Labor Day (20 page)

A lot of the clothes she put on to show him were things I’d never seen her wear, probably because she’d never had the occasion. You could tell he loved it and in a different way from him, I did too. She was so pretty, I felt proud of her. I also liked seeing how happy she looked. Not only because I wanted her to be happy, which I did, but because seeing her that way took me off the hook. I didn’t have to be so worried all the time or trying to figure out ways to cheer her up.

Lunchtime, Frank made another of his amazing soups, out of potatoes and onions this time, that he served cold, which was perfect for a day like that. After, my mother decided to give him a haircut. Then Frank said he thought I should get a haircut and he gave me one. He was surprisingly good at this. At the prison,
he said, he cut everyone’s hair. They weren’t allowed to have scissors, but there was one guy on the cellblock who had a pair that he hid inside a loose piece of cement in the yard.

Frank hardly ever said anything about where he’d spent the last eighteen years, but he told us about how, after one of the guards found the scissors, and they all had to go back to prison buzz cuts, the men used to reminisce about the good old days when Frank cut their hair.

My mother taught him how to dance the Texas two-step, though he couldn’t really dance too well yet because of his leg.

As soon as I’m all mended up, Adele, he told her, I’m taking you out on the town.

This would be in Canada.

It was so hot, we weren’t hungry for dinner, but my mother made popcorn, with melted butter, and we laid pillows on the floor in front of the TV set and watched a movie,
Tootsie.

That’s what we could do, when we cross the border, my mother said to Frank. Dress you up like a woman. You could wear one of my costumes.

Her saying that brought us back to how things were for us. For one day, we had gotten to act like we were these three carefree people with no troubles bigger than getting the garbage disposal unclogged, but when the picture came to us, of crossing the border into a different country, with a carload of everything we had in the world, from our old lives, and no idea where we were headed except away, a silence came over us.

Trying to break it, maybe, my mother said, Dustin Hoffman looks sort of nice as a woman.

I’m more the Jessica Lange type, I said.

I’m more the Adele type, Frank said.

After the movie was over, I told them I was tired, and headed up the stairs, but not really to bed. I sat for a while at my desk. I was
thinking I should write my father a letter. I figured I wouldn’t see him for a long time, and even though the times when I did see him were hardly ever good, I still felt sad.

Dear Dad,
I wrote.
I can’t say where I’m going right now but I don’t want you to worry.

Dear Dad
, I started again.
You might not be hearing from me for a while.

I want you to know, I really appreciate all the times you took me out for dinner.

I want you to know, I appreciate when you helped me with my science project.

I know how hard you worked to bring us all to Disney World.

I’m happy you’ve got some other kids around, to keep you busy.

I don’t blame you for anything.

Sometimes it’s a good thing for people not to see each other for a while. When they get back together, they have a lot of things to tell each other.

You don’t have to worry about me,
I wrote.
I’m going to be fine.

Say good-bye to Richard and Chloe for me. Also Marjorie.

I had hesitated a long time, when I got to the bottom of the page. I decided on
Sincerely yours
. Then just
Sincerely.
Then I crossed that out. Then I thought about how stupid it would look, having a cross-out, and how, if he looked close, he’d still make out the word I’d written in the first place, and wrote
Yours truly
. Safer than the alternative, which had been
Love.

CHAPTER 19

T
UESDAY MORNING
. S
CHOOL WAS SUPPOSED
to start the next day. My mother was cleaning out the refrigerator. She had started boxing things up to take in the car, but there was surprisingly little. Our dishes had come from the Goodwill. A couple of pots and pans, also nothing special. The coffeepot.

We’d take her tape player, but not the television. I had turned it on when I came down, to keep me company while I ate my cereal. Jerry Lewis had signed off, finally, but now we had Regis and Kathie Lee checking in.

I won’t miss that sound, my mother said about the TV set. On Prince Edward Island, we can listen to the birds.

