The Boys of My Youth (17 page)

Help! Help! Help!

Nobody helps you when you need help. When your sister left you trapped in the sewer and your dad is at the tavern, drinking
with the dog. Screaming doesn’t work but I can’t stop doing it. Nobody is helping me!

Oh, wait. Here they come. My mother and Helen, walking briskly, Linda hanging back a few paces, nursing herself. Helen points
and suddenly my mother breaks into a run. I’ve
never seen her run before! She gets larger and larger, her mouth a stark gash across her face, until she’s just a pair of
feet, the bike is wrenched out of the grate and thrown on the curb, I’m lifted, turned, and pulled. Up and out.

Well. That was easier than it looked.

Helen unwinds the leash from my neck, picks the gravel out of my shinbone, and tugs my shorts back around where they belong.
She brushes the seat harder than she needs to, but I’m not in a position to say anything. My mother is sitting on the curb
with her head on her knees, panting quietly and weeping.

Linda is just arriving on the scene. “Well,
that
was a close one,” she says. “Just the kind of situation you read about, where a kid is riding her sister’s bike and gets
too close to Nineteenth Avenue.” She’s talking directly to Helen. My mother looks up.

“Get home,” she says.

Linda is in for it.

“The both of you,” she tells me.

We try to wheel the bike but it won’t. Linda picks up the front end and I pick up the back end. At the end of the street we
have to set it down for a second. My mother and Helen are still back there, sitting on the curb. My mother is talking and
Helen is shaking her head.

My sewer leg is still cool to the touch. We pick up the bike and carry it another half block before resting. My mother and
Helen are a ways behind, walking slowly.

“I think she’s laughing,” I tell Linda.

She sets down her end, fiddles with her shoelace, looks backward under her armpit, and then picks up the bike again. We resume
walking. “I think she’s crying.”

She may be right. Either thing is possible.

We stow the bike in the garage for our dad to look at once he sobers up. Tomorrow, or a week from tomorrow, hard to say.
In the house, we divide up. I take a can of Pledge into the living room and start polishing the furniture; Linda runs dishwater
and briskly begins dumping glasses and spoons into it. This place is a mess. My parakeet is asleep on his perch. I stick my
finger through the bars and he’s on it in an instant, biting into my knuckle with his beak. The door slams and I race back
to my Pledge and spray it dramatically on the coffee table, all around the plastic flower arrangement.

Yimmer trots into the living room, leash trailing. She inspects the spot where she threw up earlier and then goes back into
the kitchen for a long drink. My mother and Helen must have swung by the tavern on their way back. Well, that’s a relief;
one of the boozehounds is home.

The other one, lacking a leash, is always harder to retrieve.

I’m reading a book called
I Was Murdered
, a mysterious ghost story about a lady who can’t rest until her killer is found. The cover has a picture of a typewriter,
with two bloody hands typing the title on a piece of paper. I got it out of the neighbor’s trash, along with some comic books
that I already read. I’m partial to ghost stories, but this is nothing like the ones at the school library, where the ghosts
invariably turn out to be real people guarding buried treasure. This book has a severed head in a refrigerator and other goings-on
that I’m way too young to read about. That’s the main reason I can’t stop.

My sister is watching
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. and putting on clear fingernail polish. She’s quote babysitting unquote while my parents are over at the tavern. She made
Brad go to bed a half hour ago but we can still hear him up there, punching his inflatable clown, which hits the floor and
bobs back up again repeatedly. Sometimes he steps on the clown’s head for a while to keep him down, and then there’s silence.
We don’t care what he does, as long as he does it up there.

My book has me terrified. I want a bottle of pop really bad but it’s in the refrigerator. I can picture it in there keeping
a severed head company, blood dripping, pooling up on the Tupperware containers, seeping into the vegetable bin. My mother
should watch me better and not let me read books like this, but if I do, my sister should go out to the refrigerator during
a commercial and get my pop for me.

“Are you
kidding?
” she says, insulted.

