My Good Man, page 10
“If I was a girl on Happy Days, they might be,” I said, sure this was some obscure optometry joke. “I know the pair I want. They’re in the front room.” My mom was out of sight, somewhere in the showroom, so I couldn’t get her attention.
“What about these, then?” The optician held a pair like Buddy Holly’s, waiting for me to slide forward. “They’re at the high end of what you’re allowed, but we could swing it.”
“No,” I said. “Out there, really. I saw them when I came in.”
“Hon. These are the ones available to you. Those out there are for other people,” she said.
“Adults?” I asked. “I’ve seen kids my age wearing wire frames. And I’m super careful. I hate sports. The only time I got a third-place ribbon was because there were only three runners.” I was pleading now, assuming it was a matter of persuasion. “And that was this year.”
“Well wire frames are more fragile, that’s true, but if you promise to be careful … Well, what about these? Is this closer?” She held out yet another pair of cat eyes from her seemingly endless supply. True to her word, these frames were metal. I tried them on and looked in the mirror, instantly transformed into a Batman villain … a female one.
“No, I’m sorry. I can’t do that,” I said. “Why can’t we go into the other room and look at those? Do you not understand that these are girl glasses?”
“Don’t you understand you’re on Welfare?” she said, finally. Of course I understood we were on Welfare. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, other than the fact that we weren’t supposed to talk about it, and that once a month, we came to the city to be grilled by an unsmiling woman who asked if my ma was working anywhere, if there were other people living with us, and if I could give detailed accounts of what we were eating.
We’d practiced my answers. No, she did not work. Cleaning houses was “off the books,” and Welfare didn’t need to know about that anyhow. And no, nobody lived with us. Even when Gihh-rhaggs had been around, he didn’t officially live with us, still getting his mail somewhere else, so that wasn’t a stretch. Evidently our menu of hamburger gravy, lettuce-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, and the occasional SOS kept us safely in the Welfare nutritional expectations. (I later learned that SOS was polite for Shit on a Shingle, creamed corned beef and peas on burnt toast—close enough.) No, we didn’t get any pizza, no chicken wings, no fast food. Yes, I am sure. Yes, I understand that to lie to a government official is a felony offense. But what did any of this have to do with my glasses?
“I know it, yeah,” I said, my voice much quieter than hers. “But …”
“Your exam and lenses are covered, and you’ll be eligible again two years from today, but as far as frames go, these are the only ones we’re authorized to offer you. See?” she said, closing the case and showing me the neat Dymo Label sticker: “Welfare Medicaid/Medicare Frames.”
“Well, what about if we pay for the frames?” I asked, immediately transforming into a new hero with limited powers: The Bargainer.
“Hon, if you can afford showroom frames, maybe you shouldn’t be entitled to a Welfare check. We only sell the best, but they’re for—no offense—paying customers. Look, hon, I know what it’s like to be, what are you, twelve?” I nodded, though I wasn’t quite twelve yet. “Maybe encourage your mom to find a job. There are plenty to be had, if you have some gumption. They’re not the greatest, but they might be better than your current situation.”
Even with my fifth-grade-math education, I knew: If your job pays federal minimum wage of $3.15 an hour, for five days at seven hours a day, and you take out Social Security and New York State Income Tax and United States Federal Income Tax and compound it with an undependable ride that costs five dollars each way, every day, and divide it by three dependent children, what do you have? Please use only a Number 2 pencil; show your work.
When my gigantic glasses were ready, looking like brown bedroom window frames, glee filled Chester’s face. “Nice specs, Clark! Good luck finding a phone booth on the Rez. Don’t forget your groovy shoes and your utility belt.” Seeing Chester better wasn’t a decent trade-off for the brown plastic rectangles that adorned my face.
Thus began my campaign to find work around the house, to afford frames on my own. I did trash, dishes, folded clothes at the Laundromat, and filled the drinking water bucket at the pump. That weekend, I wound up at the mall. While Randy pumped quarters into arcade games, I went to the new fancy optician, a sleek beacon of glass and chrome. Surely they didn’t carry Welfare Clark Kent frames. I spotted a sweet pair and asked the new optician how much.
