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Authors: Tom Spanbauer

I Loved You More (37 page)

BOOK: I Loved You More
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Ruth Dearden isn't as tall as me. She's barefoot and I got two inches on her. She's not fat or plump. She's just big. By the time she meets Hank she'll have lost twenty-five pounds. Her skin is that strawberry blonde that freckles. The flush still on her chest. Maybe a heat rash. Her hair is thick and red that hangs to her shoulders. Curly hair that won't frizz. I want to touch it. Because of the color and how it looks silky and because I'm high.

“What did you say?” she says.

I have to stop because I'm laughing. That happened a lot with Ruth. There was a way so many times when we were together I'd start laughing and not know how to stop and the moment would expand and expand. I'd just suddenly find myself in a place I couldn't explain that was never ending. And I'd be laughing.

“Shingli-shoozi,” I say. “It's a Betty Grable movie. Betty's singing and dancing on a stage in front of a red curtain and there's a pocket in the curtain and she steps inside the pocket and changes into a skimpier outfit.”

“It's a game my sister and I played,” I say.

The way Ruth is looking at me. Her big plastic glasses a little crooked. Her bangs hanging down into her eyes. That asymmetrical jaw of hers and her mouth open. The flush is on her cheeks as well.

“I made up the word,” I say. “Or my sister did. When I was five. I was so fascinated by Betty Grable's pocket in the curtain and her quick wardrobe change I called it Shingli-shoozi.”

“Shingli-shoozi!” Ruth says.

“My father hated it,” I say.

“Betty Grable?”

“No,” I say. “That I made up the word.”

“Was it you who made it up,” Ruth asks, “or your sister?”

“Men can't do that, you know,” I say. “Women are lucky that way. You can step behind a curtain, change your outfit and your makeup, and voilà, you step out a whole new woman.”

“Jeez,” Ruth says. “Wish I knew how to do that.”

That was the first time Ruth hit me. Knocked me the fuck down. I mean she didn't mean to. It's just at that moment, Ruth decided to do one of her dramatic dance moves and she twirled with her arms out and when her arm came around, her fist hit me square in the face and knocked me down.

I put my hand to my nose, blood on my hand.

“Ben!” Ruth says. “I'm so sorry!”

She leans down, and with a tuft of chiffon she's ripped from her dress, she goes to put the chiffon to my bloody nose.

“HIV!” I almost yell it.

LATER ON THAT
night, when the full moon is hanging above the chatter and the music of the party, I pass out the words to a song. It's an old song from the Thirties and what's a better thing to do on a Cancer's birthday than sing to the moon.

I turn the lights out and each person lights a candle and we gather close together in the backyard and we're all in white and we all look up. The full moon up there in the dark night sky, a bright silver ball. The night is clear and warm, and the moon feels close, how we can see that it's a ball hanging up there, the craters on its surface. The way it shines is the way we all shine when we know we're beheld.

Blue moon

You saw me standing alone
.

VOICES RISING TOGETHER
in song. It can get me every time. All of a sudden, my body feels the bodies close around me. My birthday, my friends, my students, this new world in Portland, Oregon, the shine up there shining just for me. The breath I take is another new breath, a breath without the constant fear.

I heard somebody whisper please adore me

And when I looked the moon had turned to gold
.

It's on the refrain that I look around at the group of us. Mortals singing at the moon. We're all children, really. No wonder people sing to feel united. Each one of us, alone in our body, gives voice to a sound that goes up and out into the world. Our voice is joined by other voices, and by some miracle, what joins our voices out there dives down into our throats back into our hearts.

Then I hear it. One voice I can hear above the rest. It's not a strong singing voice. There's something fragile about it, yet clear, determined.

Ruth Dearden, a candle under her chin, her big plastic glasses. All the chiffon tufts of her dress torn off. Her head is tilted up. The way she's looking at the moon, somehow you just know.

All her dreams are going to come true.