This is grounds for a fight but before I can formulate my opening arguments, the sound of a key in the back door startles
us both.
Man from U.N.C.L.E
. is followed by
Mission Impossible
is followed by
Creature Feature
. We’re supposed to be able to watch all of them before our parents come home. It’s getting so you can’t count on anything
around here.

My mother comes in and peruses the situation briefly, then listens at the stairs. Brad has fallen suddenly silent up there.
I can tell by her face there won’t be any
Creature Feature
, and popcorn is out of the question. Linda is watching her show intently, looking neither left nor right. I put my book down
and watch it, too.

“This is a
great
show,” I say to the room.

Out in the kitchen, my father is opening cupboards and getting spoons. When he opens the refrigerator there’s a long moment
of silence and then he shuts it again. I guess there was no head in there. A minute later he appears with ice cream, a bowl
for Linda, a bowl for me, and a giant mixing bowl of it for himself. He joins us for the last fifteen minutes of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
., acting very impressed when Illya Kuryakin shoots a guy using his ballpoint pen for a gun. Yimmer is sitting on his lap.

“Is this the one where he has a telephone in his shoe?” he asks me.

“Get Smart,”
I tell him. This confuses him for a moment and
then he understands, and nods. It’s been about two months since he’s had a drink. Every night he sits in here while we watch
TV, reading his bird books and talking to us. At first we didn’t like it, but now we do.

My mother is in the kitchen alone, chipping the polish off her nails and smoking. I put the ice cream dishes in the sink and
drift toward the refrigerator, where my bottle of pop is waiting.

“No you don’t,” she says curtly.

Nothing is fair around here. I can’t decide whether to argue or not. The only light is coming from the living room, and she
has her glasses off. Her eyes look weak and vulnerable, but her lips look like blades.

“He embarrassed me to death tonight,” she says.

Uh-oh. Why did I come out here; what was I thinking?

“In front of everyone,” she continues. “Embarrassed. To
death
.”

She looks pretty alive to me, but if the truth be known, I’ve been embarrassed by him myself. Slumped and staggering, or sleeping
all night in the passenger seat of the car, parked in the driveway, because he can’t manage the back steps. Disappearing into
the garage at odd times during the day, sipping from a sack and staring at the back of the house through the dark doorway,
thinking no one can see him. We see him.

“There we all are,” she says in a low voice. “Playing cards, trying to have
fun
, drinking a few cocktails, and he sits there for two hours drinking
orange juice
. Holier than thou; won’t even have a drink on a Saturday night when we’re at a
tavern.”

I think about this, standing on one foot. The dark kitchen, her cigarette going, the bitten-off words. It’s hard to know what
expression to put on my face. From the living room comes the sound of a fuse burning and then a theme song starts up.

“Mission Impossible
is on,” I tell her. She turns back to her
ashtray and I return to the sofa. Linda is explaining the gist of the show to my dad.

“They all have different identities, and they have impossible missions,” she tells him.

“I see,” he says agreeably. “All different identities and missions.”

“Impossible ones,” she stresses.

“They aren’t
impossible
, the people just think they are,” I explain.

“They
seem
impossible, until the different-identity guys take over,” he clarifies. “Is that it?”

We nod. He’s drinking a glass of milk.

“Want me to get you a bottle of beer?” I ask him. Linda swivels her head around to stare at me but my dad keeps watching the
television. After a minute he shakes his head no.

I want to go back to my book and leave them to their show, my mother to her dark kitchen, but I can’t. My words are still
hanging in the air of the living room, drowning out the TV. My dad is staring at
Mission Impossible
but he’s no longer watching it.

Eventually, he shifts his weight and Yimmer stands up on his lap. She turns around and stares him in the face with her ears
folded back and her tail going. He kisses her on the forehead, sets her on the floor, and stands up. Out to the kitchen. The
refrigerator door opens, closes.

Yimmer’s ears go up as she listens. Linda looks at me and I look at my book. Then the familiar, inevitable sound of a bottle
being opened.