“Uh, let’s see,” she said, eyeing me up. She glanced at the small price tag affixed to the glasses. “Okay, here’s the retail, and, will you be needing an exam?”
“No,” I said. “I just don’t want these … I prefer to have some choice in which glasses I’m going to wear,” I decided.
“Many do,” she said. “And that’s good, because, you know, we would have to add new lenses, right?” Having not yet encountered advanced Geometry, I’d assumed they could swap my lenses out. She tallied the frames, new lenses, cutting the lenses, and a fitting. I thanked her for the total. Given the hours I’d already worked at home, I needed to find a whole lot more to do. Maybe I could climb the roof and patch the leaks. I amped up my campaign, reporting all completed work and asking my ma for my allowance, this thing I’d heard about so often on TV.
“What’s that?” she asked, puzzled. Clearly, we did not watch the same shows.
“You know, weekly money for all those things I did around here this week.” I listed all the work I’d completed again, sure she’d be impressed.
“You mean the work I do all the time?” she said. “You don’t see anyone giving me an allowance. Now you see what I do around here, plus cooking plus cleaning plus paying the bills plus lugging in kerosene and a bunch of other plusses I’m too tired to think about.” She set down the True Romance she was reading and looked straight at me. “Should I go on?”
“Seems to me you get an allowance from the Welfare office, or I wouldn’t have to go uptown and lie for you once a month,” I said. With my new glasses, the four-dollar price tag on the True Romance was crystal clear, and this was one of a dozen magazines she read regularly.
“Now what’s this all about? What, you want some model or toy? Maybe we can swing it. Tell me what. Come on,” she said, inviting me to sit with her in the swivel rocker. I stayed in the chair nearest the kerosene stove, switched off until fall now that it was June. I enjoyed the blowing heat when it was on, any chance I got. She seemed not to smell the pungent slop pail behind her swivel rocker, a swamp of table scraps and cooking by-products, hamburger fat, bacon grease, apple cores, and pig knuckles. I could never go near that chair without the odor swirling around me like a rancid tornado, and yet she was impervious.
“It’s these glasses. I’m glad we were able to get them, and I’m really glad I can see again, but they’re …”
“That damn Chester. Forget him. They don’t look like Clark Kent glasses. They look …”
“I can see now, Ma. I don’t need Chester to tell me they’re awful. Look at Mona’s glasses. Why’d she get to choose?” Glasses like this would be another visible sign of our secret, financially destitute life, just as I entered junior high. I’d had no idea when I was younger how we were just this side of a bad story, in part because my siblings had invented kind lies to tell me regularly. As much as they disdained the problems I caused them, they’d been down this road before me.
“I might as well be walking around in a new pair of Groovy Shoes!” I said, bringing out Chester’s big ammunition. We’d faithfully watched Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and reruns of The Monkees and Batman growing up, and desired all things Groovy. Mona used to decorate the upstairs bedroom with psychedelic drawings of swirls and daisies and bull’s-eyes and paisley and bloodshot human eyes crying. Occasionally, she’d let me admire her avant-garde creations.
Grooviness sometimes entered our lives unexpectedly. Our ma would come home occasionally from the places she cleaned with bags of stuff, clothes mostly. Chester grabbed sports team logo T-shirts and left the rest for us. My ma would hold up a button shirt that was exactly his size and insist it was perfectly good. He’d hiss his disapproval.
“Look, man, for you!” Mona said to me once, revealing a pair of shoes. They were a deep-red shiny leather and had a buckle and strap, with designs tooled into them. They fit way better than my current shoes, but something seemed funny. “Man, those are the grooviest shoes I ever seen,” Mona said. “Any in my size, Ma? Any other pairs?” she said, diving back into the bag.
“Only those ones, sorry. Seems like your lucky day,” she said to me.
