“Where’d you acquire such a foul mouth, mister? Not from me.”
“Exactly that’s who: Me.”
By instinct I knew that the best defense against Me’s bruise-mood meanness (bruise-mood was what Me called her depressed state, & this term was apt) was a fast & unrepentant offense. Like a boxer who doesn’t wait for his opponent’s jab but goes for the head pronto.
“Bye, Me! See ya later.”
“Fuck you.”
Most mornings even if Wolfie was a few minutes late the bus was waiting for him, & the other kids staring out the windows like by himself he, Wolfie, is a spectacle not just a scrawny long-haired 13-yr-old with shadowy doom eyes & sullen mouth like a girl’s, & the reason was (Me’s paranoia, but Me was accurate) that the bus driver was a true mother-type, all smiles & sympathy, who pitied Wolfie as a child-with-a-problem-mother. Olcott was a small town where rumors & gossip (not all malicious) were like radio waves continuously bombarding the air. Within a few days of Me & Wolfie moving into the bungalow on Seaview Lane with rusted screens & fake-brick asphalt siding & that weedy yard with a look of things buried in it, it was known through the neighborhood that this wasn’t your normal American TV family.
No dad, for instance.
“See what I say? People spying on us.”
“But not the enemy, Me. Not here.”
If Me flashed a little crazy after a restless night of smoking & prowling the darkened house with owl-eyes alert to suspicious noises outside & on the roof, it didn’t inevitably mean she’d still be in such a state when the schoolbus deposited Wolfie back home at 3:35 P.M. In fact it could mean Me’d taken her meds & calmed her mind by working at collage-sculptures of “found objects” (which Me never finished out of superstition) & having a vitamin-enriched midday meal (yogurt, wheat germ), & possibly she’d take a miles-long hike on the windy beach & even a nap curled up like a cat among the dunes, & return refreshed & invigorated & maternal. All this was a possibility. In the universe in which Me & Wolfie dwelled, each hour was a new toss of the dice. Heads, tails. You don’t always lose.
So possibly Me’d be awaiting her only child home from school, a tray of peanut butter cookies (only slightly scorched) cooling on the kitchen counter, smiling & attentive like any Olcott mom. Teasing, “Oh hey: back so soon? Guess I gotta let you in, huh?”
(Not like any mom, maybe. Me’d have the screen door latched & within grabbing range, on a counter, one of her razor-sharp knives.)
“Guess so, Me.”
“Well, I love ya, dummy. C’mere.”
At 13-going-on-14 you’re expected to shrink from a mom’s kiss but I never did. Couldn’t take a chance it wouldn’t be the last.
WOLFIE THE DEMEROL kid. Me reminisced.
Meaning she’d had me by way of that “heavenly” drug. & other drugs keeping sanity afloat. Lithium, Dilaudid. Valium no more exotic than aspirin. If you grew up with them you saw them as greens, blues, whites, big-capsule, medium-size capsule, square-cut, pumpkin seed & clamshells. Some of the pills were manufactured with X’s imprinted on them, almost invisibly, & others were indented with lines at the meridian so, if you wished, you could cut the pill neatly in two with a knife & it wouldn’t crumble. Wolfie’d learned to split pills at a young age. When Me’s hands were shaky.
Wolfie was the Demerol kid but in fact that was Ralphie. Little Ralph, Jr. God damn what a name for a sweet innocent guy, Me said. She’d repented not having the kid but the circumstances. Except if you subtract the circumstances, where’s the kid? We’d ponder such riddles of metaphysics on our long drives in the ditchwater-color Chevy van Me’d borrowed (from a man friend in Stanley, Montana, who must’ve never seriously expected to get it back). Me was susceptible to bruise-moods when pondering how we’re essentially determined by our genes, locked into patterns of behavior rigid as ants if you had the perspective to judge, yet Me could be lifted suddenly into 100 -watt moods by a vista of beautiful mountains, cloud-formations, rolling hills, farmland & dairy cows & horses grazing in fields, & the realization that mankind is essentially free, there’s free will for all, since we can’t foresee the future & strictly speaking there is no future until we make it. “See what I’m saying, kiddo?”
Wolfie grunted sure. By age 11 he’d become a metaphysician.
Figuring it’s only words Me batted around like Ping-Pong balls. But words with a certain power to pierce the heart.
