Riding In Cars With Boys (19 page)

He was lying in bed, the covers over his head. I sat next to him. “You’re an asshole,” I said to make a joke.

“Is that why you chased me all the way home?” he said. “To call me an
asshole?”
He was crying now.

Suddenly, I was mad again. “You made me feel guilty, about not having Cupcake.”

“What?”

“You know she’s broken and I don’t have the money to fix her, yet you had to complain and complain. It’s not my fault.”

“That’s not what it was,” he said. “I wanted a ride because I was cold and tired. That’s not what it was.” Now he was sobbing and choking from not catching his breath. I lifted him onto my lap and rocked him. I’d thought Jason was trying to make me feel guilty when he’d simply been tired. He hadn’t been thinking of me at all. Just as I hadn’t been thinking of him.

Did I always believe that everything Jason said and did was for the purpose of eliciting some effect in me? Was I that egocentric? Was this a result of my thinking his being born had ruined my life, so I forgot the kid had a life of his own and only thought about how his life affected mine? Had my personality been so unformed when I had him that he simply became a part of it, like a birch grafted onto an elm?

I stroked his back. His face was hot and wet against mine. I hoped that his grandmother’s thinking the sun rose and set in him would overcome his having been invisible to me.

 

 

In a month or so I got the car fixed, and in May of that year, 1978, I graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English. In June, I began looking for an apartment in Little Italy—it was cheap and safe—in New York City, where I was determined to make my life and my fortune, whatever that would be. I found my apartment on June 24, on the same evening I totaled Cupcake.

I was alone and exiting Central Park when I didn’t see the meridian separating the incoming from the outgoing traffic and sailed right over it, landing splat in the middle of the “in” side. The engine shut off and her lights went black. When I stepped out, I saw that her tires had flattened out to her sides and her belly was flush against the asphalt. I flagged down a Checker cab, which crunched into her rear end as it pushed her against the curb on Fifth Avenue, where I left her. When I returned the next morning for a visit, her doors were flung open, her battery gone, the contents of her glove compartment strewn all over, and the golf ball that had been her gear-shift handle ripped off and gone forever. I sat by her on the bench all day and wept.

I’d planned on giving Cupcake away anyway. She was eighteen years old, not worth much money, and I’d been told I wouldn’t need her in New York. She’d be too difficult to park and expensive to keep. Now I wished I’d never driven her to New York at all, that I’d parked her in my parents’ backyard, where she’d have been safe, drilled a hole in her roof, and planted a tree through it.

WHEN we reach my parents‘, it’s nine in the evening, pitch-black out, and no longer pouring rain. We see my mother at the window and in a second she’s at the door. She doesn’t wait until we’ve stepped out of the car before she starts talking, “So you finally made it. What weather.”

“I bet she’s been waiting at the window for three hours,” Jason whispers to me.

“Only rain,” I say.

“But in all that traffic?”

Jason lopes up the hill to the front door, where my father is now standing behind my mother. My mother kisses Jason while my father shakes his hand and puts his other hand on my son’s shoulder, which is taller than his. “The college kid,” he says, giving Jase a pat. This trinity in the doorway, a lawn length away, makes me feel strange. Lonely or melancholy, aware, at least, of how nothing stays the same.

We go into the house, and I feel like a clairvoyant. I can predict exactly what will happen in the next half hour. My mother will ask a million questions about the journey, as though we’d come halfway across the world through continents deluged by monsoons when all we did was drive two and a half hours north on the interstate from Manhattan in the rain. Jason will cut himself a piece of whatever she’s baked for the occasion, eat it, then go up to the attic recreation room, otherwise known as his room. The Castro convertible will already be made into a bed. He’ll take his science-fiction book out of his backpack, lie on the bed with the remote for the cable next to him, and settle in for the night. Since he became a teenager, when he comes to his grandparents‘, he seeks solitude in comers like a cat. At home in New York, because our apartment is so small, he either shuts the door to his room or goes down to the Polish bar a couple of blocks away, where he plays chess with an old Romanian who wears paper bags for hats, or he plays pool for hours and hours, for as long as he holds the table.

Is this sad?

