Father's Day, page 12
My eyes begin to well again, for the second time today.
“Getting ready to do what he did for God knows how long,” I say. “And we missed it.”
He runs his hand through his hair. It looks just like my father’s. Parted on the same side even, a razor’s edge of white scalp separating two fields of wavy gray hair. “Oh, Matty,” he says, full of sympathy. “Your father was so shut down it was ridiculous.”
It stings me—that “ridiculous.” He’s loaded with sympathy for me alone, I guess. Doesn’t have a drop to spare for my father. It’s not like anyone would choose to shut down, would they?
“You could never tell what was going on with him,” he says. “Even when we were in grade school.”
He sits back in his chair again.
He should know, I suppose. Still I don’t like his tone. It’s not for him to criticize my father. “You were saying you brought my mother here?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Yes,” he says, but looks confused.
I suppose the shift was a bit abrupt.
“Annie and I brought her here when she and that friend of hers came to visit,” he says.
I’m confused now too.
“What friend?” I ask.
“You know, the tall woman,” he says. “The swimmer.”
Bertie?
“My mother brought Bertie to visit you?”
“Bertie,” he says happily, recognizing the name—yes, that’s it. “Umhmm.” He nods.
“When was this?” I ask.
“Let’s see,” he says, eyes squinting slightly and looking off into the middle distance, searching for a landmark. “We still lived on Fithian Road then, so it must have been about twenty years ago.”
I was a boy then, still at home. I should remember this.
“Are you sure?”
But I’ve lost him again. I see his eyes wandering off. He’s following the waiter around the room again, not like a bee this time though, dipping in and out, more as the crow flies—in a very straight line.
The handsome waiter is carrying our drinks to us now, walking carefully. Glasses filled to the tippity-top, brimming with alcohol. He’s guarding every last drop for us. My uncle watches him closely. He wants every drop. He and the handsome waiter are absolutely on the same page. The waiter places the glasses carefully on the table. Lovely glasses too, wide open at the top and tapering down to delicate little stems.
“Here’s to you,” my uncle says, lifting his glass gingerly and bringing it to his lips. “And your mother.”
Why not my father? I wonder, another little surge of resentment coursing through me.
He doesn’t sip his drink though. The glass is too full for that. He merely places his top lip in the clear pool of alcohol, like a bird at a birdbath.
“I think of you two every day,” he says.
He’s a good man. I know that.
“To you,” I say, touching the skin at my cheekbone, just beneath my left eye. Tender still.
I’d almost forgotten about my face. Isn’t that amazing? Before this getaway, I couldn’t go two minutes without thinking about it, running off to the bathroom mirror.
“You’ve really got to be more careful,” he says, looking thoughtful now. “New York can be very dangerous,” as if he were sharing a secret.
It’s not hard to imagine Annie pulling the wool over his eyes, playing tennis two or three times a day even. In the rain and the snow. Without a racquet occasionally.
I sit quietly.
Touch the bruise on my cheek again, feel my kinship with Annie.
“Any news on the memorial service?” he asks.
I sit up in my chair. He’s caught me by surprise. This is what I should have been rehearsing this morning, my answer to this. But I didn’t. I was too busy concocting an alibi for my face.
I don’t know what to say to him.
My mother’s not even close to agreeing to a memorial service. And the more insistent he gets about it, the less likely she is to agree. It’s becoming a war of wills, a real Battle of the Network Stars.
“It’s coming along,” I say. I just hope he doesn’t ask how.
I place my top lip in the alcohol too, copying him. I don’t taste anything though. Just feel the icy liquid against my lip.
This memorial service has got me stumped. I don’t know what to do. The funny thing, of course, is that I’m right where I usually love to be, smack in the middle of a conflict: Eliciting confidences, and then betraying them, stirring the pot. I don’t love this one though.
“Looks like early October,” I say, as if it were resolved.
We have to commemorate my father somehow. I know that. Send him off properly into the ether. I don’t know how to do it though, or how to convince my mother either. It’s no mean feat, getting her to do something she doesn’t want to do.
“Okay with you?” I ask.
But I don’t feel like any fireworks tonight.
He nods back at me.
“That’ll be good,” he says.
I smile at him.
We’ll save the fireworks for another day.
Now that his drink’s not filled to the brim anymore, my uncle picks it up and sips properly from the glass. I follow his lead. It’s shocking this time though: Purely alcoholic. Nothing to mask the taste of it either, just a few olives sunk down to the bottom of the glass.
My mother would scoff at all this drinking: A waste of perfectly good calories, she’d say. “It’s funny,” I say, letting my mind wander back to her. “I don’t remember my mother ever visiting you with Bertie.”
Bertie was a neighbor of ours in the country, long since moved away. Just a summer neighbor really. She taught high school in Toronto during the school year, calculus or some other math that was light-years ahead of me at the time. She spent the summers in Vermont, in a little cottage not far from us. She ran the beach club during the summer at Putney Lake. She was very lovely, tall with shiny raven hair that hung down straight to her shoulders. An excellent swimmer too. That was how we met her: She taught me how to swim.