Wolfie, the weird name, was Me’s compromise of Ralphie. She’d been pressured (not just by the baby’s father, but by the baby’s father’s mother) into agreeing to that name. Ralph, Jr. For the father was Ralph, Sr. He’d had his proud-father way with naming & baptizing as well in that long-ago time. Baptizing! In 1966! Me was disgusted. You’d think by then the Christian religion would’ve gone the way of the dodo & the duck-billed platypus but it just hangs on, fumed Me, & Wolfie interjected with wiseguy pickiness is the duck-billed platypus extinct, I don’t think so.
Me ignored this. If you hoped to correct her when she was slip-shod, she had a queenly way of not-hearing.
“Those Christians! All they want is to gobble up our hearts.”
Me was Wolfie’s version of Mommy. Mommee. Me liked to tell how I was a breathless butterball-baby squealing & lunging for attention already in the cradle, & snatching at words but able to grasp, as with pudgy butter-fingers, only syllables. Coaxed to say Mommy, the best I could do was Meee even as a toddler. Daddee came out Du-ud (as Me told hilariously) & naturally that pissed the guy off. Even an asshole has feelings.
Wolfie, who was Ralph in school records, tested out high on I.Q. exams (not genius like the 160’s but pretty smart like in the 140’s), & this was actually held against him by Me in her down moods. Me believed that the smarter you are, the more you suffer. The more developed your brain, the more there’s to go wrong, like a high-speed computer. Me had a girl cousin in Geneva, New York, who’d had a Down’s baby & was that little boy sweet! Wolfie said sarcastically he was sorry he wasn’t brain damaged & Me said that’s typical of a bright boy, sarcasm & irony as bad as me. Me seemed to mean it saying over the years she’d have preferred a sweet dumb child of either sex, not brain-damaged of course, just normal, what passes for normal in America, boy or girl wouldn’t matter so long as this child didn’t inherit her tendency to malaise, mope & metaphysics & yanking out eyelashes in idle times.
Actually, neither Me nor Wolfie’d succumbed to this bad habit for a while. Our sloe eyes were thick-lashed like dolls’.
Me said a high I.Q. is like a laser beam, peering into cavedarkness where you don’t really want to go. She liked to retell Plato’s parable of the cave which was more than 2,000 yrs old & which Wolfie thought was overrated. Me said, “There’s two species within Homo sapiens, the illusioned & the disillusioned. You can begin as the first & end up as the second but not the other way around. You can be born either one & never budge an inch. Who knows why?”
Me had that teacherly way & with her icepick eyes was compelling.
Except in her own eyes where she was ugly & a scrawny blond broad Me was a good-looking woman, & Wolfie’d seen how men stared at her in the street & sometimes followed her on foot or in their vehicles. That was how some mistakes were made, Me conceded. There were times she’d gone to a male barber & had her hair trimmed to a butch cut out of meanness to herself & whoever might’ve wanted to contemplate her, & there was her thin whiplash body & the scary glisten of her eyes & it was true Me had a scar on the underside of her jaw like a centipede (caused by tripping & falling on black ice Me insisted but Wolfie seemed to recall years ago the ex-father shoving Me down face first on a gas stove burner which lucky for Me’s looks hadn’t been turned on, Oh yes Wolfie recalled the blood & the crazed screaming & shouting of those lost days), still Me was a goodlooking woman & would retain her looks for another ten years at least. At 34, which was Me’s age in 1979 in Olcott, New York, in T-shirt & khaki jodhpurs & baseball cap & sandals she looked so young, the schoolbus driver had to ask
Wolfie is that your sister & Wolfie blushed grunting a reply that might’ve been yeh or naw stomping on to the back of the bus so the goddamn question couldn’t be repeated.
The move to Olcott, like previous abrupt moves, had been an impromptu decision on Me’s part. Departing one place of residence for another, & leaving no forwarding address, gave Me a quick high. (Wolfie grooved on it, too. No need for this kid to sniff airplane glue like his white-trash classmates, with such a mom as Me!) In Olcott, population 1,600, there’d been a period of peace & calm of approximately five weeks as in the aftermath of a hurricane & tidal wave. Olcott was a “resort” town of which Me claimed she’d heard, & must’ve confused with somewhere else. Cheap lakefront rental cottages & bungalows, bargain-rate motels, a tacky boardwalk & amusement park including a neon-pink Ferris wheel visible from their bungalow a mile away—Romantic, huh? Me asked, late summer nights. But summer ended. Half the population departed after Labor Day like robots & businesses shut down & immediately the air turned chill. Lake Ontario was a bitch, Me admitted, so fucking big. A harsh wind blew from the distant Canadian shore, an odor of rotted clams & fish. The tide began (as Wolfie knew it would!) to seep back into their lives. The bruise-mood tide. Me began to brood on death again & asked such questions: “Maybe we’re actually dead & don’t know it? Like you’re dreaming, & don’t know it? For the essence of the dream is to hypnotize you, right?” Me locked doors & windows in the five-room house when Wolfie was away at school & sometimes doubted he was at school & not elsewhere, kidnapped by the enemy. Or plotting with the enemy.
