Martin and John (4 page)

ON THE NIGHT my mother finally died, while waiting in Penn Station for the train that would take me to the hospice, I met a man who made signs: the support columns of the platform had just been painted, and his signs read “blue wet-paint columns.” One caught my eye just as I descended the stairs, as much for its odd syntax as its cheap handmade feel. I looked down the platform from one sign to the next and I was struck by the uniformity of them all. The handwriting was a sloppy scrawl of red marker, a mix of capital and lowercase letters that was repeated exactly from sign to sign. My eye followed them down the platform until there were no more, and then I looked down and saw the sign maker, or his back
anyway, a back as broad as a field. I walked to him slowly. The platform was deserted except for the two of us and a few mice gnawing candy wrappers between the tracks. When I reached him I stood silently behind him; a slight tension in his shoulders told me he was aware of my presence but he continued to work slowly, drawing his marker across the paper with his left hand and repeatedly glancing at a scrubby slip of paper held in his right. I knew without looking that the paper contained the words taped to the posts, and that they were written exactly as they were written on each sign. I cleared my throat and said, “Blue wet-paint columns.” The man looked up. The details of his face were lost in a thick black beard, but I could see confusion in his eyes. A single sound erupted from his mouth like a burp: “Huh?” That’s when I realized, suddenly and unexpectedly, that he couldn’t read, that he was simply copying the words in his right hand as if they were drawings, stick figures dancing meaninglessly across the paper. “Blue wet-paint columns,” I repeated, caught off guard, and I wondered then why I had approached him at all. His blank expression prompted me to point at the sign he was making, but I couldn’t think what to say, so I read it yet again: “Blue wet-paint columns.” Hadn’t someone told him what he was writing? He examined the paper as if he’d never seen it before. “No,” he said, “these’re dry. It’s the support posts that’re wet.” “No, your signs—” I started, but he interrupted me with a wave of his hand and stood up. “Don’t tell me no, man. Those”—he pointed at the signs—“are dry. And
these”—he pointed to a column—“are wet.” He looked at me for a moment, and I thought I read a hint of fear in his eyes. He blinked suddenly, then walked to a column and smacked his palm against it, and then he slapped the hand on a sign. “Check it out,” he said. “Wet.” The imprint glistened under the heading “blue wet-paint columns” and I stared at it blankly for a moment. I tried again. “Look, it’s just that your signs say—” “I
know
what they say,” he cut me off again. “I been writing them all night. All night!” He raised his voice on the last words, and he raised his left hand as well, and then he shoved them both in my face. I started to dodge the blow, but his hand stopped a few inches from me and only then did I see red ink on his hand, smeared from heel to pinky. “I know what I’m writing,” he said quietly. “I got the words under my skin.” Under his skin, I thought. Like a disease, I thought, and then I remembered why I was in the station. It was always like that for me: just when I was trying to concentrate on one thing, something else came along and distracted me. The man’s cheeks quivered just under his eyes: he was afraid, and I knew why. He realized I was aware of his lie, but that didn’t bother him as much as the idea that I’d call him on it, that I’d cut through the story he’d been telling everyone, and probably himself. His sign, its bold handprint and lipstick letters, caught my eye. I looked at it for a moment, and then I stepped backward. The man dropped his hand. “Aw, hey, man,” he said, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry.” I smiled, then I turned to leave. I didn’t
see any point in saying anything, but he called after me: “Hey, you can read them, can’t you?” I looked back and nodded. “Yeah,” I said, “I figured out what you meant.”