“Sure,” he said. “They came for a quick visit once, to see the land we’d bought for the new house.”
I take another sip.
The drink is growing less bad now, burning less against my throat, and glowing nicely in my stomach.
“Don’t you remember?” he asks, sounding proud of his reconstituted memory. “They had car trouble and had to stay over.”
“Yes,” I say. “I remember that.” And really I do. I’m not just remembering to be polite. I remember a maroon car that broke down. A lemon, my mother called it. I just don’t remember Bertie being with her on that trip. Bertie is the sticking point here.
I take another sip. The drink is actually bordering on nice now, not tasty by any means, but a nice experience in my mouth and throat.
“Bertie stayed too?” I ask.
“Well, of course,” he says. “Both of them.”
That makes sense, I guess. If the car broke down, Bertie would have to stay too. I lay my hands flat, palms down, on the starched cloth in front of me. See the gold ring on my right hand.
“Funny,” he says, remembering more. “We called our mechanic the next morning. Asked him to come over and take a look, but it started right up,” he says. “No trouble at all.”
Of course it did. That car was as dependable as the North Star. There was never a problem with the car. Lemon, my ass.
“Just a temporary glitch, I guess.”
He really is a fool.
My face is on fire now. It must be flaming red again, like after the visit from bachelor number two. Like the foliage at my mother’s house in October. Maybe he’ll put it down to the alcohol.
My mother cocked up a breakdown to spend the night with Bertie.
I open the large menu and hide my face. The golden tassel falls into my lap. The overlovely script inside, loopy and black on the thick ecru stock, is enough to make me sick. I already know I don’t want a single thing they have to offer here.
Sheila. Bertie too.
I’m as big a fool as my uncle.
She’s had lots of lovely women. My mother.
I close the menu and place it carefully on the table.
“I’m going to have the rack of lamb,” he says.
I have no idea what I’ll order.
Maybe another drink?
I fold my hands in my lap. My fingers start to work the ring I’m wearing—twirling it and twirling it.
It’s my father’s wedding band. I’m sure of it, but I pretend I’m not. I found it in the top drawer of his bureau a couple of months ago. My mother must have claimed it from the undertaker and put it there. I took it, wear it sometimes, when the mood strikes.
She hasn’t said a word about it yet, but I’m sure she’s noticed it missing. I give her credit too, for keeping quiet. It’s not her strong suit. She must be waiting, trying to work out what it means. It’s awfully complicated, Oedipal almost beyond belief. Who does it marry me to? My father, who wore it for so many years, or her, wearing its twin even as we speak?
It looks lovely against my skin though, very rich.
Turns out I’m a gold person.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lemony Sweater
I’M SITTING IN a little bookstore café in Westport—walls and walls of books surrounding a small café in the center, only ten tables or so. I’d always thought this particular combination—coffee and books under the same roof—was a New York City phenomenon, scarce real estate and all, but I guess they have them everywhere now.
The bookshop itself is practically empty, just a couple of browsers poking wearily through the shelves, but the café is bustling, nearly all the tables occupied, lines of people at the “to go” counter.
Muffins are flying out of this bookstore.
We café patrons all have books with us at our tables. I’ve got a picture book of midcentury chairs with me. We’ll muck them up with coffee and jam, and then just leave them behind without a thought, ruined. Books and food, together like this, have never seemed a very clever combination to me, but I’m clearly out of step on this one.
I’m sitting at a small round table, strangely tall for the chairs surrounding it. My chest barely clears the tabletop. You could dislocate your shoulder reaching for the sugar here.
I’m waiting for Henry.
Can you believe?
From the suburban sex line.
I called him this morning, after my uncle left to play tennis.
Live and not learn, that’s my motto.
I should have it embroidered on a cushion—a very small one with intricate needlework, small enough so I can take it with me wherever I go. If I had a pillow like that now, I could sit on it. It would give me some height in this tiny chair. I’d hate for Henry to think I’m a midget at first glance.
It didn’t seem like the dumbest thing in the world, when I called him this morning to arrange a meeting—it’s a public place after all. He was so glad to hear from me too. But it doesn’t seem like the cleverest move now, now that I’m actually sitting here, waiting for him to throw open the doors and disappoint me.
I can see it all already: There’ll be me and some perfectly nice man who’s definitely not for me. There’ll be coffee and some baked goods too, no doubt dry and crumbly, but we’ll soldier on and choke them down with copious amounts of butter as a last-chance lubricant, struggling to clear our passageways. We’ll be struggling for air and struggling for words.
This whole thing really can’t help but be a bust.
I should probably leave right now.
But my face is finally approaching normalcy this morning. It would be a shame to let that go to waste. You’d almost have to be looking for a black eye to see the remnants of mine this morning.
Wait— This could be him now.
No, no. False alarm. That one’s meeting the lady in the corner. She’s waving wildly for him too, as if she were trying to flag him down from the opposite end of Madison Square Garden.
I feel the hope draining from me, drop by drop. But I keep sitting here all the same, ass glued to this Romper Room chair.
How close do you have to be to tell someone’s eyes are hazel? And isn’t that just brown anyway?
