Lawnboy (17 page)

I believed that both Sid and Ursula still held more sway over us than we realized. It was hard not to imagine our lives in a shadowbox, the two of them still hovering over us, twisting our strings. How we wanted to please them, to bring them their happiness, as if their success actually depended upon
our
achievements. It wasn’t like they’d actually prepared us for a life apart from them. Once in the dentist’s office I read a magazine article about a certain kind of family—“The Self-Sufficient Family,” as the author called it—so self-absorbed, suspicious, and dependent upon one another that it couldn’t help but cave in on itself. It described us to a T, in such an eerie fashion that I couldn’t help but throw the article down, convincing myself it was horseshit. It made me think about Holly and her presence in my brother’s life. Could his relationship with a woman still primarily be about pleasing my parents, even though he’d kept her hidden from them?

I thought about the one time that Peter had brought a girlfriend home. I still remember her name, a beautiful name, DeeDee Middlebrook. She lived in a big house off Old Cutler Road in Kendall—the daughter of an obstetrician and a lawyer. Ursula talked about the dinner for days, planning the menu, pondering what dress to wear—all to the dismay of Peter, who didn’t want to make a big deal of it. I didn’t think he was all that interested, anyway. Upon meeting DeeDee, they made every effort to be nice to her, to welcome her, deliberately restraining themselves from saying anything patently provocative. Still, beneath it all was the disturbing sense that Peter had to choose between the family and DeeDee, that a decision to spend a Saturday night with his girlfriend constituted an implicit betrayal. Something was at stake here. I sat at the dinner table, listening to the jovial conversation around me, a dread settling into my marrow. Just one false word from Sid, and she’d find out we were freaks, that we weren’t like other people. “I guess you’ll be out having fun tonight,” my mother had said glumly on more than one occasion. Though the evening went off without a hitch, Peter stopped seeing DeeDee not two weeks later.

***

It was the quiet, laid-back hour before dinner. The guests were already in their rooms, taking their showers, rubbing sunburn cream on freckled shoulders. I walked farther into the woods than I ever had, past the burned-out buildings and the marina, across the single, unfinished bridge on the property. Here, before the state land commission had issued the sales moratorium on Boca Palms, Clem Thornton had actually started constructing a semblance of a city, all for the benefit of his prospective lot buyers, though not a single house had ever been completed. The roads now were crumbling at the edges, coarse weeds growing through the sun-bleached asphalt. On every corner stood a moldy concrete marker, its exotic name printed vertically—Miraflores, Isla Dorada, Tulipan, Costa Nera, Costa Brava—each derived from a street in Cocoplum, the gated section of Coral Gables, of all places, near where Peter and I had grown up.

I stepped into a partially built house on Pan American Boulevard. It was the only one of its kind, an unfinished model home with a faded sign hidden in the brush: THE BAL BAY. The exterior, though finished, was chipping, the window glass peppered with BB holes.

The inside was another matter. A mere shell, its floorboards were weathered to the point of rotten, and I stepped cautiously, testing their strength. The air smelled of dust. My eyes drifted through the cobwebs toward the corner. I jumped. Instantly, my stomach was in my mouth.

“You scared me,” I said.

Peter sat on the floor, legs drawn up to his chest. He looked bemused. He shrugged once, a gesture toward apology.

“What are you up to?” I said finally.

“Thinking.” He smiled more openly, then shrugged again.

I sidled up next to him, leaning back into the wall. My heart was still beating. I glanced at his bent legs, conscious of the space between us. I imagined that space itself vibrating, charged with a complexity of emotions I couldn’t name. “What are you thinking about?”

He rubbed his whiskered face with his palms. “Bills, bills.” He sighed once, loudly. “More bills. They’ll be the death of me. And you?”

I made a steeple with my fingertips. “Just taking a walk.”

The afternoon light was orange, thick, almost sticky on the floorboards. I was going to tell him what I assumed, ask if it were true. Then something told me not to: any inclination toward openness had always shut him down. It wouldn’t be any different now. My secretive brother.

“You and Hector—” he started.

I looked at him. I tried not to register any expression on my face. “What about?”

“The two of you. You both seem to be getting along fairly well.”