There’s going to be a style show at school, something the PTA dreamed up. My mother is sewing three matching outfits and we
have to be in it. Every time I think about it I feel sick; the
dress she’s making for me has the wrong kind of sleeves and she’s threatening to give me a permanent. The last time she gave
me a permanent only one side of it took, and I looked like I had a bush stuck to my head.

“You’re not going to be in a style show with stringy hair,” she tells me. She’s working on a little shirt for Brad made of
the same material as my dress and Linda’s.

“Why don’t you put puffy sleeves on
him
for a change?” I ask her. He’s in the kitchen, eating a post-dinner bowl of cornflakes.

“No!” he calls out, alarmed.

“If I hear another word about sleeves, you won’t
be
in a style show,” she says to me.

“Sleeves,” I reply.

Brad’s in the doorway with a dripping spoon. She shows him his shirt with its long sleeves attached. It’s getting cowboy fringe
on the yoke. He goes back in the kitchen.

Linda is doing her homework at the same big table where my mother is sewing. Neither of them is interested in talking to me.
The pattern for our dresses shows a picture of two girls, a younger one with short curly hair and puffy sleeves, an older
one with long swingy hair and a little cape.

“You should make Linda wear this cape,” I say to my mother. Linda looks up.

“You’ll both have the cape,” my mother says firmly.

A cape! Oh my God.

Linda starts poking herself in the head with the eraser on her pencil. She can’t do her math and she’s starting to get hysterical.
My dad is the only one who can do math around here and we have no idea where he is. He didn’t show up for dinner again, and
it’s a sore subject with my mother.

“Let me see,” she tells Linda. This won’t work. My mother can always get the answers but she figures it out in her head instead
of on the paper. They make us figure it out on the paper to keep our parents from doing it for us at night when we’re having
hysterics.

“That’s
old math
, Mother,” Linda says desperately. “Do it in
new math.”

“Oh,
new math,”
my mother says. “What a load of bullshit.” She goes back to her sewing.

One time when Linda was three she shoved a tiny toy train up her nose to see how far it would go. It went quite a ways and
she had to have it removed at the hospital. My mother has never gotten over this, and in our house, Life Savers and dry cleaning
bags are treated like loaded handguns. So when Brad makes a choking noise out in the kitchen all hell breaks loose here in
the dining room. My mother leaps up, throwing the shirt one way and the fringe the other, Linda drops her pencil, Yimmer barks.

Brad appears in the doorway, enormous-eyed. He points back to the kitchen with his spoon and then pushes past my mother into
the living room where he turns and points again, then buries his shocked face in a sofa pillow. There’s something in the kitchen!
The rest of us crowd through the doorway to see.

Nothing.

My mother screams. I look around wildly and then I see it. Through the glass of the back door, framed by my grandmother’s
lace curtains, a face wearing a creature-feature mask. Black hair, forehead, two stunned eyes, and then the rest is blood.
It looks like my dad. He fumbles for the doorknob but can’t see through the mask, his hand slips and he cries out, something
slides from his mouth and lands on his shirtfront; a wad of blood. My mother springs forward, opens the door, and we get the
full picture. His clothes are frozen to his body and over it all, shirt, sport coat, trousers, is dark blood, coming
from his mouth. Some of it is frozen and some of it is fresh. He can’t move at all and when Linda and my mother try to pull
him inside he groans and resists.

We get him up over the threshold, my mother on one side, Linda and me on the other, and then try to sit him in a chair in
the middle of the kitchen. His legs won’t bend. He groans again and then, with a noise like cracking ice, sits. My mother
opens the oven door and turns it up to five hundred. She wants to look inside his mouth but he won’t let her, so she gets
a clean dish towel, wets it under the faucet, and starts wiping the blood from his face while Linda and I try to remove his
shoes. The laces are stiff but the shoes come off okay. When we peel the socks away, his feet look like long yellow boats.
My mother gasps when she sees them, then hands each of us a towel and tells us to rub. When we do, he makes the groaning noise
again so we stop. She resituates him so he’s closer to the oven, and then fills a dishpan with tepid water. When she sets
his feet in it he makes a moaning sound.