      
14.

Father

THE CAR I RENT IN BOISE IS A GRAY CHEVROLET ASTRO
. I stop off at their houses, but Reuben and Sal and Gary are still in Atlanta. On I-84 it's the Mountain Home desert. All the windows are open and my elbow's out the window. August in Idaho. It's mid-day and my shirt's off. No shoes, my baggy cutoffs, my bare legs, bare feet. Wind blowing through the Astro and the radio cranked up high, I'm alone singing loud to the golden oldies the one hundred and fifty-four miles to Jerome.

God, I miss Hank.

Tony would've loved Idaho.

MY FATHER'S HOUSE
is set a ways off from the highway. The country mailbox Grunewald with the red metal flag, set on a railroad tie stuck in the ground in the gravel right where the driveway intersects with the highway. My mother used to back her Buick out of the garage, pull it up back to behind the house, just to where the Buick's nose was even with the board fence, then hit the gas. She'd hit sixty before she got to the mailbox and still have time to stop. The distance less than one city block from starting line to finish.

The house is a tile-roof red-brick house with a picture window. My father built the house for my mother when they sold the farm. This new house is almost identical to the house I was raised in. The same three-bedroom ranchburger. Same kitchen, same vaulted-ceiling living room with used-brick walls and
exposed beams, the same front porch with a loveseat for two that is a swing. Identical to the old house, almost. It's what is not identical that makes me crazy.

My mother's not in it. She's dead.

I pull the Astro to into the driveway and park next to my father's red Chevy pickup. The sun is late afternoon hot and bouncing bright off the cement driveway and the white vinyl garage doors.

The car engine shut off, the engine still ticking. This is always the point, Christmas or summer or whenever the visit, just as we're about to get out of the car, just before we enter into the portal of the family house, is when my sister Margaret always said it:
Cowboy up, Ben
.

Immediately, that day getting out of the Astro, I have a quick moment of shame and I want to cover my naked chest and arms, my naked legs, my bare feet. According to father, a man is always in his boots, in his Levi's. Only long-sleeved shirts that you can roll to the elbow. And a hat. A man always wears his hat.

Fuck him and his hat. I'm bare-headed, barefoot, half-naked, and he's almost dead. I am too. Still got three and a half years. But I don't know it. Don't want to know it.

My feet are hot on the cement. I do a back stretch and when I lean forward I fart. Think of Hank. Think of my father. Both of them big on farting.

On the sidewalk, just below the mudroom door, is the old chain-linked metal mat you scrape your boots off on that's been in front of the mud room door since I've had a memory. The metal presses little squares into the bottoms of my feet. The mudroom door is unlocked. Up the four steps, the kitchen door is unlocked too.

The silent way that door opens. Not like the creak of the door of the first house. I call out hello, but the house is silent the way only the second house can be silent. More than silent. The way nothing arrives at the ear. This second house, just empty,
because it's trying to be the other house, and it will never be the other house, plus she died in this house.

Only the grandfather clock in the living room. That tic tic tic. At a quarter past, the chime, so German, and at the half-hour, and at quarter 'til, and then on the hour the big to-do with the chimes and the cuckoo. Like to drive you fucking nuts.

But it's not just that my mother isn't here.

The first house he built her had a promise. Something about that first house – how it expanded out past the green lawn she kept so perfect, past the log pole fence I built her, past the Four o'Clocks and the Austrian Copper rose, to the Tyhee Road, and from there through the fertile valley into town and from there on out it was the world.

This second house was a ruse. A stage set of the first house built on a hill in the desert with a wind break of half-dead pines and scrub Russian olives. Something to keep her going, to stop her spine from bending completely forward at the waist. To stop the psoriasis and her hair from falling out. Something to get her to start baking apple pies again, au gratin potatoes again, chocolate cakes, carrot pudding, start playing her piano again – anything to bring her back. But the day she walked into that new house – at the very place my bare feet are standing that day – when the door closed behind her, she knew she'd never leave it. At that moment, one step in, so much like the old house but not the old house at all, this new house was a prison and she fell and broke her ankle.

