Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (5 page)

When she talked, her cigarette bounced.

~

The guy from the Neighborhood Watch comes to the community center and we all go over there and sit in the meeting room and listen to him talk about how to prevent crime. He shows us some things you can only get from a locksmith. Long striker plates, with silver screws designed to be driven deep into your door frame. He tells us if we don’t put the right type of deadbolt on our doors, we might as well leave our doors unlocked.

The meeting room has the smell of a classroom. The smell of years of children being frightened into submission.

~

I had the book in my hand. I took it across the darkness of the bar. Twice I almost dropped it. The second time I thought,
Why am I living this way?

I took the book and handed it to an old man and said, “Maybe you want to read this.”

~

You couldn’t put a quarter into a video game in Athens. You would have to use some form of Greek currency. After that, the differences stop, and you encounter things that give us a common existence on this planet. Most involve frightening premonitions of sudden death.

~

Sometimes I can’t tell my wife, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law apart. They all have the same eyes.

I sit in that chair my in-laws had reupholstered a couple of years ago, because the cat had ripped the stuffing out. Now, whenever the cat goes to scratch the chair, my mother-in-law runs over and tries to hit it.

My father-in-law, Jack, mutters, “Goddam cat.”

It was my sister-in-law, Coco, who brought the cat home, about seven years ago. Jack said he didn’t want a goddam cat in the house. He said he was allergic to fleas.

For a while, he collected fleas. He kept them in a plastic pill bottle. He stuck the fleas between pieces of Scotch tape and put them in a bottle. Tutti showed it to me once.

Sometimes I’ll look up from reading and say, “Hey, honey,” and then experience a moment of panic. I’ll look right at Tutti’s face and wonder, is it Tutti, or Dora, or Coco?

I was reading Chekhov one Sunday afternoon, and I saw Tutti out of the corner of my eye. I looked up. Tutti was looking at me. For a long moment I felt lost.

I wonder if Tutti will one day be exactly like her mother. Every year Dora tries to get Tutti and me to go to the Binder Twine Festival to help park cars. If you help park cars, you get free hot dogs. As many as you can eat. Dora and Jack go every year. They direct traffic and eat hot dogs.

Will that be how it is when I get older? Will I look at Tutti and wonder who she is? And will I go on wondering for a long time, until I cannot remember at all? Will I have moments of clarity, moments just long enough to understand where I am and what is happening to me?

~

I was thinking about Horseheads, which is this place Tutti and I used to go in New York, and I was thinking about the big highways down there, about how they curve off into space and then dump you suddenly in some little town, and I was thinking about how the air feels when you get out of the car to stretch your legs in some parking lot somewhere, how fresh and cool the air always feels when you get out of the car in Horseheads.

~

I was at the bicycle shop and there were these two guys in the back who were supposed to be fixing the bikes and my bike was back there waiting to get fixed and I couldn’t hear what the two guys were saying, but then I heard the one guy say, “I found out something you can do with smokers,” and then I couldn’t hear what they were saying again for a while and then I heard the same guy say, “You have to do it for at least two minutes.”

~

When I was a child, I would sit and stare at the television screen. This would be about four o’clock in the afternoon, light flooding in the front window, making it difficult to see the figures on the screen. But I could hear what they were saying. I felt I understood them perfectly, these people on the television. They never spoke to me directly.

~

I would get him down on the floor in a headlock and tell him, “Shut up, you bastard!”

Remember the time we were back by that door? It had just fallen off. I had your dad in a headlock. “Shut up!” I said. All of a sudden it started to rain. It rained into the house.

~

There was a long pause in which everything was a photograph of something that had happened before. Then there was another long pause in which everything was a movie version of the book. After that, we came out on video, only it was the director’s cut, in which Jane washed more dishes.

~

Some days I wanted my name to be a phone number, so when people called me I would ring. I thought ringing would be the most eloquent of responses. The old-fashioned ringing of those black phones that used to be the only phones you could get.