SOMETIMES, ALONE IN Kansas, I loved my father so much that I would push chairs against the walls lest he trip over one and crack his skull, and other times I hated him and I knew that, somehow, he was responsible for what had happened to my mother. On those days I stole things from his room—T-shirts, pens embossed with his company’s name—and I destroyed them in the prairie. I never understood why I did this, because I didn’t know how I felt about myself: every time I tried to think about myself I ended up thinking about them. I resented them, both of them, but especially my father’s constant attempt to re-create my mother’s presence in the house by wearing her apron, cooking her food, or using me as her stand-in. I began to deny his attempts to remember her, but each denial only prompted him to try harder. He took to coddling things she’d owned, an old blanket, a picture of her, a piece of jewelry she’d once worn. After he went to sleep I would take these objects to the attic and pack them in boxes, and seal the boxes tightly with tape. Eventually there were no more objects and he came for me. It was inevitable, I suppose; all these things had done was remind him of her, and what more tangible reminder existed than me? He followed me to my room one night, still wearing her apron, and when I sat on
the bed he sat down heavily beside me. He stank of beer, and I tried to ignore him. I fell backward on the bed, and then I lifted my legs up and over him, and for an embarrassing moment I saw him in the V of my legs—I was coming from the shower and I had nothing on under my robe—and then I kicked my legs past him to the bed. I lay there rigidly, hands clenched in fists at my side. “John,” he finally said, after saying many other things I don’t remember, “you just don’t know what I live with every day.” But I did, I did know—or I knew at least that it had something to do with the way his hands kept pushing their way through my hair like a thick-toothed comb. “John,” he said, “I’m sorry.” But I wouldn’t listen. Three words kept batting around my head until finally I let them out: “Don’t touch me,” I hissed, and my father’s hand stopped automatically, like a machine, and then without speaking he left my room.

After my father’s visit to my room it seemed that the only thing left was for me to visit his. I snuck in often and rifled through the papers in his night table: I wanted to find one thing, just one thing, that would at last confirm or disprove what I already knew. And so I came home one day, and hearing nothing, I wandered in. My father sat on his bed in a blue satin gown that clung to his waist and hips but sagged at the chest. A brown curly wig sat crookedly on his head, and the makeup on his face looked as though it had been applied following paint-by-numbers directions. I looked at him for a long time; he looked down at a red inch of lipstick
poking from a silver capsule. Very slowly, the crayon-like tube twisted back into its chute. “It’s not so easy to put this on,” he said. “It’s harder than it looks.” Smears of red stole the shape of his mouth. His eyelids lowered, as if weighted by the globs of mascara sticking to them. He stood up, then nearly fell as his heels tipped out from under him. He removed his feet from the stretched-out shoes and turned his back to me. After a pause, he said, “Unzip me, please.” I did it quickly, looking away when I saw the bra strap, and then I stepped far away from him. The straps fell off his shoulders loosely, and he carefully pushed the dress past his waist. “Your mother kept her figure better than I do, I guess.” He wore her underwear, and the pale fabric stretched so tightly across his buttocks that I could see the split between them as if he were naked; red indentations marked the panties’ outline after he took them off, and a few crumpled pieces of toilet paper fell to the floor when he took the bra off. There was a towel on the bed, and he wrapped it around his waist like men do before turning back to me. Catching sight of himself in the mirror, he stopped, pulled the wig off. “She had a shag once,” he said, “and long hair came back in style, so she picked this up.” He looked at it a moment then dropped it to the floor. My father the drag queen: his stage name, I suppose, would be Miss Communication. I moved farther out of his way than I had to as he passed me and went in the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

Sometimes my mind plays a trick on me, and I remember
that as the last time I ever saw him. But I didn’t leave home until a year later and he came out in just an hour, his lips still a little red, and he cooked dinner like he always did. Afterward he made his way to the shelf where he kept the liquor, and he poured himself a glass of whiskey which, as though it were bottomless, he never finished. If he did empty the bottle in our house he went to the pool hall, and on those nights I’d get a call at two in the morning from the bartender, asking me to come get my father. One time I found him at the bar’s old piano, slumped on the keyboard. A ceramic cowboy on a rearing horse sat atop the piano, and as the bartender and I each grabbed an arm, my father stirred himself enough to say, “I never wanted anything that she didn’t want.” In the car, a little more sober: “She once told me that there was nowhere she could go where I wouldn’t find her. She said she had to make
me
go away.” And then he said, “She was my
wife,
dammit!”

