The Boys of My Youth (16 page)

“We
want
the truth,” my mother says, in a voice that ensures she will never get it. A pause, an inhalation, an exhalation, and then
the story unfolds. It has a complicated plot that is difficult but not impossible to follow, and several very dramatic things
occur, but the gist is this: the bathroom doorknob poked her in the eye. It’s a play with several acts but only one actress;
my name is never mentioned. I hope he puts the eggs on pretty soon because I’m suddenly hungry. I begin fiddling with my barrette,
trying to fix it.

“The doorknob would come up to about
here,”
my mother says. I imagine she’s pointing to my sister’s stomach.

“Well, it didn’t,” Linda responds flatly. “It came up to
here
, as a matter of fact.”

There is a long, stand-off silence in which all you can hear is Linda thinking.

“I had to pee so bad I was bending
over,”
she says firmly. Brilliant. This is why she’s the older sister and I’m the younger one.

Snap. Crack. My mother’s lighter and my father’s eggs. I don’t see why I’m quarantined in the living room when I didn’t do
anything.

“Can someone please fix my
barrette?
” I call out.

Right before we file out the door for school, my mother calls me over. She takes off her glasses to get a better bead on me.
“Do
you
have any idea why your sister has a black eye?” she asks.

I hesitate. You hate to say it, but when it’s the truth, it’s the truth. She
never
looks where she’s going.

In addition to Linda and me, there’s a brother, a strange little guy named Bradley, obsessed with his own cowboy boots. He
paces around and around the house, staring at his feet and humming the G.I. Joe song from the television commercial. He is
the ringleader of a neighborhood gang of tiny boys, four-year-olds, who throw dirt and beat each other with sticks all day
long. In the evenings he comes to dinner with an imaginary friend named Charcoal.

“Charcoal really needs a bath,” my mother says, spooning Spaghettios onto his plate. His hands are perfectly clean right up
to the wrists and the center of his face is cleared so we can see what he looks like. The rest of him is dirt.

“Charcoal was locked in the garage all day,” he replies. My mother made fried chicken for dinner, but Brad will only eat food
prepared by Chef Boyardee.

Across the table from me, Linda pushes a mouthful of potatoes past her teeth and lips until it’s hanging there, making me
sick. I will only eat potatoes in the form of french fries, and that’s because I don’t know that french fries
are
potatoes. I have a weak stomach. The second I open my mouth to complain, she sucks it back in and swallows, touches a napkin
to her lips, and goes for a preemptive strike.

“Jo Ann is making me sick,” she tells my mother. Everyone stops eating and looks at me. I’m searching my chicken leg for the
big rubbery string. If I get that string in my mouth, dinner is over.

“I can’t find it,” I say. The fork won’t do what I want it to, and chicken juice is getting on my hands.
Quit looking at me
. My mother reaches over and takes the chicken leg, drops it on my father’s plate.

“Find the string for her,” she tells him shortly. He looks at her, looks at the leg, and finally picks it up. He begins hacking
at it amiably, gazing around the table in benign spirits. He’s not paying attention to what he’s supposed to be doing; the
leg slips suddenly out of his grasp and, in the ensuing clatter, milk is dumped over and my father’s plate is flooded.

“Well, I’ll be,” he says slowly, watching with surprise as his beans and potatoes become islands. A full minute passes while
we wait for my mother to do something about it. Eventually she gets up from the table, takes his plate, scrapes it into the
dog’s bowl, gets another plate from the cupboard and hurls some food onto it. While she’s doing all this, my father is sitting
with his elbows on the table and his face in his hands.

By the time she puts the new plate of food down in front of him, he’s asleep. She shoves him and he comes to with a snort.
He no longer has the amiable slap-happy look that offends her; now he looks belligerent. She tells him he’s a sorry excuse
for a man, which causes him to shrug.

“Who do you think you are?” she asks him. She has her face right up in his. “Dean Martin? Because he’s nothing but a lush,
too.”

My father not only drinks like Dean Martin, but he actually looks like him. They sing alike, too, Dean on TV, and my father
when he’s shaving. He can’t help but like Dean Martin, because they have so much in common. Somehow, though, the word lush
hits him the wrong way and he guffaws instead of fighting back. My mother quickly corrects herself.

