Child of My Right Hand (12 page)

Dad backed out of the garage and the last image flickering on Simon's retinas was Sam sitting up in the driveway, his big head (Dad said was so noble it belonged on the back of a nickel) following them, brown eyes pleading, How? How can you leave me? Next thing Simon knew Lizzie was shaking him awake somewhere outside Indianapolis. He tried to slap her hand, but she was too quick, a prissy little gnat. Mom called, “Rest stop in two minutes, then I'm in the back!”

“No, Mom, no!” he shouted, warm and comfy under his blankets, safe and adored in the rhythm of this and other road trips.

Mom and Dad had been popping them into minivans (this was the fourth they'd owned) for weekend outings for as long as he could remember. Four, six, eight hours, no problem, especially in California, where they were always driving somewhere. They'd bundle him into the back and Lizzie into her car seat to camp in the sequoias or to stay in some Mexican hotel. He'd play on his Game Boy, and Lizzie would whine to use it, until Mom and Dad bought a second one. He'd listen to his Walkman for hours. God, how he loved those tapes,
Jungle Book
,
Little Mermaid
,
Mary Poppins
. He even loved Raffi, one strange dude. Simon would sing louder and louder, until Dad would shout, Pipe down, Lizzie can't hear her tape. So he'd pipe down, and the miles would unroll, four, six, eight, and later twelve hours to New York to see Dad's family after they moved to Ohio. When they were little, he and Lizzie thought everyone took such trips. Later, when he learned most of his Ohio friends hadn't been anywhere, except maybe Indiana, and certainly hadn't spent their childhoods rolling up and down the interstates, he began to complain. But he didn't complain long and pissy—goddamn, he was a good complainer when he wanted, a good arguer, too; to get what he wanted out of Mom and Dad, he had to be—because riding in the bubble of the family van, Simon had always felt warm, safe, and loved, a small boy even now that he was huge, wrapped in the embrace of his family.

Dad pulled into the rest area. The Barish clan donned shoes and sweatshirts, hurried up to the rest rooms. Unzipping inside a closed stall, Simon could hear Dad at one of the urinals. Simon used a stall whether he was just peeing or not; when he was younger he didn't want anyone to think he was sneaking a peek at their penis because they might think he was gay, now that he was gay, he didn't want anyone peeking at his penis in case it was the wrong size or shape. Dad whistled that off-key whistle of his, something from
Man of La Mancha
. Damn, it was embarrassing. Dad's urinal flushed, and still Simon waited, unzipped but not yet pissing, because he didn't want Dad to hear. He couldn't say why that mattered. Damn, he didn't want to think about it. He glanced at the gray stall wall. Someone had printed in red marker: For a good time, call Bob. 789-4242. Next to that, someone had scrawled, Faggots suck! A third someone had answered, You bet we do! Simon heard Dad move to the sink; water started to flow. He wished Dad would get the hell out; he had to piss like a racehorse. Then Dad started to sing. He was actually singing in a public bathroom.

“To dream the impossible dream…”

Simon thought he would die, he was so freaking embarrassed.

“To fight the unbeatable foe…”

God, he had to pee. Then Dad called, “Simon, you alive in there?”

Not in a million years, Simon thought, am I going to answer.

“To try when your arms are too weary…”

God, but he had to pee.

Dad called, “It's all right. There's no one here except us.”

“Will you leave me alone?” Simon hissed. “So I can piss in peace?”

“You're just taking a leak? What's taking so long?”

“Dad!”

“All right.” Dad started laughing. What an asshole he was sometimes. “I'll be out in the car.”

Dad moved away from the sink. Simon could see his legs and big feet under the stall wall. The men's-room door opened and banged shut. Simon's stream hit the bowl like the blast from a fire hose, strong enough to extinguish a second-story blaze. The toilet bowl frothed. Simon's bladder eased and he remembered some camping trip, he must have been nine or ten. He'd had to pee right now! And Dad pulled over on a country road. He'd stepped outside and started to pee, shielded from the world by the van. Mid-pee the van started to roll. Next thing he was running after the van, holding his shorts up with one hand, holding his penis with the other, still peeing, trying not to laugh but cracking up, while from inside he could hear Mom, Dad and Lizzie laughing and laughing. After maybe ten feet Dad stopped, but they never forgot it, any of them, little Simon running alongside the van taking a leak, holding his dick.

