Triplines (9781936364107) (20 page)

He pulled out the hose and stared at the receding dirty water. Lenny knew the pond was nothing like his father had envisioned, and to Lenny's young eyes he thought it looked more like a muddy trench. Lenny watched him coil up the hose and walk back into the house. Lenny moved closer to
the pond to inspect it, and could only see swirls of dirt beneath the clotted surface.

The empty pond sat there for a few weeks until his father filled it in with dirt and never mentioned it again.

Lenny sees Sal again on his new motorcycle, but this time he has a girl riding with him, hugging his waist. She wears a helmet, but her long blond hair flutters from her neck. Sal pulls up to Lenny and tells him that he's quitting the business. The girl takes off her helmet and flips her hair back. She has wide, blue eyes and freckles on her nose.

“This is my girlfriend.”

She gives Lenny a gorgeous smile, and he suddenly feels shy.

Sal says, “I want to go to college. I got my high school degree and am going to Nassau Community. I'm getting my shit together.”

“That's great,” Lenny says.

“I have seeds if you want them. Let me know. I'm definitely not going to use them.”

“Why don't you sell them?”

“I'm done buying and selling—”

“And using,” his girlfriend adds.

“And using.”

When can I get them?”

“No hurry. Those are sealed and good for a while. Come by whenever.”

His girlfriend puts the helmet back on, and Sal waves to Lenny before riding away.

Lenny has never seen him with a girl before, and as they disappear down the street he feels lonely. He walks up to
the train station, lays down some pennies and, while waiting for the train, he calls Nancy. But the number has been disconnected. He tries again and then calls the operator who says that the number hasn't been changed, but turned off.

He thanks her and hangs up. He remembers Nancy mentioning working at a camp during the summer. He sits down on a bench and wonders why he doesn't have more friends.

A train approaches, and he stands near the edge of the platform, looking down at his pennies. The train stops, a few commuters walk out, the conductors peering out of the windows, and the train pulls out of the station.

Lenny jumps down to collect his squashed and warped pennies. A woman yells, “Hey! What are you doing?”

He turns and sees an elderly woman with a Macy's shopping bag rushing toward him. She says, “Get back up here! You shouldn't be down there!”

He ignores her, pocketing the pennies, two of which are almost perfectly oval-sized. The woman glares down over the edge and says, “Young man, you can get killed down there.”

“I'm fine.” He hoists himself up onto the platform, and dusts off his jeans.

“How would you like me to tell your father what you're doing?”

He says, “My father is dead.”

She blinks, startled. “Oh. I'm sorry.”

“He died last month. Heart attack.”

“Oh. I… I…”

“He died in front of me.”

“I'm so sorry.”

He walks away. The strange thing is that the story feels
true.

Lenny will see his father only a handful of times over the next decade, and the final confrontation—which will involve his father refusing to acknowledge any fault in the violence in their house—allows Lenny to cut all ties with him. His father, then, does die in Lenny's mind, for after the break Lenny never sees him again.

The chores multiply. In addition to cooking, washing dishes, laundry and yard work, Lenny also has to vacuum the house. Mira is supposed to empty the garbage cans once a week, but she never does. He has to remind her dozens of times, and she just doesn't seem to care. He ends up doing her chores, because no matter how much he hounds her, the garbage cans overflow.

Mira becomes secretive, refusing to tell him where she goes. When Lenny tells her to come home for dinner, she says, “You're not my parent.”

“I'm in charge when Mom's not here.”

“No, you're not.”

“You better listen to me.”

“Or what? You're going to tell on me? I'll tell Mom that you have a lot money from somewhere.”

He freezes. “What did you say?”

“I know about all the money you have.”

“What are you talking about?”

She taunts, “Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?”

He grabs her arm and shoves her against the wall. Lenny had hollowed out the book to hide his cash. He yells, “Are you snooping in my room?”

“Ow! You're hurting me!”

“Did you take any of my money?”

“Where did you get all that?” she demands. “Did you steal it?”

“You searched my room!”

“Let go!”

He lets go of her arm, but blocks her way from leaving the kitchen. He says, “You went through my things? You know that's wrong. How would you like it if I did that in your room?”

“I bet you stole it. I know you go sneaking out at night sometimes.”

He steps back, not sure how to respond to this. “Did you tell Mom?”

“No, but I will if you're not nice to me.”

He shakes his head. “When did you get so mean?”

Her face crumples. “I'm not mean.”

“We have to be sticking together.”

She looks down, about to cry. He punches her lightly on the shoulder and tells her it's okay. “But please don't go through my room anymore.”

She nods her head, still looking down.

When he returns to his room, he takes the cash out of the Bermuda Triangle book, and tries to think of a new hiding spot. Nothing seems safe enough; he needs a new bank account, and will research this after lunch. He needs a nap. It's exhausting, acting like an adult.

Bringing home the paperwork for his mother to sign, since he can't have his own account until he's eighteen, Lenny waits for her to return from work. This Children's Savings Account at the local bank doesn't need parental permission for deposits or withdrawals, so it's ideal for his unmonitored saving and spending.

She comes home late, and studies the forms, amused.
She asks how much money he has saved, and he tells her he plans to close his joint account with Dad, which has thirty dollars in it.

“Why do you want to close that one?”

“My friend Sal said not to trust joint accounts. Dad can steal it.”

She laughs. “He won't steal thirty dollars from you.”

He tells her about the car dent repair bill, and how his father had lied, making Lenny work more than he should have. His mother sighs. “I didn't know that.” She signs the paperwork, and fills out the rest of the information. She then reaches into her purse and pulls out a checkbook. “Let me help you with the account.”

“That's okay.”

“No, just a little.” She writes a check for twenty dollars. As she tears it out, she says, “You should start saving for college. I don't know how we will pay for all that.”

