Lawnboy (3 page)

She reached into my fly. I felt a quick high panic, thinking that she’d think my dick was mediocre, when it wasn’t mediocre, not when I had an erection at least. I pulled back and folded my arms. Even when I’d imagined this scene, it had never been so clumsy.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“You think I’m fat.”

“No,” I insisted. “I don’t think you’re fat.”

“You’re not attracted to me. You think I’m disgusting.” She pulled at the excess skin of her thigh.

“Stop,” I said, reaching for her shoulder.

“Don’t touch,” she said, and curled up with a pillow. “Go away. I feel like being alone now.”

I waited a week to explain the truth about myself. When I told her, though, in the school cafeteria, within earshot of the entire girls’ ensemble (who were working out the kinks in Benjamin Britten’s
Ceremony of Carols
), she reacted with the slightest hint of condescension, as if it weren’t news to her, before walking to the ice cream machine to buy a Buddy bar.

What happened next was more complicated. In the latter months of spring, she began dating a sophomore, DeMarco Huff, who’d been transferred to our school from the suburbs of Memphis. If you could call it dating—what it essentially amounted to was a series of quick trysts behind the Dumpsters of the Coral Sea Garden Apartments, where DeMarco lived in a two-bedroom with his mother. In any case, Jane had never been crazy about him. He wouldn’t talk to her, and they had not one single thing in common, but he was black, and she loved black men, and he had the loveliest, tiniest waist, with the prettiest belly button she’d ever seen.

“Are you sure this is a good thing?” I asked her one day.

“Sure.” She tried out a grin, looking not entirely convinced.

“Is he nice to you? Does he treat you well?”

“Of course. He’s the sweetest little piece on the planet. He’s just horny is all, and that’s all I want right now.” Her eyes were dried out, miserable. “God, I love to get fucked.”

Jane and I still managed to call each other from time to time, though we saw each other less and less. An occasional wave in the hall outside Gwen’s ceramics class—that seemed to suffice. We were always running somewhere. Then one day I received a call from her, not three seconds after I’d arrived home from school.

“I need you to go somewhere with me.”

“Go where?” I wasn’t in the mood. I spread a thin, gritty layer of peanut butter on my sandwich bread.

“Don’t ask. I’ll tell you later.”

She picked me up in her parents’ Vista Cruiser, a faded green station wagon from 1968, which we’d nicknamed the Flintstone-mobile due to its salt-corroded floor. It was amazing that her father had kept the car running, keeping a place for it beneath the palms, refusing to give it up while it still had some life left in it. The thing had embarrassed the hell out of Jane, and she’d never driven it alone before, but her face looked urgent and necessary as if its ramshackle appearance were the least of her worries.

“I’m getting an abortion.”

“You’re what?”

“Shut up. I’m getting an abortion, and I don’t want you to stop me. You’re my assistant here. Your job is to keep me safe and protected and calm.”

“Are you scared?”

“Of course I’m scared. What do you think this is, some kind of party?”

“Don’t yell at me!”

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. She raked her fingertips once down her forehead. “Why am I so mean to you?” she asked. “You who I love so much. Tell me why I’m so mean to you.”

I gazed out the window at the sand pit, the lawn-ornament yard with its Marys and Buddhas. Beneath my feet Route 1 scrolled through a hole the size of a pie plate.

“You didn’t tell your parents?” I said.

“Are you kidding?”

“You really think it’d bother them?”

“They’d kill me. Especially if they found out about DeMarco.”

I squinted. “Are you saying your parents are prejudiced?”

“No. Not in the conventional sense. Let’s just say they’d do everything in their power to stop a KKK rally from happening on their street. But they’d be funny about DeMarco. They’d just think I was trying to get back at them.”

She parked outside the clinic, a yellow, stucco-coated building near a microwave tower topped with a strobe light.

“Do you see any picketers?” she said, glancing around.

The parking lot was vacant. I shook my head.

“Just wait here for me.”

“Can’t I come inside? I want to come inside.”

“No,” she insisted. “Stay right here. It’ll be over in an hour.”

