Sacred Time (36 page)

“Maybe this will become the next neighborhood to be regenerated,” I tell Joey. “You've seen it in Brooklyn. Houses like ours. Street by street. Entire blocks.”

“Cool.”

I think of SoHo—those vacant warehouses where even students wouldn't live, and where you wouldn't dare park your car. I've seen the East Village change. All places where hardship certainly remains but no longer defines the neighborhoods.

“Kitchen Sink? First you went to the library with your mother…”

“…and afterwards she took me to Jahn's. They were famous for their Kitchen Sink Sundae. My mother said it was a rule you had to have six people to order the Kitchen Sink, because it was so big.”

“That's why you never got to eat it.”

“You remember everything.”

“Do you remember how long that rat's tail was?”

“You want to talk about tails? I had a hat with a raccoon tail when I was about nine, a Davy Crockett hat. Kevin had one, too. He also had a signed photo of Fess Parker.”

“Who's that?”

“The actor who played Davy Crockett. One day, in front of the Concourse Plaza Hotel, Fess Parker got into the cab of Kevin's father, who took him to Yankee Stadium. When he told Fess Parker that he was his son's favorite actor on the continent, he whipped out a photo and signed it right there. ‘For my friend Kevin, from the king of the wild frontier. Fess Parker.'”

“Cool.”

“King of the wild frontier…” I sang. “Davy, Davy Crockett—”

“Daddy…” Joey glances around.

“…born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state—” I laughed. “I used to sing ‘cleanest state.'”

Joey walks faster, embarrassed to be on the same street with me.

“Just a year ago, you would have sung with me.”

“A year ago, I was a child.”

“The Palisades song? ‘Come on over…'”

“‘Palisades has the rides after dark….'” He runs ahead.

“Wait. We can talk about the rat.”

He stops. “Did the man step on the rat from the side or from the top?”

I spare him by lying that I didn't see the man's foot coming down.

“You can sing me the rest of that Davy Crockett song now.” He sounds relieved.

“You're too…kind.” I start singing: “‘killed him a bear when he was only three…'”

“Are you saying that killing a bear is not as bad as killing a rat?”

“You're fixated on rats, huh? All right. My father, he hated rats more than anyone I know. One afternoon, he arrived home early, yanked off his trousers, and slapped them against the wall, dancing around.”

Joey laughs.

“He was sure rats had climbed up his legs. They'd swarmed around him when he walked past Smelly Alley. ‘Hundreds of rats,' he said, ‘a sea of rats. Rats of all sizes.' It started with one scurrying across his shoe, and within seconds all he could see were rats—in front of him, behind him. There were no cars by the curb for them to hide beneath, and he was between the rats and their protection, those bushes and weeds in the alley.”

“Maybe they were afraid when this human appeared,” Joey suggests.

“My father—he freaked out. Hopped up and down, certain he felt claws and fur against his legs. One rat headed toward a sewer grate. Then the others. Down. Hind ends last. A wave of hind ends, and it was over. My father took a shower until all the hot water was gone. Never wore those pants again.”

“Let's not say anything to Grandma about the sick rat,” Joey says as we approach the corner candy store, where my mother still buys her cigarettes and magazines, and where Joey often gets a Snickers. But today he doesn't mention candy.

Joey and I approach the building where I grew up, where the hedges have been dead for many years. In their place: hard soil. The courtyard has a steel gate. On the building old graffiti, new graffiti: “fuck you suck me lola loves tommy up yours happy eater…”

“Eater?” Joey asks. “Probably something to do with food, sex, or a misspelling of ‘Easter.'”

“I vote for Easter.”

“You're such a…Dad.”

“To think that I got hell for drawing with chalk on the sidewalk….”

“And what happened?”

“The super told my mother, and I got grounded.”

“Different generations, Dad.”

I glance at Joey from the side, and we both laugh.

My mother's bell no longer works, but I have a key for the gate and the front door. Six concrete steps with concrete flowerpots, cracked and gray with specks of white where the paint hasn't weathered, filled with cigarette butts and candy wrappers and cellophane. It could be so different.

As Joey and I race each other up the stairway, I smell cardamom and turmeric, schmaltz and wet plaster, urine and yesterday's fish.

Three floors up, and I'm panting. “Wait—”

Joey stops halfway up the next flight. More than four decades between us. If I were a young father, I'd be able to give him more energy. More playfulness. Less of the caution he already rebels against. He waits till I'm next to him. Side by side, we walk up to the sixth floor, where it's silent in the hallway. No loud music. That's how I know my mother is home. I knock.

When she opens her door, James Hudak is sitting on her sofa in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, working on one of her crossword puzzles with the retractable pencil I gave her. Though his age is somewhere between my mother's and mine, James looks younger than I, fitter. As usual, he doesn't stay. Mumbles something about coming back later to fix the window latch. Last time it was the sink. When I was a boy, I used to see him often—too often, really—because whenever he visited his grandmother she ignored me. James and I passed a sharp and swift dislike back and forth between us until he went into the Navy, and then I was away at cooking school, and we didn't come across each other for years.

