Drowning Lessons (4 page)

I arrive at the hospital midafternoon. It seems hospital beds are scarce this time of year. They've got Mother on a gurney in the hall. She puts down her
Vanity Fair
.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better, tank you.”

(The Death Voice, I'm pleased to report, is gone.)

“How was de funeral?”

“Day after tomorrow,” I tell her. “The wake is tonight.”

She grasps my hand in the busy hospital corridor. “Mi dispiace,” she says. I don't know if she's sorry for missing Lenny's mother's wake, or for getting sick, or what. “Poor Lenny, he must be upset.”

“Sure,” I say. “He's very upset.”

“I bet he cry a lot.”

What sort of remark is that? “Naturally,” I say. “His mom just died.”

“Hmmm …” I'm supposed to translate this “hmm” into a whole conversation but refuse to do so. Instead I study the manufacturer's label on the gurney rail. Derwood-Kaiser Medical Supplies, Waterbury, Connecticut.

“When is you brother come?”

“Around dinner time, he said.”

“Dire lui … non preoccuparti. Tell him … not to worry.” She winces.

I pick up the
Vanity Fair
. Flipping its pages, I come across fat Marlon Brando crying at his son's murder trial. A pretty nurse takes my mother's temperature. One-oh-one.

At suppertime, as promised, from St. Albans, Vermont, where he's a Unitarian minister, Geordie arrives. Unitarians aren't supposed to believe in God, or maybe they just don't have to. Anyway, from what I gather my brother does a good job preaching
around
the Good Lord — like someone eating around the spinach on his plate. He drives an early-model Honda Civic and looks beat up from the trip. He's been divorced two months, and that shows, too.

“How are you?” I say, lugging his garment bag inside.

He takes a look around, shakes his head. I know what he's thinking. A: nothing's changed, and B: what's my jerk-off twin doing still living here? I want his love for me to overwhelm such thoughts. It doesn't. Though I've always looked up to him, Geordie has never liked me. He considers me an embarrassment,
a cheap knockoff of his genuine self, a counterfeit coin with his face on it. He especially resents the fact that I've spent the last ten years working at the local bicycle-seat factory. He can't seem to understand that, despite our looking like each other, it's
my
life, that what I do with it is no reflection on him. The reason he's surprised to see me here is because, last he heard, I'd taken an apartment of my own, on the seedy side of town, by the train tracks, next door to Goose Lumber. Until two weeks ago, that arrangement still held. But I couldn't take living alone in that place, in a one-room apartment over a family with something like thirty yapping dogs. When the dogs didn't rattle my brain, the freight trains rattled it. And, to be honest, I didn't like leaving Mother alone in the house. Which I'm sure helps shore up Geordie's impression of me as a
mammone
, which is Italian for “mama's boy.”

“Where are you sleeping?” His first words to me.

“In the den.” Nonnie's — our grandmother's — old room, where we used to watch
Hogan's Heroes
reruns. “I can move; I don't mind.”

He grabs the garment bag from me, drags it upstairs. I consider following him up to our old room, where twin beds and cardboard furniture sag, but it would only annoy him. My following Geordie has always annoyed him. Instead I yell, “Need a hand?”

The sound of unzipping answers. I lean against the balustrade, thinking I'm always at the threshold of things. I want to run up and hug my twin, confide in him about hollow tombstones, ask if he's brought his bathing suit. “They opened a Boston Rotisserie,” I call up.

Arms crossed, scowling, Geordie appears in gray underwear
at the top of the stairs. Legs white, belly sagging, hair, at twenty-eight, thinning and gray at the temples. You'd think he was eight years, not eight minutes, older.

We hike in the woods behind the house. Nonnie, my father's mother, was a big believer in wolves. She'd swallowed whole the legend of Romulus and Remus, those twins who, suckled by a she-wolf, went on to found Rome. I've always been fascinated by wolf stories.
White Fang. The Jungle Book. Peter and the Wolf
. Werewolves. I daydreamed that, like Kipling's Mowgli, I'd been raised by wolves. They could have done no worse.

Geordie walks ahead of me, gathering plastic hand-grenades and other relics of childhood warfare, tossing them over his shoulder, hitting me in the face. He pulls branches out of his way and releases them in time to whack my forehead. I don't even say ouch.

