Calling Home (10 page)

The dead voice says, “I'm in a safe place.”

15

“I bet you've been looking forward to this visit,” my mother said as she drove.

I chose my words carefully. “I'm very curious to see what it's like down there.”

She nodded, and for a minute or two, I did not feel that we were enemies. She did not want me to go, and, although I was excited, I was frightened of the plane trip, and reluctant to commit myself to a place I had never visited. I could suddenly be taken sick, I thought, and then call my father. One of those viruses that hit people so quickly they practically go in their pants. These things happen. Life is full of bad surprises.

But I knew my father was probably at that moment getting his house ready for me, and looking forward to picking me up at the airport, and I did not want to disappoint him. It was an odd feeling, as if I were an adult and my father were a little boy whose feelings I did not want to hurt.

“You'll have a good time,” she said. She said it as if it would be a bad thing for me to have a good time, but that I was the sort of creature who would have fun wherever I was.

“I'll probably hate it,” I responded, in a voice that was surprisingly weak. “It's just a bunch of Republicans down there. Old geezers with spotted hands with the hots for teenagers in bikinis. They don't have any style down there. Probably all drive gigantic cars that get about a mile per gallon. And smog that would wither a statue.”

She readjusted her hands on the steering wheel. “Maybe.”

“You've been down there,” I said.

“I was born in San Diego.”

“It's only the weekend,” I said, pointlessly.

She dropped me off at the curb at the Oakland Airport, and had tears in her eyes as she waved. I hefted my backpack and watched her taillights enter the necklace of tail-lights that looped away from the airport.

The automatic door opened without a sound and I was in a brightly lit place filled with people going somewhere. Everyone there seemed selected to represent some type: businessman, overweight retiree, nervous college student; no one was an individual. I worked my shoulder muscles, wondering how I looked to everyone else.

“Do you want to check any luggage?” asked the man with freckles. He moved quickly, sorting papers, punching keys on a computer, then looked at me again, his eyebrows in a question. I lowered my backpack onto the scale, dismally certain that some gorilla in Orange County would throw my pack onto the pavement so hard the bottle of rum Angela had slipped me would explode. Freckleface clipped a tab around the handle. “Gate sixteen,” he said.

“Gate sixteen,” I murmured, and shuffled like a zombie across the dazzling floor. Desperate for something normal to do, some act which I knew how to perform, I found the door labeled
MEN
, with a drawing of a stick figure in a business suit. I peed with chilly fingers on my faucet, working out every little drop.

A security guard in a blue uniform stepped into the men's room like he was doing a pervert count, but he didn't even glance around. I tucked my spigot back in quickly, but he simply took a place at a urinal and I realized that this was an unofficial visit. Instead of a gun, the guard wore a holstered radio, like he could knock people down with words.

The water out of the cold tap seemed warm on my fingers, and the pink powder from the soap dispenser was as gritty as sand and didn't dissolve for a long time. I shook my dripping hands and watched the security guard punch a button and hold his hands before a blower. I wiped my hands on my pants.

The stewardess showed us how to breathe through an oxygen mask. She was pretty in a ticky-tacky way, with sprayed brunette just-so hair, and long beige fingernails that matched her lipstick. The president of the airline smiled at me from the cover of a magazine. In his hands, he held a miniature jetliner just like the one I sat in. I wanted to be reassured by this. He had competent gray hair, and his hands looked like they knew how to do things that mattered. Would he let us ride in a plane that had anything wrong with it? I peered into the vomit bag like I expected it to contain my lunch.

The mint-breathed business suit in the seat next to me cracked his attaché case. He flipped through manila folders as the plane shifted and rocked over the dark runway, not taking off, but not staying still, either, traveling about as fast as a car looking for a parking place. I wanted to think peaceful thoughts, but it was like trying to grab carp in the big, placid fish pond at the Oakland Museum.

