City of Boys (15 page)

—Well, he says, and his wife enters with a glass of Coke, which she puts carefully on a little wooden coaster. She smiles at me and leaves the room. My father watches her back until she is gone, then turns to me. When I pick up my glass, it leaves a wet ring on the coaster. My father smiles carefully.

—How’s your brother? he asks.

—Oh, I say. —Fine. I try to place my glass back exactly on the ring. —He doesn’t really live with us anymore.

—Oh? my father says. —What’s he doing?

Upstairs doors open and close, and voices come from the kitchen. I try to hear what they’re saying. While he waits for my answer, his hand reaches for a magazine on the coffee table. He strokes the cover, but does not pick it up.

—Well, I say finally. —He has a job. A good job.

—Yes, well, he says. —That’s good. That’s terrific.

—Yes, I say. —It is.

—And your mother, he says, not looking at me. —How is your mother? He runs his finger along the edges of the magazine, flipping the pages. When I take a sip of Coke, his eyes flick to the cover, reading the headlines.

—She’s fine, I say. —Just fine. Great.

And for just one bright second, my father’s eyes meet mine, and in this moment, so brief it may not even have occurred, he looks at me as my father, who loved me once, and who knows this cannot be true. But then his eyes dart away, back to his magazine, and the moment passes, gone so suddenly I will have trouble believing it happened. It leaves us in an airless silence, and I move closer to the edge of the couch. In a few minutes I will go back to New York, where, right at this moment, the basketball player stumbles to the ground, his shot clanging, unmade, off the rim of the hoop; the woman with the baby smiles up at a man who happens to be passing, her child forgotten; and in the alley, the cat springs
after the pigeon, leaping right to the center of feathers and flapping wings.

My father sits back suddenly, putting his hands in his lap. A look of something almost like contentment settles on his face as he gazes across the room, and I try to think of something we have in common.

—Thanks for the birthday cards, I say. —And the money.

They have come regularly every year, more or less around the times of our birthdays, colorful impersonal cards with a ten or a twenty tucked inside, signed just
Dad
. For years I suspected that my mother was responsible for this, that she took the money from his regular child-care payments, and that this is what accounted for the rather terse signature. I suspected this even after it became clear to me that this was simply not something that would occur to my mother to do.

—Oh, my father says, embarrassed. —Well, it’s the least I could do. He laughs nervously.

—It’s nice of you to remember.

He looks confused, shifts in his chair. —Well, yes, he says.

—I guess it is. He looks around the room. —I guess your birthday is coming right up sometime soon, he says.

—A couple of months. I’ll be seventeen.

He smiles. —Deirdre’s birthday is coming right up too. She’ll be fourteen. And the twins. He shakes his head, smiling. —They do grow up.

He stops suddenly, jarred by his words, and turns his attention back to the magazine. —Do you want another Coke? he says, making no move at all.

—I guess not, I say, twisting the glass round and round into the wet circle on the coaster.

—Well, he says, —it’s been awfully nice of you to come all this way just to see us. Me.

He smooths his pants down over his thighs and prepares to rise and I think,
Wait
, but when I look up to say something,
he is gazing down at me, patiently waiting, and I recognize the expression on his face, in his eyes: it is the look of every man my mother has ever loved.

No one comes to the hall to see me off, only my father, who says goodbye with his hand on the doorknob.

—Well, he says, and I say, —Well.

—Say hello to your brother.

—Okay.

He calls my name when I am halfway down the front walk, but when I turn, he clearly does not know what to say. He stares at me helplessly and opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He closes it and I turn again. When I reach the sidewalk, I hear the door close. On either side of their house, the houses look alike. A few dry leaves drift across the lawns as the wind picks up, and the rising chill of evening has driven most of the neighborhood children inside. I head back for the station and wonder what I could have been thinking. What could you have been thinking? my mother will say when I tell her and she’ll turn her face to the wall. Haven’t I been a good mother to you kids? she will ask. I count each block of cement in the sidewalk as dusk falls over the quiet street, the quiet cars, the quiet families living in each quiet house.