I did what she said. I focused all my attention on the door, awaiting her return. A woman in white stockings came out, regarding me briefly, warily, before hurrying down the block to her hatchback. I wondered whether Jane had been more upset than she’d let on. Two weeks ago, against the advice of Mrs. Wash, the health teacher, she’d given an oral report about the right to safe abortion—admittedly the most hackneyed of topics—but the class had actually listened. Her words were rational and tough-minded, so who could have assumed that getting an abortion would have been a big deal for her?

I stared for five minutes at the door. I hoped they weren’t hurting her.

When we were at our most inseparable, Jane came up with the notion that she’d one day like to have a child with me. And if we couldn’t have that child, we’d have an imaginary child. He’d be a boy. We’d call him Nico, after the Velvet Underground’s lead singer. He’d be the perfect child. He’d be fluent in many languages. We’d take him everywhere with us—Paris, Goa, Crete, Amsterdam—where everyone would ask, who is that child? Who is that stylish, witty, extraordinary child? Ours, we’d say humbly. Nico.

God knows why I was thinking about that now.

A half hour later, according to schedule, the door opened and Jane walked toward the car. She appeared neither relieved nor distraught, a little pale maybe, the hint of raccoon rings beneath her eyes. Her breath smelled faintly of orangeade. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to behave. Was I supposed to hug her, comfort her, speak words of wisdom, or act like she’d just been to the dentist’s, like nothing significant had happened? I stared at the blue bruise beneath my fingernail. I felt less assured than I’d felt in a long time.

So I asked, “How did it go?”

The corners of her mouth were filmed with white. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Just don’t let me talk about it.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“Nn nn.” She pulled out a Kleenex and wiped off her mouth. “I’m feeling a little woozy. Did you eat?”

I shook my head. I was ready to do anything she wanted.

“Let’s go to Burger King. For some reason I’m really in the mood to go to Burger King.”

It was the silent time between lunch and dinner, and we seated ourselves away from the windows to keep ourselves out of the direct sun. My skin felt chilled and hot at once. Jane stared down at the tabletop, eating onion rings with one hand, propping up her jaw with the other, twirling a piece of hair between her fingers. She hadn’t spoken in a full ten minutes.

“Poor Nico,” she mumbled.

“What?”

She smiled, exhausted, a watery glaze in her eyes. “He would have been the best.” And as if in slow motion, she pushed over her Coke, watching its contents fizzing on the tile floor.

I tossed down some napkins to cover it up. A uniformed boy walked toward us with a mop, but I waved him away, kneeling down to take care of it myself.

I glanced up at Jane. I said, “Don’t talk like that. We’re not kids anymore.”

“It was just a joke,” she said in an exceedingly hurt voice. “Don’t be so hard on me, okay?”

I held her close to me for the longest time.

We left. Jane dropped me off, and I went to bed early that night. She came back to herself in the next few days, but our friendship seemed strained and uneasy after that. We’d crossed some line. We knew too much. The thing was, I believed it was possible now to know too much.

***

Once a week, I went to William’s house, mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, and had sex. I gradually began to understand him, his silences and quirks, how he couldn’t stand when I nicked the flesh of the century plant or splashed gas near the bird feeders. I learned when to talk, I learned when to be quiet. I also learned not to be resentful whenever he ignored me afterwards. We had a pattern. We knew exactly what to expect from each other. No hurts, no disappointments. Not much talking. Sometimes, if we finished up early, he’d take me to the Speedboat Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale and I’d order exactly what I wanted: hamburger, salad, fries, dessert, soft drink. We might have been any other father and son. No one suspected a thing.

One afternoon I saw both of my parents sitting across from each other in the living room, silent. It was unlike them to be together in the same room. I couldn’t tell whether I was grateful or frightened. Then it occurred to me that one of them, most likely my father, had cancer.

“Sit down,” my father said grimly.

“I already have.”

My eyes drifted to the baseboard heaters. It was a murky afternoon, threatening rain, and Ursula flipped on the lamp, which depressed me. Lamps are for night, I wanted to say. Their silence somehow amplified things: the clicking of a palmetto beetle, the pressure of the palms against the window glass. A stray nerve kept pulsing in the small of my back. I knew what was coming. I wanted to pick up and run down the street.

My mother finally sat forward on the sofa. “You’ve been spending a lot of time away from us.”

Silence from Sid. He slouched low in his seat, curled the edge of his hand over his brow.

I nodded solemnly. “You want me to help out more?”