My kid had no cozy living room with family portraits on the wall, no clan of siblings fighting for space on the couch. No. My son had only me. More to the point of my feelings right now, I had only my son and a cat named Lou to keep me company in my apartment. And now, with his imminent departure to the upstairs room, I am anticipating the grander, deeper, more permanent departure to college that will come the next day. But what’s the big deal? Why the mo roseness? Hadn’t I been shaking my fist at the ceiling, wishing for solitude and an apartment of my own? Hadn’t I been chomping at the bit for the day I’d be minus one guilt-inducing kid to take care of? Then, like a flash of lightning, I’m struck with an image of not so long ago. Of his waiting for me to get out of a car so he could walk with me hand in hand. I’m being dramatic. I can’t help it. Endings do that to me. Besides, it’s in my blood.

Everything goes as predicted, and once Jason has gone off to his room, my father shifts focus back to the TV and my mother and I sit in the kitchen with cups of tea in front of us. My mother stirs some milk in and says, “My prayers were answered.”

“Ma,” I say. “Do you actually pray?”

“Of course. What do you think I am? Of course,” she says, offended.

“Well, you know, some people use it as a saying. I was just wondering if you really pray or use it as a saying. ”

“Every night. I prayed for Jason to get all A’s and get a scholarship. Then, when he did, I said I’d say so many extra Our Fathers and I forget how many Hail Marys. I pray that you’ll do good with your writing. I don’t ask for anything for myself. Just give me the strength.”

I’m a little shocked by this revelation. I mean, I knew my mother believed in God, if only by the amount of times she’d say, “See? God punished you,” when, for example, I’d dropped a gallon of milk on my toe. And her most common curse evoked the Holy Family: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, if you kids don’t shut up, I’ll kill you.” But she never went to church, except for baptisms and funerals. She said the priests were mostly Irish and money hungry. But now that I think of it, there’s always been that string of mother-of-pearl rosaries hanging on her bedpost, which I’d assumed was for decoration, like the crucifix above her bed.

Now I have the vision of my mother, this short lady (my mother has shrunk about two inches since my childhood) with a big nose and hair that’s more pink than brown because the gray refuses to take the dye anymore, lying on her back, clutching her rosary beads to her flat chest, praying for me and Jason and the rest of her family night after night for years and years and years. I figure I’m lucky. How many people have a mother praying for them every night? But knowing my mother, she was probably praying for the wrong thing—like the time I told her I’d be going to college and she said, “I thought you wanted a job.” But then, I’ve been thinking lately that maybe there’s a big design, that the end is already there in the beginning and there’s nothing we can do about it, not in a lifetime. Nothing we can do about the events, but plenty we can do with them. It all comes down to the way we look at things.

Right now, I’m thinking my mother’s looking at me like I’m a heathen. She says, “I bet you don’t even remember your prayers.”

“I remember,” I say.

Now Jason walks through the kitchen on his way to brush his teeth but is bushwhacked by my mother, who has come back down to earth for her role as mother-provider. “I bought you soap, you know, a big pack—economy—shampoo, toothpaste, Q-tips, shaving cream, a couple of notebooks, pens, socks, underwear; can you think of anything else?”

“No,” Jason says.

“No,” I say.

“You got sheets, towels, a pillow?”

“Yes,” Jason says.

“Yes,” I say.

“You got a raincoat, boots?”

“No,” Jason says, when I was about to say yes. “I don’t wear a raincoat or boots,” he says. That’s the difference between Jason and me. I’ll lie 100 percent of the time to get my mother off my back, Jason only 50. Now he’s got her going.

“What? You’ll catch your death. What’re you going to do when it rains?”

“Drown,” Jason says, and I laugh.

“And you,” my mother says. “I suppose you never make him.”

I just shrug. It’s the old debate. Good mother, bad mother. Is it worse to have an overprotective one who tries to keep you a kid forever or one who verges on neglecting you and therefore makes you responsible for yourself? Did I neglect Jason out of indifference? I don’t think so. It was just our habit. We’d started out as one kid looking after another, and things haven’t changed too much, even though I’m now about to turn thirty-six. I went to the source and asked Jason once. We were at a diner in our neighborhood in downtown New York. I was buttering a piece of bread and Jason was sinking an ice cube in his Coke with a straw. He was being moody and uncommunicative, a common state since he had started to sprout pimples a year before. He was fifteen at the time.

“Do you wish you had a real mother?” I said.

He smiled. “We’re more like roommates than mother and son, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” I said, startled to hear coming out of his mouth what I’d often thought to myself. “But do you ever wish we were more normal?”

