After Visiting Friends (5 page)

No ropes. No lowering of the box bumping against the grave wall. No fistfuls of dirt
tossed on top.

A few years later, we are at the kitchen table, the three of us, and my brother says
out of nowhere, “How come we didn’t get to throw dirt on Dad’s coffin?”

My mother says, “What did you say?”

He says, “Like they do on TV.”

“Because we didn’t,” she says. “That’s why.”

And then she walks out, her food sitting there, going cold.

#  #  #

A few weeks after he was dead, a man in a white shirt, white pants, and a white cap
comes to our house and starts working on our doors, front and back.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Deadbolts,” he says.

Not until I was in my thirties did my mother let slip that for months after he died,
phone calls came for her in the middle of the night. Obscene phone calls. She tells
me she has a theory: There are men who read the obits in the paper, looking for what
she calls
“fresh widows” to prey upon. “It’s easy,” she says. “Everything is right there in
the obit. Everything you need to know to hurt someone. It’s like a burglar driving
through a neighborhood and looking for a dark house. A vulnerable target.”

My mother calls the police. They come to our kitchen and take her statement. In the
end, they do nothing, just tell her to take the receiver off the cradle at night.

One of the cops tells her, “You don’t want to be inviting any of this.”

I can only imagine her terror. Alone in that house with her two children, aware that
somewhere out there is someone who knows where you live. Someone who is watching you.
Someone who has your number.

Dead bolts.

#  #  #

I asked her about her friends. Who was there for you after he died? Who was there
for us? Who stepped up?

“For a month or two, I got invited to dinners or to parties. The things we always
went to as a couple. But then that stopped. Just like that. I’d hear talk about the
parties the morning after, when I was in town running errands. I think it was the
women who cut me out. They all thought I was out to steal their men.”

She is playing solitaire at the kitchen table.

The shuffle. The cut. The deal to herself.

“Married women don’t like single women,” she says. “If one appears in the group, they
cast her out. That’s when I saw that I was alone.”

She looks back at her cards.

1, 2, 3. No match.

1, 2, 3. No match.

1, 2, 3. No match.

“I’ll never forget the women who cut me loose,” she says, not lifting her eyes from
her cards.

#  #  #

You are being raised by a single mother. You are growing up in a house where silence
is the rule. Still, you can’t help yourself. There are times you forget the rule,
times when you want to ask a question. About him. About life. About her. And your
mother always answers your questions with the same question: “Michael,” she’d say,
“remember the last scene?”

From the time you are a small boy, she has drilled this scene into you. Some kids,
their parents make them study the Bible, learn piano. Speak a foreign language. You—you’re
taught
The Godfather
.

Even before you ever saw the movie, she tells you about the last scene, acting it
out for you and your brother as you sit at the dinner table, your Green Giant niblets
simmering yellow and bright in the CorningWare, next to your tuna casserole and perfectly
browned Pillsbury crescent roll.

She tells you how Michael, the not-firstborn son, becomes, upon the death of his father,
what he never wanted to be—his father.

She tells you how Michael, so seemingly gentle at first appearance, so seemingly immune
to the rage that burns in the blood of the family, slowly and surely becomes the complete
embodiment of this rage. Rage drives Michael to settle family business. But Michael
is blind to the truth that he can never settle the score. He wants revenge for what
has been taken from him. Yet he cannot see that revenge will not bring back to him
what is lost.

Your mother tells you then about the last scene—her favorite scene, she says. Your
mother says it is her favorite scene because in it, Michael has finally become wholly
his father, and as he stands there in his father’s study, being attended by his dead
father’s lieutenants, his wife, driven to doubts about her husband, confronts him.

Your mother says this is her favorite scene because it contains her favorite line
of dialogue.

“And then,” your mother says, “Kay asks Michael, ‘Is it true?’ Is it true that he
ordered the murder of his sister’s husband? And Michael looks at her and says, ‘Don’t
ask me about my business, Kay.’ ”

Your mother smiles and says, “I love that line.”

