Labor Day (6 page)

Partway through the meal, a drop of tomato sauce trickled onto my mother’s cheek. She could have licked it off with her own tongue probably, but she must have understood by this point that there would be no need. He dipped his napkin into the glass of water and touched it to her skin. His finger also touched the skin of her cheek then, for a moment, to dry it off. She made a small nodding motion. Easy to miss, but her hair had brushed his hand, and when that happened, he’d taken the strand of hair and brushed it off her face.

He himself did not eat. I had been hungry, but sitting there now, at the table with the two of them, it felt as crude to chew or swallow as it would have to munch on popcorn at a baby’s christening, or lick an ice-cream cone while your friend told you his dog died. I shouldn’t be here was how I felt.

I guess I’ll take my dinner in the living room, I said. Watch some TV.

The telephone was also there of course. I could have picked it up and dialed. The door, the neighbors, the car with the key in it—nothing had changed. I turned on
Three’s Company
and ate my chili.

A few shows later, when I got tired, I looked back in the kitchen. The dishes had been cleared away and washed. He had fixed tea, but nobody was drinking any. I could hear the low sound of their voices, though not the words they said.

I called out then that I was going to bed. This was the moment my mother would normally have said “Sweet dreams,” but she was occupied.

CHAPTER 5

M
Y MOTHER DIDN’T HAVE A REGULAR JOB
, but she sold vitamins over the phone to people. Every couple of weeks the company she worked for—MegaMite—sent her a printout with phone numbers of potential customers all around our region, to call up and tell about the product. Every time she sold a vitamin package, the company paid her a commission. We also got a discount on vitamins for ourselves, which was a fringe benefit. She made sure I took my MegaMites twice a day. She could see the results in my eyeballs, she said. Some people had these grayish corneas, but mine were white as an egg, and the other thing she’d noticed already was how, unlike so many other kids my age (not that she saw other kids my age much), I did not suffer from acne.

You are too young to appreciate this yet, she told me, but in the future, you’ll be grateful for how the minerals you’re taking
in now will affect your virility and sexual health. They’ve done studies on that. Particularly at the moment, as you enter puberty, it’s important to consider these things.

These were some of the lines my mother was supposed to deliver to the people on her potential customer printouts, but mostly the person who heard them was me.

My mother was a terrible MegaMite salesperson. She hated calling up strangers, for one thing, so very often she avoided the whole thing. The new printouts would sit on our kitchen table, on top of the old ones, with a name checked off here and there, and the occasional comment—
Line busy. Call back at more convenient time. Wishes she could buy but no $.

I can tell you’re someone who should have these vitamins, Marie,
I heard her saying on the phone one time—a rare night when she had set herself up at the table with the phone, and a pen to take notes, and the list of numbers they’d given her. So far so good, I was thinking, when I came into the kitchen to fix myself a bowl of cereal with powdered milk. This was particularly good news to me because at the time she’d promised, if she could drum up another thirty MegaMite customers, she’d buy me the boxed set of Sherlock Holmes I’d been wanting, from Classics Book Club, that we’d joined the year before to get the free world atlas and a leather-bound edition of
The Chronicles of Narnia
with full-color illustrations.

So here’s what I’m going to do, Marie,
she was saying now.
I’m going to send you the vitamins anyway. I’ll get them myself on my company discount. You can send me a check later, when things improve for you.

What makes you think that person you never even met is any worse off than us? I asked her.

Because I have you, she said. Marie doesn’t.

I
DON’T IMAGINE YOUR FATHER HAS TOLD
you anything about sex, she said one night, when we were having our Cap’n Andy. I had dreaded this moment, and might have avoided it if I’d told her yes, he explained everything, but it was never possible to lie to her.

No, I said.

Most people put all this focus onto the physical changes you’ll be going through soon. Maybe they’ve even started. I don’t intend to invade your personal privacy by asking about that.

They explained everything in our health assembly, I told her. Cut her off at the pass was my thought. As swiftly as possible.