I learned the truth about Touch-Tone when I was nine. The buttons on the keypad lit up on the phone in my grandma’s bedroom.

I wish Grandma could come back so I could cradle her like a phone, take back everything I am, make myself that one, single gesture, retroactive to September 1959.

I
PUT
Sammy in his crib and went out of the room. I closed the door. Sammy started to scream. I went into our room and lay down on the bed. I was waiting for Sammy to stop screaming.

After a while, I got off the bed and started reading things. I read the spines of books on my bookshelf. I went down to the kitchen and read the side of a cereal box. The cereal box was still on the kitchen table from breakfast.

When I went back upstairs, Sammy was still screaming.

~

“Any ideas about dinner?” I yell.

“Fish cakes,” Tutti yells.

“Don’t like fish cakes,” Sammy says.

“Sammy says he doesn’t like fish cakes,” I yell.

“Don’t do it,” Sammy says.

“Don’t do what?” I say.

“Don’t do it, Daddy,” Sammy says.

“What did you say?” Tutti says.

“I said Sammy says he doesn’t like fish cakes.”

“He’s never had fish cakes,” Tutti yells.

“You’ve never had fish cakes,” I tell Sammy.

“Don’t like fish cakes,” Sammy says.

Tutti comes down wearing earrings and perfume and makeup.

“I can’t get up,” I say.

“Set the oven for four-fifty,” Tutti says. “Give him milk. You have what you want. Slice up some potatoes and fry them in oil. Give him some ketchup, but don’t let him have the bottle.”

“Can I use the machine to do the potatoes?”

“Yes,” Tutti says. “Use the slicing wheel.”

“Okay.”

I follow Tutti along the hall to the front door and stand there while she laces her boots.

“Do you think your sister might drop by?” I say.

“No,” Tutti says. She straightens up. “Look at your hair,” she says.

I touch my head.

Tutti looks at me for a minute, then does that rolling thing where disgust comes shooting out of her eyes.

I touch the front of my shirt and look down at my hands.

“I’ll be home around 9:30,” Tutti says. She goes out the door.

Sammy comes wandering up with his thumb in his mouth and his blanket dragging behind him.

“Don’t want dinner,” he says.

I think it’s the sound of it, “fish cakes,” and the way dinner comes along every night, relentlessly, like a bomb.

~

They do look pretty happy. I have to admit. I had heard they looked pretty happy, but I would never have guessed how really very happy they actually looked.

I heard it from Cleo. She called to tell me. She said it made her sick to see it, the way they looked so happy. It just made her sick.

I told her it made me sick, too, but the truth is, I was just saying it. I hadn’t even seen it. I was just saying. Cleo wasn’t listening anyway. She was too busy saying how sick it made her.

Finally, I said, “Well, it’s just one picture, Cleo. It’s easy to look happy for just one picture. Who knows what it’s like when they’re at home. Their home life is probably no different from yours and mine. It’s probably no different. It’s probably worse.”

“Well, it makes me sick,” Cleo says. “The whole thing makes me sick.”

~

Late in the day, I fall asleep on the couch. Tutti starts giving Sammy hell because she has to clean up all his videos. She keeps telling him to be quiet. “Be quiet,” she says. “Daddy’s sleeping.” She puts all the videocassettes back in their cases. Every time she puts one back, she clicks it shut and it wakes me up again.

~

She slams the door and I can hear her in there calling the dog. I can hear her saying, “Fido. Come here Fido. Here Fido. Here boy.”

Then I hear her telling the dog to get the hell over and eat his supper before she wallops him.

Then I hear her call him, “Fucking Fido.”

That dog is a good retriever, though. He’ll retrieve anything. He was just a puppy, and we had him in the front hall and one of us said, “Let’s call him Fido.”

~

Sammy says he thinks the light on his ceiling looks like a bear. He says if he lies at the bottom of his bed and looks up at the ceiling, his light looks like a bear. He tells me to come down and lie beside him at the bottom of the bed and look at the light.

