The Voices in Our Heads (15 page)

Jonathan?

Yes?

Will you adorn my crest with shovel marks?

Now, you know that’s the signal! I can’t go digging up the same grave over and again, ’cause it’ll wreck the integrity of the cavity. Tomorrow is Mrs. McGill’s turn over in the Covington Grove section. That’s the game. We’re family, all of us.

Family.

Right.

Games.

It’s all we have. Now, let’s say our goodbyes here where its comfy. You know I don’t like to have our voices lost out there in the wind. Goodnight, Professor.

Oh, fine. Goodbye.

Oh, no, yourself, Professor. I prefer ‘See you soon’ if you please.”

December

The first snow of the year never lasts. It usually starts with a few flakes dancing on the air like campfire ash, then graduates to a heavier pattern. I like when it slants. I like when it straightens, when it thickens, makes the world into a snowglobe. I take the quilt from the bed and wrap it around myself, the pathetic old king with his robes trailing him across the floorboards. My breath makes mist on the window. When the display outside peters off, it will be bleak again, hard wind running through branches that bow in dumb servitude, the sky a defensive grayish blue, the clouds just bruises.

If only it would keep.

If only it would have intensified, swirled, buried the sidewalks, iced up the phone lines, blanketed all the side streets, cut visibility to the point that the mayor shut down all the major bridges and Penn DOT closed off sections of Route 95. If only that first December snow of 1978 could have been a storm instead of a tease.

I’d have been the first up for sure, bounding to the window facing the back yard.

Snow days meant extra cuddling time with Addy, two pots of coffee, watching the fuzzy RCA downstairs and getting the snow measurings at the airport, accident reports along the Schuylkill Expressway, all with the couch blankets pulled up to your chin and the dog with his snout across your lap. Safe and cozy. When you were a teacher, a snow day was a fun day, an “I don’t have to run” day, though the Bangles would preach it a few years later and trash what I had always thought a pure sort of paradigm for working Joes on the front lines, not shitty little rich girls air-guitaring what would have been best kept in Daddy’s living room.

Snow days were times for watching stupid game shows, sipping Swiss Miss hot chocolate made extra syrupy, fluffy eggs and bacon and pumpkin pancakes, grilled cheese on seeded rye for lunch, marathon showers, Heinekens before noon.

Addy liked to screw on snow days. She was a short fireplug of a woman, strong thighs, awesome tits. When she let you do it from behind, she had a way of curving her back and turning you this wry look that drove you crazy with desire. She used to flip on Zeppelin 1, side 2, loud as shit when she knew you were going to bang her hard. She cried out those times, but not as loud as I did. She was a good girl. The kind that never bitched about money. Or laundry. Or the empty propane tank, or the bags of clothes you forgot to bring to Goodwill, or the old smelly rugs you rolled up and stuck in the garage because you never quite found time to make it to the dump. She looked good in a bathrobe, looked good cooking pepper steak in a wok. Made me want to drink at home. Love the world. Kiss the sky.

Danny had moved down into the partly finished basement and swore it didn’t smell even a little bit moldy. His old room became my “office,” which Addy dolled up with an oak desk that had tons of drawers I didn’t use, a leather chair, and a cherry wood minibar with compartments that I most certainly did use. We put the eight-track in there, along with most of the pictures, some classic novels I swore I’d get around to reading some day, and all Danny’s trophies. Addy used to say that the kid moved down to the basement to exercise his independence, but I always thought it was the loud Zeppelin music.

I still walked down two flights of stairs every morning to give him a kiss, even though he was fourteen. Kissed him to wake him up, right on that hot part of his forehead with the little tan birthmark on the right side just below the hairline. I was also guilty of making that cone with my lips, putting it to his cheek, and making “whub-whub” noises. Like Addy, he never bitched. I’d kiss him, give him the “whub-whub,” and he’d squint, crinkle up his nose, and mutter, “Hi Dad,” in that deep voice I was still getting used to.

