Riding In Cars With Boys (18 page)

Sally and I made a family with our kids. We cooked dinners together and ate mostly at Sally‘s, because she had a dining room with a piano on which she played Chopin, a candelabra, and cloth napkins. I learned about WASPs from Sally. I said to her, “But what do you
want
?” and she said, “It doesn’t matter,” or, “Whatever you like,” when whatever it was did matter. Finally, I caught on that I was supposed to ask her four or five times before I could expect the truth, because before that, Sally figured that to tell the truth was impolite. She smiled and was polite to everybody, even the troupes of boring, ugly, single professors who dropped by morning, noon, and night unannounced to get flashed by Sally’s smile and soothed by her graciousness. I know for a fact she loathed some of these guys for being smug or pompous or dull, but she offered them wine or beer and put Linda Ronstadt on the stereo and pretended to listen to them anyway. When our kids were acting like idiots, she said, “Now, children,” while I said, “Shut up.”

 

When Sally graduated a year before me, Jase and I were sad, but there were compensations: We weren’t really losing them because they were only moving to New Haven, and I had asked the university for and had been granted her house, which was much larger and nicer than mine, then I’d invited two men ex-students to join me as roommates.

Their names were both James and they were big and gentle, like golden retrievers. I’d met them in a class called “Toward a Socialist America” and they’d stayed on after their graduation to found a political magazine. They were the type of guys who handed out leaflets and jumped all over the university about this injustice or that discrimination. They’d get drunk with their friends and stay up until dawn debating social democracy versus socialism, throwing words like
hegemony
around and ending by actually singing “We Shall Overcome” at sunrise. They had hundreds of friends who visited our house. Two or three stayed for a couple of months. We had huge dinners and grand dancing parties that spilled onto the street. We sang in the car on trips to the store or laundromat with Jason. We played cowboy family during dinners. Sometimes we read poems by candlelight while we ate dessert; other times we pushed the dining table into a corner, and Jase and I taught them
Saturday Night Fever
dances we’d memorized from seeing the movie five times over.

Like Fay’s moving in with me back in 1971, this was a dream come true. There were two guys living in my house, shooting baskets with Jason and reading him stories, which was as good as any father; plus, these guys didn’t lionize me, exactly, for being working-class, but they were uncomfortable with their own social advantages and awfully curious about me and my family. “Does your mother vote like your father automatically, or does she make up her own mind? Is her factory unionized? What does your father think of your living with two guys?”

THEY got the answer to that question soon enough. My father came by to hang a spice rack that I’d requested he make me for my birthday, and didn’t offer his hand for shaking when I introduced him. Naturally, this pissed me off.

The next Sunday, I showed up at his house wearing a see-through blouse, then struck up a conversation with my mother. “You ever been to a porn shop, Ma?” I said.

“No,” she said, glancing nervously at my father, who was pretending not to listen as he watched the Giants game on TV.

“They have this doll. You blow it up human size. It’s got a hole … ”

My father left the room, then slammed into the cellar, where in a moment we heard the screech and drone of his electric saw. This was the first time in memory my father had ever abandoned a Giants game. I considered it a victory.

“Good,” I said to my mother. “Want to watch the Bette Davis movie on channel five?”

“Shame on you,” she said.

College had not made me your model daughter. Maybe I was worse than ever. I purposely used words they didn’t understand, because I refused to curtail my speech to bow to ignorance, and insisted on criticizing my parents’ way of life to my mother. “How can you stand to have that television on nonstop? It’s like mental Novocain.”

“You know your father.”

“And you have nothing to say about anything that goes on in your own house?”

“Please, Beverly, don’t start.”

At Thanksgiving, I suggested my father and brother do the dishes. I got laughed at. I turned on my mother. “You put up with it. What’s the matter with you? You must like it. You’re a martyr.”

“You do what you want in your house and I’ll do what I want in mine,” she finally said, and I shut up about it.

But that didn’t mean my mother shut up about me. One weekend my last semester at college, I dropped Jason off, as I often did on Friday nights, leaving him there until Sunday. This Friday, she said, “Honest to God, Beverly. Don’t you ever look at your son? Look at him. Just look at him.”

“What? What?” Jase said, looking down at himself.

