The Boys of My Youth (14 page)

My mother came in and tried to wash my hair. She’d given up reasoning with me long ago, had adopted a style that married brute
force with loud comforting comments. “You’re such a good girl,” she lied, struggling to hold my head in the water. Soap was
lapping onto my face. I shrieked and tried to shake my head; a wave washed over my mouth. “One more time and then we’re done,”
she said resolutely, sitting me back up with one viselike hand and squirting soap on my head with the other. I looked her
in the eye and shrieked again. My father came and stood in the door of the bathroom, watching.

“What’re you doing to her?” he asked my mother.

“She’s doing it to
me
,” my mother replied grimly. She gestured with her head. “Look at Hal.”

Crap. Now I’d have to listen to that. I stepped up my end of the struggle.

“Oh dear,” my father said. Hal was collapsed on himself, dripping slightly. My father rolled him in a towel and wrung him
a couple of times. I screamed; they were trying to kill us.

“
Shut up
,” my mother said. She stood me up and began brass-knuckling my head with a towel. When she was done she swatted my wet rear.
It made a loud insulting noise without exactly hurting. I collapsed on the bath mat, wailing, while she strode off to find
my jammies.

The bathroom ceiling had sparkles on it. The dog-in-the-boat stain was still there. Hal was wadded up inside a towel on the
floor. I unrolled him and we lay on the bath mat together, panting quietly. They had manhandled us.

My mother has hung Hal upside down on the clothesline. I’m spending the morning in the sandbox to be near him, using an old
comb to make furrows and lines which I then plant blades of grass in. I’m making a farm. Every once in a while I use the comb
on my own hair, and warm sand falls down the back of my shirt. Hal is watching from upside down, clothespins pinched into
his calves, vinyl hands dangling near his ears.

“
I am not hurting him
,” my mother said dangerously as she pinned him up there. I better not pull a trick like that again or somebody’s in trouble.
I try to reach the measuring cup and my leg makes the grass fall over. I have to stand up and stomp on it carefully and then
sit back down and start over, combing in the rows. Once I find a caterpillar and hold it up to show Hal. He can’t see too
good upside down. The caterpillar won’t get off my finger so I scrape it onto the sand and use my scoop to
throw it out on the ground, along with a considerable amount of sand.

I have on blue sunglasses with wiener dogs on the frames. I can pull up my shirt and fill my belly button with sand except
if I do she’ll dig it out with the washcloth tonight. I’m starting to learn cause and effect. Hal in the bathtub means Hal
up in the air. He still doesn’t have his clothes on. I climb out of the sandbox and sit down on the ground to take my sandals
off. I put my sunglasses on top of them and stand back up. After I push my shorts and underwear down I have to sit again in
order to pull them off my feet. The shirt gets stuck on my head and I can’t see. After a frantic second I get it off but it
yanks my nose. The barrettes slid out of my hair while the shirt was going past; I put one inside each sandal. I get up and
sit on the edge of the sandbox to rest.

A bee is on the hollyhock by the fence. It steps into the flower and walks around, then steps out again, flies to the sandbox,
and hangs in the air in front of my face, buzzing. I shake my head at it and it hovers for another instant and then takes
off again, flies to Hal, and lights on his hanging hand.

Injury laid right over top of insult. I start screaming.

When she comes out we look at each other for a long moment, then she sighs, reaches up, releases the clothespins, lets him
drop, then catches him before he hits the ground. She hands him over and stoops to collect my clothes while I put my sunglasses
back on. I follow her to the back door, carrying Hal by the feet. His shoes are warm from the sun and he smiles as I drag
his face along through the grass and then — bump, bump — up the two steps and into the house.

Hal’s body has become lumpy, with protrusions of wadded stuffing in some spots and absolutely nothing in others. My mother
tries to fix him each morning by squeezing him like a
tube of toothpaste, forcing the stuffing from his lower body into his upper body. A gritty, sandlike substance is coming through
his pores. He’s still smiling. Hal and I are the only ones who don’t care about personal appearances.