All through your childhood, whenever you ask her a question about her life or what
she is doing or where she is going, she will fix you in her gaze and say to you, her
son: “Don’t ask me about my business.”

Omertá
.

#  #  #

My mother often has more interest in the lives of TV characters than those of real
people. It’s easier for her to talk about their problems, their story lines. We talk
about their lives more than we talk about our own lives.

She loves Joseph Cotten in
Gaslight
but thinks William Holden is the sexiest man ever. When I was fourteen,
Picnic
came on one night and she asked me to watch it with her, then told me how she saw
it as a teenager and fell in love with Holden after he, the dark and mysterious man
who drifts into a small Kansas town, gets drunk at the Labor Day picnic and takes
his shirt off and dances with Kim Novak.

She especially loves movies and TV shows about cops or prisons or men doing bad things
and getting caught and punished. If I happen to call her while she is watching one,
she picks up the phone and says, “I’ll call you when this is over,” and hangs up.

When we were boys—my brother and I—and we’d come home summer nights after playing
Kick the Can or Ghosts in the Graveyard, before we were allowed to take a bath, she’d
send us to the laundry room to take off our dirty clothes, strip to our underwear.
As we’d head down, she’d always shout after us, “Taking it off here, Boss!”

Only years later, when I saw
Cool Hand Luke,
did I realize she was quoting the line Paul Newman and the other prisoners had to
say to No Eyes when they wanted to remove their shirts.

She reveres Edward R. Murrow. When I was thirteen, there was a special on PBS about
his life. She made me watch it with her. As the show ended, she looked at me and said,
“Cotten was the sexiest. But Murrow? Oh, he was the most handsome ever.”

#  #  #

Summers we were ghosts in the graveyard. The game was simple: Every kid save one transformed
into a ghost. The neighborhood, our graveyard. The game begins when the undead child
is sent away from home, told to disappear. Then the ghosts come a-hunting. The ghosts
look to capture the one among us who is not a ghost—the one who is undead—and change
him into a ghost before he can reach “safe,” reach “home.” Victory depends on defying
the ghosts. Evasion. Elusion. Finding home.

#  #  #

Omertá.

After he died, silence descends. Silence and fear. My twin poles: my binary black
holes. I live in fear of upsetting my mother, of even uttering my father’s name. I
believe that even by saying his name, I might kill her. Or she might kill me.

#

Three of us remained. Three atoms that retreat to the outer edges of our chamber.
A nuclear family flawed, reduced. We drift apart. Unable to bond. Not knowing how.
Survivors who stagger into a shelter or a bombed-out ruin, each eyeing the others
from our shadowy corner. Wondering. Calculating.

He died and we never spoke again about him. Every once in a while, I’d find the courage
to ask about him. Every once in a while, the question nagging in my head—
How did he die?
—would become too much and I’d forget the rules and ask.

#

My mother, at the kitchen table, playing solitaire.

The shuffle, the cut, the deal to herself.

Depth of summer, dead of winter, she is forever dealing. The only other thing alive
in our kitchen, the radio atop our refrigerator. It’s always on.

My grandmother carried a transistor radio the size of a pocket Bible. The two panels
bound together with a thick rubber band. Come bedtime, she’d place it beside her on
her pillow and keep it on all night, tuned to WGN. The talk shows, the call-ins. She
never slept much. Most nights she’d walk room-to-room, look out the
windows, into the night. She was like that, she said, ever since her mother died.
But she had that radio, always on. When I was a boy, she told me, “The voices remind
me I’m not the only one out here.”

But my mother’s radio was forever tuned to WIND. “Chicag
ohhhhh’s
wind!” is what the men say when they have to identify themselves. “Five-sixty on
your AM dial.”

April 1970.

Even now, there are songs I hear—songs that make me think of then.

If you could read my mind, love, what a tale my thoughts could tell. Just like an
old-time movie, ’bout a ghost from a wishing well . . . You know that ghost is me
.

Then another song. A woman has had a man leave her. The woman ends each day the way
she starts out, crying her heart out.
One less bell to answer. One less egg to fry. One less man to pick up after
.