“He’s a
drunk
,” she says.

My father doesn’t like that one bit. He tries to counter it by insulting Carol Burnett but my mother cuts him off. You don’t
see Carol Burnett standing there with a drink in her hand; she actually puts on a
show
. Usually I try to think of other things when they fight like this at the dinner table, like how to swallow. But by using
television personalities, they’re holding my interest. My favorite show is
That Girl
, but I’m one hundred percent sure they aren’t going to mention her.

Linda ignores them completely, staring instead at me, willing me to look. I can see out of the corner of my eye what appears
to be a Ping-Pong ball coming out of her mouth.
Next to me, Brad is a country unto himself, quietly stirring his Spaghettios and taking occasional peeks under the table at
his cowboy boots. His mouth is orange.

Dinner ends when my father gets indignant and tries to stand up. He falls backward into the wall and the big ceramic salad
fork drops from its hook and shatters. My mother can’t have anything nice; the minute she gets something decent, it’s ruined.
She works all day and then comes home and makes a beautiful meal like this, and the dog is the only one who will eat it.

Soon there are distant unrestful snores coming from upstairs; from the sewing room the furious, intermittent buzz of the Singer
9000. In the living room, Brad and Charcoal play a friendly game of cards. “When I go like this, it means you lose,” the visible
one tells the invisible one.

This is our house in Moline, Illinois, a big white clapboard that needs new gutters. There’s a little garage out back, and
in the corner of the garage is an old cupboard. Inside it are cans of paint, folded rags, tools for cleaning fish, an old
dog brush, and a bottle of vodka in a brown paper sack.

Here in the kitchen, African violets bloom wildly on the windowsill, hopped-up with fertilizer. The radio on the counter plays
a new Beatles song and the girls take a break from clearing the table to clutch their hearts and listen. Tuesday night at
the Beard household, and it’s business as usual: Linda washes, Jo Ann dries.

Yimmer the dog is missing. She spends most of her time shedding on the furniture, or balanced on her back legs at the end
of her chain, barking at the house. Right now, the last time any of us can remember seeing her was hours ago, at lunch, when
she coughed up part of a garter snake on the living room rug.
My father is also missing, which has led the authorities — my mother and her girlfriend — to believe they are together.

“It isn’t enough that he goes to the tavern in broad daylight,” my mother says to Helen. Her mouth is full of pins. “He’s
got to advertise it to the neighbors.” Popular thinking places Yimmer at the crime scene, a white dog against a brown brick
establishment, fodder for local dinner table discussion tonight.

“If there’s a garter snake in this neighborhood, then I’m moving,” Helen tells her. They’re making sheers for Helen’s dining
room, so she can open her drapes without the whole world looking in. They keep taking the pins out of their mouths in order
to smoke, and then putting them back in. As soon as they get the hard part done they plan to switch from iced tea to beer.

All three kids have been dispatched to find the dog on our own block, but I have come back early, due to the bogus nature
of the mission. We all know where she is. I’m trying to get my parakeet to look at me. No matter where I stand, next to his
cage, he turns around in a single hopping motion and looks the other way.

“I think this bird is mad at me,” I say. He wants me to put my finger in there so he can peck it. The back door slams and
the refrigerator opens.

“Get out of there,” my mother says through her pins.

Linda flops down on the sofa and opens her book, taking small bites off a radish. “She’s putting her fingers in the birdcage,”
she tells my mother.

“I forgot,” I say quickly.

“Well, he’ll be happy to remind you,” my mother says.

“Linda’s eating a radish without washing it,” I report.

“I wish I had about eight more just like them,” my mother tells Helen. She goes to the back door and calls for Brad, very,
very loudly, in a voice designed to scare all neighborhood children, then stops at the refrigerator and gets two cans of beer.

It takes Brad a full ten minutes to report in, and when he does, it turns out he forgot his mission altogether and was making
a campfire in the middle of the alley.