Simon shook himself dry, flushed and unlocked the stall. Good, no one. God, he thought, grinning, but Dad could be an asshole.

***

They rolled west on I-70 across Indiana and into Illinois. Mom snoozed in back under a mountain of blankets. Simon sat in the middle captain chair, hooked up to his Discman, singing along to the new Britney Spears. Lizzie sat up front beside Dad. In between songs, he could hear them chatting, easy and relaxed, and he felt a switchblade of regret, a rose petal of sorrow. Dad loved Lizzie better, just look. If he were a girl, or good at sports, Dad would love him as much.

He remembered elementary school, their first year in Ohio. Dad was always coaching back then; such a big-ass jock and he hoped Simon would be, too. That spring, Dad was the assistant little league coach; he stood near third and waved the kids around. This one game, Simon hit a double and an inside-the-park home run. Man, he really socked it. He could still remember Dad's face when he chugged by, arms pumping, slogging towards home. That's my boy! But Simon couldn't keep the rules straight—When did you slide? How many foul balls?—and he was afraid of the ball. No, not afraid, f-ing terrified.

Later that same spring, some idiot pitcher on an opposing team, one of those moonface jocks who could throw really hard but didn't know where it was going, hurled a pitch at Simon's head. He tried to duck, but his legs wouldn't obey, and the ball rushed towards him big as a planet. He turned just in time, and instead of hitting his face, the ball smacked him in the middle of the back. Simon felt like he'd been harpooned, and the rest of the spring, every time he stood at the plate, he'd feel the ball smack him—Thar she blows!—and lurch away from every pitch like a sounding whale, like a sissy, the other kids said, even if the ball was a mile away. That was the last spring he played baseball.

In middle school, Dad convinced him to try football. Dad the Jock had been throwing to him in their backyard for years. Buttonhook, he'd shout. Post. Down and out, or some other code Simon never got, as if it were the secret handshake of a club he wasn't allowed to join. He knew this much. He had to run out. Dad would whip the ball at him, and if he wanted to be loved and applauded, he was supposed to catch it like Dad's big brother Russ, the family hero, except he never could. It would bounce off his hands, as if the ball and his fingers were repulsing magnetic poles. Or he'd flinch and miss it completely. Then Dad would shout, “It's not going to hurt you, what the hell are you afraid of?”

“Nothing.”

Which was a big, fat, whopping lie, because back then he was afraid of everything. Not just the ball, but the pissed-off look that would smirch Dad's face when Simon demonstrated yet again that he didn't share the Barish gift for football. He was so afraid of that look in eighth grade, when he was bigger than almost everyone, over two hundred pounds, and the middle school football coach stopped him in the hall one day and said, Hey, why don't you come out for the team? He decided he would, even though he hated football.

They made him a lineman, and though he didn't know the rules and couldn't follow the plays, he dressed in the locker room with the other guys. He put on shoulder pads. He put on a cup, thigh pads, knee pads, cleats and a helmet, and for part of every game, they'd put him in and let him bang into some other kid. This one time, he was opposite some poor schlub he must have outweighed by sixty pounds. He kept knocking the kid back and falling on top of him. No matter what the play, he'd do the same thing. Man, he was pancaking that kid, he was bulldozing him. In the stands Dad was shouting, “Way to go, Simon. Way to go!” which Simon thought was pretty great.

Then one play the kid didn't get up. He'd sprained an ankle or maybe broke his leg and lay on the ground crying. The other team's coach came out on the field and carried him off. He was just a little kid. And though everyone said Simon hadn't done anything wrong, he never played hard after that, and he was grateful when his first and final season ended, although he did miss the locker room. After that, he pretty much gave up on sports, and Dad, he thought, pretty much gave up on him.