The kid had dirt under his nails, greasy hair lying like strings on his forehead, and rumpled, obviously worn-too-many-times clothing. Until she’d mentioned it, I hadn’t even noticed. I thought back and could not tell you the last time he’d bathed. I felt terrible about this, and on the drive home from my mother’s house, it set me thinking. First I thought about Sasha, the woman who lived upstairs from me for a year and a half in the gray shingled house. She had a three-year-old son named Armond, who, if you asked me, she was overprotective of. For this reason she never joined in on our communal day care. Armond hardly left the apartment, even to play in the yard. Periodically, Sasha would go off her rocker and stomp down the stairs with Armond under her arm like a football and knock on my door. When I answered it, her face contorted with anger, she’d say, “I’m taking Armond to the orphanage. He’s a very bad boy. I can’t stand him anymore.” Then Armond would cry and Sasha would make him promise to be good, then end the dramatics. Or if she was really furious, she carried it further, dragging the kid to the car then off to some building she told him was an orphanage. Anyway, one day I’d gone somewhere and not returned until dusk. Maybe Jason had done something to piss her off, like tease Armond, or maybe Sasha was just being a nut, I don’t know, but when I came home she was standing in the hallway livid. “You’re a terrible mother,” she said. “You don’t deserve to have a child. How could you leave an eight-year-old for five hours? Five hours unattended?” At the time I thought to say, At least I don’t threaten my kid with an orphanage, but instead I just shrugged.

Now I thought of what Sasha had said in light of my mother’s pointing out the physical neglect of Jason, and I thought the two of them had something. I was becoming a more terrible mother than ever. I wondered, in fact, if I weren’t dissipating altogether.

There was plenty of evidence. For one thing, I was smoking marijuana before class more and more frequently. For another, I had on occasion taken to mixing Kahlúa with milk and substituting it for coffee in the morning. And last semester I’d gone to my dean, sat Jason on my lap as evidence, then asked to drop a class. I said, “It’s unfair that at this university there are students who have a maid come in to clean their bathroom when I have to carry the same course load, cook and clean for a kid, plus work part-time at a job (as an editorial assistant, ten hours a week).” The dean had simply agreed and said, “Sure. If you want, drop the class. We understand it’s more difficult for you single mothers.”

That gave me more time, so what I did was take up with a drug dealer named Sonny Tune, who drove a Lincoln Continental and carried a gun in a briefcase. Half the reason I went with the guy was to be able to tell people and to see the look on the Jameses’ faces when I let it drop that Sonny kept his gun under the bed every time he slept over. Sonny didn’t last long though. Since he could only call me from phone booths and I could only reach him at the same, he was hard enough to get in touch with, but once a judge put a subpoena out on him, it was impossible.

Next, this final semester, a couple of weeks before, in fact, I went to a bar in Hartford and picked up this muscle-bound ape named Rocky who drove a white Caddy. When we went into his car to snort some cocaine, he rolled up a thousand-dollar bill for the purpose and said, “Do you swing?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You know. You and me and my buddy Sal?”

“Sure,” I said, “we’ll arrange it.” Then gave him a fake phone number.

So this day in the car, envisioning the way Jason had looked when I dropped him at my mother‘s, I thought he resembled a nine-and-a-half-year-old David Copperfield after his mother died, and I decided I should stop this slip-sliding before I got carried away. I figured my dissent was the result of the minor breakdown I might be having due to my imminent graduation from Wesleyan.

Wesleyan had given me an excellent education and paid for it, besides being like a finishing school preparing me for the upper middle class. It had given me a house and shoveled my walks. It had been like the ideal father to me, but in the end it would be just like my father of flesh and blood, who’d said so long ago, “Once you leave, you’re not coming back.”

Let’s face it, I hadn’t done such a good job on my own the first time around. I figured it was no coincidence I was using men as a means to disintegrate given what success I’d had using them for the same purpose in the past—conscious or unconscious—starting with Skylar Barrister in the backseat of a car parked by a garbage dump.

I decided to watch out and begin a campaign of good health and better morals. I would begin by instituting bath time every night and by making a date for the movies the next weekend with Jason.

As it happened, the week between my resolve and our date, Cupcake broke down. The mechanic said she needed a new alternator, which would have to wait because I had no money to fix her. Seeing Cupcake covered by a mound of snow in the backyard felt like an omen. It was my last semester. I was about to graduate, and maybe I would leave better off, with a college diploma, but I might also be reduced to the status of carless person. What would that mean?