My mom nodded, then wagged her head. “I’m surprised.”

I smiled, because I couldn’t contain it any longer, but neither of them smiled back. “I don’t understand.”

“People are talking.”

“Huh?”

She whispered, “Why are you spending so much time with that man?”

I raised my chin. Always what the neighbors thought. “So what?”

My father sprang to attention. “Don’t talk to her like that. That’s your mother.”

My eyes smarted. Did I know them? All my life I’d come and gone as I pleased. All my life I’d taken care of myself. Even when I was younger they’d never asked for report cards, never taken an interest in my hobbies or projects. I was the kind of five-year-old you saw circling the shopping-center parking lot on his bicycle, dodging cars, bewildering the parents, years before the other kids. And I wasn’t complaining, okay? But there seemed to be a tacit agreement that they completely stay out of my business.

“What’s this have to do with Mr. Parsons?” I stood up now.

“You sit down,” my father demanded.

I didn’t sit. They’d never talked to me this way before, and it wasn’t going to start now.

“Do you see how he listens?” my father said to my mother. “Just like his brother.”

“What’s he have to do with anything?”

She ignored the question. Her lips hovered over the rim of her cup. It seemed that I’d frightened her. “What have you been doing with that man, dear?” she asked shyly.

I stood. My mother reached into her sundress pocket and showed my a piece of wadded-up paper. The printing was mine. I’d covered the entire page with the same phrase, in columns, using the tiniest of letters:
I love to fuck I love to fuck I love to fuck I love to fuck.

“I found this in your notebook. I know I shouldn’t have gone through your things. I know it was wrong, but when you started withdrawing from us, I didn’t know what else to do.”

I wasn’t withdrawing from anyone. “You had no right, Mom.”

“Have you been sleeping with that man?”

“What makes you keep asking these stupid things?”

She nibbled at the corner of her mouth. She recognized the truth in my eyes. “We’re having that bastard arrested.”

“Don’t talk about him that way.”

That did it. My father went for my arm. He didn’t punch me; he didn’t do what any regular father would do. Instead, he drew me to him, somehow rolled me over his knee like a puppet, and—get this—started spanking my clothed butt for a good half-minute or so. I was seventeen years old. It was such a comic thing that I let him do it until we both filled up with shame.

“Happy, buddy boy?” I said.

I laughed all the way up to my room. When I lay facedown on my bed, minutes later, I was still laughing. Fools. I took breaths, many deep breaths, breathing, breathing, calming myself down, then reached for a pen, a red ballpoint, and started punching it in and out of my right palm, deft and precise as a sewing-machine needle, until I was looking down at a smear, a little red star on my hand. It was beautiful to see. The house stilled, and I fell fast asleep holding my beating hand to my face.

I wished I’d had more courage. I wished I’d held onto my anger, letting it fuel me, giving me the beauty and strength of the supersonic, but in the weeks that passed something happened. I learned that I was nothing more than a coward. My parents kept looking at me as if I’d crossed a bridge over a steaming fjord and had become a stranger to them. I became flat, an outline, weightless. One afternoon, coming home from school, I overheard my father talking about removing my name from his will. I didn’t care about his money. But this erasure from their lives startled me, like an unexpected punch in the neck. I’d thought they’d get over it after a while, that we’d be the family we’d always been, fixed in our silences and resentments.

So I gave them what they wanted. I avoided William. I stopped picking up the phone and answering the door. I even shirked my gardening duties. I didn’t even pass William’s house, and imagined his lawn grown mangy and foul without me. On my way somewhere, I’d take the long route, around the park, through the college gates, just so I wouldn’t bump into him. I lived in great fear of bumping into him, at the drugstore, at the motor vehicle registry, of seeing the worn-out expression on his face:
Why have you done this?

I helped with the garbage, manicured the hedges. I even scrubbed the mold from the side of the house, something that should have been done years ago. I made it quite clear, without saying it, that I no longer had anything to do with William, or with people, for that matter. My parents started treating me with kindness. They actually talked with me, asked my opinions, discussed current events. They’d finally gotten a good son, whoever that was, and he was gradually becoming an exemplary young man. I had only one more year of school, then I’d get out, hungry and loosed upon the world. I watched my soul shrink then shimmer to a tiny point.