The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (4 page)

W
hat we perceived as an enmity between our parents was not quite that—though Julia often sold it that way. There were feuds and sideways looks, snippy comments to us about the other’s parenting that we were meant to deliver. A couple times, when we were younger, our parents had taken battle stances on our respective front porches and hollered. It would always be pretty late when it happened, and the neighbors’ windows would light up, slow and weary, like the sighs they were no doubt emitting in their bed- and living rooms. The fights always concluded with my father more amused than angry, delighted at Julia’s easy female temper, and her, livid, slamming things around in the kitchen pretending to be looking for something—but when Thomas was found dead in a flophouse in Oakland when Jackson was eight and James almost seven, it was my father who took Julia to identify the body and bring her glasses of yellowish water as she cataloged the erratic and strange evidence that her children’s
father had left behind. Perhaps my father was remembering that it had been Julia who stayed with him the first hour in our house without my mother, who had made him coffee and sensed he didn’t want to talk and instead put on a Neil Young record she knew (somehow) he liked, soft but not so soft he couldn’t hear the generosity of the words:
Will I see you give more than I can take? Will I only harvest some?

It was this never-ending series of owe-you-ones that bound them together even beyond the fact of their children’s hips being attached. Because they’d seen each other at their worst, I think, they felt relieved to leave those moments where they were—bury them in the dirt as opposed to making them a foundation. It was beautiful in the sad, secret way illicit affairs are: relationships that choose what to include, that are shaped only by the circumstances the participants experience together. It allowed, from what I can tell, my father to sustain a picture of himself he more or less liked: jaded and cynical but resilient, always willing to tell or hear a good joke. As for Julia, I can’t say exactly what it gave her, only that the times I secretly glimpsed them drinking coffee at our kitchen table, she seemed to hold herself differently, her shoulders lower, and spoke in soft peals I’d never imagined could come from her and found quite lovely.

They had quite a bit in common, given their dead spouses and the children they’d been left to raise alone in a town that had grown to overflow with nuclear families with two Volvos that escorted their sons and daughters to not only baseball but also piano and art lessons. Only
my father had learned to laugh at these people, and Julia secretly envied them; she cursed her shotgun wedding to the man who, with the arrival of the second young, grabby boy, ran off quicker than you could say child support.

“Irony” is a word I hesitate to use. My life has been marked, dyed, twisted, by the unexpected or inconvenient, and any safe patterns I could identify would seem forced. In any case, when my father and Julia essentially united after Jackson and I separated, “irony” certainly seemed to be the word the rest of the world wanted to employ. It was something of a concession on both of their parts, but they seemed oddly happy to make it.

Were they dating? I asked. Not exactly. They had simply decided that officially being on the same team seemed to make sense. Julia put her house on the market (it sold in a matter of days) and moved the few doors down into my old bedroom. My father had been diagnosed with emphysema three years before, and the disease was starting to close in. He took the invasion gracefully and with wonder; he was amazed at the ways his body, of which he was so long the master, started submitting to another owner. Julia supervised his breathing exercises, took walks around the block with him, refilled his prescriptions at the pharmacy, grew to love the finicky, aging cat. They cooked elaborate dinners that they ate before the flickering of the Turner Classic Movies channel; she revived my father’s garden while he watched from a chair set up in the sun. They swapped sections of the newspaper over breakfast, they played Scrabble with my father’s house-sized
Oxford English Dictionary
open and ready. Julia took on the domestic role wholeheartedly as she’d never done before: she sewed new curtains of panels of sheer pastels for the living room, she painted their mailbox yellow, she wore floppy sun hats and made sun tea. Talking to my father on the telephone was like a three-way conversation, him often repeating to Julia what I’d just said, or me waiting while they laughed their way through a private joke.

I was happy for them, though I couldn’t help but feel strange that after Jackson had cut-and-dry removed himself from our long-woven history, our parents had found a way to enforce it. We had so long kidded about them getting together, but when they actually did, he wasn’t around to balk at the punch line.

It crossed my mind whether it would have happened if we’d stayed together, whether it had been pending awhile but their children being romantically linked had prohibited even the discussion. And if it had, was it better that Jackson and Ida—a dangerous, circuitous affair that had festered too long—had ended, so They could begin? Did the factually old deserve more than those who simply felt too aged for their own good?

E
ventually the circus came down in favor of other projects, ones requiring less devotion and planning. Jackson was happy with build-your-own wooden planes and ant farms, and relieved of a good amount of guilt. The circus had remained on the walls through fall and winter, some pieces of the butcher paper curling and estranging themselves from others. Though he had tried, on many occasions, to make progress, the fine markings of his pencil, erased and redrawn, only looked alien and insignificant next to the seven giant chartreuse sharks James had carelessly slopped on in crayon one afternoon. The permanence of the wax frustrated Jackson; the jagged triangular teeth teased the procession of small dogs through a hula hoop he had taken such pains with.

I had tried to help, my hair held back by yellow heart barrettes. I drew a cage around the misshapen sharks, but that black wasn’t thick or powerful enough, only made the beasts seem sort of striped, and that, to Jackson, was even
worse. So in the spring, after much deliberation, he admitted defeat.

His mother noticed a certain adultness in the way her son devoured his after-school peanut butter and jelly; when he was finished, he cleared his throat and locked himself in the bedroom. In the hour and a half James was at his swimming lesson, taking immense pleasure in his green goggles and floating, Jackson took the pieces down, one by one, and placed them in a box until he decided what to do with them. He trusted I would come up with something. He looked forward to his brother’s return, expecting screams and sobs, to an expression of passion their project had deserved but James had never provided.