I was studying a lot of literature and seeing symbolic meanings and foreshadowings in everything. I was being silly. I cheered myself up. There were plenty of students who went four years to college without ever having a car. I could walk to all my classes. I could shop at the little, though more expensive, comer market. I could hitch rides with neighbors. Eventually, I’d save the money to fix her. It would work out.

On Saturday evening, the night of our date, it was freezing out. It had snowed for eight hours and there were mountains of snow bordering all the roads and driveways. Ice covered the paths. Jase and I bundled up and made off to see
Dog Day Afternoon
at the theater on campus, stopping first to buy Jason some penny candy at the comer market.

As soon as we felt the blast of heat in the lobby, Jason took off his mittens and stuck his hand in his pocket to fondle his candy and found there was nothing left but a single, miniature peanut butter cup. “Oh no!” he said. “They fell out the hole.” His festive aspect collapsed before my eyes. Immediately, I felt guilty for the hole in his pocket, both because it was there and because I hadn’t known it. We sat down. Jason, who’d been chatting lightheartedly with me on our walk, was transformed into a black hole in the seat next to me. I didn’t sense him lightening up until midway through the movie, when he laughed at Al Pacino’s transvestite girlfriend/boyfriend. Then, as we were exiting the theater, we ran into an acquaintance named Dan who Jason knew to have a car. Jason whispered to me, “Do you think Dan can give us a ride?”

This reminder that once again in my life I was stuck without a car, as well as his suggestion that I rely on a
man
to help us out, irritated me no end. “We’re walking,” I hissed under my breath. “It’s good for you.”

Once outside, Jason started chattering his teeth and taking tiny steps like a Chinaman to signify how cold he was. Almost beside myself with loathing by now, I grabbed his shoulder and turned him around to pull his hood up. “Ouch!” he yelled, surprising me.

People stopped and looked at us.

I dropped to my knees in front of him, said, “Hold still,” and yanked his hood string so hard it broke in my hand.

“You broke it!” he screamed, which surprised me again. Next, he yelled, “You’re
nuts
! I’m running away.” Hysterics were not part of Jason’s repertoire. Whining, moping, arguing, yes, but hysterics definitely not. While I stood there kind of dumbfounded, he took off, leaving me in the snow, with half of the school staring, like I was a child beater.

I watched this little black figure gliding along the snow until it disappeared behind a mound and all I could see was his black sailor’s cap above it, which turned around every now and then to see if I followed. My chest felt fluttery, like I was on the verge of laughing. But Jason was getting farther and farther away, so I began running. When I was close enough, I alternately ran and walked to keep him no more distant than a hundred yards. With my kid running away from me like I was his enemy, an instance of recent child abuse came to mind. He’d had a friend over from school and they were firing rubber-tipped arrows at me and the Jameses as we prepared a complicated Mexican dinner for one of our socialist professor friends. Jason must’ve been using us for target practice for about half an hour when my ability to concentrate on what I was doing and ignore kid disturbance reached its threshold and it dawned on me that I did not have to take this. In fact this was ridiculous to allow. So I said to one of the Jameses, “Grab that Indian.” He did, and I took an egg and cracked it on Jason’s head.

I thought it was a riot. Jason did not get the humor. He was outraged. His face turned red and his eyes bulged from his head and he said, “You’re crazy!” then he ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. He would not let me in, but eventually he did let the Jameses in. Later, they told me that Jason had cried and said that he was going to become a lawyer and specialize in the rights of children, which I’d heard before. He also said that now he was afraid his friend would go back and tell his class that his mother had cracked an egg on his head. Which had never occurred to me. Now, as I saw Jason stop at the crossroads—where if he took a left he’d really be running away, but if he took a right he’d be nearly home—I stopped too, thinking that I may have been cursed by being saddled with a kid so young, but that Jason had been just as cursed by being saddled with me. He took a right. My heart stopped pounding in my ears and I walked the rest of the way. I took my time in the house, too. I could see the little puddles left by his boots on his way to the stairs to his room. I put some cider on the stove and smoked a cigarette while waiting for it to warm. I knew we had to talk, but I didn’t know what I would say. I looked at the guitar he’d pretended to play earlier in the evening, standing on the hassock and bouncing on his knees. Sometimes when Jason lightened up, we could have a good time. Sometimes he could be a regular ham. We could sing in the kitchen for hours and disco dance like crazy.