You know what we’ll do, Henry? she said. We’ll get you a violin. We’ll find an old Canadian fiddle player to teach you how to play.

She wasn’t bringing her cello since it didn’t actually belong
to her, though considering the other major law we were breaking, by crossing the border with Frank, I wouldn’t have thought stealing a rental cello was such a big deal. Never mind, she said. I’ll get one up there. Full size this time. We can play together, once you learn your violin.

One thing she felt bad about was abandoning all our supplies—the year’s inventory of paper towels and toilet paper, our store of Campbell’s soup. Frank said there was no room in the car for those, and anyway, if they stopped us at the border to look through what we had, it would look suspicious. She could bring some of her clothes but not everything. All her wonderful dancing outfits—sparkly skirts and scarves, hats with silk flowers, tap shoes and her soft leather ballet slippers and the high heels she used to wear when she went tango dancing. She’d have to pick out just a few favorites. No room for more.

She had to bring our photograph albums. Almost nothing from her own childhood, but half a dozen leather volumes documenting mine, though in every picture where my father appeared, she had taken a razor blade and cut out his face. In a couple of the pictures where I appeared—at age two, age three, age four—she was wearing a baggy top indicating a pregnancy. Then you turned the page, and no baby. Though in the back of one volume, there was a footprint, no bigger than a stamp. Fern.

In my case, there wasn’t all that much I cared about, to pack. My
Chronicles of Narnia
and my
Giant Treasury of Magic Tricks
and, from when I was little,
Pokey Little Puppy
and
Curious George
. My poster of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue.

When you got down to it, the main thing I cared about was Joe. Except for when we brought him home from the pet store, he’d never ridden in a car before, but I figured I could take him out of his cage if he got scared, and just hold him under my
shirt, where he could feel my heart. I liked to do that sometimes, even when we weren’t going anyplace. I could feel his too, faster than mine, under his soft silky fur.

He hadn’t been doing well in the heat wave. It had been a couple of days since he’d shown any interest in his wheel. He just lay around on the floor of the cage, panting, with a glassy expression. He hadn’t touched his food. I had fed him some water with an eyedropper, because the effort required to get up and drink had seemed too much for him.

I’m worried about Joe, I told my mother that morning. I wouldn’t want to take him in the car till the weather cools down.

We need to talk about that, Henry, she said. I don’t think they allow hamsters to cross the border.

We’ll have to smuggle him, I said. I can put him under my shirt. I was already planning to carry him there so he wouldn’t be scared.

If they found Joe, they’d start checking everything out. Pretty soon they’d discover about Frank. The police would arrest him. They’d send us back.

He’s part of our family. We can’t leave him.

We’ll find him a good home, she said. Maybe the Jervises would like him for their grandchildren.

I looked at Frank. He was down on the floor, scrubbing the linoleum. They wanted to leave everything looking really nice, my mother had said. She didn’t want people talking about her. Now he was holding a knife, running it along the place where the tile met the drywall, to dig out any built-up dirt. He didn’t look up, didn’t meet my eyes. My mother was rubbing steel wool over the toaster oven, over and over, in the same spot.

If Joe doesn’t go, neither do I, I told her. He’s the one thing I care about here.

She knew better than to say we’d get another hamster. Or a dog, even though I’d always wanted one.

You never even asked me if I minded not seeing my dad anymore, I said. Some people get to have brothers and sisters. All I have is Joe.

I knew what that would do to her. On the outside, the parts of her face all stayed in the same position, but it was as if someone injected a chemical in her at that moment, with some strange and terrible toxic effect. Like her skin froze.

It could ruin everything, she said. Her voice was so quiet now I could barely hear. You’re asking me to put a man I love in jeopardy for a hamster.

I hated how ridiculous she made it sound. Like my whole life was based on a joke.

Only the things you care about are important, I said. You and him. All you want to do is get into bed with him and fuck.

It was not a word I’d ever used before. It was not a word I’d ever heard spoken in our house. Until I heard it coming out of my mouth, I would not have believed a word could possess so much power.

