Little Boy Blues (24 page)

This was where our flight had taken us, not just across town, from one apartment to another, but thirty years or more back into the past, where there was no divorce, no drinking, no unhappiness. I suppose we were both driven a little mad at the time, she because all her dreams of what life would be were finally, irrevocably dashed, me because I was an awkward, lonely boy whose every foray into make-believe had been nursed and encouraged with the well-meaning goal of protecting him from the harsh realities of alcoholism and life with little or no money. Imaginary worlds were my meat. That might explain why this one began to collapse after only a year or two, as soon as I began to see that there was no place for me in the fantasy Mother was so intent on cobbling together—no place for the me, that is, who rode beside her in the car, sat across from her at the cafeteria or walked with her back and forth to church. Time had gotten stuck in Mother’s mind, and I had gotten stuck with it. Whenever I did something that displeased her, I was “not the Malcolm I know,” the Malcolm she knew being, as far as I could see, about five years old—forever.

Melita and Tom froze me in time, too. To my aunt, in particular, I was not just five forever, I was perfect. But she was so sweet about it, and so purely devoted to that ideal little boy that it didn’t bother me. There was nothing there to take personally, because
her image of me diverged so radically from the original that there were no grounds for comparison. I could have stepped to one side, and she would never have noticed. There was nothing coercive about it, either. She didn’t seem to mind when the evidence right under her nose contradicted her faith. With Mother, it was different. She insisted on her vision.

Everywhere I turned in that apartment, I ran into my much younger self coming around the corner. Words that I had misspoken as a toddler were now permanent parts of my mother’s vocabulary (macnana for banana, baving suit, kenis for penis—that one didn’t get trotted out much), along with all the many hilarious ways that everyone from my little friends to the woman who did our laundry mispronounced my name (Malkin, Maclum, Michael). If I mentioned Aunt Melita, she would correct me, “You mean Eda,” my childhood stab at pronouncing my aunt’s name. The sight of a pumpkin always prompted a recitation of my mangled version of “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater”: “put her in a pumpkin shell, and there she is, very much.”

There was no sudden break, no single moment when I decided I didn’t want to be my mother’s imaginary playmate any longer. But the rift between us only widened. We were like two children who found that they could no longer play together but had nowhere else to go. Everything I did—and everything I didn’t do—seemed to rub her the wrong way. I was in junior high by then, and my grades in math and science had started going south. I took up the violin and then the guitar and then just as quickly abandoned them. I stopped drawing and painting. I stopped watching television with my mother after supper. Instead, I spent most of my time in my room, reading, listening to the radio or playing records on the same little phonograph I’d had
since I was four, the kind that looks like an overnight case until you pop open the lid to expose the tiny turntable just big enough for 45s.

The one activity I kept up that pleased my mother was singing in the choir, although I will never know if I did it for her or for myself. I did like the singing. I liked hymns, and I liked being part of a chorus. Everything about choir was familiar, from the easy key signatures on the sheet music to the robing up on Sunday before the service. Most of what we sang was music I’d been singing all my life. It was a relief, as well, to be able to do something with my mother that we both enjoyed. Doing it in a crowd made it just about perfect, because there was no chance there would be any personal friction between us.

Things went along like that for several months. We were uneasy around each other, as though we were waiting for something to happen, but we didn’t know what. It wasn’t long in coming. One Sunday in early November 1967, there was smoke in the air, and if you hadn’t known better, you might have mistaken it for the smell of someone burning leaves and not from one of the hundred fires set off by the rioting that had consumed the city for four days after a black man was killed in a struggle with the police. We had come home from church and immediately turned on the television to see if anything new had happened. “I didn’t see Red Benton this morning,” Mother said. The mayor, a member of our church, had been negotiating all weekend with leaders in the black community. We watched the news in silence, and when it was clear that nothing new was happening, that things seemed under control, Mother turned the set off and started for
the bedroom to change. Walking past me, she said, in a tone so deliberately conversational that I knew it meant trouble, “I heard some boys gave Bill Moser a terrible time in Sunday school this morning.”

I kept my head buried in the funnies.

“Do you know about that?”

“Mr. Moser’s stupid.”

She turned and looked at me as though I had just spat on the floor.

“He started it!” I said.

“That’s not the way I heard it.”

“He said the Flood and Adam and Eve and all that were real, that that’s the way the world began.”

I had a vision of all the kids in the Sunday-school class laughing and Mr. Moser, our new teacher, standing in front of the class and getting so flustered that he put his hands on his hips and got chalk all over his black suit. The memory of the white chalk and his white hair and the perplexed look on his face made me giggle.

“Are you deliberately trying to hurt me? Why do you want to do these things? This isn’t like you. I’ve never been so embarrassed.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” I said to her back as she went into her bedroom.

“It has everything to do with me, honey,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m your mother. People judge me by the way you behave.”

I went back to the comics. Staring into the beautiful, boring world of Prince Valiant, I could hear her at her dresser, making a show of slamming her earrings and necklace back into her jewelry box. I waited for a break in the clatter.

“I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Anything wrong?” She came out into the hall in her slip. She still had her heels on. “Do you have any idea how upset he is? They say he was shaken.” For no good reason, I hated it when my mother used words she didn’t normally use.
Shaken
was not a word in her vocabulary. I knew as soon as she said it that she was parroting what she’d heard in the hall at church. Still, what she said slowed me up. My brain felt muddy.

I tried to reconstruct what had happened in the class that morning. It started when two of us said we wanted to talk about the riots. It was all anyone in town had talked about for four days. Our old Sunday-school teacher had often used current events in her lesson. But Mr. Moser said no, we should stick to the lesson. We argued with him, but he wouldn’t budge. “You should pray,” he said. “You should pray for the police.”