I ARRIVED AT the hospice in the early hours of the morning; when the taxi I’d taken from the train station finally turned on the flagstone driveway I felt excited, as if I were visiting someone I hadn’t heard from forever. I felt like I was going home too, for the hospice was only twenty miles from our old house. The main building was long and low, surrounded by scruffy pines. It reminded me of its patients: well scrubbed but decaying. The flagstones were hosed clean but
cracked, the hedges trimmed but scraggly with age, the door freshly painted but the wood wasting away. And this is all there was to her life: long windowless hallways, a small room, a cane chair made for weightless bodies. It creaked under my weight. She sat there: they sponged her every day, combed her hair, brushed her teeth and gums with a piece of gauze wrapped around the wrong end of a toothbrush. She rolls her eyes, or perhaps it’s just the muscles twitching. Her wandering eyes see a nurse’s plump face, a picture of a lonely building lost in a field, her own wasted lap. I knew nothing about her save the things laid out for me: a bed so firm it seemed a person never slept in it; clothes years old yet like new; some pictures of my father and me, years out of date; and the letters she wrote me. No, not her, but someone with small handwriting who tucked a note in with the first letter. “I think I understand Bea when she speaks,” this person wrote. “I read her everything, a sentence at a time, for her approval. I’ve not written anything against her wish. But I don’t know if I’ve written everything she would have liked to say.” Does that matter? I thought then of the man who couldn’t read but still managed to write readable signs: he and this woman were both messengers with little idea of what they were sending or what would be received, and yet their indirect communication still managed to convey the most vital information. It was only there, sitting in the chair my mother sat in and reading about how she missed us—not me,
us
—that I was able to say, if only to myself, that he raped her. He raped her and he killed
her. There was something he wanted—and I don’t think it was just another child, a big family—there was something he wanted more than he wanted to believe that his wife could die if she became pregnant again, so he raped her. He didn’t beat her, didn’t rip her clothes off; chances are that all he did was hide her birth control pills or refuse to wear a condom, or however they took care of things in the years between my birth and my mother’s second pregnancy. These facts settled around me, not with the surprise of discovery, but the familiarity of acknowledgment. But then, it was never really a question of clues but a simple matter of admitting something that I’d known for a long time; it was kind of like coming out.

Sometimes I feel that my mother is less a person than an idea in my head. But when I tell someone about her I’m always asked, Why’d she stay? Why’d she take it? and she becomes real again, a person. Like my father, like Susan, like any man I meet and sleep with once and never see again. I have to admit I don’t know why she took it. And that’s where this story stops, I think. That’s where it fails. Of all the letters, only one is truly from my mother. Or is it really from me? It rested in a wrinkled envelope with a piece of string hanging out of it, a piece of string that, when pulled, pulled out a single letter, which that round and round and round. No note came with the ring, but it, and the string which had held it around my mother’s neck—all by themselves, they said everything.

HE LIVES ALONE now, visited only by the person who cooks his meals. I will never see him again. I imagine him though, sitting in his old recliner. He holds the box I sent him, the box that, he knows, holds all that is left of his wife’s life. A few articles of clothing, letters, a rubber band I found in a dresser entwined with some of her hairs. I imagine his hands, the same hands that held down my mother, that felt the mound of new life that grew beneath her skin, that brought spoonfuls of food to her mouth. They have withered, paled, the hairs on them are white now. He looks at them but he can’t bring himself to use them to rip open the box. Instead he turns it over and over and listens to the soft rustle of things inside. I imagine him: in the silent living room of his empty house he sets the box down and reaches for his glass of whiskey, and as he drinks it I wonder if his thoughts are as divided as mine. Is it her that he’s thinking of, or is it me?