In her room, on the folding table next to her portable electric stove, Nonnie kept a bronze miniature statue of Romulus and Remus straddled by the she-wolf. She'd point to the twins one by one saying, “Questo e Alberto; e quello li, Geordie.” Tucked away in the rear of the house, Nonnie's room was a museum of smells. Mothballs, soy sauce, lavender, iodine — odors that conjured past lives and dreams of ancient, far-off places, crumbling cities beyond time's greedy grasp. After Papa died (a funeral I hardly remember), Mother treated Nonnie like a prisoner, condemning her to her tiny room and getting furious when she'd step out of her cell to use the bathroom, pasting her with ripe-tomato Italian epithets.

Nonnie's world crawled with wolves. She saw them everywhere, in her imagination, in her dreams, slinking across the
backyard terrace at night, eyes burning yellow as the petals of the forsythia bush Papa planted just before he died. Their den (Nonnie claimed) was the abandoned guest cottage behind our house. Geordie and I head there now, walking on dirt-and-leaf-covered flagstones through a raspberry patch, prickers clawing at skin and clothes. Nonnie said the wolves lived in the crawl space under the floor and came out only at night. Being six years old and knowing her window faced the woods, Geordie and I believed her. Anyway, who were we to argue with our grandmother, who was ninety, spoke a dozen languages (none English), and made the best fried spaghetti in the world?

At the cottage's empty doorway Geordie kicks through a pile of dead leaves. The floorboards are rotted; the sky pours through a yawning gap in the roof. Kids have been here, punching holes in Homisote walls, scrawling their names in pitch. If a family of wolves ever lived here, they've moved on.

Geordie unzips his fly, pisses into a tangle of venetian blinds. Geordie has always gotten a kick out of me watching him pee. He'd stand at the edge of our driveway, his golden effluence arching into milkweed and bulrushes. I'd stand beside him, hoping to see my own urine arch triumphantly next to his, only to see it trickle away languidly.

“I'm leaving the Barn,” he announces, still pissing, his broad back to me. The Barn is the Unitarian Church, only they don't call it a church. I'm stunned — not so much by the news, but because when Geordie speaks to me, it's always a bit stunning.

“Why, Geordie? What happened?”

He shrugs. It's just like Geordie to throw a bomb like that and follow it up with a shrug. I don't press him, knowing if I do he'll just clam up more. He wants the information to work on me, like
paint remover. He zips his fly, packing his penis away like a travel accessory. He smiles, pleased that I'm not saying anything. I'm learning. “Poor Mrs. Wolff,” he says, smiling.

“Yeah,” I say. “Poor Mrs. Wolff.”

Nonnie died at ninety-six. I was twelve. And though I didn't cry when told or at her funeral, still, Nonnie's death shook me. I knew she was really gone when Mother reclaimed her room and painted it a resolutely cheerful shade of yellow, the new-paint smell murdering all those other smells I'd loved.

Now it's Mrs. Wolff's turn to be the powdered doughnut. Dressed in sports coats and ties, Geordie and I greet the survivors: Lenny and his wife, Elaine; Mr. Wolff. I've never seen Mr. Wolff in a suit. Until now I've only seen him in the stained T-shirt and green work pants he wears to the pump house. “Good to see ya,” he says, hugging me (though built like a bear, Mr. Wolff is not the hugging type). I hug Lenny, then Elaine. Already I'm tired of hugging people. We get in line to look at the corpse, then take our places among the respectful. Next to me sits a girl with long brown eyelashes and cherry lips like Lenny's. I wonder two things: first, is she related to him? and second, is it okay to think about sex with your best friend's relative at his mother's wake? I spend the next few minutes searching for appropriate feelings, but it's like looking for aspirin in a dark medicine chest.

Then Clyde arrives, looking like hell in a seersucker suit. Clyde was always the tallest of us. Now he's the baldest, gauntest, and most successful, with his own video company in Boston. Clyde's latest project: a documentary about the Wright Brothers, narrated by former game-show panelist Orson Bean. When Clyde's
done hugging people, I say, “Did you bring your bathing suit?” It's code, our private joke, our secret handshake. Man, he looks awful. “How goes it?” I ask, as if it's not painfully obvious.

“Fine,” says Clyde, “thanks to an array of pharmaceutical products. Still working at Corbinger's?” Corbinger's: the bicycle-seat factory. At one point, five of us worked there. I stayed.

“I quit,” I tell him. “Last week.”

“No shit?” says Clyde.