Lenny's dreams have been getting more and more vivid, and he suspects it's because he sleeps more deeply. With his father gone and their evenings quiet, he finds himself relaxing more quickly, and sinking into a sleep that often knocks him out until morning. It's almost as if he's catching up on years of deprivation. But his dreams are usually frightening, often puzzling, and when he wakes up he lies still for a while, remembering the fleeting details. His jaw aches. His head hurts. He replays the images in his head, disturbed by the repetition of the same kind of dream—being chased, hiding, running—and even though he knows that these are variations of the same memories, it doesn't make his mornings any easier.

This pattern of deep but disquieting sleep will continue throughout his life, with his teeth-grinding worsening over the years to the point of cracking his molars and wearing his incisors down to stumps. He will add hair-pulling and unconscious thrashing soon, but at this moment the vivid nightmares and jaw-clenching battles prefigure a significant shift, when violent days and sleepless nights become peaceful days but violent nights.

When their father would sit at the dinner table with them, drunk and expansive, he would often tell them how he had always wanted to be a doctor. Even after coming to the United States to study finance, he dreamed of switching over to biology and then applying to medical school. And every time he told the story he would add that having a baby, Ed, made it impossible. Usually Ed was there, and Mira and Lenny knew better than to look at him, but Lenny sensed Ed's exhaustion with the topic, with being blamed for thwarting their father's dreams. Ed sat stone-faced and unmoving, folding his arms and ignoring his food.

Their father often lied about where he had gone to school, claiming he had his PhD from Columbia, though in reality he had been a teaching assistant there for a semester, and the PhD he did receive when he was in his forties was an honorary degree from a small religious college that awarded it to him in appreciation for a donation.

At the dinner table, while he listened to his father ramble drunkenly about how close he had come to being a doctor, Lenny became good at feigning attention, staring and nodding his head but having almost no idea what his father was saying. His father's head would expand and contract in a psychedelic way, and Lenny would sometimes count rice grains on his plate to pass the time. Did you know a mound of white rice on a plate contains as many as a hundred mushy grains?

Lenny walks back to the house from somewhere—possibly Radio Shack or the library—and notices his father's blue Cadillac parked on the street around the corner. He stops and stares, wondering if someone else had bought a similar car, but then he sees the smoke rising from the driver's side, and when he moves closer he sees his father sitting there, flicking his ashes onto the street. What is he doing? Waiting? Spying? Meeting someone? Lenny stays hidden behind a tree. After ten minutes Lenny concludes that his father is spying.

His father blows his smoke straight ahead in the car, and it swirls around him and slowly rises up out of the window. Lenny knows that his father misses them, but he won't come to the house because Lenny's mother would probably call the police at this point. She grows stronger every day she spends without him. Lenny watches his father for another few minutes. He then backtracks and wanders the neighborhood.

Later that evening, when his mother finally returns home from work, Lenny tells her about the spying, and she says, “Yes, I've seen him. I think he also calls and hangs up. He misses his children.”

Lenny says, “We don't miss him.”

His mother turns to him, surprised. She studies him for a moment, and says, “He's still your father.”

“A bad one.”

She sighs. “Sometimes you can be as hard as him.”

This startles Lenny, who says, “That's not true.”

She smiles, and shrugs it off.

Lenny finds Mira in the living room watching TV and drawing on looseleaf paper. Her art teacher told her at the end of the school year that she has a gift for drawing, and this is all the encouragement she needs to dive into it during the summer. He asks her if she wants to explore the church, but she doesn't.

He says, “You can find stuff to draw in there.”

She looks outside and replies, “It's too dark.”

They haven't been spending any time together, and although he likes not having her tag along, he's lonely. He asks, “You want to see what's playing at Gables?” The movie theater recently began a 99-cent promotion.

“No, I just want to watch TV and draw.”

He's about to tease her, grab her paper and taunt her with it, but he remembers his mother's comment, that he can be as hard as his father. This rankles him, so he goes downstairs and watches his illegal cable TV and reads about strategies of guerrilla outdoor marijuana farming.

Many years later both his sister and brother will echo his mother's sentiments, that Lenny, according to Ed, is “scarily like Dad.” Ed will point out Lenny's military style—waking at dawn, maintaining a strict, rigorous schedule, even an instinctive, methodical, warrior-like way of getting what he wants—that can't help but remind them of their father. This will hurt Lenny more than he will admit, since he will strive his entire life not to be like his father. He will argue that he is what his father could not become—disciplined and focused. But Mira will point out how Lenny can coldly, even cruelly, cut people out of his life, like he does with their father.
Lenny doesn't see this as cruel, but justified—that the people he cuts out of his life are dangerous to him, and need excising. In this way he is the opposite of his mother, who gave their father too many years of second chances.

But it's true that Lenny does have a very disciplined approach to everything during this time; he trains almost every day, practicing both tae kwon do and kung fu, and teaches himself all kinds of useful and, for the most part, illegal skills, everything from building a microwave antenna from coffee cans that receives a new premium TV service, to finding hacked long-distance card numbers, to using a whistle from a Captain Crunch cereal box that coincidentally has the same tone to trick a payphone into giving him free calls. All this information is readily available to anyone who digs, and Lenny likes to dig.

He buys an inexpensive Atari computer—the keyboard isn't even real but has a flat membrane that's so hard to press he can only use his index finger reinforced with his middle finger to type. He buys a cheap dial-up modem and joins bulletin boards—the earliest incarnation of forums—where he learns even more from the hacking community.

He worries about his father spying on them, so learns more about surveillance, but by the time he builds a telescoping periscope that allows him to see the street from his basement, his father stops showing up. His mother says the hang-ups also stopped. She guesses that he probably found another woman.