For a moment, I felt like Mead. Not simply remembering him, but being him, flesh and bone. I was Mead sitting in an airplane, ready to leave everything.

The plane flew. I felt foolish for having been afraid, and watched the crush of lights out the window.

16

“You'll sleep in here,” he said, turning on a light. A bed with a striped coverlet, next to a white nightstand. There were no pictures on the wall. It looked like the room had been built that very day. The air smelled faintly of fresh paint. This, plainly, was going to be my bedroom if I decided to live here. My father hovered in the doorway. I sat on the bed and felt the firm surface of virgin mattress.

“It's nice,” I said.

“No, it's not. It's plain. Clean, but plain.” The implication was that I could fix it any way I wanted to if I lived here.

“I like things plain. Simple. Straightforward,” I said.

“So do I. The simpler the better. Nothing fancy. The world is too complicated.” His face was hungry, and he looked at once more lively and older than when I had sat across from him at the restaurant. “I like to keep things simple. Maybe that's been my problem.”

He left, announcing that dinner would be ready in a few minutes. I was glad to be left in the room, even though the smell of paint grew stronger with every breath, the sort of stink that sneaks up on you and pretty soon gets to work on your pleural membrane and your liver while you get drowsy and slip off into permanent brain damage.

“We're just a few blocks from the beach,” my father said, chewing the meat off a wing of barbecued chicken. “You can walk there if you want. Breathe a little salt air. I don't intend to hang on you like a leech. You might want some time to yourself.”

I shrugged, almost ready to swallow a lump of store-bought potato salad. I swallowed. “I don't care. I can't believe I'm here. It's hard to get used to being shot from one place to another.”

“Might as well get used to it. It's the world we live in. Things happen fast.”

“I'm a slow person. I like things to not be so fast. I should have been born in different times. When they had oxen cropping the front lawn. Things like that.”

My father laughed so hard I was embarrassed, red barbecue sauce on his front teeth. “Cropping the front lawn,” he said. “That's good. The point is, you appreciate things like that.”

“Like what?”

“History.”

“I don't know. I only took U. S. History. I took it last summer to get it out of the way. It was okay.”

“U. S. history is very important,” he said with the smart expression of a man who doesn't know what he is talking about. “The U. S. used to be nothing. Just so much land. Now look at it.”

I wiped my mouth with a paper towel. My father was quiet while he wiped his hands, too, even though I sensed that he was still hungry. The light over the kitchen table was so bright that it was difficult to see the rest of the house. It was all semidarkness, but I knew that there was nothing to see. It was a fairly new house, carpeted with expensive beige plush, but with very little furniture aside from a television and a stack of stereo components. A single chair hulked in the semidark, facing the dead TV screen, and the chair did not look like a chair so much as a scoop, a tilted cup for my father to sit in when he wanted to watch a football game.

My father folded our paper plates together and stuffed them into a paper bag under the sink. He rinsed the silverware and dropped it into a rack in the dishwasher. He wrapped aluminum foil around the lopped chicken carcass and put it on an otherwise empty shelf in the refrigerator. He took a package of chocolate cookies from the cupboard and fought the cellophane. Utensils rattled in a drawer as he found a long, thin knife and slit the package.

He lay the ruptured package between us on the table. “What I'm saying is,” he said, selecting a cookie, “that I have come to a point in my life. You never think it will happen to you, but it does. You reach a crossroads and you absolutely must decide what to do with your life. If you ignore the crossroads, or if you decide not to decide, well, that's a decision, too, a decision to be less of a man.”

I bit into my cookie. It was too sweet, a punishing chocolate burst that hurt my saliva glands. I coughed the cookie down.

My father poured us each some milk. He nudged the glass toward me like it was the gift of life. He licked chocolate crumbs from his front teeth and took a long swallow of milk. He squirged the milk around in his mouth, looking at me while he did it, then swirled it over his front teeth so that I expected him to spit it out.