“Honestly,” I say, “ever since they stopped making banana seats my heart hasn't been in it. I just passed my civil service exam. I'm going to work for the P.O.” P.O.: that's shorthand for “post office.” Somehow it's easier to get out that way.

Like Geordie, Clyde's been through a nasty divorce. The day the papers came through he passed the world's largest kidney stone, his “piece of the rock,” he called it. Now he's got a duodenal ulcer, some strange intestinal malady, plus bursitis in both elbows and a bone spur on his left foot. He walks with a cane and wears a special orthopedic shoe: thick, soft, black, a far cry from the brown wing tip on his other foot.

“How's the stiff looking?” he asks.

“Stiff,” I say, shrugging. “There are some pretty good-looking nonstiffs here, though.” I nod toward the dark-lashed girl. Clyde looks, nods in turn, smiles. All the chronic illnesses in the world wouldn't keep him from admiring a pretty face. When the young lady catches his look, he wiggles his fingers at her.

“So,” I ask, “did you bring your bathing suit, or what?”

Clyde closes his eyes and bows his head like he's about to own up to something embarrassing. For a second I'm afraid he's going to say, “Al, those days are over for me,” or something heartbreaking.
Instead he pops up his head, screws up his face, and says,
“But of course!”

We gather on a ramp behind the funeral home. Still raining. Water surrounds us, dripping from eaves, gurgling in gutters, splashing into puddles. Lenny lights a cigar. “I can deal with a half hour of just about anything,” he says.

Clyde, who never smoked, snatches the cigar, takes a drag. Soon we're all smoking the same cigar. For a second I'm confused, thinking it's Stewie's wake all over again, that the past five years never happened.

“It's all shit and roses.” Geordie's ministerial voice upstages the rain.

“Is that what you preach to your congregation?” says Lenny. “‘It's all shit and roses, amen'?”

“We don't say, ‘Amen.' I did it once; people got upset. We Unitarians are extremely protective of our secularism.”

“But,” says Lenny, “you don't mind having your noses rubbed in roses and shit?”

“That's right,” says Geordie. “Shoot the messenger.”

“As for me,” says Clyde, changing the subject, “I'm just waiting for life to be perfect so I can go about my business.” He breaks into a soft-shoe, but the bone spur waylays him.

Mr. Wolff steps out the back door, sees us all floating in cigar smoke, shakes his big head, and ducks inside.

“Back to the salt mines,” says Lenny, flicking the cigar over a dripping hedge and then going back in.

It's strange, but over Bennington Pond and nowhere else there's a break in the clouds. Sunlight spills onto the water, leaving the rest
of the world in sullied darkness. A sunbeam singles out the red door of the pumping station on the far shore, beyond the island with the lighthouse. Normally, even on rainy days, the red door is ajar. But Mr. Wolff mourns.

The hike to our rock coats our shoes with mud. We take them off, jam them into a crag, and strip down, except Lenny, who carries his baby son in a papoose sling and thumbs a Bible, searching for a passage to read at his mother's funeral. The joke about bathing suits is we don't wear any. Clyde's dick hangs long and red and is his point of greatest health. Geordie's is shrunken and shriveled, his least healthy part. We have twin dicks.

“Roses and shit!” I cry, tearing a hole in green water. It's late May, and the water is icy still. My testicles retreat into my guts. I feel immortal, twenty-eight years old, but who's counting? My body is twelve, the same age it was when we first started coming here. Freestyle, I head for the lighthouse. I used to be able to swim back and forth two, three, four times. Halfway there I'm winded, treading water. Geordie catches up with me, doing a backstroke, his feet kicking up plumes of sun-spackled water, spouting up into shafts of sunlight, spewing mouthfuls. Then along comes Clyde, doing a scissor kick–sidestroke. Back on the rock Lenny thumbs through Proverbs and bounces his kid, who keeps crying. The cries carry all the way across the lake, to the stone lighthouse, beyond, to the pumping station, reverberating off the red door to begin their journey back as an echo. To our surprise, the island has only been slightly polluted. Cans and bottles wink back the sun's rays; Geordie gathers them up, muttering. Clyde climbs the rusty lighthouse ladder and stands behind the topside railing, sunlight daubing his furry parts. His ailing flesh paints a pink rainbow as he dives. I imagine his symptoms leeching into the
reservoir, sending dozens of unwatched pumping-station meter needles flying into the red zone.