My attention keeps drifting back to the mother and son a couple of tables to my left. I can’t help it. My eyes just keep drifting back. She’s wearing an eight-dollar wig, the mother—reddish brown synthetic curls springing out from every square inch of it. A real Zsa Zsa Gabor number. It might be the cheapness of it—the unreasonable optimism in the face of certain failure—that’s created this tenderness in me. I feel it inside me like a solid mass, like a brick pressing itself against my chest, just beneath my heart.
At least it’s not lopsided. I’ll give her credit for that. She’s got that wig on straight. She’s got a shiny aluminum crutch too, and I don’t think it’s about a sprain or a stress fracture either. No, she’s palsied in some way. You can see it in the way her hand topples over her wrist, like a waning sunflower, spilling over its flimsy stem. There’s something plainly wrong with her motor skills.
Her little boy—seven, maybe eight—runs back and forth to the counter for her, fetching their drinks, then their muffins. Running back for the cream, then for a knife. So many trips for such a little boy. He’s barely tall enough to reach the top of the glass counter.
Could my mother have some ice, please?
I’m afraid for him every time he races back to retrieve some new thing she wants. He picks up just a little too much speed for the short distance he has to cover. He looks as if he’s going to smash into the display case every time. Someone should warn him. Put a small decal on the face of the glass. Maybe that would do the trick—a butterfly sticker, anything, just some small warning to let him know it’s not the open road; if he’s not careful, he’s going to crash through to the other side, all cut up on a shelf of brioches.
He’s going back again.
She’s an awfully demanding woman. He doesn’t appear to be the least unhappy with his lot though, springing up again and again, delighted to do her bidding. He doesn’t appear to notice that there’s anything wrong with her either. No trace of embarrassment in his smiles and giggles.
That’ll come later, I guess.
He’s focused on her too, to the exclusion of everything else in this shop that might claim his eight-year-old attention, thrilled to run for a pot of raspberry jam if that’s what she wants.
Just a little boy in love with his damaged mother, like the rest of us.
My mother and I are standing in the playroom together. She’s just asked me to do some little thing for her.
“What?” I ask.
I’m very small, six or seven.
I’ve fallen into the habit of asking her to repeat herself, even when I’ve heard her perfectly the first time. Just a little strategy for dragging out our conversations, prolonging her attention for as long as I can manage.
She even asked the pediatrician to test my hearing once. Afraid I might be slightly deaf—hard of hearing, she called it. But I always heard her perfectly. That was never the problem.
She obliges me though, repeats her request in a calm voice still.
“Will I get a surprise?” I ask.
She looks perplexed, pauses for a moment.
I may have jinxed myself.
I’m afraid her voice will be brittle when I hear it next, her eyes hard at the sight of me. I wish I could retract the question, but there aren’t any second chances here. I know that too. You either get away clean, or you don’t.
A smile breaks out across her face, small and sly. “Absolutely,” she says, smiling at me instead of everything I feared. Her eyes are velvety brown still and warm, no hardness there at all.
Relief blooms inside me, creates a jumpy dancing in my little body, a slight bouncing up and down.
The little thing she asked for—whatever it was—didn’t merit a reward. I don’t even remember it now, just some little thing a mother might naturally enough ask her young son to do: Put away his toys, find her cigarettes, listen to an involved story about her husband’s inadequacies.
I do the little thing, whatever it is.
It couldn’t have been very complicated.
I’m only six or seven, after all.
And I feel my legs rushing back to her again, breathless at her side now.
“All done,” I sing out, happy to have done what she wanted. “I’ve done it,” I say. Happy to please her and happy for the reward to come. “Yea!”
I see some hesitation on her face, some tension around the eyes.
She must be reconsidering her promise. Must see that the task was too small to merit a reward. I’ll never concede the point though. “A promise is a promise,” I remind her.
“Quite right,” she says, nodding. “Yes, you are.”
That’s all it takes. I’m thrilled again, dancing my body from side to side, from foot to foot. It doesn’t take so much with a little boy, you see?
“I think I might faint,” I say.
And it’s true, I feel as though I really might.
“Now, you lie down on the floor,” she says.
What?
Her voice is neutral. I don’t know how to read this request. There are no clues for me to make out here.
“And close your eyes, mister.”
She must be warming up to this though. She’s stretching out the process, letting the excitement build. This isn’t like her. She isn’t the sort of person to appreciate the pleasure of a surprise waiting to reveal itself, sitting in plain view but unknown. She’s too impatient. Sometimes our birthday gifts aren’t even wrapped.
Still, I go along with her. I jump onto the ground, onto my back.
“Now you have to give me a minute,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”
I’m bursting at the prospect.
“Do you promise to keep your eyes closed?” she asks.
I squint my eyes shut. Purse my lips closed too, although she hasn’t even asked for that. I nod with abandon. I promise. I really, truly promise.
She leaves the room. I hear the leather heels of her sandals tapping gently against the wooden floor, then the more muffled sound as she crosses the threshold onto the kitchen linoleum. She closes the French doors behind her.
