Naked (8 page)

She didn’t seem to appreciate being called “sweetheart” and bristled when my father, his eyes never leaving the ball, suggested
that if she shake a leg, she might make it back in time for the next tee off. She looked at my father as if he were something
she had scraped off the bottom of her shoe. It was a withering gaze that softened once it shifted direction and settled on
Lisa, who stood shamefully staring at the ground, her hands cupped to hide the stain. The woman nodded her head and, placing
her hand on my sister’s shoulder, reluctantly led her toward a distant cluster of buildings. I didn’t understand the problem
but very much wanted to join them, thinking perhaps we might talk this person into giving us a ride home, away from this grinding
monotony and the cruel, remorseless sun. With Lisa gone, it would become my sole responsibility to fetch the splintered tees
and pester the contestants for their autographs. “Lou,” I would say, holding out my father’s scorecard. “My name is Lou.”

The game finally over, we returned to the parking lot to find Lisa stretched out in the backseat of the Porsche, her face
and lap covered with golf towels.

“Don’t say it,” she threatened. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”

“All I was going to do was ask you to take your lousy feet off the seat of the car,” my father said.

“Yeah, well, why don’t you go fuck yourself.” The moment she said it, Lisa bolted upright, as if there might still be time
to catch the word between her teeth before it reached our father’s ears. None of us had ever spoken to him that way, and now
he would have no choice but to kill her. Some unprecedented threshold had been passed, and even the crickets stopped their
racket, stunned into silence by the word that hung in the air like a cloud of spent gunpowder.

My father sighed and shook his head in disappointment. This was the same way he reacted to my mother when anger and frustration
caused her to forget herself. Lisa was not a daughter now but just another female unable to control her wildly shifting emotions.

“Don’t mind her,” he said, wiping a thin coat of pollen off the windshield. “She’s just having lady problems.”

Throughout the years our father has continued his campaign to interest us in the sport of golf. When Gretchen, Amy, and Tiffany
rejected his advances, he placed his hopes on our brother, Paul, who found the sprawling greens an excellent place to enjoy
a hit of acid and overturn the golf carts he borrowed from their parking lot beside the pro shop.

Our father bought a wide-screen TV, an enormous model the size of an industrial-sized washing machine, and uses it only to
watch and record his beloved tournaments. The top of the set is stacked high with videocassettes marked 94 PGA and 89 U.S.
OPEN — UNBELIEVABLE!!!!

Before our mother died, she put together a videotape she thought Lisa might enjoy. The two of them had spent a great deal
of time in the kitchen, drinking wine and watching old movies on the black-and-white portable television that sat beside the
sink. These were just a few favorites my mother had recorded. “No big deal,” she’d said, “just a little something to watch
one day when you’re bored.”

A few weeks after the funeral Lisa searched my parents’ house for the tape, finding it on the downstairs bar beside my father’s
chair. She carried the cassette home but found she needed a bit more time before watching it. For Lisa, these movies would
recall private times, just her and our mother perched on stools and reeling off the names of the actors as they appeared on
the screen. These memories would be a gift that Lisa preferred to savor before opening. She waited until the initial grief
had passed and then, settling onto her sofa with a tray of snacks, slipped in the tape, delighted to find it began with
Double Indemnity.
The opening credits were rolling when suddenly the video skipped and shifted to color. It was a man, squatting on his heels
and peering down the shaft of his putter as though it were a rifle. Behind him stood a multitude of spectators shaded by tall
pines, their faces tanned and rapt in concentration. “Greg Norman’s bogeyed all three par fives,” the announcer whispered.
“But if he eagles here on the fifteenth, he’s still got a shot at the Masters.”

My mother had a thing for detectives, be they old, blind, or paralyzed from the waist down — she just couldn’t get enough.
My older sister shared her interest. Detective worship became something they practiced together, swapping plotlines the way
other mothers and daughters exchanged recipes or grooming tips. One television program would end and then the next would begin,
filling our house with the constant din of gunfire and squealing tires. Downstairs the obese detective would collect his breath
on the bow of the drug lord’s pleasure craft while up in the kitchen his elderly colleague hurled himself over a low brick
wall in pursuit of the baby-faced serial killer.

