Into the Great Wide Open (13 page)

Don’t answer! Kenny wanted to say. Trick question! He’s trying to get you out here in the open, trying to get you to expose yourself.

“I want to,” Ray said; and they both braced themselves, waiting for it. The Clarks were like little chickens who don’t know that a tornado is coming. They looked bright, expectant.

“I don’t see how I can say no,” Kenny’s father said. They waited for the rest of it; but there wasn’t any more.

“That’s wonderful,” said Mrs. Clark.

“I’ll give you a plane ticket,” his father said to Ray. “If everything’s OK in a year, you can cash it in. Just so you can come back if you feel like it.”

“Good idea,” said Mr. Clark. The suntanned sailor, decisive. “This is the trip of a lifetime,” he said. Ray was twelve then, still a little boy.

“And when you get there, then what happens?” asked Mr. Kolodny.

“We were there two years ago,” Mrs. Clark said. “We’re consultants.”

“There isn’t any problem with the work situation, as far as visas and all that.”

“Do you have any plans of returning?” Kenny’s father asked.

“Not
plans
, exactly,” said Mr. Clark.

“We’re terrible gypsies,” said Mrs. Clark.

Kenny’s father closed his eyes. But again it didn’t come; the anger, the explosion. Kept it bottled up inside himself until the Clarks were gone, and then just drank it down. He let his son go, just like that.

He wouldn’t let Kenny go as easily.

Kenny closed his eyes. That once, his father forgot himself long enough to let Ray escape; if he had escaped, if he ever would. Kenny longed for a joint, a drink, a fuck. The smell of the fried chicken, sound of the television drowning out the hospital intercom. This was what he could find to praise: my father forgot himself once.

A green-suited doctor stood in the doorway. “Mr. Kolodny?” he called out; and Kenny thought no, my father’s in surgery. Then realized that the doctor was calling for
him
.

Looking back, Kenny can never make it add up; when certain things happened, how they pressed against one another. He remembers a gray screen of days, punctuated and pierced by a string of bright moments. These bright moments don’t seem to have any orderly relationship to one another in time, or in consequence; they have the brilliance and solidity of dreams, they seem
exactly right
and undeniable without making sense. That first weekend at the beach, for instance: Kenny knows there were two days but he remembers it as one; he can’t date his first touching Junie to the first night or the second. Someday he’s going to sit down with all the evidence, look up the ice storm in a newspaper to find out the date. He’s still got his father’s hospital records, or somebody does. If he could only find enough real dates, he could connect the dots, separate the weeks and
months into their orderly channels, little squares on the calendar …

Thanksgiving disappeared entirely, and Halloween. Where was he? The year before Junie, the height of his fame as a charity case, Kenny ate Thanksgiving dinner at three different houses, ate more or less continuously from noon till ten at night. The trick was to eat sparingly, to let the metabolism keep pace, and plenty of dope between meals. Pumpkin pie! Dressing! Gravy! The memory makes him queasy now, but it was a kind of feat, a triumph.

His father had his stroke in what seemed like late October. But when he went to Wentworth’s house, where they had offered to keep him, the Christmas decorations were already up. He can remember this precisely: snow in the yard and a green wreath on the red door. In the living room, a small dark fir with a few ornaments, wooden angels from Mexico and a sparse string of tiny white lights that didn’t blink. The cold outside and the smell of dinner, which the Wentworths had already eaten. A month was missing somewhere. And even if Kenny goes back and draws the lines, he knows that memory will sprawl across them again, bleeding like ink on a wet page.

Wentworth’s mother said, “I’m so sorry. Mike told us about your father. Of course you’re welcome to stay.”

“Thank you,” Kenny said.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Mr. Wentworth said; looking genuine, disturbed. It tolls for thee, Kenny thought. Any middle-aged man would think so, and Wentworth’s father was no slouch in the alcohol department either, though not in a class with Kenny’s father.

Wentworth himself came down the stairs yawning and looked at Kenny. “Come on up,” he said, without a trace of welcome in his voice.

Kenny shrugged. Wentworth’s mom gave him an apologetic half smile and Kenny toted his duffel bag upstairs. Wentworth stopped on the second floor, where his parents slept, though his own bedroom and the other spare were out of harm’s way at the top of the
house. “I was thinking,” Wentworth said. “This would probably be OK, right?”

