally came downstairs to hold
both of her hands in one of his huge, dry hands and warn her about the ills of the world. But she couldn’t really say this, could she? Neither did it seem right to say that her mother, praised always for her vivaciousness, for her ass-length hair and fine, rippling laugh, died when her car left the road in the July of Goldie’s eleventh year. The car was found days later at the bottom of a gully. It would be off-putting, certainly, to say this, or to say that for years she thought her mother faked her death, that one day Goldie would come upon her at a bus station or on a busy avenue in some city, would come upon a nervous woman with dyed hair and big sunglasses, and they’d embrace in spite of themselves. She should not say these things, right? But as it turned out she didn’t need to say anything, because he started talking again, and this was an enormous relief, for she knew it was basically impossible to say anything about your parents without flattening them out to their saddest parts, without showing the part of you that’s just the same.
He said, “My old mum is a playwright. The Valley Players are putting on her show next month. It’s called Winter: A Death in Three Acts. You should go—it’s really tremendous. I helped her edit it. First-rate.”
She said, “Yes, I’ll have to check it out,” wondering if this might be a date.
8
He didn’t want the cake anymore. Now that he could have it, now that it was his and no one else’s, he didn’t want it, not the cake, not the matchbox car, they had no meaning. No—they had new meaning. They meant: If you eat you’ll become that Fluff-devouring guy on the kitchen floor. Or they meant: You’ll become him anyway, but faster if you eat.
That wasn’t true either. They meant: Who are you kidding, kid? You’re him already. You were born him.
He sat at the table wishing he were somewhere else.
Three years before, his mother had taken him into the city. She wanted to eat a special kind of sandwich and bring him to a shop that sold famous pickles. She wanted to buy them each a new pair of shoes. But what did he care about shoes? The city was magnificent and filthy. Poo spit breath pee yeast. Being there was like entering someone’s body—it made him think of a movie where the heroes get miniaturized and injected into a human bloodstream and travel around in a special submarine, dodging vessels and cells. How could he try on a pair of shoes? How could he be expected to care about his feet? He’d let go of her hand and gotten lost.
Fifteen hours later he’d gotten found.
He wasn’t allowed to play baseball or see any kids for a month after that, no dessert either, or TV, though the TV part lasted only a few days. Without TV he was always hanging around her, tapping her elbows, interrupting her magazine time and bath time with jokes he’d invented and numerical equations. It was a lonely month. She kept saying, “You’ve fried my nerves, Paul…You’ve fried me all up,” and she did look fried for a while after that, fidgety, tense, always chewing the inside of her cheek so her mouth looked twisted and old. “That was the very worst night of my whole life,” she said, and he saw that she meant it.
He was sorry, he was, but it wasn’t the worst night of his life. He hadn’t meant to get lost. He’d been just seven years old, a little kid, fascinated still by sewer sludge and bottle caps, by the faces in kneecaps. He couldn’t be blamed. The city was loud and pure. It was itself the way a body is itself; it had no say in the matter. He couldn’t avoid the windows full of radios and robots, the shuttering subway grates, the jolt that rose splendidly into his loins when a train passed underneath—underneath—him, and the rows of phone booths, all those phones with their rigid silver cords like the tails of the rats of the future. There was a man whose beard was a squirrel. There was a beach ball in the gutter, fully inflated, floating along in the wind made by traffic. But these were not the things that took him from his mother. They just held him back a little, and then she would turn and grab him, tug his wrist for a while, until she herself got distracted and would loosen her grip again.
After walking for a long time, they came upon a park. They turned a corner and there it was, endless, full of yellow flowers and squirrels and birds, everything fluttering. A shirtless man on roller skates flew by them, by Paul and his mother, and she turned to watch, cried “Speed demon! Hot potata!” and this is when she let go of Paul’s hand for the last time.
The park smelled of grease and melon, a picnic air. Free of his mother’s grasp, he was drawn to a stream where a pale red fish whipped itself in circles around a beer bottle. He was drawn to a tangle of barbwire. He found a yo-yo without its string. He found an unopened can of RC Cola. The place was full of traps, bitty snares, harmless and perfect mysteries, a pile of athletic socks here, a trumpet case there, more and more yellow flowers the deeper in you went, orange newts. But it wasn’t nature that interested him, it was how ruined nature was, how full of metal and glass and plastic, and he understood that in some essential way nature really was best when it was spoiled, you could know it better like this, could see it for what it was, though you weren’t allowed to say so or you were a litterer and unlawful. He didn’t want to litter; he just enjoyed the effect. When did he realize he’d lost sight of his mother? It dawned on him slowly. He let himself pretend it wasn’t true. He turned in a few circles. He called for her. He retraced his steps, then surged forward on the path. But she was nowhere.