***

When they were two hours east of St. Louis, he moved into the back seat with Mom, who was sitting up reading. “Mom,” he said and put his head on her shoulder. “How are you doing?”

“Just fine.” She smiled her special Mommy smile, which he believed she reserved for him and only him all these years later, her eyes crinkling a bit. “And how are you?”

“I'm good.”

“I'm better.”

“I'm the best,” Simon said, just as he used to when, oh, he didn't know, he was five or six, and he'd crawl up on her lap. They beamed smiley beams at each other, and he wished, not for the first time, that he could still fit on Mom's lap without crushing her. “Tell me about your Mom,” he added, thinking, as he always did, who I never knew.

“I already told you, Simon.”

“Tell me again.”

“She was tall, thin, and beautiful. Lizzie looks quite a bit like her. She had jet-black hair. She curled her eye-lashes. She was very glamorous.” Mom got this faraway look, and he wished he knew where she went. “She hated food, which was how she stayed so thin. She died when I was twenty-three.”

“You've told me all that. Tell me something new.”

“She died so long ago, I'm not sure there is anything new.”

Simon looked out through the van's tinted windows at farm land rolling past like a river. “Tell me your happiest memory,” he said. “Then tell me your worst.”

“Oh, Simon. Sometimes you're really so wise.”

A happy glow spread through him like food coloring diffusing through a glass of water. In the whole world no one else thought he was wise.

“When I was eight years old I was walking with my mother in Vandervoort's, which was the fanciest department store in St. Louis. I don't know where my brother Billy was, it was just the two of us, which was rare.”

Mom paused, and her eyes got their crinkly look.

“We were all dressed up—I can't remember why—and we walked through Vandervoort's holding hands. Everyone who saw us smiled. I knew my mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. But that day she was also the nicest. We arrived at the fancy-dress department, where everyone knew her. ‘Oh hello, Mrs. Gordon,' they said, ‘so good to see you.' As if she were a queen or a movie star, and it wasn't because she spent lots of money, because I know now she didn't. ‘Oh hello, Mrs. Gordon, how are you?'”

“All the salesgirls gathered around us, and in those days they weren't girls, they were grown women. Doris said, ‘I'm extra-wonderful today, because my beautiful daughter Genna is with me. Isn't she just a doll?' I felt so happy, Simon, I can't tell you.”

From the front of the van, Simon could hear that crappy punk music Lizzie listened to, either from the front speakers or escaping her headset. The kid was going to be deaf by eighteen.

“So what was your saddest memory?”

Mom looked out the window. When she turned back, tears like tiny pearls spun on her lashes. “That was both. She never said it again, so I knew she didn't mean it. I don't know why it mattered so much—it shouldn't really—but it did to my mother. No matter what else I did, she never forgave me for being a little bit plump, pretty but not really beautiful. My mother,” Mom paused, then continued, speaking as she sometimes did, as both judge and jury, “was a shallow woman.”

Simon didn't know what to say. He thought about how Dad made him feel, like he didn't really love him because he didn't play football and all that. But he also knew Dad did love him, and he thought, wonderingly, that Mom was stuck in her childhood. All grown up but still worried her dead mother didn't love her.

“I think you're beautiful, Mom.” He kissed her cheek then grinned. “For a mom.”

“Thank you, Simon. I think you're beautiful, too.”

He laid his cheek on Mom's shoulder and let the joy of the moment overtake him as they rolled west towards St. Louis.

Journeys of Discovery

They splashed in the pool, bubbled in the Jacuzzi, then consumed slabs of animal protein in the hotel restaurant, although Jack annoyed her by arguing it would have been cheaper and probably healthier to eat anywhere else. Give it a rest, Jack, she'd said, the kids are tired. Later, those same tired kids stayed up half the night in their room watching MTV and
Seinfeld
reruns. It had been years since the Barishes managed a single hotel room, and then only because until she was twelve or so, Lizzie liked sleeping on the floor. Before saying goodnight, Genna had warned the kids that if they charged movies they'd pay for it out of their allowances, and both kids got this expression on their faces—Yeah, right—because neither she nor Jack had ever managed to enforce such a threat.