“She tried to give him a bath,” my mother tells my aunt, who is holding Hal and looking at him through the bottoms of her
bifocals. They’re trying to figure out if he can be given a torso transplant. My aunt runs her thumb over his bald spot.

“The paint’s wearing off his head,” she says definitively. “Throw him out and get her a new one.” Thus spake Bernice.

“No,” I say, shaking my head vigorously. I get right up in Aunt Bernie’s face. I shake my head again, harder. She holds Hal
out of my reach. I do one short bloodcurdling scream and she hands him over.

My mother, the one who is not taking credit for the bald spot on his head, lights a cigarette nervously and exhales. Bernie
is the oldest of five brothers and sisters. My own big sister Linda is playing jacks on the kitchen floor and every time I
move she calls out
She’s getting my jacks
. My mother believes her. One more time and I’m going to be sat right down in a chair. Aunt Bernie is still waiting for a
reply. Her eyebrows are in the middle of her forehead.

“Listen,” my mother tells her. “She will scream until we’re
all
in the asylum, you included.” Bernie snorts, takes a cigarette and lights it. Smoke pours out her nose.

“She may run
you,”
Bernie says dryly, “but she doesn’t run me.” Her own daughters are in the living room standing in separate corners. The crime
was cursing. It’s time for Hal’s thumb to be sucked.

“She’s got that thing in her
mouth,”
Bernie says.

“Don’t put that in your mouth,” my mother tells me in a stagey, I’m-the-mother voice. I stare at her until she reaches over
and gives his hand a yank. It doesn’t move.

“She’s
biting
on it,” Bernie says.

“I don’t know what’s got into her today,” my mother says nervously. She lights another cigarette and gives me a desperate
glare. Linda’s rubber ball bounces one, two, three, four times. Hal’s hand drops back down to his side. “Okay then,” my mother
says.

When they put me down for my nap Bernie looks around the bedroom and says she doesn’t know why they’ve got me in a crib. “It’s
either a crib or a leash,” my mother says shortly. When they leave I cry the minimum amount and then put my feet through the
bars. Hal is lying with his head on the pillow and the blanket up to his chin. I put him down at the bottom where he belongs
and then I go down there with him. The ceiling is white and has sparkles just like in the bathroom. If I pee in this bed it
doesn’t matter but I don’t have to pee right now. I put my face next to Hal’s and close my eyes. The ceiling sparkles appear
against my eyelids, like stars. Hal’s got his arm under me.

In my sleep I show my girl cousins how to tie shoes, just like my dad showed me. Make a bunny, cross over, push one ear through,
and pull. It’s supposed to be a bow but it unravels, just like always.
I can’t do it
. My girl cousins disappear and in their place is Bernice, who points to the corner. I shake my head. She takes the manual,
grasp-and-steer approach.
This is not a good idea
, my mother whispers. I’m in the corner all alone and I can’t feel Hal’s arm in my back. Wherever I am, that’s where Hal’s
supposed to be. I turn around and around, but the corner is completely empty. All that’s in it is me.

Under the sofa: quite a bit of dirt, several jacks, a book called
The Wait for Me Kitten
, a ballpoint pen, and the crust off a peanut butter sandwich. No Hal. To look behind the refrigerator you have to put your
cheek against the kitchen wall. All that’s back there is dirt. The broom closet doesn’t even have a
broom in it, just the vacuum cleaner. Under Linda’s bed are about ten sandwich crusts, a clear plastic coin purse with an
empty lipstick tube inside, the usual dirt, and a strange piece of red felt that looks like the tongue of a stuffed animal.
The bedroom closets yield nothing but shoes. Hal wouldn’t be able to go out to the sandbox by himself because he can’t walk.
Nevertheless, I open the back screen door and call to him.

Nothing from Hal, but in the kitchen my mother drops what she’s doing and moves directly to the telephone. She dials with
a pencil, puts a cigarette in her mouth, fishes around in her pocket for a lighter, finds it, snaps it open, lights the cigarette,
and says into the receiver Let me talk to your mom.