I nodded, pushed out my lips. “I guess so. Well enough, I guess.”

“That’s good,” he said. “He’s quite an interesting guy. I’m glad you two are getting along.” He pushed himself up off the floor, glanced down at me.

“We are.”

“Good, good. Just watch yourself.”

His words burrowed in the pit of my stomach.

“I don’t mean to sound corny, and I don’t mean to exaggerate.”

I laughed out of sheer nervousness. “Could you be clearer?”

“You’ll know,” he said, and offered me his hand. He made a face. “Now get up.” And, in silence, I followed him through the door, down the wrecked road back to the complex.

I slumped before the TV in the guests’ lounge, sitting before a rerun of
Lost in Space,
barely processing the images. It was early afternoon, a little after two. I’d already done my assignments for the day: I’d retested the pool water twice. I’d rewired the noisy switches in my bedroom. I’d even fertilized some plants—the loquat, the pitch apple, the clematis, the breadfruit—an intricate, complicated procedure that involved the consultation of several guidebooks; I didn’t want to burn anything. Now I sat here in stillness, too bored to read, too fidgety to immerse myself in anything but the fact of June Lockhart’s appallingly tight spacesuit. My eyes drifted to the granulated spray ceiling. I pictured mold spores growing on those dusty clumps, mold spores turning to protozoa, then to more complex cells, then to flesh-eating bacteria, then to:
Where’s my arm? Where’s my arm?

Hector walked in the room. I jerked awake, afraid it was Peter. What was the matter with me? He was hardly my father.

He collapsed into the vinyl chair beside me. He was shirtless, revealing a torso so sculpted and defined that I looked away—so much for my notion that I’d stop thinking about him in those terms. The night before, trying to cheer each other up, we found ourselves exchanging our most embarrassing personal stories, and before we knew it, we were laughing like old friends, a peculiar comfort and intimacy passing between us. I thought now about his date with Ted Gessler, a famous music producer, in a trendy, pretentious Upper West Side cafe. I thought about how he’d excused himself to go to bathroom, returning to the table only to see that a thirty-foot length of toilet paper was sticking to his shoe.

“What’s so funny?” he said now, laughing along with some nervousness. “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said, pressing my palms to my face.

I looked up. He was staring back at me now with an expression I reserved for the best of my friends, something open, without judgment, as if he simply liked the experience of looking at me.

“You’re making me crazy,” I said after a while.

He squinted slightly, confused.

“Stop—”

“You know what I think?” he said, looking at the top of my head.

“What?”

He shook his head emphatically. “Forget it. It’s none of my business. Forget it.”

“Unh-uh,” I said. “You can’t get away with that.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I don’t like to tell other people what to do. It’s one of my worst habits, I’m always getting crap for it, but—”

“What,
what?
”

“I really think you’d look good if you buzzed off your hair.”

We made faces at each other. My laugh was sloppy, out of control.

“What’s so funny?”

“No way,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“No way, Jose,” I said, wagging my head three times.

It wasn’t that I was so attached to it, that I was afraid of giving it up, like my poor aging brother with his bald spot, his bureau topped with Minoxidil bottles. It was that I knew I didn’t have the head for a buzz cut. It was too long, too narrow, with hard angular features—in particular, a straight pointy nose with a high bridge—that needed to be softened. I knew myself too well: it just wouldn’t work on me.

“Another time,” I said, standing up. I turned off the TV. “Do you want something to eat?”

“Oh, change the subject, why don’t you.”

I stared back at him, annoyed. “You’re really into this.”

“Well, I think it’d look really hot. I’m not bullshitting you. Everyone else would think so, trust me.”

I looked back at him, my face heating. He’d hit on something. He knew where I was confused, unsure, and took advantage of it. I might have pushed him over onto the floor. I glanced at the blank TV screen, waiting to see what he’d do next.

“You’re bad news,” I mumbled.

“Come on.” He smiled, buoyant with newly won power. “Just give it a try. It’ll grow back in two weeks.”

Pulse pounding, I followed him up the stairs to his apartment. I’d never been inside before, but I was intrigued. What a place! Aside from the expected—unopened letters, Japanese comic books, precise stacks of porno magazines—there was an entire wall devoted to Laura Nyro artifacts: posters, autographs on napkins, bootleg album covers, as well as news-letters from her fan club, which operated out of a post office box in North Jersey.