“How about the man who got killed by the police?” someone asked. “Shouldn’t we pray for him?”

Mr. Moser didn’t answer. Instead he opened his lesson book and began talking about Noah and God’s promise to never again destroy the world.

“Who can tell me what that means?” he asked without looking up. No one said anything.

“Why do you think God caused the flood in the first place?”

Again, no one answered.

Now he did look up. He was a thin man with wiry, grizzled hair framing a face that seemed to be collapsing in on itself, like a piece of withered fruit. Peering up from his book with his neck stuck out, he said, “Well, who can tell me how long ago this happened?”

Three of us in the back row looked at each other and laughed.

“What’s so funny back there?”

“You mean in real years or Bible years?”

He stared at us as though he didn’t understand the question.

“You know, like Methuselah,” I said. “I mean, he didn’t live nine hundred and some years in our measurement.”

“Son, that’s what it says right there in the Bible.”

“And it says God created the world in six days, too.”

Now he looked totally nonplussed.

“And Joshua got God to stop the sun in the sky,” I said. This was fun, using everything I knew about the Bible to argue against it. That’s when Mr. Moser stood up and started pacing behind his desk. At some point, he picked up a piece of chalk from the little blackboard that sat on an easel in the corner and began rolling it absently between his fingers.

“Don’t blaspheme,” he said.

“Who’s blaspheming?” I asked, with that giddy sick feeling you get in the middle of an argument when you know you’ve gone a step too far but can’t stop yourself. “We’re just asking questions.”

I half believed that myself. We were sparring, that’s all. We did it with our teachers in school all the time. The ones who stood up to it were the ones we respected. Arguing with Mr. Moser was more of the same.

I started to say this to Mother, but the words died on my tongue. I knew it wasn’t that simple. I’d known it back in that classroom. There were two or three of us who were the most merciless, but after a while even some of the girls had piled on, picking at his defenses, tearing down his assertions. But even while we were doing it, I knew there was something different here, that poor old Mr. Moser really believed what he was saying, and he couldn’t argue with us because he couldn’t quite believe that we
believed what we said or that we would go after him so relentlessly. I had put this out of my mind almost as soon as I left the Sunday-school class. But it bothered me then and here it was again: it wasn’t like school. The teachers in school were used to us. They saw cocky little intellectual bullies every year. We were nothing new. But that Sunday morning, we knew somehow—I did at least, maybe the others, we didn’t talk about it—that we were playing a more serious game. I wouldn’t say we were out to destroy Mr. Moser. He was a nice enough man. But we knew he was overmatched, and we went for him anyway.

“Well, I’m sorry, but he asked for it.”

My mother caught the halfhearted tone.

“And just what did he ask for that got him so upset that he had to leave church and go home before the service?”

“He kept saying the world was 6,000 years old, and everybody knows that’s not true. We tried to tell him, and all he would do was keep saying the Bible is the word of God, and if you don’t accept the Bible, you’re not a Christian and you won’t go to heaven.”

“You were laughing at him and making fun of him.”

“That was at the end. And not everybody laughed.”

“But you did. Malcolm, you weren’t brought up to act this way. No one in my family—”

“I wasn’t the only one. And we weren’t making fun of him. We were making fun of what he said.”

“So you were making fun?”

“Of what he said. Not of him. Not just me. We were arguing with him. What’s wrong with that?”

“And how did you think this would make me feel? Did you think about that?”

“He wouldn’t listen.”

“Don’t you have any consideration? Any respect? After what I’ve been through.”

“He didn’t respect
us.”

“I’m talking about
me.”
I waited for her to go on, and when she didn’t say anything else, I looked up. That wise, rueful smile that I despised was plastered across her face and she was shaking her head. “I just hope when you have children that they don’t treat you like you treat me.” This was one of several sentences I’d been hearing a lot recently, along with “The world is made for couples,” and “I think I’ll just crawl in a hole and die and everyone will be happy,” and “If you love your father so much, why don’t you try living with him, although I don’t remember him asking you,” and “Jesus understands what I’m going through, even if you don’t,” and “God gave you to me after I waited so long, and now you’re going to betray me, too.”

In a moment of total frustration, and to keep from swearing, I tore off my clip-on tie and threw it on the sofa.

“Stupid baby tie.”

“How can I show my face in that church? Cindy Moser’s in my Bible class.”

“It was just an argument.”

“You little boys think—”

“We’re not little boys.”

“Next thing you know you’ll be telling me you don’t believe in God.”

“Well, maybe I don’t. Not that kind of god.”

I said the second sentence to the bedroom door she’d just slammed in my face.

Where had that come from? I said what I said before I even
thought it—I, the boy who only a year or so before—and it felt like less, like a day, or a week—had still seriously considered a life in the ministry, the family business. Before that morning, I had never spent five seconds questioning the existence of God, but as soon as those words were out of my mouth, I knew it was true. Or maybe just half true, or maybe not true at all, because right then I didn’t know what I believed. Arguments with my mother shifted ground so suddenly—and the rules changed so often and so fast—that much of the time I wasn’t even sure what we were arguing about.

When I got up the next morning, Mother had left a note on the table in the dinette. It was just three Bible-verse citations. The first was Philippians 4:13, which I expected, although I didn’t see how it applied here. The other two, one from First Corinthians and the other from Proverbs, I had to look up.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

I read the passage from Corinthians twice, the first time apprehensively and the second with more optimism. Briefly I toyed with the idea that she had come around, that she understood that I wasn’t thinking like a little boy anymore, that I would no longer accept whatever I was told without question. Then I went back to option one: she thought just the opposite, and this was her way of trying to get me to act, as she so often put it when I did something of which she disapproved, “maturely.”