The next morning, lying in a contented ball in Jack's arms on Thanksgiving morning, Genna concluded a few movies, even at hotel prices, was cheap for a whooping orgasm. In a hotel bed, on clean sheets, with miniature shampoos already stashed in her make-up bag, and a soft-core, soft-focus video on the box, they remained hot for each other. What conference? What woman?

As if once again they were Jack and Genna, starting out, when they were so hot for each other she'd suck his fingers and other digit with such urgency he'd joke afterwards he thought he and it, all of him, were going to disappear inside her like smoke inside a genii's bottle. Mmm, she thought, snuggling, feeling Jack's stubbly cheek abrade her shoulder, she could still hear the joy ripping out of her—OOOOOH, Jack!—as she came last night and he pushed her up on her knees and entered her again, mashing her face into a pillow, his fingers reaching up from beneath her to pinch her nipple, his cock—his COCK, upper case, OH YES! HIS UPPER CASE COCK!—pounding so far up and down inside her it was a pile driver and she was the pile, Jack the wave and Genna the ocean floor he broke against wet and dripping. My God, she thought, and shuddered against him, where did that come from?

Later, after they'd dressed and eaten and dressed again in their holiday best—which for Simon meant the extra-wide Ginkos with red velvet pocket patches, now what would her family think of that?—and she sat around while the kids watched more reruns, and Jack gazed with longing—she might even say the ineffable sadness of lost youth—at the first of several college-football games, the family climbed back into the Town and Country and drove through beautiful downtown Ladue to Mellon Drive on the tree-lined east side of town. Here the houses, substantial as aircraft carriers, were protected from the eyes of pedestrians (maids walking large dogs) by brick walls and battle groups of juniper hedge. Jack eased up to the wrought iron gate, the only opening in Billy's high brick perimeter. Each of the gate's vertical members, elongated like a Giacometti walking-man sculpture, ended in a well-defined, anti-welcome exclamation point, intended to discourage the unwashed and uninvited from popping in unannounced.

Jack rolled down his window and pressed the large tab on the security keypad. A moment later Billy's voice found them in the van, right there, remarkably static-free.

“Welcome, Jack, drive right in.”

“In former times,” Jack said,
sotto voce
, “the heads of Jewish martyrs were mounted on that gate.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said as Jack eased the van into gear. “The front gate was reserved for Catholics. How did Billy know it was us?”

From her captain's chair, with more than a dollop of teenage scorn topping her vocal sundae, Lizzie answered, “We're always last, Mom.”

Jack said, “There was a mini security camera, smart-ass.”

They proceeded up the tree-lined drive. Maples, Genna thought, though the leaves were down. It was disorienting to see Billy so mummified in the signifiers of wealth. Each time she visited, which wasn't often, she was like, as the kids would say, Are you kidding, Billy?

They parked in a turn-out near the house, where silver sedans sparkled like sterling teasets in the November sun. For a moment she wished they'd washed the van before coming over, then put it out of her mind. Jack parked beside a low-slung roadster.

“Look at that Beemer!” Simon exclaimed when they were out of the van, collecting themselves and the cut flowers she'd bought, straightening their clothes. “That car is awesome!”

They proceeded up the front steps in family order, Jack beside her, their ducklings trailing behind, and stood between Doric columns supporting a second story portico. In the center of a carved door, the brass jaws of a lion's-head knocker opened wide as a gnu's throat. Below the bell press there was an engraved golden plaque: House of Gordon, Established July 4, 1992; the year Billy and Carolyn had bought and refurbished their pleasure dome. Genna pressed the buzzer and somewhere inside a chime played the opening measure of Beethoven's Fifth. Sometimes—du-du-du-DUM—she believed her brother had lost his way.

A uniformed maid admitted them to the front hall. Billy entered, smiling his smile of smiles, face tanned and handsome as ever, though perhaps a bit fleshier above his yellow cardigan. “Hey, Sis,” he cried, and here came the flash of teeth, that light in his eyes, the recapitulated elegance of Doris's jaw. “It's so damn good to see you.”