“What’s the matter?” Kenny asked.

Wentworth wasn’t giving him anything, eyes blank. “This is more convenient for the bathroom,” he said. “You don’t have to walk all the way downstairs.”

“What the fuck is your deal?” Kenny said. “You don’t want me to stay here, that’s fine.”

“You don’t come around here,” Wentworth said. “I don’t see you at school, you haven’t got time for me. Then when you get into trouble the phone rings. I’m sorry, man, you hurt my feelings.”

All said in a sleepy monotone, like he was reciting the phone book. Kenny couldn’t think of what to say. He had never heard anyone talk about feelings, not a man, anyway, or a boy, or whatever Wentworth was. Kenny was the only one with feelings. He had left Wentworth behind like a discarded toy truck, while he went charging off into Junie-world.

“Shit, man,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s OK,” Wentworth said, in the affectless monotone. “You want to stay down here or what?”

“I’d just as soon stay upstairs, if that’s OK.”

“That’s fine,” Wentworth said. “Whatever. There’s sheets on the bed, I think.”

Kenny dumped his duffel bag in the spare room, one dim bulb. It had once been Wentworth’s sister’s room, full of pink and riding trophies. All the children that were gone, all the rooms that were waiting for them to come back, but they’d never come back. They were gone to adult-world now and the rooms were left behind. Whose Abba posters were these? The teddy bears stared down from the window ledge, abandoned. Something manufactured, something fake in all these souvenirs of childhood. Childhood was a thing you bought; Kenny’s parents couldn’t afford one. Something like that.
Still the little girl was gone, some new adult sprung up to take her place. He twisted one up, and smoked it with Wentworth, leaning out the attic window so the smoke wouldn’t leak back into the house. Then watched
Mission: Impossible
.

Lying in the darkness Kenny remembered what it was like to come inside her. My father is sick, he reminded himself, my father is in the hospital. I have neglected my friends. It didn’t matter. He closed his eyes and saw her lying in her nun’s cell of a room: naked on the narrow bed, waiting for him; or propped up on one elbow, like she was offering herself to him. His dick was hard just thinking about her. It was only the night before, he thought, and this was wrong again—too much had happened, she was too far away. He counted the hours again and remembered that he had spent the night before in an armchair in the waiting room, slept for some amount of time between television accidents and bawling children. An afternoon, an evening, a night, a morning, an afternoon. These measurements seemed old, archaic when they referred to hours spent inside a hospital, hours without oxygen, sunlight, or rest. His father was still there, captive. Kenny tried to remember.

But there was Junie, waiting for him in the dark behind his eyes, the pink darkness of the girl’s room.
Pink:
the blood smeared on the whiteness of her thigh. What was it like to lead a girl’s life? You’ll never know, the ponies answered. You can’t imagine, said the dolls.

Jane Mrs. Dr. Williamson was fussing with a chair, gluing a spreader back between two wobbly legs, on the floor of her basement sewing room. She also wanted to take a look at the upholstery. It was almost time to re-cover the seats, and she wanted to have a look. Curator of the house, Kenny thought; caretaker. He was being spoken to. Not
that he was in trouble, just that he was getting the treatment, the professional attention.

“I spoke to Dr. Nguyen, at General?” she said. She was holding a drill bit in one corner of her mouth, like a cigarette. “He was the lead doctor in the team that operated on your father.”

“I remember him,” Kenny said.

“What’s he like?”

“I don’t know,” Kenny said, trying to remember: a deadpan, indifferent face, a feeling of skepticism toward Kenny, not quite dislike. “He’s a young guy,” Kenny offered.

“Did he seem bright?”

“I couldn’t tell,” Kenny said.

“He seemed fine on the phone,” Jane Mrs. Dr. Williamson said. “It seemed as if he knew what he was doing.”

“They put on a white coat, they’re all the same to me. I can’t tell the difference between a good doctor and a bad doctor.”

She took the drill bit out of her mouth and scolded him. “Your father’s alive,” she said. “That makes him a good doctor, maybe a very good one.”

