Labor Day (24 page)

With my father, those first few weeks after I moved back into our old house, I got the feeling he didn’t know what to say to me, and so, more often than not, he said nothing. I knew that papers had been filed, statements made to the court, concerning my mother’s questionable parenting choices, as revealed by recent events, but to his credit he didn’t say a word about any of that to me. The newspapers had said it all anyway.

A few weeks after I moved in with my father and Marjo
rie—around the time I chose not to try out for either lacrosse or soccer—my father brought up the idea of taking a bike ride together. In some households—I can’t say
families,
because I didn’t consider us to be one—this might not have seemed like such a big deal, except that in the past, he’d never seemed to acknowledge the existence of any athletic activity in which no score was involved, no trophies awarded, no winners or losers identified.

When I reminded him my bike had been out of commission for almost two years, he suggested it was time to buy me a new one—a mountain bike, twenty-one speeds. And a bike for himself. That weekend, the two of us drove to Vermont—this being the time of year when fall foliage was particularly great—and rode through a bunch of towns together, staying in a motel outside of Saxons River. One good thing about riding a bicycle: you don’t do all that much talking when you’re riding one. Especially on those long Vermont hills.

That night, though, we went out to a diner where they had a prime rib special. For most of the meal, we sat in near silence. But around the time the waitress brought his coffee, something seemed to change in my father. Who he seemed like, in a funny way, was Frank, back at my mother’s house, as the police cars were closing in, with the helicopter overhead, the bullhorns blaring. He was like a man who knew he was running out of time, and it was now or never. A little like Frank, he surrendered then.

What he did actually was he got on a subject we had generally avoided up until then, my mother. Not the part about her not getting a real job, for once, or whether she was mentally stable enough to take care of me, perhaps because from the looks of things it had already been established, she wasn’t. It was their early days together that he spoke of.

You know she was a terrific woman, he said. Funny. Beautiful. You never saw anyone dance like her, north of the Broadway stage.

I just sat there, eating my rice pudding. Picking out the raisins, actually. I didn’t look at him, but I was listening.

That trip we made to California was one of the best times I ever had, he told me. We had so little money, we slept in the car, mostly. But there was this one town we passed through, in Nebraska, where we got a motel room with a kitchenette, and we made spaghetti on the hot plate. We didn’t know a thing about Hollywood was the truth. We were small-town people. But back in her waitress days she’d waited on a woman one time who was one of the June Taylor dancers on Jackie Gleason, who had written down her number and told Adele to look her up if she was ever in L.A. That’s what we were going to do: call the June Taylor dancer. Only when we did that, her son answered the phone. She was in a nursing home by then. Senile, basically. You know what your mother did? We went to visit her. She brought cookies.

I did look up from my bowl then. When I did, his face looked different. I had never thought I looked anything like him—had even wondered, once (in fact, this was a topic of speculation raised by Eleanor), if he was really my father at all, we seemed so different from each other. And he, such an unlikely person to have married my mother. But looking across the diner booth now at this pale, slightly overweight man with his thinning hair and the newly purchased spandex bicycle shirt he’d probably never wear again, I recognized, weirdly, something familiar. I could imagine him being young. I imagined him as that young man my mother had described, who knew just how much pressure to apply to a woman’s back as he moved her across the dance floor, the crazy young man she had trusted to keep her
from falling when she executed her three-hundred-and-sixty-degree flip in her red underwear. I could see my own face in his, actually. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes looked moist.

It was losing those babies that did her in, he said. The last one. She never could get over that.

There was still pudding in my bowl, but I had stopped eating now. My father hadn’t touched his coffee either.

A better man might have stayed around to help her through it, he said. But after a while, I couldn’t handle all that sadness. I wanted a regular life. I cut out, basically.

And then Marjorie and I had Chloe. It wasn’t as if doing that erased what happened before, but it was easier for me, not to think about it. Where for your mother, the story never went away.

This was as much as he said about it, and we didn’t revisit the topic again. He paid the bill, and we went back to our motel room. The next morning we rode a little more, but I was realizing by then how totally unnatural a thing it was for my father to be moving along the hills of Vermont by any means other than a minivan. After a couple of hours, when I suggested we call it a day, he didn’t argue. On the way home, I slept, mostly.

I
STAYED AT MY FATHER’S HOUSE
for most of that seventh-grade year. One good thing: because I was living with my father and Marjorie, there seemed no need to continue our excruciating tradition of Saturday night dinners at Friendly’s. Meals at the house were easier. The television set stayed on, for one thing.

You might have thought my mother would have lobbied hard for visits, but the opposite happened, for a while anyway. She seemed to discourage my coming over, and when I stopped by on the new bike (delivering groceries, and library books, and myself), she would seem busy and distracted.

She had calls to make, she said. Vitamin customers. There were all these chores to be done. She was vague about what the chores could be in a house with no furniture to dust or rugs to vacuum, where no cooking happened, no visitors came by.