They never tell you about love, Henry, she said. For all the discussion of body parts, the one that never gets mentioned is your heart.

That’s OK, I said. Desperate to get this conversation finished. Only her words kept on coming.

There is another aspect your health teacher is unlikely to explore. Though he may refer to hormones. No doubt he has done that.

I braced myself for all the horrifying words then.
Ejaculation. Semen. Erection. Pubic hair. Nocturnal emission. Masturbate.

Desire, she said. People never talk about longing. They act as if making love is all about secretions and body functions and reproduction. They forget to mention how it feels.

Stop, stop, I wanted to say. I wanted to put my hand over her mouth. I wanted to jump up from the table and run out into the night. Mow the lawn, rake leaves, shovel snow, be anyplace but here.

There is another kind of hunger, she said, clearing our plates—hers barely touched, as usual—and pouring herself a glass of wine.

Hunger for the human touch, she said. She sighed deeply then. If there was any doubt before, it was clear. She knew about this one.

CHAPTER 6

T
HERE IS A THING THAT HAPPENS
sometimes, where you wake up and you forget for a minute what happened the day before. It takes your brain a few seconds to reset, before you remember whatever it was that happened—sometimes good, more often bad—that you knew about when you went to bed the night before and blanked out in the night. I remember the feeling from when my father left, and how, when I’d first opened my eyes the next day, and stared out the window, I knew something was wrong without remembering exactly what. Then it came to me.

When Joe got out of his cage and for three days we didn’t know where he was, and all we could do was scatter hamster food all over the house hoping he’d come out, which he finally did—that was one of those times. When my grandmother died—not because I actually knew her very well, but because my mother
had loved her and now she was going to be an orphan, which meant that she would feel even more alone in the world, which meant it was more important than ever for me to stick around and have dinner with her, play cards, listen to her stories, listen to more—that was one of those times.

The morning after we brought Frank home from Pricemart—the Friday before the start of Labor Day weekend—I woke up forgetting he was there. I just knew something was different at our house.

The tip-off came when I smelled coffee. This was not how my mother did it. She was never out of bed this early. There was music coming from the radio. Classical.

Something was baking. Biscuits, it turned out.

It only took a few seconds before I got it. Unlike other times I’d woken up and then remembered some piece of news, there was no bad feeling to this one. I remembered the silk scarves now, the woman on TV saying the word
murderer
. Still, the feeling I had, when I thought of Frank, contained no fear. More like anticipation and excitement. It was as if I’d been in the middle of a book that I had to put down when I got too tired to keep reading, or a video put on pause. I wanted to pick back up with the story and find out what happened to the characters, except that the characters were us.

Coming down the stairs, I considered the possibility that my mother would be where she’d been when I left her the night before, tied in the chair, with her own silk scarves. But the chair was empty. The person at the stove was Frank. He had evidently made some kind of splint for his ankle, and he was still limping, but he was getting around.

I would have gone out and got us eggs, he said, but it might not be a great idea stepping into the 7-Eleven at this moment. He nodded in the direction of the newspaper, which he must have picked up from the curb where it had been tossed sometime
before the sun came up. Above the fold, next to a headline about the heat wave they were predicting for the holiday weekend, a photograph of a face both familiar and unrecognizable—his. Only the man in the photograph had a hard, mean look and a series of numbers plastered across his chest, where the one in our kitchen had tucked a dishrag into his waistband and wore a potholder.

Eggs would really hit the spot with these biscuits, he said.

We don’t go in much around here for perishable groceries, I told him. Our diet mostly featured canned goods and frozen foods.

You’ve got enough room in back for chickens, he said. Three or four nice little Rhode Island Reds, you could fry yourself up a plate of eggs every morning. A fresh-laid egg is a whole other thing from what you get in those cardboard boxes from the store. Golden yolks. Stand right up off the plate like a pair of tits on a Las Vegas showgirl. Companionable little buggers too, chickens.

