The Full Cleveland (17 page)

“OhHolySaintJudeApostleAndMartyrGreatinVirtueandRich …”

“Slow down or no Buick!”

“In miracles. Faithful intercessor of all who invoke your special patronage in time of need. To you I have recourse from the depth of my soul and jumbly …”

“Watch the diction.”

“
Humbly
beg to help me. In return I promise to make your name known and cause you to be invoked. Publication must be promised. Amen, you owe me a Buick.”

“What? What's the last part?”

“A convertible, please.”

“The last part of the prayer!”

She shrugged. “Publication must be promised, Amen.”

“I knew it!” I started walking back and forth on my heels in front of all theTVs. I knew there was something in there like that. “Lucy, doesn't that sound strange? ‘Publication must be promised'? What do you think it means, about the publication?”

“I guess, you know, advertise. Like Daddy does.”

“That's right. Advertise. Like in the
New York Times.”

“The newspaper?”

I blinked at her. Don't tell me she reads the
New York Times.
“You think Mother prays mostly to Saint Jude? What's she praying for?”

“Money.”

“Money?!”

But her mouth immediately fell open and she immediately covered it with her hand. “Uh-oh, it's a secret.”

I hopped over and sat down close to her, very confidential. “That's okay. I won't tell. How do you know this?”

She jumped off the couch and turned up the volume on the TVs. “I can't say any more, it's a secret.”

“Come
on
, Lucy.”

“I can't. It's a secret. It wouldn't be honest.”

“It would be honest. You honestly forgot it was a secret.”

But Lucy wasn't saying. I couldn't really blame her. I probably wouldn't say either, if it were a secret. I stared at my toes. If I wasn't going to do a protective coat, it was time to take the cotton out. I was sitting there deciding it, so I missed it when he lowered the boom.

“Oh no!” Lucy cried. “In the last round!”

“Which one? Which one won? The black trunks, right?”

You couldn't see, there was too much confusion in the ring. Trainers and managers and everybody's brother swarming in, yelling and cursing and shoving.

Lucy said sadly, “And he might have gone the distance.”

Right. In a billion years. But you don't want to tell a kid that no matter how much she wished it otherwise, the guy in white had no chance, ever, of going the distance. So instead I said, “Of all the words of mice and men …”

Lucy finished it up. “… The saddest are, what might have been.”

That night when I got to my bedroom there was a single red rose from the dining room table centerpiece on my pillow. I knew immediately it was Lucy who had done it. So I went to her room and woke her up. She sat up under Cabot's old canopy, rubbing her eyes. “Is it you, Zu?” she asked sleepily.

“Did you do this?” I whispered, holding the flower up under her nose.

She nodded. “I thought you might still want one, and just felt too funny to ask.”

“Thanks a lot, Lucy. That's really nice.”

“That's okay.”

“But would you do me a favor? Would you take it and hand it back to me?”

“Okay.” So she took the rose and handed it back to me. I thought it was really nice how she did it, just instantly did it, without asking a lot of embarrassing questions I wasn't prepared to answer. So I threw my arms around her.

“Zu?” she whispered into my shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Are you going to paint my toes before you go away to school?”

I took her by the shoulders and told her, “We'll do it tomorrow. We'll do it all day. It takes a really long time.”

Boy, did she smile. And if that didn't break your heart right there, she added, “And if it's okay with you, I don't want a Buick.”

“I thought you might reconsider.”

“I want a Dream Machine.”

“But a car like that's not so easy to come by. It might take a while. Can you be patient?”

She giggled.

I kissed her. Then I got up and held my rose up over my head and pranced around with it, like it was the championship belt or something, and we were the guy in white, and against all odds, with no chance, without a prayer, we had gone the distance. I held it overhead, then kissed it and waved it, then paraded it around the room and out the door. I made her laugh.

I took my single red rose to my bathroom for water. I put it in my glass and put it on my vanity table and stared at it for a while. The sad part was, if I had prayed for something before Lucy handed me the single red rose and things like handing single red roses really worked, I probably wouldn't have to go away, and nothing would have to change. Or I could have prayed for poor people, and had the whole world change. That is, of course, if it worked.

I sat up in bed until it was late and everyone was all safe and asleep, even Mother and Dad. Then I got up and sat at my window. As late as this afternoon, I hadn't really expected the dark to come at the end of the day. I guess you never really expect the dark to come at the end of the day. You know it's coming, it's coming and you know it, but you never really expect it, even though it happens everywhere, to everyone, simply all the time.

The cradle rocks above the abyss
, I kept thinking as I rocked along in the backseat of a Buick on the way to boarding school.

Naturally I had no way to know it yet, but my clearest memory of boarding school would become this, the two days it would take to get there, the backs of my parents' heads, Dad in his aviator glasses and, riding shotgun, a French silk scarf with an equestrian motif around her hair, his copilot, my mother.