What he got was almost worse. James did not acknowledge the absence, didn’t notice how bare their wall suddenly seemed, how the paint previously beneath their doomed circus was a shade brighter than the rest of it. Instead he flopped onto his bed, demonstrated his perfected breaststroke, and made gurgling sounds into the cowboy sheets. Jackson was furious. That night, he lay awake with a knotted stomach while James dreamed and murmured.

“Everyone … can have the peanut butter,” said James’s sleep, and Jackson began to unknot as he hoped for a brilliant revenge.

Though Jackson was generally very attentive in school, thrilled by mathematical equations and more so by their answers, that Friday he mostly drew circles, over and over until they perforated the paper. On the walk home he stepped on every crack and did not participate in the game
of slug bug that James and I played halfheartedly. James, sensing something the matter, wondered amiably what was for dinner to an apathetic Jackson. As he watched us pass, the old man who always sat on his porch in pleated dress pants, puffing at his pipe, was thankful for another spring, especially watching James shoot finger guns at the passing cars. We were encouraged not to speak to strangers, but when the old man asked us how we were on our walk home every day, we smiled in the best way we could think of.

Today, though, Jackson gave no notice.

My father found the Godzilla in the bottom of a box at a yard sale three months before, hidden beneath some children’s books whose illustrations had been edited with crayon, and held it up to James, who shot out his arms in welcome immediately. It wasn’t priced, wasn’t supposed to be there, and the woman with untouched roots in unflattering pink capri pants, whose children were long gone from Madrone Street, shrugged and said she’d take whatever they gave her. My father pulled out a dollar; James found a filthy gumball-machine toy in his pocket, one of those sticky hands made of gel material that flew and stretched with a flick of the wrist, and offered it to the woman, who just smiled morosely at her magazine and told him to keep it.

While my father’s gesture was kind, it only gave Julia more reason to dislike him; nothing in the house was safe from Godzilla. Besides the expected destruction of miniature cities, he devoured the petals from the flowers that sat
in a vase by the kitchen window, he tore down shower curtains (despite being only eight inches tall), he tormented the cat, he microwaved earrings, he disrupted the meticulous organization of Jackson’s underwear drawer, he overflowed the bathtub.

“It was Godzilla” became James’s catchphrase, and he went as far as to scorn the toy in front of his mother. She was not fooled: the monster slept with him every night. With time the house grew relatively peaceful again, with only the occasional pile of folded laundry strewn or a splattering of “blood” on the front door. Now Godzilla spent most of his time guarding the beta fish (who were not concerned for their safety either way). Though James’s appetite for destruction had cooled, the Godzilla remained adored and admired; he liked the shadow of the monster cast on his wall by the night-light.

Because Jackson had always been privately jealous of the Godzilla, and played with it in secret, casting the doll as a gentle giant who sang to the smattering of tiny cowboys and Indians and carried hurt G.I. Joes to rescue in its mouth, he knew it well. It was of an older design, its claws likely hand painted, with hard bumps on its plastic to represent gruesome skin. A seam ran down its face, its protruding stomach, down the tail, and up the back.

The task would require a surgeon’s precision, but Jackson was confident and appointed me as his assistant. I watched as Jackson took a pillowcase from the linen cabinet and placed it over the Godzilla, covering its head first. From the kitchen he took a knife his mother used for chopping
vegetables and a jar of peanut butter, placed them both in the pillowcase, and we headed out the back door.

I was conflicted, but Jackson was so intent, his eyes so needy, that I agreed to help. We decided my living room had the best light and the most space, and placed lingerie ads and classifieds on the hardwood floor to reduce the likelihood of evidence. I held the monster’s arms down while Jackson considered his best angle, deciding finally that throat to crotch would be the easiest. The first jab required more pressure than he thought, but after a couple tries it came easier; the knife aligned itself to the seam nicely as Jackson sawed in and out of the hard plastic.

“Peanut butter,” said Jackson, who watched hospital dramas with his mother.

“Check.”

“Spoon,” commanded Jackson with a grimace.

“Check.”

A smooth curve of the metal worked initially, but to really pack the monster’s guts, Jackson realized he would have to use his hands. When all the hollow spaces of the stomach were filled, Jackson pressed the seam back together, delighted at what an adhesive the peanut butter had turned out to be. It wasn’t apparent, either, unless you were up close, that the creature had been operated upon. With ten minutes until James returned glowing from backstrokes, Jackson and I hurried back to his house and placed the monster in its original position. The sunlight of four thirty p.m. slanted perfectly in through the window, threatening playfully to ooze the innards of James’s Godzilla.

I was pleased and proud, and I felt the sensation of Us so strongly that I reached for his hand and squeezed it. What I felt were words I didn’t know yet, words like “clammy” and “trembling.” Even when you are so young, seeing a child suppressing his tears, biting his lip, is strange. It is at this age we are allowed to feel generally how we like, and so to be ashamed, to begin to view one’s emotional outpours as events that would be judged, was odd. I let go of Jackson’s hand, shocked, and his quaking gave way to sobbing.

Ultimately, it was Jackson who ended up squeezing the peanut butter out of the monster, Jackson who was made ignoble by something destroyed by his own hand. Remembering him and the splayed-open, exploding figure, it is clear he loved it just as much as his brother had; it is clear he loved it for how much James had loved it, by proxy of loving James; it is clear he hadn’t wanted to hurt anything that amounted to love, that he hadn’t seen the equation clearly.