The lake winds brought hellish nights when Me’s adrenaline level was such she couldn’t sleep & her hunger for metaphysics kept her awake. But she was too excited to read, too. Her consciousness was piercing through to a higher level—“Beyond linear, man!” She worked with 25-lb dumbbells lifting & swinging the black weights for hours. Her biceps swelled like breasts. In Eagle Falls, Minnesota, she’d taken karate lessons with an ex-Marine instructor, a guy with thinning black hair in a ponytail who’d fallen in love with her (was Me’s account) & given her gifts she hadn’t wished for including money. & with this money, Me & Wolfie’d made their middle-of-the-night departure. If only the high could last forever! “Like those renowned rats,” Me told Wolfie, “they implanted electrodes in their brains & the rats could stimulate ‘pleasure zones’ & grooved on that & forgot to eat, & died of starvation.”
Wolfie said dubiously, “That’s cool, Me? I don’t think so.”
“That’s Nirvana, baby. You’ll wish for it too, one day.”
Not long afterward, one windy Olcott night Wolfie woke hearing mutterings & soft laughter through the plasterboard wall of his room. He recognized the symptoms. Crept out to see what the hell the woman was doing. Off her meds (that was obvious) & her skin smarting & burning & he dreaded to think that in a mutinous gesture she’d flushed every capsule & pill down the toilet. That shit’s expensive, Me, Wolfie’d tell her. There Me was naked, splendid & naked, skin glittering like mica from the manic sweat, & eyes glaring fierce & scared. Her slender muscled legs covered in filmy blond hairs & the hair of her skull, Wolfie noted, grown now to several inches, floating & blond-filmy in lamplight. Oh, Me was a beauty! Quick, Wolfie ducked back into Me’s bedroom to hunt up something for her to wear, returned to toss a rayon robe at her, his face heated with embarrassment. Saying, “What if somebody’s looking in the window for Christ’s sake! Always you’re worrying people are looking in our windows!” Wolfie raged & fumed (it pissed him off, the inconsistency of the paranoid) & Me laughed at him. Not that Me’s nakedness, the dazzling milky skin of her breasts, belly & upper thighs in contrast to the tanned skin of shoulders, arms & legs, was a great surprise to Wolfie. Not that the staring breast nipples & the blond swath of pubic hair was a wholly fantastic sight to him. They’d been together, Me & Wolfie, for 13 yrs. Me laughed crudely at the kid’s face. “Wolfie’s a prude, I guess. How’d I give birth to a prude?” But she took the robe & struggled vaguely with the sleeves, got it on partway though un-buttoned & the belt not tied. On the shadowy living room floor—Wolfie’d stumbled against them—were cardboard boxes from their move, only partly unpacked, & on the ratty rattan sofa were a half-dozen of Me’s knives, long gleaming blades & tooled handles, Me’s so-called knife collection she’d inherited from a grandfather who’d been a major in the U.S. Army (Wolfie took this on faith, he’d never encountered grandparents let alone great-grandparents) & her Samurai puppets & aged rag & porcelain dolls she’d collected in a time preceding Wolfie, & old framed lithographs (“The Skaters,” “The Engagement,” “Three Little Kittens”) that revived sharp memories in Wolfie. Those faded & dreamlike drawings Me & Wolfie’d tried to copy in crayons, rainy days, snowbound days & nights, in remote places they’d lived & had one day fled. Wolfie rolled his eyes at this corny old stuff but there’d been a time not too long ago when he was fascinated by the lithographs, like Me. Seeing that in olden times, in the 1880’s, life was different. People were happier then. Their faces were less complicated. Their bodies were like mannequins, carefully dressed. Kittens had a way of smiling with upturned whiskers that brought tears into your eyes, almost. In pictures of families in horse-drawn buggies, even the horses smiled.