It wasn't much of a memory really, but I hate to say, it won my heart. Though I sat there for two days with arms crossed rejecting it, reluctant to confer the status of instant classic, I knew that's what it was—the culmination of every ride in the back of a blue Buick since I was a baby buffered by brothers and sisters. By the end of the drive it had muscled its way into the sacred place you keep such things, bumping off far better stuff, like French kisses, field hockey games, and swimming pools.

It didn't deserve it. Not even due to longevity. Boarding school itself would last much longer. Though as it would turn out, not all that long.

It was really nothing that was said.

I was doing my best to ensure dead silence through sheer force of bad attitude, and by the time we reached the Ohio border, my parents had stopped the small talk. Mother tried one more time in Pennsylvania, asking bravely what my new roommate had said in her letter, but blowing it by forgetting there were two of them. I gave her the one-word answer. “DottiandDitto.”

“Oh, dear. Of course. The Twins.”

If the point of my banishment to boarding school was to remove me from the influence of the likes of Mary Parker, I wished, if we were speaking, I could tell them it was backfiring. The farther I got from Cleveland, the more I thought about her, the books she had assigned me to read and the knowledge she'd tried to impart. I thought to myself, If they only knew I'm sitting here thinking,
The cradle rocks above the abyss.

It was from a book, but it wasn't on the reading list. Mary Parker told me the story. A man sees a home movie shot before he was born. Sees his own baby carriage on his own front porch. Realizes with dread that he once totally did not exist. Feels about as thrilled about seeing his own carriage as he would his own coffin.

It was death, see, except in reverse. But the worst part: the people laughing and waving in the home movie, his own family, do not seem in the least distressed by his absence.

That's what I was contemplating as we sped through the tunnels of Pennsylvania, staring at the back of my parents' heads, leaving home, the family now reduced to the three essentials, me and them, as if hurling forward to a time when the rest of them would inevitably fade away, and you're back to where you started. Them. The end. Just like the beginning.

And there's nothing to be done about it, you just sit and look out at the other cars, and wonder a little about the people inside, but just for as long as it takes them to pass.

In New Jersey, I felt sorry for them. My cursed magnanimous nature.

But I knew it was treacherous to speak. They might take it as a signal not to suffer anymore for sending me to boarding school. My words would have to be carefully chosen, and well spoken. Finally: “Mom? Dad? The cradle rocks above the abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

There.

They turned to look at each other. Due to her scarf and his shades, I couldn't judge how much eye rolling was going on. But then Dad winked in the rear view mirror. “Ah, Nabokov,” he said. “Speak Memory”

Well, you had to give him credit for it. I looked out the window. A swift gray Porsche was passing like a self-possessed ghost on the right.

“There's a great line in there. A funny one.”

Yeah, Dad? I'd love to hear it.

He waited for a ten-ton oil transport truck to pass, with the word
HAZARD
flapping furiously on every wheel flap of every wheel. Then with a grin back in the mirror: “Man as a rule views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.”

Mother looked at him. Maybe we were over her speed limit now.

“Thanks, Dad. I'll remember that at boarding school.”

I would be running away from there, for sure.

I mean not immediately or anything, I'd go through the motions for a while, then try not to make a big drama about it—I would probably just pack up a few essentials one night and slip out some fire door. I already knew the most memorable part about it was the drive there, and I wouldn't bother going into it further, if it weren't for Dotti and Ditto, and the strange visits from my parents that fall, and my unusual correspondence with Mary Parker.

•   •   •

So I'm not going to say how they left me there. I'll just say I had my personal plans to mourn their absence, and the loss of my childhood and my brothers and sisters and boyfriend and best friends and all that, my own plans to see them off at the Buick, then go cry like a baby about it out by the school pond. The minute I had seen it when we drove onto that ivy-covered postcard of a campus, I had it all staked out as a good place to go drown myself in tears. Forget that I'd claimed to Cabot that I was a guy inside who didn't cry. But it never happened as I planned, because I'd forgotten to factor in Dotti and Ditto.

My parents came up to put my things in my room. The Twins were there, sitting at the ends of their beds, flanking mine with the bare ticking-striped mattress. All exactly as in the photograph Andrew John had brought just a few days before in the mail. When my things were all put away and my parents said to come downstairs and say good-bye now, The Twins thought that meant them too, and they stood up, smoothed their skirts, and trailed us down to the Buick. So it wasn't tearful at that point, because of Dotti and Ditto.

And then, if they didn't follow me right out to the school pond. I tried to shake them off, I protested they'd get their feet wet or something, they'd get a chill, but they said they wanted to show it to me. And the worst part of it was, they were so nice about it. I mean they looked weird, for sure, with their big ruffled hair and their thick black glasses, but you've never met two nicer people who just wanted to show you a pond.

“That's the pond,” said Dotti.

And Ditto said, “See? We told you. That's the pond.”