She turned back to her chair, gave him time for this to sink in. He was supposed to be thinking about peril, about gratitude to doctors and taking better care of his health. He was not supposed to be noticing her ass. But she was wearing sweatpants, a t-shirt, leaning away from him at a certain angle; she looked like Junie, but more compact, like somebody had taken Junie’s length and compressed her down by about six inches. Her mother had big sex advertisements, a round ass and big breasts.
Voluptuous
, Junie would say.
Epicurean
. She had inherited this from her mother: they both distrusted the sexual aspect of their bodies, hid them in loose clothing.

“It’s going to be six weeks at least,” Jane Mrs. Dr. Williamson said. “Nguyen said it was touch and go, he still isn’t sure how much recovery there’s going to be in terms of movement.”

“He said there’s almost always something.”

“But how is he now?”

“He can’t talk,” Kenny said. “He can’t move much at all on the left side of his body, but that’s the part that the doctor said would be most likely to improve.”

“He doesn’t really know,” she said. “I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t hope. But every stroke, every instance of paralysis, is different.”

“That’s what Nguyen said.” And in the following silence he saw the maimed King, gray against the white of the hospital sheets, an abject thing. Sorrow: Kenny took the feeling apart, found different pieces. First was ordinary pity, the kind you feel for anyone broken, a weak, official feeling. Next was self-pity, Poor Kenny, O what will become of him? Another weak emotion. It had already happened to Kenny, most of it, whatever it was. The strong feeling at the center was this: a memory or an imagination of a memory of a time of happiness, a time when Kenny and his father and his brother and even his mother were together and doing things—a trip to the beach, maybe, a backyard barbecue. (How much of this was Kenny’s own?—and how much advertising, happy-family propaganda …) He felt nostalgia without knowing if the place he felt homesick for had ever existed. His father was sick, would never be the same. His father was hardened into his own life, and now there was no way back. He remembered the pink bedroom: no way back to a boy’s life, either, no way to understand it.

“It’s weird,” he said; and he wanted to shut up. He was having feelings. But that’s what he was in the cave for, to show his feelings. It was
healthy
. He said, “It’s hard to see him lying there,” hoping this would pass inspection.

But Junie’s mother wanted more. “He might be paralyzed for good,” she said. “I’m not trying to rub your nose in it.”

“No.”

“But you need to think about it,” she said. She put the chair down, turned to face him, turned the big lights of her understanding on him. “You need to feel your way into this,” she said. “I mean, what’s going on with you? How are you doing? What are you going to do with yourself, Kenny?”

He felt guilty, frozen, caught in the lights. She was asking him to manufacture feelings for her; asking him to counterfeit. Then anger started to rise in him. He is my father, Kenny wanted to say; seeing a picture, lit by flash, of his father lying in his own puke between toilet bowl and tub, the peach-and-white tile floor. My father, nevertheless.

“You need to get ready,” Junie’s mother was saying. “This could be a hard few months to get through.”

And talking about it will make it easier? Talking to you? Kenny said nothing. A vision formed in his mind, his father’s face on the hospital pillow: the King is dead, long live the King! The war was over, and Kenny had somehow won.

“I’m going to take care of him,” Kenny said. “Take care of both of us, I guess.”

“How are you going to do that? Where’s the money going to come from, for one thing?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Kenny said. “I mean, I know he’s got something coming in from work, some kind of sick leave or something besides the insurance. I’ll find out.”

“That’s a big project, taking care of him.”

“There’s nobody else to do it.”

She seemed to be surprised to hear this; she turned back to her work, looking for another plan, apparently. Kenny couldn’t figure out what the first one was. He didn’t know if there was some scheme or aim she had in mind for him, or whether this was just a ritual of concern; the queen of practical emotions, exacting her tribute. He said, “I have to live anyway.”

She went on working. She said, “They have nursing homes, that
kind of thing. They could take care of him. You could take care of yourself.”

I have a parent in cold storage already. He didn’t say it.

“I’m glad to see it, you and Junie,” she said, “but my gosh, you’re a glum pair! I realize, these are real problems, I’m not trying to make light.” She didn’t look at him; unpinned the seat cushion from the chair, and held it in the air in front of her, surveying it from different angles. She pointed it toward Kenny, a side that had been hidden from the sun for twenty years or so, that had kept its color while the rest had faded. “That’s beautiful fabric, isn’t it?” she asked. “That’s a beautiful color.”