He grew up on a farm, he said. He could set us up. Show me the ropes. I shot a look at the newspaper while he was talking, but I thought if I looked too interested in the story of Frank’s escape and the search now on to find him, it might hurt his feelings.

Where’s my mom? I asked him. For just a second there, it occurred to me to be worried. Frank hadn’t seemed like the type to do anything bad to us, but now a picture flashed through my brain of her in the basement, chained to the oil burner, maybe, with a silk scarf over her mouth instead of wrapped softly around her wrists. In the trunk of our car. In the river.

She needed her sleep, he said. We stayed up real late, talking. But it might be nice if you took her this. Does she like coffee in bed?

How would I know? The question had never come up.

Or maybe we’ll just let her catch a few extra winks, he said.

He was taking the biscuits out of the oven now, laying them on a plate, with a cloth napkin on top to keep them warm. Here’s a tip for you, Henry, he said. Never slice a biscuit with a knife. You want to pull them apart, so you get all the textures. What you’re aiming for is peaks and valleys. Picture a freshly rototilled garden, where the soil is a little uneven. More places for the butter to soak in.

We don’t usually keep butter around, I said. We use margarine.

Now that’s what I call a crime, Frank said.

He poured himself a cup of coffee. The newspaper was sitting right there, but neither of us reached for it.

I don’t blame you for wondering, he told me. Any sensible person would. All I want to tell you is, there’s more to this story than you’ll see in that paper there.

I had no answer to that one, so I poured myself a glass of orange juice.

You got any plans for the big weekend? he asked. Cookouts, ball games, and whatnot? Looks like it’s going to be a scorcher. Good time to head to the beach.

Nothing special, I said. My dad takes me out for dinner Saturdays, that’s about it.

What’s his story anyway? Frank asked. How does a fellow let a woman like your mother get away?

He got together with his secretary, I said. Even at thirteen, I was aware of the sound of the words as I spoke them, the awful ordinariness of them. It was like admitting you wet your pants, or shoplifted. Not even an interesting story. Just a pathetic one.

No offense intended here, son. But if that’s the case, good riddance. A person like that doesn’t deserve a woman like her.

I
T HAD BEEN A LONG TIME
since I’d seen my mother looking the way she did when she came into the room that morning. Her hair, that she usually pulled back in a rubber band, was hanging down on her shoulders, and it seemed fluffier than normal, as if she’d slept on a cloud. She had on a blouse I didn’t think she’d ever worn before—white, with little flowers all over it, the top button left open. Not so much revealed that she looked cheap—I was still thinking about that line he’d uttered, about the Las Vegas showgirl—but friendly, inviting. She had put on earrings, and lipstick, and when she got closer I could tell she was wearing perfume. Just the faintest whiff of something lemony.

He asked her how she’d slept. Like a baby, she said, then laughed.

I don’t know why they say that, actually, she said. Considering how often babies get up in the night.

She asked if he had any children.

One, he said. He’d be nineteen now if he was living. Francis Junior.

Some people, like my stepmother, Marjorie, would have made some kind of sympathetic remark here, about how sorry they were. They would have asked what happened, or if they were religious, said something about how Frank’s son was no doubt in a better place now anyway. Or told about someone they knew who had lost a kid. I had been noticing lately, how often people did that: take whatever anybody else mentioned in the way of a problem, and turn it around to them, and their own sorry situation.

My mother, hearing about Frank’s son who died, said nothing, but the look on her face changed in such a way that no more was needed for the moment. It was a moment like the one
the night before, when he was feeding her the chili, and holding the wineglass up for her to sip from, and I got the feeling they had gotten past normal words and moved on to a whole other language. He knew she felt bad for him. She knew he understood this. Same as when she sat down in the chair at the place he’d set for her—her same chair from the night before—she held her wrists out for him to put the scarves back on. They had an understanding now, the two of them. What I did mostly was watch.