Another song.
Stones would play, inside her head. And when she slept, they made her bed.

Another song. The first line is like a word problem. Something I’m not at all good
at.
By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be rising
 . . . Each time, I wonder who the woman is that this man has left behind. And how
fast is he moving away from her? Vanishing.
She’ll find the note I left hanging on her door. . . . By the time I make Albuquerque,
she’ll be working. . . . But she’ll just hear that phone keep on ringing off the wall.

Songs of loss. Of missing men. Of men leaving. . . .
Leaving, on a jet plane. Don’t know when I’ll be back again. . . . Already I’m so
lonesome, I could die. . . .

Even now, there are songs that can make me cry. Like “(They Long to Be) Close to You.”

I’m not afraid to admit it.

On the day that you were born, the angels got together, and decided to create a dream
come true . . . Aye, da-da-da-da-di-i-i-i-i-i-i-ie, close to you
.

I remember riding my bike in the alley, singing that song and thinking that that girl
liked me. That she was going to lift me up and take care of me. In the summer, those
days long as the Crusades, I’d ride my bike everywhere. It was a way to keep moving.
I learned to look forward to the day after Independence Day. Get up early, ride the
neighborhood, scan the gutters for duds. That endless search for what we called the
non-pops. Gather them up. Stuff them in my pockets. Then unroll them all. Scrape the
powder in a pile and throw a match at it.
Pfffft!
A flash and a cloud of smoke, and then—gone.

I lived for that.

#

My mother comes home one afternoon that summer. My brother and I are sprawled on the
floor, watching a show about a beautiful woman married to a man who makes her hide
her true self. She has magic powers. A good witch. My mother says to us, “I don’t
want you to get the wrong idea about why we’re going. This is Uncle Dick’s treat.
And you are not getting to go on a vacation because your father died. But—would you
like to go to Disneyland?”

I think,
Are you kidding me? I can’t get there fast enough!

Three memories of that trip:

1. I eat pancakes cooked in a silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head.

2. We never see Mickey or any of the characters. I start to think that they don’t
exist. Then, on our last day in the Magic Kingdom, we come upon a lone figure shambling
along in what looks like a soiled oversize bathrobe. Turns out he’s one of the Dwarfs.
Not one of the famous ones, like Dopey. One of the C-listers. My mother grabs the
little man, pushes my brother and me in front of him, and snaps her Instamatic.

3. My mother, my brother, and I squeeze into a small car that is borne by means unseen
down a dark path. The Haunted Mansion. A restraint lowers, locks us in. I feel the
machinery underfoot, pulling us forward. A driverless car, yet we move.
As our car makes its way toward the end of the ride, we come to a stop in a shadowy
room.

Still, I can see something. There’s just barely enough light. Yes, there it is: our
new family. The three of us, reflected in the mirror before us on the wall.

But I look again, and there, in the mirror—in the car with us, sitting between my
brother and me—is a ghost of a man. Hair, crazy. Teeth, cracked and black. Clothes
but shreds, full of holes. For a moment, I think the man is real and I try to hide
my fear.

Our car passes from the mirror.

The ghost is no more.

Halloween. After he is dead. My brother says he wants to be Dracula. My mother sews
his cape and makes a kind of royal, count-like medallion for him by tying an old broach
to some thick red yarn. She slicks his hair with Dippity-Do, brings it to a point
on his forehead. My brother completes the transformation with a pair of ninety-nine-cent
plastic vampire teeth he buys at the Kroger.

I tell my mother I want to be a bum. She digs up one of my grandfather’s suit vests
and one of his cast-off hats. I wear the vest over a T-shirt. She gives me a pair
of old trousers. They’re my grandfather’s, too. He’s so short that even though I’m
a boy, they are almost the right length. I wear the bottoms of them rolled. Then I
cinch them around my waist with a length of frayed twine, knotting it tight.

In my mother’s basement, there’s a photograph she took of my brother and me standing
on the back porch in the dying light, winter’s chill already in the air. Her two sons,
transformed. Her elder, one of the living dead. Me, a tattered, meager man doomed
to wander without a home.