Mr. Rosenberg looks down at me through his gray window. He is smoking and does not wave. When I knock at his door, I hear him creak slowly across the floor. I am surprised to see that the television is not on and that all of his window blinds, even on the side wall, are raised.

—So, I say. —How about some TV?

He throws his cigarette on the floor and rolls back to the window. —Oh, he says, —I don’t know. Maybe your mother was right about TV. He lights a cigarette and holds the
match up in front of his face. —It’s cold in here, he says.

—Don’t you think it’s cold in here?

Through the uncovered windows I can see the people in the building across the alley. An old man takes off his shirt and stands in the cold, while next to him, only a thin wall away, a woman pets her cat, blinded by the certainty that love will come to her today, or tomorrow, and over them and under them lives go on that are just the same.

—You know, Mr. Rosenberg says, staring out the window,—you ought to do something with your life. You really ought to. You just ought to do something.

He does not look at me when I let myself out. The streetlight glints off the steel arms of his chair, and Brenda smiles sadly down at him.

—Honey, my mother says as I open our door, and Nick looks up from where he stands behind her, his hands hanging loose at her neck. She smiles as his eyes travel up along my legs to my face, and I pull the door shut on them, but before it closes, I see Nick pull the scarf from her neck and let it fall to the floor.

She is in his arms again by the time I am on the street. I look up at Mr. Rosenberg, but he doesn’t see me, gazing past me at a city full of people going on about lives that have nothing to do with me. He drops his cigarette and wheels away.

Right now my father is sitting down to dinner, smiling absently at the bright blond heads of his new children while my brother sits in a dark room, turning to stone. In the alley, pigeons rise and settle anxiously, shaking off the growing chill.
Mother
, I want to call out,
Mother, I am dying
, but she is falling once again into the arms of a man she loves.

Because he is my brother, I will try to remember everything. I am waiting for him here at the edge of the campus, watching ragged clouds skid across a dirty sky. Across from me is the city, which comes right up to meet us, but we are cut off from it by a highway, cut off here with our books and our
stone buildings. Around me pass students, and above me rises a statue of Winged Victory, its head long gone, the enormous shadow of its wings stretched out across the black grass. I wait here and try to remember everything.

In the neighborhood free-for-alls on the rolling lawn, he is always the smallest, always the most vulnerable. —Glen, Mother calls, sitting with Father and Uncle Bill and Aunt Eileen. —Glen, she calls again, flicking her cigarette ash onto the fresh-cut green of the lawn. —Don’t break anything. Watch your glasses, watch your braces. For God’s sake, be careful if you’re going to roughhouse like that. —Elizabeth, she calls to me, —you watch him.

When I look over at her, her face is already turned up to Father as she holds out her glass for a fresh drink, already turned with a smile to Uncle Bill. She does not see me watching Glennie through a pile of boys, and she never sees me join the pile. When Glennie looks up with his myopic, undirected gaze, I wonder what he sees. He turns his small face to the ground, waiting for the boys to grow bored and wander off to some other cruel game; he turns his face to the ground to watch the beetles and ants fight it out over a territory smaller even than his own. In front of the house, Mother’s laugh trails out over the lawn and ice clatters against the sides of empty glasses. The boys wriggle off eventually, and Glennie stays on his stomach, looking down at the ground. When he raises his head, his face is cheerful, but I know that in one way or another I will later pay for this.

—Lizzie, he whispers. —Don’t tell Mother I broke the lamp. He looks up wildly at the sound of her car pulling into the driveway, and looks down at the broken shard of lamp in his hand.

—Tell her a burglar came in, he says. —Tell her that he tried to kidnap us and broke the lamp. Tell her that, he says, beginning to believe it himself. He hands me a piece of the lamp, and his eyes go sly and clever as he smiles a little half-smile. —Tell her he looked like Daddy.

When I tell my mother that our dog broke the lamp, running from window to window after a squirrel it spotted in the yard, she fingers a frosty silver streak she has just had put in her hair.

—Elizabeth, she says, already losing interest. —Did you and your brother break the lamp?

—No, Mother, I say. —Honest.