“How’s your case coming?” my mother would shout during commercial breaks.

Cupping her hands to the sides of her mouth, Lisa would yell, “Tubby’s still tracking down leads, but I’m betting it’s the
Chinesey guy with the eye patch and the ponytail.”

Theirs was a world of obvious suspects. Looking for the axe murderer? Try the emotionally disturbed lumberjack loitering near
the tool shed behind the victim’s house. Who kidnapped the guidance counselor? Perhaps it’s the thirty-year-old tenth-grader
with the gym bag full of bloody rope. It was no wonder these cases were solved so quickly. Every clue was italicized with
a burst of surging trumpets, and under questioning, the suspects snapped like toothpicks, buckling in less time than it took
to soft-boil an egg. “You want to know who set fire to the retirement home? All right, it was ME, you satisfied now? That’s
right, ME. I did it. ME.”

It’s easy to solve a case when none of the suspects are capable of telling a decent lie. Television took the bite out of crime,
leaving the detective as nothing more than a lifestyle. It seemed that anyone could solve a murder as long as he had a telephone,
a few hours of spare time, and a wet bar. My mother had all three ingredients in spades. The more suspects she identified
over the course of a season, the more confident she became. Together, she and my sister would comb the local newspaper, speculating
on each reported crime.

“We know that the girl was held at knifepoint on the second floor of her house,” Lisa said, tapping a pencil against her forehead.
“So probably the person who robbed her was… not in a… wheelchair.”

“I’d say that’s a pretty safe assumption,” my mother answered. “While you’re at it, I think we might as well eliminate anyone
confined to an iron lung. Listen, Sherlock, you’re going at it all wrong. The guy broke in, held her at knife-point, and made
off with three hundred dollars in cash, right?”

“And a clock radio,” Lisa said. “Three hundred dollars and a clock radio.”

“Forget the clock radio,” my mother said. “The important thing is that he used a knife. All right now, what kind of person
uses a knife?”

Lisa guessed that it might have been a chef. “Maybe she was at a restaurant and the cook noticed she had a lot of money in
her pocketbook.”

“Right,” my mother said, “because that’s what cooks
do,
isn’t it. They crawl around the dining-room floor looking through purses while the food sits in the kitchen cooking itself.
Come on now,
think.
Who uses a knife to commit a crime? In a world of guns, what kind of person would use a knife? Give up? It’s just two little
words: drug addict. It’s that simple. A professional thief would use a gun, but even secondhand, a gun costs money. Drug addicts
can’t afford guns. They need all their money for their dope and smack — the hard stuff. These dopers have a habit to feed
every minute of every day, which means they’re always on the lookout for their next mark. This was a heroin addict who followed
the girl home from the bank, parked his car around the corner, broke into the house, and robbed her at knife-point.”

“If he can’t afford a gun, what’s he doing with a car?” Lisa asked. “And what about the clock radio?”

“Screw the damned clock radio,” my mother said. “And as for the car, it was stolen. He took it last Thursday from that couple
on Pamlico. You saw the report in the paper. The brand-new Ford Mustang, remember? You thought it had been stolen by Gypsies,
and I said we don’t even
have
Gypsies in this part of the country. I said the car had been taken by a dope addict who’d use it for a couple of burglaries
before selling it to a chop shop. Bingo. And there you have it.” She crushed her cigarette and used the butt to trawl an X
through the residue at the bottom of her blackened ashtray, her way of pronouncing that this particular case was closed. “What’s
next on our roster?”

Vandalism at 318 Poole Road, breaking and entering at the Five Points Pharmacy, a hit-and-run traffic accident in the parking
lot of Swain’s Steak House — it was always the work of a drug addict or former police officer, a “renegade,” a “rogue.” To
hear my mother talk, you’d think the sunny, manicured streets of suburban Raleigh were crawling with heroin addicts, the needles
poking through the sleeves of their tattered police uniforms. It embarrassed me to hear her use phrases like “copping a fix”
and “the pusher man.” “I have to go now,” she’d say to the grocery clerk. “My mother-in-law is back at the house, jonesing
for her lunch.”

“I beg your pardon?” they’d say. “Come again?”