On the morning that ruined us, I walked down the stairs and forgot to move around the creaks that might wake Addy unnecessarily. Chipster, our cocker spaniel, flopped his tail in the basket by the fridge and clicked over to me across the linoleum, cute as a button with the exception of that doggie gunk gathered at the bottom of his eyes and those black lines underneath like the mascara of some weeping actress. I gave him a scratch behind the ears, opened the back door, and put him on his lead. The snow was letting up a bit. Probably a false alarm, but teaching shop in the inner city was far better than working the construction trades out in the elements. Still had vivid memories of that shit like it was yesterday. I shut the door and went into the bathroom adjacent to the galley area for my morning dump, because when I dropped a deuce in the morning it was like a runaway train, and even though I was inconsiderate enough to lumber down the creaky stairs, I still had enough common sense to shit in a central area that wouldn’t waft linger-stink into the bedrooms.

Down in Danny’s “room,” things were a mess as usual. He had tried to make the place “his” with a black light, two lava lamps, and one of those spangly steel weeping willow desk lights from Spencer’s that looked like vegetation from Mars. I thought I smelled incense. Had to talk to him about that.

“Time to wake up, dum-dum.” I’d given him his man-kiss, and I ruffled his hair. Still blondish, all Addy’s side, though it had darkened quite a bit since his baby years. “Dan.
Danny!”
I got a mumble this time, and a half roll away toward the wall. He’d put up new posters. Had them in the shadows so I hadn’t noticed right away. Gloria Gaynor, John Travolta, and The Commodores. We’d
really
have to talk now. His Leo Sayer, Rod Stewart, and Gary Wright phase had been strange enough. I mean, all our friends thought Addy and I were reckless in our seemingly endless hunger for new rock-and-roll, but I couldn’t bother myself with my own generation’s antiquated boardwalk, bee-bob, and show tunes slop. I loved music, loved it raw, and Addy was even worse with it. She’d gone to catholic school way back when, yeah, plaid skirt and knee socks, and when the Beatles changed everything she’d already tossed the tassel to the other side at Saint Joseph’s. She spent much of her adult life making up for what she’d missed.

As for Danny, he sort of rolled his eyes at our fascination. I would say “ Z. Z. Top, Aerosmith, Kiss!” and he would come back with “Kris Kristofferson.” Said he liked the lyrics. Me and Addy teased him about that one, and I even tried to get serious with it, show him that the lyrics didn’t stack up to masters like Emerson, Whitman, or Poe, that music wasn’t about lyrics anyway. His undisputable, one word answer took care of both sides of the argument.

“Girls.”

Yeah. Disco sucked, but it was a tool for fourteen-year-old chick-magnets. One of those Catch-22s that would never be solved.

“Danny. School.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“OK. Snuggle.”

I lay down next to him, held him, said in his ear,

“You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“OK, breathe.”

Both of us together then, in, out, then break, a ritual so ancient I didn’t even recall when we first laughed about it. He sat up and chewed a hangnail.

He was really getting bigger. Even though his chest seemed narrow, it was developed, only in miniature, if you know what I mean. He was five foot five inches but hadn’t quite grown into that height yet, if that makes any sense. A true man-child.

And gorgeous.

He certainly didn’t get his looks from my side of the family, and sometimes we laughed and called him the postman’s child, simply because he didn’t quite favor Addy either except in the hair color category. He looked like a damned angel. His eyes were a bit almond-shaped, and his features were simply portrait-worthy. Straight nose, soft lips, high cheekbones, sharp eyebrows. Almost feminine, though I’d never have told him that to his face.

The girls loved him, and in turn most of his friends were female, sort of rare for a young teenager. The phone was constantly ringing; in fact, the closest thing to an ongoing fight in the house was Addy’s constant frustration with the fact that the line was never free in case Barbara was giving a ring to go to the mall, or Gina was phoning over to change the time for their magazine and Tupperware club.

“You didn’t hit off the tee last night.” I jerked my head back toward the netting I’d hung from the exposed pipes by the water boiler, his twenty-nine-ounce Louisville Slugger and the tennis balls lying around the black tee in the same places they’d been three nights running.

“I will tonight.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

I paused so he’d look at me.

“Your back elbow’s dropping.”

“I know, Dad.”

“If you don’t fix it now, you’re—”

“Gonna get burned by the high cheese, I got it, Dad.”