“No,” he said. “It’s better we’re this way.”

He might’ve just been trying to shut me up, so I continued with the questions—in search of the truth or, maybe, reassurance. “If I were a regular mother”—I helped him along—“I wouldn’t let you play pool at Stella’s.”

“Right.”

“Or stay home from school when you felt like it.”

“And you’d probably make me make my bed every day.”

“But I’d also cook you breakfast and dinner.”

“That’s true,” he said.

Jason and I grocery shopped together, and he cooked as often as I did, although his repertoire was limited to tacos and hamburgers and frozen dinners (for himself, not for me), while I could be a good cook when I felt like it. Half our meals were eaten at the very diner we were sitting at—an entree of meat, mashed potatoes, and a vegetable for $2.95. Or we ate take-out from the Chinese restaurant around the corner or Pete’s A Pizza on 14th Street.

“Still,” I said. “You’re glad?”

“Ma, you’re a good mother,” he said.

He might’ve just said it to spare my feelings, but that was as good as his telling the truth. Jason, I was aware, had become my friend. It started when we moved to New York. Neither of us knew another soul but each other, and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t dump Jason on my mother and his loyalty shifted from her to me. Maybe it began when we heard gunshots in the night and talked through the wall dividing our rooms in the darkness. “Did you hear that, Ma?”

“Yeah.”

We walked all over the city, going to double-feature movies, shopping in thrift shops, staring at people on the street. We held hands everywhere we went. When I was with Jason, the men with menacing eyes and animal noises coming from their mouths left me alone out of respect for the young man, or maybe respect for motherhood.

When I discovered a great bar a couple of blocks west, with pictures of Al Pacino and Frank Sinatra on the wall, I went there for beers with Jason, who the owner treated to Cokes and chips. Jason learned to play pool and, on Friday nights, at the age of ten, could sometimes hold the table for as long as two hours. But after seven or eight months of camaraderie, I met Nigel. Nigel was eleven years older than I and a painter. He’d been to parties with John and Yoko and lived in the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid murdered Nancy. I was impressed. He carried a camera everywhere and documented my every sigh, dirty look, and burst of laughter with the click of his camera. I made up to cosmetic companies for all those years I had never used their products, because I’d become a twenty-eight-year-old walking, talking, club-hopping Barbie.

Jason hated Nigel. Probably because he was a nut. And looked like it. He had blond hair that stood on end and intense bulging blue eyes that never softened. He was afflicted with severe separation anxiety, which meant he couldn’t let me out of his sight. At the time this was fine with me, because it meant he’d support me if I quit my job as a secretary, which I’d taken to feed me and Jason while I continued doggedly writing my short poems, if you can call them that: “I purple my hair my eyes my mouth. My cheeks I paint blue. I make myself into a bruise for you.” And I kept a notebook of graffiti for future reference: “Lick me, eat me, make me write bad checks. Lexington Avenue Line, Canal Street, 1979.” Maybe I liked that line so much because Nigel could’ve written it. The guy was a raging alcoholic who threw money around like toilet paper. So once the money ran out from a painting he’d sold, we had to leave the beautiful cathedrallike loft he’d sublet and I got a job typing on a computer three nights a week.

Meanwhile, poor Jase was being ostracized in an all-Chinese school, where he excelled in his schoolwork but had no social life whatsoever, except when he stopped at the post office on his way to school to buy some first-issue stamps that he’d sell to the kids for a profit. Soon, though, after we lost the sublet, we moved to an empty two-hundred-year-old building that was no more than an abandoned construction site. We were planning on renovating it, but in the meantime we slept next to cement bags and walked up stairs made of cinderblocks and washed dishes with a hose poised over a floor drain. Jason met two boys in our new neighborhood, Juno and Amos, kids of sculptor parents who’d lived in a camper on the streets for a couple of months, and for a year in a ditch in New Mexico, so Jase had something in common with his new friends. They began shining shoes in bars for spending money, while I began to seriously dissolute in the same bars with Nigel, making my fear about using men to slip-slide away a reality. Finally, at the bar around the comer, there appeared a gypsy fortune-teller who for five dollars threw three pyramid-shaped dice and told me to ditch Nigel. “And who is the boy?” she said. “The one with light hair and light eyes? He is crying for you. Alone. The man will eat you alive. Leave him, and go with the boy. That is your salvation.”