The linoleum is cool under my feet. The same pattern as the old linoleum. The countertops the same Formica green. The white cupboards. The same early American drawer pulls. The wallpaper with rows of yellow roses. But this kitchen is the mausoleum of the old kitchen. Not even a ghost of live food. Feels like you're standing in a large hallway that happens to have a refrigerator and a stove and a sink in it. Everything so clean, so antiseptic the way she'd have kept it. My father takes care that everything stays exactly the way she'd have kept it – the kitchen
table with the grapes and apples and pears oilcloth tablecloth, the salt and pepper shakers that look like milk cans in the center of the table, the lamp you can pull down so the bright light isn't in your eyes, the green wall telephone, the fancy pen with the feather on it on the built-in table under the green wall phone. On the wall next to the phone, the faux-weathered wood sign that says:
Vee get too soon alt and too late schmardt
.

That day when I walk into the bathroom, there they are, the set of forest green bath towels and hand towels and washrags one Christmas I bought my mother at Bloomingdales monogrammed
J&M
. The set of towels she only hangs out for company. That is, for me. The bath towels hang perfectly lined on the rack above the bathtub. The hand towels hanging perfectly lined next to the sink. The forest green washrags with the monogrammed
J&M
folded over each towel. The forest green toilet seat cover, the green rug on the floor around the toilet.

For a moment, I wonder if he's hung the towels out there for me. But
he's
had a stroke.
He
is almost dead. Maybe already dead. How could he possibly think to hang the Forest Green Monogrammed Bloomingdale Towels out. Maybe since she'd died, my mother was the company he'd put the towels out for.

Probably it was my sister. Above the toilet is a blue and white ceramic mother duck with three blue and white little ducks swimming behind. They're all swimming with their beaks lined up with their mother's in a straight line – then there's the odd duck, the black duck with his bill tipped down. Always been an odd duck.

In their Dusty Rose bedroom on the same carpet but different, mother's worn blue fuzzy slippers next to her side of the bed, side by side exactly, her rosary with the beads that glow in the dark on the bedpost. Her folded jeans on the chair. The blue cotton blouse. On the wall, the paintings of The Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the woven palm fronds from Palm Sunday stuck into each frame. The round mirror of my mother's vanity. The infant I was from my crib who stared into
that mirror. Inside that mirror, the bedroom reflected, somehow in there is the most terrifying of all.

The last time I'd seen my mother was when I'd visited in 1988. I was studying at Columbia and working at Café Un Deux Trois. One evening, after supper and apple pie and ice cream, my mother and I sat on the brown davenport and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. She'd fluffed up her hair and wore her Orange Exotica lipstick. My father sat at the kitchen table, his back to us, the lamp pulled down, that bright light onto his big hairy hand, onto the purple grapes and the red apples and the yellow pears on the oilcloth tablecloth, onto the pages of the
Treasure Valley News
, my father a looming torpor of silence, stirring his tea with three teaspoons of sugar with his teaspoon – while I was with her in the living room, her hero. Full of romantic stories of famous people and faraway places. Frank Sinatra ordering a Manhattan, Ingrid Bergman's daughter spilling ketchup on her blouse. When I tell my mother that Tony Bennett's toupée looks like a rug on his head, she laughs 'til her gums show.

The next morning is the morning I have to leave. In the kitchen, I've just shook hands with my father and am hugging my sister, when over her shoulder I see my mother. She's in the hallway motioning with her finger for me to come with her.

In the bathroom, mother locks the door behind us. Surrounded by the Forest Green Monogrammed Bloomingdale
J&M
towels, the black ceramic odd black duck, my mother puts her hand around my arm, her slick palm, and squeezes. Her almond-shaped hazel eyes.

BOOK: I Loved You More
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