“So I reached this point,” he said. “And I realized that I should do something to help you. I don't think your mother has what it takes to really be a parent to you at this point in your life. Or her life.”

I wanted to defend my mother, but realized that my father was not a real threat. He was tired of my mother, he didn't like her, but he wouldn't hurt her.

“We get along all right. She has a lot of imaginary fears about me.”

“Every parent has fears about their child winding up in jail.”

“There are worse things that could happen.”

He looked at me with a little surprise. “Maybe. The point I want to make is: I want to help.”

“Mother makes up stories to tell you. She's just trying to make you feel bad.”

“She doesn't have to work very hard at it. I do feel bad about how I've treated you, and I want to make it up to you. If you moved down here, you'd find it a lot more fun. You could have a car.” He waited for a response. “A car. That would be nice, wouldn't it? And a stereo of your own.”

I bit into another cookie.

“These are things that would lift you out of a dismal life in the middle of a crummy town, and put you right into a life of—well, not luxury, but at least—”

“Oakland is not a crummy town.”

“Oh, Christ. Don't give me Oakland; I grew up there. There are worse cities, but it's basically a dull, wasted city full of Chinese and blacks. Now, I have no fight with minorities; minorities are what this country is all about. But after your window gets jimmied a half-dozen times, or the third or fourth old person gets stomped by some kid on welfare, well, it makes you think maybe you don't want your child growing up in that kind of environment.”

“You're afraid it will rub off on me.”

He looked at me like he was an alley dog and I was a hambone juicy with fat. “I think it already has.”

“Has what?”

“Had a cheapening effect on you. You talk about your mother's love life like it was some trash in some soap opera you were talking about, not your own mother.”

“You should hear how she talks to me.”

“That's what I mean. That's exactly what I mean. I don't want you living in that snake pit of worry and frustration—”

“And blacks and queers and—”

“All right, you little twerp. Sure. Say it all. I'm afraid you aren't working out at all well. I'm afraid you're hanging out with sluts and teenage alcoholics and God knows what.”

I tried to be offended, but my father wasn't like my mother. He was obnoxious, but he was being frank; he wasn't trying to irritate me into a fit of fury so that he could prove to me how immature I was, like my mother. He was goading me, but it was to make another kind of point. He wanted to give to me.

“I'm all right. I really am. I'm a perfectly normal person.”

“I know you are. I know. I can tell by looking at you. You've got a little of your mother's coloring, but you're a good, solid, healthy-looking young man.” He said “young man” like he was going to say “kid,” and his care in choosing his words offended me.

“I am perfectly normal,” I said, like someone in a trance. “In every way.”

“Maybe your mother has exaggerated. She talks about your friends like they were something that crawled out of Slime Mountain.”

“Who?”

“I don't know. She says you spend time with one or two very creepy characters.”

“She doesn't have any right to have opinions like that. My friends are good people. She's telling lies.” I thought of Mead, and I found myself wanting to cry.

He examined a cookie for a moment. He glanced at me, then said, like he was addressing the cookie, “I think that your mother is worked up over a lot of things. I think you frighten her.”

“For no reason!” I began.

My father smiled, and for the first time, maybe in my life, I liked him. I saw how a man his age looked at a person like me, and how the way I argued with him made me, in his eyes, a callow, foolish, but lovable animal.

“For no reason,” I repeated dully.

“There's another reason I wanted you to come down here,” he said after wrapping the cookies in the slit cellophane. He did not continue at once, and seemed for the first time that evening to want to go slowly and take his time with language, instead of steering along like words had to be used fast or they might stall on you.

“What reason is that?” I asked, but an insane flame flickered inside me, and I thought that he must know everything, that this entire conversation had been a sneaky game, and that the police would step out of the darkness of the living room like a troupe of trained bears and handcuff me to the refrigerator.

“It's something terribly important.” He nestled the package of cookies into a corner next to the toaster.