“Groovy Shoes?” Chester said, dragging the oo. He planned to say more, but my ma listed a bunch of unpleasant jobs if he didn’t have anything better to do than consider my shoes.
I wore the Groovy Shoes, but when kindergarten rolled around, Mona encouraged me to give a younger cousin a shot at grooviness. My ma revealed a black lace-up pair, but I’d watched feet all year. Among the boys I knew, I absolutely had the grooviest shoes by far.
One morning, they were gone. When I protested, Chester clarified. “Those were from the free bags. We tricked you into wearing them before we had to get a new pair, and you cannot wear them to school.” He turned to my ma. “I told you! Bad enough we took him out in public in girl’s shoes. Now he prefers them.”
“You lie,” I said, but Chester flipped open a Sears Catalog to the junior shoe spread of many Groovy Shoes, officially called the Mary Jane. And now here I was again in the land of Groovy Shoes, another signature of our poverty, courtesy of the optometrist.
“Well, Mona’s been babysitting, doing other things for money,” my ma said. “That’s how she bought her glasses. I sure as shit I didn’t buy them.” Case closed. The summer went about as you might expect, people routinely asking if I was planning to step into the nearest phone booth.
One August night, my ma was four hours late, prepping for some party. Rolanda wasn’t working it so that meant walking from Lewiston to the Rez on her own. She plodded in a little earlier than I’d expected, though. “Tim Sampson picked me up,” she said.
“Why would he do that?” I asked. All kinds of people saw me walking the roads, and they rarely offered to pick me up, unless they thought there might be something in it for them. As far as I knew, Tim Sampson was occasionally a part of card-playing at our house, but after Gihh-rhaggs died, he stopped coming. I suspected maybe he was out shopping, and it seemed to me that Miss Vestal hadn’t been gone all that long.
“Well, I guess he was being nice,” she said, looking at me like I’d started dancing with no music on. I was about to suggest to my mother that she was being kind of naive, when she sharpened the image for me. “My Good Man was his brother. I imagine that counts for something in manners.”
“He was what?”
Somehow I’d missed that Tim and Gihh-rhaggs were brothers. It was common to refer to older men and women in your orbit as uncles and aunties, but it finally clicked that when Christine referred to Gihh-rhaggs, she was describing a real family member. She was puzzled about my ache for him. We’d each learned not to ask people much about extended families; you never knew when things were going to get muddy. But she and I had found each other in shared grief, even if I hadn’t understood how shared it was. I felt like an idiot, but in my defense, Tim and Gihh-rhaggs didn’t look much alike, other than both being super pasty and blond. A number of white guys who wound up with Indian families fell in that same complexion category.
“Like real brothers? Like me and Chester?” I was trying to picture Tim Sampson, but because I normally tried to keep my distance, he was a little hazy beyond his size.
“Is there another kind of brothers?” Of course there was. There were half brothers and stepbrothers and foster brothers and adopted brothers, and secret, silent versions of all of the above, but she wasn’t saying that.
“But they don’t look anything alike,” I said. Gihh-rhaggs had been average height and weight, at best. He seemed strong enough to do the things guys were expected to, but probably the only person he towered over was me. Tim Sampson was massive, broad-shouldered, and he always had trouble finding a place for his gigantic feet under a table where he wasn’t accidently resting them on someone else’s toes. Instantly, I had the insight that brothers could be quite different. No one comparing me and Chester would pick us out as brothers. But he was so much older, and a natural athlete.
It seemed funny that Tim had given my ma this ride home, but I couldn’t say why. “What did you have for supper?” she asked, sitting in the swivel chair and closing her eyes. “I hope you didn’t wander down the road till you got invited to someone’s house.”
“Can of ravioli from The Chef. Small one.” I confirmed I hadn’t opened the Family Size.
“Didn’t turn the stove on, did you?” Our stove always smelled like gas, and since none of the pilots worked, we had to stick a lit match around the ring and take our chances. Chester’s arms had become hairy, but his hands were bare as a young girl’s from his stove use. If I’d had the heat vision my Clark glasses insinuated, warming the can would have been no problem, but that night, my utensils had been just a fork and can opener.