“What’s that about?”

“Greatest fucking singer/songwriter on the planet.” He tapped out some pot into the bowl of a red pipe. “My soul mama.”

“I don’t know her very well.”

“
Know
her,” he demanded. And he handed me the pipe, lighting the bowl, before wandering off to put on a CD.

“Christmas and the Beads of Sweat,” he said, closing his eyes.

I pulled the smoke deeply into my lungs, tasting its harsh acrid scratch. I was curiously out of practice. It made me think about that one and only time I’d gotten stoned alone with Jane. The pot crept up on us, cunning, mysterious; we could barely keep our hands off each other. I dragged warily, worrying about Peter finding out. What about those AA meetings? What about that twelve-step sticker on the bumper of the van? PRACTICE SENSELESS ACTS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION or whatever the fuck it was.

“Now let’s get to this hair,” he said, wielding a clipper at me.

“Are you sure you’re in good enough shape to do this?”

“I’m fine, for God’s sake.” His smile was trumped up, maniacal. I couldn’t tell whether he was playing with me or not. “Now take off your shirt and shut up.”

I sat. I did what he said. The minute “Brown Earth” kicked into rhythm, he took his place behind me, pressing the contours of my head. I couldn’t tell him how good that felt, that the last time I’d gotten my hair washed at a salon, I’d literally moaned aloud in ecstasy, unnerving the poor old guy. I apologized immediately, embarrassed by my outburst.

“You have a good head,” he said, flipping on the clipper. “You’re going to look great.”

I held perfectly still. The blade was cold against my neck; my chin tucked into my chest. Hector hummed tunelessly to the song about Freeport. On the tiled floor were the feathered shreds of my hair. I thought of a sheep being shorn, tied up, then trucked off to slaughter.

The clipper switched off.

“My God,” he said, as if amazed.

“
What?
”

“I mean, I
thought
you were going to look good, but—Christ—” He started shaking his head.

I made a face. Was he making fun of me? I felt the short stubble with my hand, then asked for a mirror.

“What do you think?” Hector said.

I gripped the mirror in my hand. It was hard not to be repulsed. It made my eyes leap out, the thick brows above them darker, bushier, even demonic. My facial bones looked sharper, more masculine. Could I pull this off? It didn’t jibe at all with the way I knew myself, and I doubted I’d ever get used to it, but
hey.
I liked and hated it at once.

“You’re going to need some sun on that scalp, paleface. Let’s sit in the grass.”

“But—” I looked around for a hat. I might have been standing before him without clothes.

He switched off the Laura Nyro. “Come on, fancy boy,” he said, laughing harder. “We’re going outside.”

We sat on a patch of burnt lawn behind the office. It was a breezy, torporous afternoon. The sun was warm, coiling, boring down into the roots of my scalp. All at once I realized I was high, unbearably high. I lay back down on the grass, laughing quietly, my arms latching behind my head. Above me, wild violet clouds blew in from the Gulf.

Hector turned onto his side, looking at me, propping up his head on his palm. I heard footsteps down the sidewalk heading in our direction. I felt too stalled and contented, too lazy to move.

“Have you seen your brother?” Hector called.

“No,” I said, but then I realized he wasn’t talking to me. I lay flat on my back, staring up at my brother’s blasted face. He attempted to smile, though he couldn’t stop biting into his lip.

“When did you do that?”

“This afternoon,” Hector said, answering for me. “Just a few minutes ago, in fact. I cut it myself.”

The three of us fell silent. My back pinched. I tried to cover my eyes—their hazy red wetness would be sure to give us away. I sat up, wishing I’d worn my shirt, brushing off the blades of dead grass stuck to my shoulders. I looked over at Hector, who seemed amused by it all, a passing glimmer of superiority on his face.

“But why?” Peter said. “Your old haircut looked perfectly fine.”

“Why
not?
” I said.

He shrugged, put off by the hardness in my voice. “It’ll grow back,” he said calmly. “No reason to be upset.” He glanced at Hector, blinked once, then lugged off a hose toward the junction boxes.