I tell him it looks like a light.

He tells me to try lying at the top of the bed. He says when he lies at the top of his bed the light looks like an owl. A scary owl. I lie at the top of the bed with him. I tell him the light looks like a light. I tell him to quit talking and go to sleep. I get up off the bed and go out in the hall. I stand in the hall.

“Daddy,” he calls.

“Go to sleep,” I say.

“Can I get a drink?”

“Go to sleep.”

I go downstairs and put some water in a cup. When I get back upstairs with the cup, Sammy is asleep.

~

Sometimes I think nothing matters but getting a boner. There are times when this is what I think. But there are other times when getting a boner doesn’t seem so important. There are times when I can’t see what the big deal of getting a boner is. Then, the next thing you know, I’m getting one. And once I’m getting one, it seems as though nothing else matters.

Back then I didn’t even know what getting a boner was. I hated it when I got a boner. No one else in my house ever got a boner. Even the cats didn’t get boners.

~

You know that story about Achilles? About how he was invincible, except for one small spot on his heel? I think that story is a lie. I think a bunch of fucking Greeks – ancient fucking Greeks – got drunk one night and made that story up. What I am seeing here is Greeks with bare chests shining in the firelight, sitting around, drinking nectar of the gods from pewter mugs.

That whole story makes me sick. The mother dipping the kid in the river Styx. The kid going on to become a hero and all the Greeks looking up to him, worshipping him, and then they turn him into an idol, and they still talk about him, right up to this very day. And then this guy – Penis, I think was his name – this guy Penis comes along and nails him in the heel and kills him. Jesus.

~

I need a haircut. There’s no question. It’s just one of those things. To tell the truth, I look like a pig. This is pig’s work though. I should not be doing this work. But there you go. Life deals its blows.

When I finish here I’m going up to redo a drawer. I don’t know what’s wrong with the drawer. I can speculate of course. The handle may have come off. There’s been a rash of that around here lately. Handles coming off. Last month it was door locks.

In this particular case, it may not be the handle at all. The whole drawer may have come off its sliders. It could be any one of a thousand different things.

~

What I did today, what I accomplished, what I survived.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem so bad out here on the balcony tonight with the whole day behind me.

I
WOKE
up, got out of bed, went downstairs, hailed a cab, and took the lid off a cup of coffee.

~

After they’d been married a few years, they went out and got a dog. The dog was there every night when they came home from work. When they’d had the dog for three years it ran out into the street one afternoon and got hit by a car.

He sat beside it on the street until she brought the car around to pick them up. The dog had a name, but that hardly seems to matter.

~

It breaks my heart to think about my father. So I don’t think about my father. I think about my mother. It breaks my heart to think about my mother, too.

~

There were separate things happening.

My mind was thinking,
I’ll be a star, I’ll be famous, I’ll be a star
, and going through all the usual posturing involved in being a star. My mind was actually doing interviews with itself. “How did you get started?” “What color is your hair?” “Did you feel you were selling out when you did the promotional campaign for Coke?”

My body was walking. That’s about all. My heart was beating and my lungs were filling up with air and the blood was coursing through my veins. I suppose the blood was coursing through my veins. I suppose the old eyes were darting this way and that. And the ears were hearing and the nose was sniffing. All the usual stuff a body does, with the added activity of walking from the car to the donut shop.

I think I was talking to myself, too. Muttering really. “Introducing – da da da da – Ken Sparling.” “Who is Ken Sparling?” “Ken Sparling is … ” That sort of thing.

When I got to the counter in the donut shop I stopped walking.

I stopped muttering.

I stopped thinking.

I had to get coffee.

I had to order it.

I had to open my mouth and say, “Two coffees please. Small. Just cream.”

On the other side of the counter, behind the apple fritters and the bran muffins and the plastic cups of fruit cocktail, was a good-looking girl with broken front teeth.