He kissed her cheek and she kissed his, which smelled faintly of Aramis. It was damn good to see him, too. Carolyn entered wearing one of the black sheaths she favored, cut just below the knee to show off her trim calves, a double strand of pearls against the black—what was it, cashmere—the diamond on her left ring finger prominent enough to denude Genna's. Oh, who gave a good goddamn. Genna offered up her cheek. Carolyn offered hers, first one then the other, a European embrace in the heartland. Carolyn's straight hair, bobbed just above her shoulders, remained the same almost-black Billy's used to be. For years, she'd suspected Carolyn dyed hers to match Billy's; it was that similar, and Carolyn was that shallow a girl.

“So good to see you,” Carolyn said, then moved onto Jack, who pulled her against him, the Barish hug—which was how he greeted everyone, especially pretty women—Genna thought, watching Carolyn flinch then readjust her smile when Jack released her. Carolyn moved on to Lizzie and Simon, exclaiming over how beautiful and grown-up Lizzie appeared (Damn right) and what a big man (now it was Genna's turn to flinch) Simon had become.

Billy said, “I'll fetch the girls,” and returned a moment later with his twins, Nicole and Tara, who were a year older than Lizzie. Nicole had her parents' pale skin and black hair. Tara's hair was honey brown. When they were younger, Carolyn had dressed them identically. Pink dresses. Lavender tights and tutus. White cashmere coats with fox-fur collars. Summer shorts and blouse sets. As the girls grew, however, Carolyn had given that up because they were fraternal twins, after all, and matching clothes only magnified how little they resembled each other. By their tenth birthday, it was hard not to think of Tara as the smaller, prettier one. Her parents' dark good looks and Doris's lean elegance had miscombined in Nicole, as if square base pairs had gotten stuck in round double helix holes. Nicole's long jaw and neck, and her over-large teeth neighed, Horse-face, Equus, freaky-looking.

“Aunt Genna,” Tara said and kissed her cheek, then Nicole did, too, finishing her pretty sister's sentence as Genna remembered she often did, “so good to see you.”

The twins moved on to be mauled by Jack, then stopped awkwardly in front of their cousins; at least Nicole did. Tara smiled, as she remembered Billy smiling at her age, confident the world would be smitten. Poor Nicole, Genna thought, as she watched the teenagers file out, first the twins then Lizzie and Simon. What she'd suspected before she hugged her nieces was anatomically true: Tara had even gotten the bigger breasts, her figure lush like Lizzie's while Nicole was knobby as a two-by-four.

Then the kids' noise and angst and bustle were gone, and the couples stood uncomfortably alone except for the maid, who'd returned for their coats. Billy said, “Come on, Jack, let's get you a drink,” then turned to her. “Daddy's eager to see you.”

Then where is he? She trailed Billy and Carolyn into the living room where split logs burned in a hearth large enough to accommodate a spitted stag. The mantle looked as if it might have been transported, tile by hand-painted tile, from a manor house where the masters had ridden to the hounds and cried, “Heigh-ho!” Instead there was Daddy, with the inevitable sweater vest under a gray flannel suit, his gold watch chain running from his belt loop up to his vest pocket. His right hand cradled a scotch, which she knew without knowing was Chivas, one rock, thank you. Daddy stood with his back to the fire conversing with Carolyn's father. Carolyn's younger sisters occupied the couch; their husbands stood across the room, talking to each other. Truth was, she could never remember which husband went with which sister. For years, she'd tried to stay near Jack, who remembered everyone's name. Okay, she thought, I'm a terrible family member, a passive-aggressive snob, but the sisters' husbands really did look quite a bit alike, more so, say, than Nicole and Tara. Wait, one of them was divorced, yes, that was the news. The tall one with the blond moustache was new. She couldn't be expected to know his name. He didn't look anything like the other one, thank goodness, though they wore the same blue banker suit. And the older woman with short-cropped blond hair seated in the armchair beside the couch must be Daddy's friend, Gwen.