Me was smoking her goddamn cigarettes Wolfie hated, so to piss Me off he’d snatch the pack from her & light one himself & take a few drags with a practiced air. Tears in her eyes Me demanded to know if Wolfie was in touch with you-know-who. Wolfie exhaled smoke & smirked. Like a kid with a secret. Me said, touching one of the stainless steel blades with just her fingertips, lightly as if it was burning hot, “You don’t want to test me, kid. You or that fucker.” Wolfie said, “What fucker? This is news to me.” Me asked if he’d come to the school & that was how he’d traced them? Wolfie registered under that other name. A name Me wouldn’t utter. Wolfie said shrugging, “Think any shit you want to think, Me. You’re gonna think it anyway at 4 A.M.” At this, Me had to laugh.
Wolfie sat on the floor looking through the boxes he’d helped to pack & Me smoked her cigarette & was drinking from a smudged glass just water from the faucet (Wolfie thought) & there wasn’t going to be much sleeping that night. Tears in her eyes Me asked why she’d lost her illusions so young? She was only 16 when the craziness first began, not so bad as it’d be later, but the start of it was hearing voices, & mostly they were reasonable voices, & the surprise of it wasn’t the voices themselves but the revelation she had at about age 19 that other people didn’t hear them in their heads the way she did, & it was a sign of craziness to answer back.
Me said, pleading, “How the fuck would you know? That everybody else wasn’t hearing them, too?”
Wolfie had to concede, “You wouldn’t, I guess.”
Incensed, Me said, “It’s like a dream. You hear voices in a dream. Why’d you doubt they were real?”
Wolfie was thinking the weirdest voices he heard were real.
“I’m responsible for it, though, huh?” Me said. “For both of us, I guess.” She sounded broody & speculative. Now running a fingertip along the sharp-honed edge of a twelve-inch blade with a carved wooden handle. Steak knife? A cigarette between her lips dropped hot ash, undetected, onto her milky-skinned little belly. “How long am I responsible for you, kid?”
Wolfie said, “Till I’m eighteen, man. That’s the law.”
Me said, “Maybe you won’t live to be eighteen. Wise-ass.”
THE CHILD SQUEEZES out of the mother’s body. How you could get so small & like a fish, was hard to comprehend. Me’d explained in a crayon drawing. A long time ago. She’d drawn a woman with a small head & smiling mouth & mostly the woman was a belly & in the belly was a little thing coiled like a fish, with shut eyes. Me saw his face & laughed tenderly saying, We were all little fishes once. Don’t be afraid to think it. Some of us stay fish, & some evolve onward into standing upright & being human. It can be fun, darling! Don’t look so glum.
She’d kiss & tickle him till he l
aughed, & shut his pudgy fingers in her hair. Their happiest time.
OUTSIDE A WAWA MARKET in Newfane, twelve miles south of Olcott where we’d go for groceries & gas, there’s this tattoo freak sitting on the front steps about 30 yrs old & good-looking in a down-dirty way in sleeveless undershirt to show off his muscles & tattoos, smoking & drinking from a can of Budweiser. This guy with sideburns, long greasy tangled hair, a three-day beard like black spikes & he’s got a crammed duffel bag so I guessed he was a hitch-hiker. Not from around here I guessed. Unless just sprung from prison & on his way home. Taking up space on the Wawa steps so Me had to practically step over him, & Wolfie with her, & in that instant vigilant Wolfie saw the look pass between Me & the tattoo freak.
The look. In theory Wolfie’s too young to know what it meant but practically speaking he knew it meant SEX.
Inside the store Me was breathless & talking fast in her scattered distracted way not seeing where she was headed, & Wolfie said severely, “We came in here to get tomato soup & ice cream & soap & toilet paper don’t forget, Me!” & Me said quickly, “Hell I’m gonna forget.” She was licking her lips like they were dry but she never once glanced toward the door.
Me’s weakness was a certain breed of man. Where the ex-husband at least had a job, selling cars & making good money (at least when not drinking), these others were worse off than Me herself, & a few of them on the wrong side of the law. In her sane state Me knew these guys were losers & bad news for one with her special problems but in her other state Me was what you’d call susceptible. ’Cause she was so fucking lonely, that’s why, she told Wolfie, just a single mom & a 13-yr-old headstrong kid & no friends or relatives to give a God-damn if they lived or died. Wolfie told her with a smirk more like it was a classic death wish.
Me flared up, “Lonely, or death wish, what’s the difference?”
Wolfie had to concede, Me had a point. For a woman, maybe the two went together.
I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories Page 7