“You leave the newspaper off the pail when you threw out the can?” The newspaper sat on top of the five-gallon slop bucket, but in August, ten layers of newsprint only took your deodorizing power so far. “How much is in it?”
“Less than half,” I said.
“Half full or half empty?”
“What’s the difference?” I asked, and she laughed.
“Never mind. Maybe I’m coming down with something. Summer colds are the worst, and Mrs. D’s boys leave snot-stiff Kleenex on the nightstands for me to pick up. Those boys, I swear must be sick constantly,” she said, swiveling lazily. “Take it out? Way out to the second pile. Not where we burn garbage, but the one farther from the well.” This was the one job I’d never done and definitely hadn’t offered in my allowance lobbying effort. I knew how much I spilled from the two-gallon bucket when I pumped water. Water was one thing. Slops? Something else.
I grabbed work gloves. Inside the pail, Boyardee’s face floated in the murky sludge, with a banana peel, a couple of pork-chop bones from Sunday dinner, and some mystery items.
Chester and Mona, were upstairs, listening to Black Sabbath, playing “Iron Man” over and over. For a heavy metal song, it made me sad, the way “San Francisco” and “Cat’s in the Cradle” did. I grabbed the pail handle and held my breath. It wasn’t as heavy as I’d feared.
Out the back porch, I looked at the path, several yards beyond the outhouse. We’d never been asked to do this one job. Really, we’d never been asked to do any. My ma accepted help with the same indifference that she accepted laziness. I’d tapered off on my helpfulness through the summer when it was clear the whole Allowance for Work concept did not penetrate the finite borders of our house, but I could do this.
Enriched by all our natural fertilizer, the bush line swelled in that patch, wild, green, and dense. The outhouse buzzed with wasps and flies. I grabbed the pail’s handle and its bottom lip and heaved the contents on our mound of waste. Scurrying noises burst from the sludge pile. I hoped they were squirrels, but I knew better.
As I got closer to the house, Ozzy Osbourne bleated out his questions, wondering if Iron Man was alive or not, whether he had thoughts, and whether he was even a hero. Iron Man was more ambiguous than most heroes. He had resources we couldn’t even dream of, and he could be anonymous if he wanted, behind that protective-armor suit. All he’d have to do was take off that outfit, and his powers disappeared. Of course, his atomic heart would still be there, pounding beneath his shirt, but conveniently, Tony Stark, like Bruce Wayne, was one rich bastard. No one would ask him to change his shirt or offer him a different one because his was embarrassingly threadbare. No one intruded on their lives in the name of doing them a favor.
Back inside, I poured water into the bottom of the pail, added half a measuring cup of Lysol, and set the newspaper back on top. My ma was in bed, covered up though it was still over eighty degrees. “You want anything?” I asked. “I could ask them to turn down the music.”
“Nah, I can barely hear it. And I could put this radio on if I wanted. Glass of water? Did you wash your hands after you emptied the pot?” I went immediately back to the dining room and stuck my hands in the basin of milky soap water. I got my Batman glass from the cupboard and poured her water from the dipper.
“Here, reach into my purse, will you?” she said when I returned. Her purse was private. I didn’t think Mona or Chester had ever lifted cash, but she never wanted to tap them into temptation. One quick movement could transform you into a thief, an action you could never undo, like being bitten by a radioactive spider, or pressing a button, launching your kid in a rocket to another planet, while you waited for your own to explode and take you with it. “See that little leather case? No, not my lighter, that other one, yes.” I removed a slim case covered in a shiny black leather. “Open it,” she said.
Inside was a pair of glasses with weird, octagon-shaped lenses. “We can get those lenses replaced with yours.” The frames were almost non-existent, a gold nose bridge and two gold arms that all mounted on little screws drilled into the glass. “They can cut them. Any shape you want. Not exactly what you were eyeing up, but the best I can do.” I lifted them out and drew circles on the lenses with her eyebrow pencil, and looked in the mirror.