I remembered the time she poured the milk on the floor, and another time—so long ago the memory was like an old Polaroid photograph that’s almost faded out—where she had sat in the closet with some kind of cloth over her eyes, with a sound coming out of her like a dying animal. Much later I realized, this must have been after the baby died. The last one. Until this moment, I’d forgotten it, but now I could see her squatting on the floor, with the coats hanging over her, and our winter boots jumbled up on the floor around her, along with an umbrella and the hose of the vacuum cleaner. It was a sound like nothing I’d heard before, and after hearing it I had flung myself on top of her as if I could plug it up. I put my hand over her mouth and rubbed my shirt on her face, but the sound kept coming.

This time, there was no sound. That turned out to be worse.
This was how I pictured Hiroshima, which I did a report on once, after they dropped the bomb. Wherever a person was when it happened, they remained frozen there, with the skin melting off their face, and their eyes staring.

My mother stood there. She was still holding the toaster oven. She was barefoot, with a rag in her hand from cleaning out the crumbs. She didn’t move.

Frank was the one who spoke. He set down the knife and got up off the floor and wrapped his long arm around her shoulders.

It’s all right, Adele, he said. We can work this out. We’ll bring the hamster. But Henry, I’m asking you to apologize to your mother.

I went up to my room. I started taking my clothes out of the drawers. T-shirts of sports teams I didn’t care about. A baseball cap from a Red Sox game my father took Richard and me to see, where I took out my puzzle book in the seventh inning. A couple of letters from Arak, the African pen pal, who we’d lost track of a couple of years back. A piece of pyrite I had believed, when I was little, to be gold. I had this idea when I got it that someday I’d sell it and make a whole lot of money and take my mother on an amazing trip. Somewhere like New York City or Las Vegas, where they’d have dancing. Not Prince Edward Island.

I went in my mother’s room, where the cassette player was. I unplugged the machine and carried it into my room, put in one of my tapes. Guns N’ Roses, top volume. It wasn’t a very good cassette player, so when you turned it up loud, there was a scratchy sound to the bass line, but that was probably the point.

I stayed in my room all afternoon. Everything I owned I put in trash bags. A couple of times, as I was tossing things in the
bags, I’d hesitate and consider saving something, but I wanted this to be slash and burn. Once you started holding things back, it wasn’t the same.

Sometime in the late afternoon, when the last of my stuff had been bagged up and carried down the steps and I’d set everything by the trash cans, I got out Eleanor’s number. I took my time walking through the living room toward the phone, past my mother and Frank, taking the books off the shelves, putting them in boxes, to set out by the library for the twenty-five-cent sale where most of them had come from in the first place.

Let them wonder.

I picked up the receiver and dialed. She answered on the first ring.

You want to get together?

Under other circumstances, my mother would have asked where I was going. This time she said nothing, but I told her anyway.

I’m going to see a girl I know, I said. In case you wondered.

My mother turned around and looked at me. The look on her face reminded me of the first time my father had come by to pick me up that time, after Chloe was born, and we were in the yard, and the car window was open, so we could hear her crying. That was when I understood, hitting a person with your fist wasn’t the only way to take them out.

We won’t do anything you wouldn’t do, I said, as the door slammed after me.

I
MET
E
LEANOR AT THE PLAYGROUND AT
the park, but nobody else was there. Too hot. We sat on the swings. She was wearing a dress so short it made you think maybe she hadn’t finished getting dressed.

You won’t believe what my mother did, I said. She thought we could just leave my hamster behind.

Eleanor was fingering her braid. Now she took the tip of it and drew it across her lips, as if it were a brush and she was painting them.

You might not be familiar with this, but psychologists say that you can tell a lot about someone from how they treat animals. Not that your mother’s a bad person or anything. But if you look at psychopathic killers, they nearly always started out by torturing pets. John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson. You should hear what they did to cats before they got around to people.