She turns to look at her new hair in the mirror. In the corner Glennie smiles, but later we are twice denied dessert: tonight for breaking the lamp, tomorrow for lying about it.

I tell Glennie that I wanted dessert, and he smiles. —Don’t worry, he says. —I’ll buy you a candy bar.

When I ask him with what, he opens his hand to show a few coins, a crumpled dollar bill. —With this, he says. —I got it from Mother’s purse.

He closes his small fingers over the money and holds his fist against his fragile chest, smiling at Mother’s purse, where it sits innocently on the counter. Our parents’ bedroom door is closed and their voices are just a hum, an indistinct buzz.

Boys pass me by as I wait for Glennie here in the moonlight by the highway. Girls pass me by, and the statue casts a pale shadow against the ground.

Mother’s purse sits innocently on the counter and the door to their room is closed.

—Lizzie, Glennie says, and he pulls me quietly over to the closed door. —Owlcake, he whispers, and we giggle, clamping
our hands over each other’s familiar mouth. —Owlcake, he breathes against my warm hand, and we run off to our own bright rooms. —Owlcake? we offer one another; —Madam, may I get you some owlcake?

We laugh and do not know why we are laughing. Their door rises far above our heads, and I feel nervous as I laugh, thinking of the owls that rise every night from the woods behind our house.

There is something in his face I want to turn from, something strange and excited. But in the exact dark center of his eyes, I see my own face looking out, huge and confused. I look away from him, at the four walls of my room, painted pink, at the white furniture, dotted with stuffed animals and familiar fluffy things. —Owlcake, Glennie croons. His hands are like soft little animals.

—Look, Lizzie, he says and I see that he has taped closed the muzzle of our dog Puff. I watch her struggle for long, domesticated minutes, until finally she comes to me, tail wagging, dumbly begging for release. I reach for her, but Glennie puts his hand on mine.

—Don’t, Lizzie, he says. —I want to see if she can get it off herself.

—It’s mean, I say. —You’ll make her mean.

He looks at me and smiles. —She loves me, he says.

—She’ll always love me. He turns to Puff, who wags her tail hopelessly. Soon she will live in the back yard, not mean but not friendly, digging holes against the fence and watching us from a distance.

I wait patiently, and in the windows of dorms girls hold dresses up to their bodies and turn this way, that way, seeing how they look, wondering what the boys they love
will think of this shirt, those shoes, the hair pulled back that way. They turn in the mirror and admire themselves and each other for the boys they love.

—Lizzie, he whispers. Like an insect he seeks the light at night, the moon coming through my window. His tiny heart beats against my hand and I tell him what I learned in science class today: that the heart is a muscle, made up of a long connected cluster of nerves. When it beats, the impulse runs down the cluster, activating each nerve ending, so that every heartbeat is nothing but a long involuntary tremor of nerves, a running impulse that can’t stop itself once it’s begun. He smiles and turns his face to the moon. —Look, Lizzie, he says, pointing to an owl coming up out of the woods. His heart beats, a long running pulse that feels like a cloud of moths fluttering against the wall of his chest.

Father works in the garden, digging away in the blazing sun, poking his trowel into the dirt. His blue shirt is marked with a pattern of sweat that runs wide across his shoulders and narrows as it trickles down the small of his back; it is like a butterfly pinned to his spine, spreading its wings across him as he bends to the dirt. Glennie sits rocking back and forth on his heels, staring down at the tiny mazes of life in the ground around him, looking up at Father, then back down at the grass. As he rocks, the sun glances off his glasses, so that his eyes, when he turns them on me, are like two blinding panes of flashing light. As Father digs into the lush waving flowers, Glennie watches, and hisses at me, —Lizzie, Lizzie, owlcake, and we slide into hilarious, uncomprehending collapse. Father looks up at us, Glennie rocking on his heels, me rolling backward on the grass. When Father waves his trowel, Glennie stops laughing and swats at me
with his arm. Father goes back to tending the bright heads of roses and carnations sunk in dirt.

—Lizzie, Glennie says. —Don’t you think Father will have a heart attack? and I am shocked by this. I look away and bright sunlight glitters off the chain-link fence. Behind it Puff stares at us.