“We’re rubbing the sticks together and then we’re going to cook things over it,” he tells my mother. His mouth is still vivid
from lunch and he has his T-shirt on inside out. Helen is charmed by him and exclaims over the idea of a campfire in the alley.
He glances at her. “Don’t worry,” he explains, “it’s all pretend.”

What about the dog?

“Huh?” he says.

The tavern is several long blocks away. The girls are to get their shoes on and go over there with the leash and see if the
dog is waiting outside. If she is, they are to put the leash on her and bring her home. If it turns out they can do that without
fighting, then they won’t get beat to a pulp when they get back.

Helen thinks this is funny and so does my mother.

Two things we are never, under any circumstances, to do. Ride double on a bike and ride a bike on Nineteenth Avenue. Riding
double means the person in control isn’t, and if she ever catches one of her kids doing it, that’s it for the bike; sold.
Nineteenth Avenue is at the end of our street, a double-laned thoroughfare with no stoplights, lined with parked cars and
carpeted with the pelts of squirrels and stray cats. We aren’t even allowed to cross it on foot.

Linda’s bike is new and almost too tall for her. We wheel it behind the garage and I climb on the back fender. I’ve got the
dog leash wrapped conveniently around my neck. She gets on and we wobble for a distance, recover momentarily, and then fall
over.

This time I sit on the handlebars, which is more comfortable, except Linda can’t see around my head and if I shift my weight
we swerve harshly. We veer past the campfire crew, who are sitting on the ground holding long sticks over a pile of short
sticks; Brad’s face is a blur of startlement, but he can be counted on to forget it as soon as we’ve crossed his line of vision.
I’m balancing us by using my legs as rudders and keeping my head to the side so Linda can see where she’s going.

Directly to Nineteenth Avenue and a right-hand swerve, out into the stream of Saturday afternoon cars. I bank my legs going
around the turn and then am forced to retract them altogether, due to the close nature of the parked cars to my right and
the whizzing cars to my left. Once my feet are settled on the front fender, I have to sit straight in order not to fall off,
and once I sit straight, Linda can’t see. Wobbling begins to occur almost immediately, along with shouting. I’m trying to
tell her where to steer and she’s trying to tell me she can’t. Somebody’s mother gets into the act by yelling at us out the
window of a car going the other direction. Cars are honking and careening out around us, causing mayhem.

Up ahead there’s a gap in the parked cars. A little street. I can’t tell if she plans to take it or not, but I’m going for
it. I bank my legs again and the traffic arcs out around us; Linda tries to compensate by leaning in the other direction.
She uses her forehead to butt me between the shoulder blades.

No.

Yes.

Around the corner, clipping a parked car.

Sewer grate.
Here comes a sewer grate.

Hard to describe how skinny my legs are, except to say that one of them fit perfectly down the sewer grate. I’m wearing the
bike like a cape on my head and shoulders; Linda is in a heap with the wind knocked out of her. Her lips are moving but the
sound is missing.

My leg is in the sewer.

One end of the handlebars is jammed into the grate and the front wheel, now curved like a potato chip, is pinning my head
down. Six feet away, Nineteenth Avenue roars dynamically. Below the street, the air is cool and damp, like air-conditioning.

MY LEG IS IN THE SEWER.

Linda is up, making a bleating sound and circling her bike. Okay, she can’t believe this. This is a practically
new
bike. This bike is now
ruined
. If it isn’t ruined, you could’ve fooled
her.

MY LEG IS IN THE SEWER.

She grabs the handlebar and tries to twist it out of the grate. When she lets go, my chin is pressed to the ground. I can
now see the undercarriages of cars whizzing past, six feet away. The first one that decides to turn the corner will smash
me like a garbage can lid. The direness of the situation dawns on both of us at the same moment. Linda steps discreetly onto
the curb and starts walking backward.

DON’T LEAVE ME HERE.

“I’m not,” she says, and then turns and starts running. She stops at the end of the block and begins limping, holding her
elbows, until she’s out of view.

This is more of an alley than an actual street, and the houses look like nobody’s home. I try hollering as loud as I can,
but Nineteenth Avenue drowns me out. Now my throat hurts. I’m going to be killed, and the only people I know in heaven are
my grandfather and an old dog named Mike, who
got hit by a car.