He grabs his denim shirt from the couch, gives me a brief nod. “Anthony.”

I nod. “James.”

“I'll call you in a while,” my mother tells him.

“You need anything from the store?”

“A couple of onions for the roast tomorrow.”

He whispers something, and she whispers back.

She gets out plates and silverware with the Festa Liguria logo. While she feeds Joey and me, I try not to think of the rat; yet the effort of not thinking about the rat
brings the rat into my mother's kitchen, makes the man's foot come down to crush it again and again, fills my head with the smell of wet feathers and sawdust, and I'm standing with Riptide in the poultry market, where the turkey with the shy eyes hangs by his feet from the scale.

“Look at that turkey looking at that little boy.”

“That turkey is looking at you, Antonio.”

“Gobobobob…”

“Nice turkey. Nice—”

“Antonio has decided. Questo.”

“No—”

And already I'm thinking of the rat again,
and the man's shoe is coming down, blood and violence, stimulating other violence,
and what you see inside your head, you have to say. It's like confession, where what you did or thought or said will push at you till you say it to the priest, and then you'll feel better. And so I murmur “rat” to myself without moving my lips. “Rat. Rat.” Thinking this is stupid. And I don't feel better. My mother is watching me. She seems small. Alone.

“Alone,” I whisper.

“What did you say?”

“That you spend too much time alone.”

“But Grandma's got James,” my son says.

“I'm talking about a different kind of relationship.”

Joey is looking at me as if he were the father and I the child. He's standing by her boombox, checking her CDs. “You got the new Busta,” he says excitedly.

“Go ahead and borrow it.”

“Thanks.” He and my mother trade CDs: Busta and Mystical and The Neptunes and Lil' Kim.

“What if you started dating again?” I ask my mother.

She glances at Joey. They both shrug.

“Dad—” Joey pulls his hands through his short hair. Makes the ends stick up. “Grandma's got James.”

“I want what's already familiar,” my mother says.

“He'll become familiar.”

“Who?”

“Someone new.”

“I don't want someone new.”

“Once you get to know him, he'll become familiar.”

“I would feel like a fifteen-year-old inside an eighty-year-old body.”

“There are men with eighty-year-old bodies…with ninety-year-old bodies…who're alone and looking for a woman to—”

“Old men…” She waves my idea aside. “Whatever would I do with an old man?”

“Maybe one of your friends could introduce you to someone.”

Joey groans. “Dad—”

My mother winks at him. “A blind date…How romantic. I can picture it already…. I'm getting dressed for our date, and before I even meet him, I'm ready to have him be the one who is meant for me. But then I open my door and there he stands, barely my height, balding or with his hair parted above one ear, smelling of some manly cologne—”

“Anything but manly cologne.” I have to laugh.

“—and I want to change him already into the man I ought to be dreaming about.”

“Warts,” Joey says, “your blind date has warts.”

“Definitely warts,” she agrees.

I'm feeling lighthearted. “Why is it that the two of you need to gang up on me?”

Two weekends later, my mother arrives on the train with raisin scones and wants to rehearse for multiple attackers. After dinner, she instructs Joey to hold on to her arms while I'm supposed to approach her from the front.

“Wait a second, please—” she says, when she has us in position. “I have to think what to do first.” She lifts her right heel. Flexes her foot. “There are six parts to this.”

I'm stunned. “Is that what you'll say if you get into that kind of situation? ‘There are six parts to this. Excuse me, please, while I think of the sequence.'”

“That is exactly why I have to rehearse with you.” Her voice is patient and slow, as if I were a four-year-old, a particularly dense four-year-old. “I have to rehearse with you, Anthony, so that it all becomes reflex.”

Swinging her right leg toward me, she stops before it touches my thigh. “I'll do this a lot harder with real attackers,” she promises, and pivots herself to the side, using her right leg—still raised—to cock back, tap Joey's knee, and from there shoot forward to graze my leg.

“Cool kick, Grandma.”

“Don't you encourage her,” I snap.

But my mother is beaming at him. Her face is flushed. “Once I remember the sequence, I'll be much faster.”

“All you'd do with any of these antics is annoy a mugger.” I hate the disapproving tone in my voice.

“No one wants to fight a wild, screaming woman. Look at Sa-lome…. And if Lot's wife had fought, she wouldn't have become a pillar of salt…. You see, that's what we're supposed to turn ourselves into when we're in danger—pillars of salt. That's how they get us. Now, if Lot's wife—”

“Don't tell me the instructor is a preacher, too?”

“It's something I've thought out.”

“Now she wants to be Mrs. Lot.”

“Don't talk about me in the third person, damnit.”

“I was just quoting what Dad would say: ‘Now she wants to be Mrs. Lot.'”

“And I would tell your father what I told you: ‘Don't talk about me in the third person.'”