I'm not saying they were perfect. They were sort of sad and expectant and worried, just like they photographed. And they weren't brilliant company, nor did their constant presence either side of me instantly endear me to the cooler kids at my new school. They were a social liability I would only grudgingly be forgiven for, and were actually annoying as anything in their own right at night, with their heads bashing ceaselessly against the headboards until they finally conked out.

But really pretty decent once you got past all that. Smart too. You wouldn't think so, with the repeated blows to the head since they were small. I knew all about that from boxers and Matt, but I figured they were one of those famous exceptions to the rule.

What could make you uneasy, though, they truly believed that I was the best thing that had ever happened to them and their room. They really wanted me to be happy there, so there was no small amount of pressure involved. Two people wanting nothing more in the world than your happiness. It was worse than your parents. It drove me crazy, to tell you the truth. It would have been easier if they had been evil twins. But what could you do, they weren't, they were as nice as could be. So I spent a lot of time under the covers with a flashlight, writing long letters to Rey McDowell, Mary Parker, the two Mickeys, my brothers and sisters, even my parents. Besides, it's not as if I could sleep, what with the racket the heads against the headboards made.

My parents didn't write much, they mostly called. The main advantage there was it gave me another way to politely excuse myself from The Twins, because you had to take your calls in the old wooden phone booths down the hall. Rey McDowell wrote love letters, sweet and funny. And he called too, and always said he missed me. And the others also, all proved reliable and worthy and stalwart correspondents.

But Mary Parker didn't call, and she didn't really write either. That is, she kept her promise, she regularly sent me mail, but you couldn't call it writing, or you'd be sadly deluding yourself. What she did was send postcards, that cut-rate blank kind from the post office, with the stamp preprinted on one side. Like Mary Parker thought communicating with me was worth about five cents. Although maybe while I was there, it went up to six. But I doubt it, because I already said, I wasn't there that long.

And then on the other side of those cards, where a person really could write something if they wanted to cram, that side invariably arrived almost blank. In fact, technically, there was more writing on the side with the addresses, if you're trying to prove your point by counting the return.

She sent solitary sentences. Sometimes just phrases. And as phrases go, they were among the most mystifying ever heard.

Her first postcard arrived the first week I was at school. It said:
When creating self, consider.
And that was it.

Then, the next week, she finished the sentence: …
That the limits generate the form.

This in answer to my twenty-seven-page letter describing every detail of my new school, the old oak tree outside Peabody Hall where we sometimes had English class if it was a sunny day and the teacher was in a good mood, The Twins of course, the dining hall where there was a lot of jockeying for social position under the pretense of just eating a bad meal, even the unusual field hockey uniform knee pads, and my thoughts about turning thirty years old. I'd written an essay about it, in the blank diary Mary Parker had sent me as a going-away present.

“Pure logical thinking”
arrived. Which, let's face it, was already suffering from overuse, but she still saw fit to send it three more eye-glazing times.

And here's a memorable one:
Hey, how's your horse?

All I'm saying is, what kind of genius writes that? It wasn't as if there was a picture of a horse on the other side, and Mary Parker was saying, Here's a horse, and, Hey, how's your horse? Or comical, like, Hay, how's your horse? Nor was it even from a fellow horse owner, as in, By the way, my horse is fine, how's yours? This was an otherwise blank card, coming with no frame or reference, out of nowhere, in your mailbox:
Hey, how's your horse?

I got that and thought, How should I know? He's in Ohio, and he never writes, he never calls…. If you think about it, and seriously, how can you not, this postcard was rather scary. I mean, maybe you tell me how's my horse. Do you know something I don't about my horse? It was like something out of
The Godfather
, which I had seen several times with Mary Parker, of course. Anyway, I got that one at my mailbox, and believe it, I was looking over my shoulder the whole way back down the long Administration Building hall.

“Fear is the opposite of love”
arrived next. As relates to what, your guess is as good as mine.

I tried to get control of the situation. In my return letter to Mary Parker, I devised a P.S., cleverly phrased in the form of a question a normal correspondent would feel obliged to at least acknowledge, even if they said they'd have to get back to you later on that. “P.S.:
Hey, how about The Twins?”
I'd written a ten-page letter about them, describing what it was like at night in my room, which I'd referred to rather entertainingly, I thought, as “the ward.”

It worked, in a way. Mary Parker wrote back a long one, for her. That is, it still filled just one side of a post office postcard, but she did go into some detail this time. Just not about The Twins—about advertising on the radio. She informed me that there was a term in radio called frequency, not to be confused with the radio signal itself, and this frequency being the marketing theory that the more often, or frequently, a radio ad ran, the more it “saturated the market” and the psyches of the listeners, and therefore the more inclined people were to run out and buy your product. No matter how much they hated hearing your obnoxious ad for the hundredth time.

After that one, I fired off a post office postcard myself:
The Twins, Mary. Not the radio.