The kitchen counter can be gotten to by way of a red step stool; you can climb up there while your mother is in the other
room and eat chocolate chips out of the cupboard. You can also stand in the sink and look at the whole backyard through the
window. She stops me before I make it up to the counter. She’s carrying the phone, the receiver pinned to her shoulder. The
other arm picks me off the stool and sets me on the floor. I point to the cupboards.

“He’s not up there,” she says shortly.

She knows something.

Back in the living room I watch her as she finishes the call and hangs up. She leans back in her chair, lights another cigarette,
and blows large ragged smoke rings up to the ceiling. Even when I lie down on the floor right at her feet she won’t look at
me. From upside down she doesn’t resemble herself; she could be a lady from anywhere.

I gently kick the rungs of her chair, once, twice. Her eyes flicker downward for an instant, and then back up. She checks
her watch, and then a second later checks it again.

Any minute now our menfolk should be coming home.

From the kitchen come the sounds of sizzling and whispering. Fried chicken and a mother and father. From outside, the rhythmic
thump and scrape of a game of jacks being played on the front stoop. Linda and her best friend, Pattyann. In the living room
is the sound of a thumb being sucked. My mother has brought out Petie, a stuffed dog with a missing tongue, to sit with me.
We’re on the sofa, being quiet and waiting. My mother peeks her head out of the kitchen and then summons my father.

“She’s back to sucking her t-h-u-m,” she says.

“B,” my father tells her.

“What?” she says.

“There’s a
b
on it,” he explains.

“What did I say?” she asks.

“’T-h-u-m,’” he says.

“Either way,” she answers.

She’s wiping her hands on a dish towel and he’s holding a spatula. They’re looking at me. Two thumps, a scrape, and Linda
tells Pattyann she’s a cheater. I use my foot to move Petie down to the floor where he belongs. They consider me and I consider
them. My mother is the first to fold.

“Jesus H.,” she says, disappearing into the kitchen.

My father brings a pencil and a piece of paper over to the coffee table. We’re going to draw pictures. I climb down off the
couch and stand watching.

“You don’t want to step on Petie, do you?” he asks me. Petie is underneath my feet.

I take the thumb out of my mouth and nod, then put it back in.

He draws a triangle with a beak. “That’s a bird,” he says, and offers me the pencil.

I can draw pretty hard as long as the pencil doesn’t break. When I’m done the whole paper is covered with a picture, and
the bird is nowhere in sight. My father licks one finger and rubs the extra pencil marks off the coffee table.

“Jo-Jo made a gorgeous picture,” he calls to my mother. He considers it carefully, turning the paper sideways and then back.

“Is it a house?” he asks me. “Is it a dog? Is it Mommy?”

No, no, and no.

My mother comes in and stands over us. She looks at the picture and then at me.

“Hal?” she asks.

I take my thumb out just long enough to nod.

“This is truly unbelievable,” my mother says. She’s sitting in the rocking chair with her shoes off, smoking. My father is
walking back and forth across the living room, singing. Each time he gets to the fringe on the rug he turns around and walks
to the other fringe. The song is one he made up, called “Bye Oh Baby,” and usually I hum along but not tonight. I can’t actually
cry anymore but I can still make the crying noise. He’s patting me on the back and I’m patting him on the back. We’re walking
the floor with each other.

“She’s a sandbag,” he tells my mother as we go past.

“Tell me about it,” she answers.

Linda appears suddenly, squinting in the light. She has her nightgown on backward and her hair is messed up from being asleep.
She shields her eyes with one hand and stares at us all. “Can we have pancakes in the morning?” she asks the room.

“I’m going to pancake somebody right now,” my mother says, preparing to stand up. Linda stomps back the way she came.

“I’d like to pancake
Bernice,”
my father says darkly. He moves me to the other shoulder, turns, and walks. My hand is
tired of patting, I’m just watching the rug go by. Three more times and he walks me over to the rocking chair and points me
at my mother.