Only on network television did people talk this way.

“I call the TV,” my mother and sister would say. It didn’t matter what you were watching, when they laid claim to one of the
televisions, you surrendered it the same way cars gave up the road at the sight of an advancing ambulance. I couldn’t bear
the detective shows but made it a point to regularly check in with
The Fugitive.
This was the story of Dr. Richard Kimble, a man on the run, falsely accused of a crime he did not commit. We are told in the
opening credits that “he changed his name…
and
his identity. The notion of identity was illustrated by a can of shoe polish sitting on what appeared to be the scuffed surface
of a motel dresser. This had me stumped for months. “What,” I asked, “would nobody recognize him with freshly shined shoes?
Did he use it to blacken his face? I don’t get it.”

“His hair, stupid,” Lisa said. “He used it to dye his hair.” Lisa liked
The Fugitive
because, she said, “He’s easy on the eyes.”

The way she saw it, Dr. Kimble needed only two things: a one-armed suspect and the love of a good woman. She failed to understand
that despite his brooding good looks, a man of his nature could never be happy. Unlike her nightly lineup of swaggering gumshoes,
the Fugitive had both a soul and a memory and would remain a haunted man long after his wife’s true killer had been brought
to justice. Most programs discouraged you from concentrating on the hero’s dark inner workings. If the girlfriend was gunned
down at her makeup table, you knew there’d be another one to replace her, no questions asked. The Fugitive had no fancy convertible
or stylish wet bar. He was cut from a different cloth,
my
kind of cloth, the itchy kind. Lisa wouldn’t know a sensitive loner if he crawled into her lap with a fistful of daisies,
and it annoyed me when she labeled
The Fugitive
as “my kind of show.”

It was one thing to sit in front of the television second-guessing a third-rate detective program, but quite another to solve
a real case. We were well into the summer reruns when our household was shaken by a series of very real crimes no TV detective
could ever hope to crack. Someone in our family had taken to wiping his or her ass on the bath towels. What made this exceptionally
disturbing was that all our towels were fudge-colored. You’d be drying your hair when, too late, you noticed an unmistakable
odor on your hands, head, and face. If nothing else, life in the suburbs promised that you might go from day to day
without
finding shit in your hair. This sudden turn of events tested our resolve to the core, leaving us to wonder who we were and
where we, as a people, had gone wrong. Soul-searching aside, it also called for plenty of hot water, gallons of shampoo, steel
wool, industrial scrub brushes, and blocks of harsh deodorizing soap. The criminal hit all three bathrooms, pausing just long
enough to convince the rest of us that it was finally safe to let down our guard. I might spend twenty minutes carefully sniffing
the towel only to discover that this time the asshole had used the washcloth.

“Well,” my mother said, thumbing through the newspaper one Sunday morning, “the person doing this is one sick individual,
that much we know for certain.”

“And they eat corn,” Lisa added, patting her head with a T-shirt. The most recent victim, she had washed her hair so many
times it now resembled the wiry, synthetic mane of a troll doll.

Everybody had their theories but nobody had any hard evidence. Discounting my parents, that still left six children and my
grandmother, all possible suspects. I eliminated myself, and because the towels were carefully folded, I excused my brother,
who to this day cannot manage such a complex activity. It must smart to use a towel for such a delicate purpose. I watched
as my family took their seats at the table, waiting for someone to cry out or flinch, but nothing came of it.

My mother and sister had always thought themselves so wily and smart, but when pressed for a suspect, they said only that
this case was beneath them. If someone were to be murdered or kidnapped, they’d rise to the occasion and finger the guilty
party within an hour. This particular case fell under the category of “aggravated mischief” and was therefore unworthy of
their professional attention. Whoever it was would listen to their conscience and confess sooner or later. In the meantime,
my mother would stock the linen closet with white towels. Case closed.

Later that month someone went through my father’s top drawer, stealing a kneesock packed with one hundred and twelve Liberty
silver dollars. I knew my father’s drawers as well as I knew my own; everyone did. That was how you occupied your time when
you had the house to yourself — you riffled through my father’s drawers before moving on to his second hiding place in the
shed. I had seen and counted these coins many times. We all had, but who would go so far as to steal them?