Before he could panic he heard a voice say, “Looking for something?” It was a lady pushing a shopping cart and dragging four old dogs. She wore two leashes around each wrist.
“My mother,” he said.
She shook her arms, releasing the animals. They approached him shyly, nuzzled his armpits and belly. Coffee cans, bags of dog food, newspapers, and tangled clothing filled the shopping cart. Her hair was long and coarse, like an Indian’s.
“My mother,” he said again. “I can’t find her.”
She gave him a glinting, easy smile. “You can’t, can you?” She nodded. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Can’t find her anywhere. But look.” She motioned to the stream and the trees and the purplish sky—it was dusk by now.
She offered to help him look. They walked the great park in many wide loops. They passed many mothers, none his. She took him into the park’s nooks, its snarls of trash and overgrowth, and never did he feel afraid. He felt shaky from hunger and exertion, and feared the punishment coming when he saw his mother again, but he knew he was safe with this lady, that she would help. She pushed her cart, grunting sometimes as they went uphill, exuding calm. She sang a song in a different language and now and then yelled out to the dogs, who heeded her. It grew dark, so she brought him to her house, which was a tiny shed like a cave, four walls of particle board and a tin roof tucked into a stand of poplars. She promised they’d look again tomorrow. She gave him graham crackers and a piece of chocolate from a padlocked box (she made him close his eyes while she entered the combination). Then she told him the story of the three bears. Its familiarity was a relief and a disappointment. She was a kindly monster. If she ate him she would eat him with tenderness. As he lay on the dogs’ beanbag, sleep approaching, an unexpected calm settled over him. It was like he’d come home, like this was the place that was meant for him. He knew that was silly but felt it anyhow. The dog called Shelby curled around him. For a few moments, until guilt overwhelmed him, he pretended she was his mother. A rain began, like a barrage of bullets on the tin roof, but he was safe.
He woke up early and knew for sure his mother would be angry and crying black tears. He left quietly. The old woman did not stir when he stood up, nor when he took one last graham cracker from the box. Three dogs were asleep; one watched him. He smiled at it, then hurried away. The sun was just rising, the park more ordinary today, uglier in the new light. Litter, today, was more like litter. He walked toward traffic noise, certain someone would see him and help him find his way to being found, which is just what happened. An old man brought him to a police officer on a horse, who to Paul’s disappointment did not put Paul on the horse but instead called another polic
e officer, who put him in a car, not even a cop car, an ordinary car, and buckled him in.
Paul often wondered what that lady was doing now. Was she as lonely as he was, in her cold shed? Or had they gathered her up long ago and put her someplace? He was not stupid. He knew something was wrong with her. But he couldn’t help it: sometimes he wished he hadn’t left. Why do some people get what they want and others don’t? He sat at the table with these thoughts. They were too familiar to be distressing. But then something that was distressing began to happen. It started in his throat—a flickering, flitting sensation—and all at once he wanted to do something mean. The feeling in his throat became a commotion in his whole body, a fluttering in his stomach, then his groin, his thighs, knees, soon filling him from head to feet. It urged him to hurt something, it was the force of badness rippling through him. It was in his body but did not belong to him, not yet, and he wanted to get it out. Could he get it out? He rose from the table, shook out his hands. He stamped his feet. It didn’t help.
He clutched his hammer and, one by one, loosened the floorboard nails. Then he pounded them back into place. This didn’t help either. It wasn’t a real chore. He had no work to do, no duty except to stay, to listen, to wait. The cake was toxic, like Clover said, and Paul thought about pounding the cake with his hammer, making a mess of it, but what would that accomplish? He felt terrible, crimpy, fluttering and hot, his body no longer his body. The strange sensation radiated lengthwise, like a twisting ribbon. It found even his toes and made them tingle. He took off his slippers. His feet were pink and ugly and blockish. With his fingernails he pinched his toes. He started with all of them but felt the pull of a single place, the skin between the big toe and the one next to it, that webbing on his right foot. He pinched harder, there.
The sensation stopped. His heart calmed. He breathed. His mother was decent, his father irrelevant, the lady in the park a harmless ghost. He breathed some more. But then, as soon as he released the webbing, the feeling returned. He pinched again—it stopped again. Let go—it returned. He could not pinch himself for the rest of his life. Panic.
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel Page 4