We both laughed and he let me run my fingers through his hair for another muff-up. He wasn’t the brightest boy in school, all B’s and a few C’s like in Spanish, but I was the last one to blame him for not finding himself seated quite flush into the “school thing” like a perfect little o-ring in an engine. He was sharp as a tack when it came to people. He had insight, a way about him that got folks talking about themselves, I’d seen it. We’d go to a pool party, and without being familiar at all with the terrain, he’d entertain discussions with thirty-year-old women about dieting, gender equality, and spiritual healing. I’d get him from school on a day he stayed late for homework club, and he’d be at the edge of the pick-up rotary, buried deep in a three-way conversation with a girl that had flood pants, earth shoes, a relief map of forehead zits, and horn-rimmed glasses, right alongside a pretty little leggy cheerleader with bows in her hair. Damn straight. He singlehandedly made them dead equals, which they were, but most fourteen-year-olds didn’t see it that way is all that I’m saying. He had friends on the chess team and pals playing football, girlfriends who were shy and awkward and others wearing heavy foundation, big fake eyelashes, and pants so tight they could have been spraypainted. He was “Mr. Social,” a bit book-dumb and a natural charmer; ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States.

“Dad,” he said.

“Yeah?” I had already gotten up and turned to go.

“I don’t think I’m gonna play ball this year. I’m tired of it.”

“No, your not.”

“Just kidding.”

I turned to go again. This time I made it to the stairs, which needed carpeting or painting, I still hadn’t decided.

“Dad.”

“Yeah, big boy?”

He was staring at his hands.

“What if Bobby Fitz starts something?”

My neck went hot and I stalked back across the room.

“If he so much as touches you, Danny, look at me. He lays one single finger on you, I want you to throw.” I looked over my shoulder as if Addy had snuck down for a listen. I leaned in and my shadow covered him for a second.

“Now listen. That son of a bitch starts in, you finish it. You hit him square in the face and don’t stop until he’s down. You don’t take shit. From anyone. Start with that kind of noise, and it spreads around the school like brushfire. Next thing you know, you’re everybody’s pincushion, got it?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

I took a deep breath and stood straight.

“You think he’s gonna start in?”

He gave a short laugh.

“Crazy if he does.”

“Why, Danny?”

“I’ll kick his ass.”

“Good boy.”

Of course, we didn’t tell Addy any of this, because she more believed in the fairytale answer to the shit that went on between boys, the go-to-the-principal-about-it answer that got the offender suspended and simultaneously cut a crack so deep in your street cred that you wouldn’t recover until you hit your third year of college. Not the textbook response for a teacher, I know, but I was all too familiar with the reality in the foxhole. Did I preach this to my students? No. Did I have a problem with this contradiction? Not in the slightest.

And I’d never liked Bobby Fitz. Neither did Danny. Not really. The two of them had been hot and cold for years, same neighborhood, same classes, same Little League. The kid lived with his mother at the end of our block in a rather dismal-looking fieldstone flat-top rancher with brambles growing all over the front walk, wild ivy on the picture window. I didn’t know where the father was, but Mom smoked Marlboros, wore bandanas and scarves, and talked with this rusty voice usually saved for New York clichés in the theater world.

And plainly, Bobby Fitz was an asshole. We’d given him a shot, but he was the type that would be over the house for dinner and demand to Addy, “Put some ketchup on my burger.” She’d give the rhetorical, “Excuse me?” and he’d reply, “K-E-T-CHUP,” and roll his eyes. Then under his breath, “Ya deaf?” Addy and I would look at each other, wounded smiles of disbelief in our eyes, finally saying nothing, because I’d just been talking about spilling a beer trying to catch a fly ball at a Phillies game, and smack in the heart of the story I’d cursed a couple of times, bucking right up on the edge of propriety just to make Fitz feel like one of the boys. Now, it seemed as if it was in the air that maybe I brought this on, keeping it all too loose or something.

One time when I was late because I had lagged back at school running a gentleman’s etiquette club the mentor hadn’t shown up for, she claimed Fitz had been over looking at baseball cards, playing some darts. Supposedly, he had burst into the kitchen and demanded a glass of water. Addy had gone to the tap, and he’d muttered behind her back,

“Cunt.”