She hurried towards the hearth, feeling the room's eyes follow her. Daddy turned and smiled. He drew his watch from his pocket and flicked the golden case. “You're late. Some things don't change.”

It was the kids' fault, not mine. “Very little changes, Daddy. How are you?”

“Wonderful. Warming my brains.” He smacked his buttocks. “Come give us a hug.”

She felt the familiar grit of his cheek. He seemed a little shorter, frailer. She stepped back and examined Daddy's long, lined face, the ironic blue eyes, remembering how he'd looked all those afternoons in his study when she'd come home after school and he'd been drinking. World-weary, cheeks flushed.

“There's someone I'd like you to meet.” He led her to the red velvet chair. “Gwen, my dear.” He offered his hand—Daddy had such impeccable manners—and helped Gwen rise. “My prodigal daughter, Genna.”

***

Jack never knew exactly what the old boy had against him. Oh sure, there were the slow-moving Jungian rivers of resentment and woe. Jack was not only banging his daughter, he'd arrived on the scene when the Judge's wife was dying and the next thing he knew not one but both of his women were gone, and no bride price, either. But Genna had been away for years, and the old boy never really seemed to miss Doris. Within weeks, there was a line of moneyed matrons out the door. Whatever he was giving those rich women he should have bottled and sold through men's stores. All right, the Judge was better-looking than Jack ever was. Saturnine was a word that leapt to mind, though Jack wasn't exactly sure he knew what it meant. The old boy could drink like a fish, an aquarium of fish, clouds of silver bait darting this way and that, always the best scotch and always someone else's, without lowering that arched eyebrow, that almost Southern grace, as if he were a patrician from some other time and latitude, noble, doomed and too proud to ask, whom it was the world and its rich ladies' joy and duty to care for.

The Judge hadn't worked since his early fifties, supported first by the women and then by his son. Now Billy, what a gift for gelt. Money stuck to him like gum to a theater seat, like shit to a straw, and on and on. Okay, maybe Jack was a little jealous. Billy was so damn nice, sweet, and dumb and stinking rich.

They stood sipping scotch in front of the hearth, which must have been twelve feet wide—you could have burned ten foot trees in it—when Gwen, the old boy's girlfriend, suddenly asked, “And what do you do, Mister Barish?”

“Genna and I are professors at Tipton University.” That didn't register, and he added, “In Ohio.”

Gwen wore one of the most remarkable items of clothing Jack had ever seen: an orange and brown Thanksgiving sweater on which a black-hatted Pilgrim on her right breast fired a musket at the turkey on her left.

“That's right,” Gwen said. “Daddy told me.”

Jack glanced at Genna who stood a few feet away chatting to Billy. She had also heard Gwen call her father Daddy.

“What's your area of expertise?”

Now that's an interesting question. “I'm writing about homosexuality.”

“A memoir?” asked the Judge, bestirring himself and turning, his eyebrow arched an inch or more.

“Not exactly.”

The Judge sipped his Chivas. “Handbook?”

“I'm in the history of science.” Jack nipped his own drink and felt in the growing silence a whooshing drop in air pressure as everyone in the room turned towards him.

Carolyn's youngest sister, Ellen, said, “That's so interesting. Tell all, Jack.”

“I'm reviewing the new emphasis on genetics in homosexuality.” Ellen and the others stared blankly. “The so-called gay gene, and what the societal implications would be if the existence of a gay gene could actually be established.”

“And what would that be?” the Judge asked.

“Depends how you feel about homosexuals.” Jack glanced at Genna, who was silently shaking her head no, which he ignored. “Not long ago, Frances Crick—who won the Nobel Prize with Watson, the double helix guys?—Crick said he thought pregnant women could have their fetuses' DNA tested, and if they discovered it carried the gay gene, they could choose to abort and no one would blame them. Now, most people think that Frances Crick is a quack, but still.”

“Do you?” the Judge asked.

“Do I what?”

“Think he's a quack?”