She was reading a lot, she said, and it was true. There were books piled up the way the Campbell’s soup used to be. Books about unlikely topics: forestry and animal husbandry, chickens, wildflowers, raised-bed gardening, though our yard remained as bare as ever. Her favorite book, which seemed to be on the kitchen table every time I came by, was one volume, published in the fifties, by a couple named Helen and Scott Nearing, called
Living the Good Life
—about their experiences, leaving their jobs and home in someplace like Connecticut and moving to rural Maine, where they had grown all their own food and lived without electricity or telephone. In the photographs illustrating the book, Scott Nearing was always pictured wearing overalls or worn-looking blue jeans—a man no longer even middle-aged, bent over a hoe, turning the soil over; his wife in her plaid shirt, hoeing alongside him.

I think my mother must have had that book memorized, she read it so often. All those two had was each other, she said. That was enough.

Maybe there was some guilt involved—the feeling that my mother needed me, and my father didn’t—that brought me to my decision, but the truth is, I think I needed my mother. I missed our conversations over dinner, and the way—unlike Marjorie, who seemed to use a whole other vocal register when talking with anybody under twenty-one years old—she never spoke with me any differently than she would to a person her own age. Though with a few exceptions—the occasional door-to-door solicitor, her MegaMite customers, and the oil-delivery man—the only person she spoke with was me.

By the following spring, when I told my father I wanted to go back and live at my mother’s house, he didn’t argue. The next day, I moved back into our old place.

I tried out for the baseball team. They put me in right field. One time, when we were playing the team Richard was on, I caught a long fly ball he hit, that everyone expected to be a triple. Every time I came up to bat, I had this ritual.
See the ball,
I said, too softly for even the catcher to hear. More often than you might think, I got a hit.

My mother and I lived, all my high school years, in a house without possessions, more or less. We had a few items of furniture left from that day we thought we were leaving forever, but except for the things we’d put in boxes in the car, we’d given away just about everything, and even of what we’d kept, intending to take it with us for our new life up north, we hardly took anything out of the boxes, besides the coffeemaker and a few items of clothing. Not my mother’s wardrobe of dancing outfits, or her amazing shoes and scarves, her fans, or the paintings that used to hang on our walls, or her dulcimer, or her tape player even, though eventually, when I started earning my own money, I bought a Walkman, so I could listen to my music.

The voices of Frank Sinatra and Joni Mitchell and (now I knew his name) Leonard Cohen were no longer heard in our house. No more
Guys and Dolls
sound track. Or any music. No music, no dancing.

At some point, after it was over, we made a trip to the Goodwill, where my mother bought back just enough plates and forks and cups for the two of us to have our meals, though when you eat frozen dinners and soup most of the time, you don’t need much in the way of dishes. In tenth grade, though, I took a home economics class—they had started opening these kinds
of courses up to boys by this point. I discovered I liked to cook, and for some reason, though my mother knew virtually nothing about cooking, I was good at it. One of my specialties, not learned in home economics, was pie.

For most of high school, my father and I continued our tradition of going out to dinner Saturday nights, though when my social life picked up, as it did eventually, we switched to weeknights, and to everyone’s relief, probably, Marjorie stopped accompanying us. I got along well enough with Richard, and I got to enjoy hanging out with my little sister, Chloe, on occasion, but restaurant nights were mostly just my father and me, and at my suggestion, we changed the venue from Friendly’s to a place a little outside of town called Acropolis that served Greek food, which was better, and once, when Marjorie was out of town visiting her sister, I even went over to their house and made a dish I’d seen in a magazine, chicken marsala.

One night, over spanakopita at Acropolis—under the influence of a couple of glasses of red wine—my father tackled the topic of sex, that had remained dormant, more or less, since his first early attempts to fill me in on the facts of life.

Everybody talks about all this crazy, wild passion, he said. That’s how it goes, in the songs. Your mother was like that. She was in love with love. She couldn’t do anything partway. She felt everything so deeply, it was like the world was too much for her. Any time she’d hear a story about some kid who had cancer, or an old man whose wife died, or his dog even, it was like it happened to her. It was like she was missing the outer layer of skin that allows people to get through the day without bleeding all the time. The world got to be too much for her.

Me, I’d just as soon stay a little bit numb, he said. Whatever it is I’m missing, that’s OK by me.

I
WAS GOING HOME FROM THE LIBRARY
one day—a place I hung out often, during the months I lived with my father and Marjorie. It was a holiday weekend—Columbus Day maybe, or more likely, Veterans Day. I remember the leaves were off the trees by this point, and it got dark early, so that by the time I’d return to the house for dinner, the lights would be on throughout the neighborhood. Riding my bike home—or, as I was that night, walking—I could look in the windows and see the people who lived inside, doing all the things people do in their houses. It was like moving through a museum with a whole row of brightly lit dioramas, labeled something like
How People Live
or
Families in America
. A woman chopping up vegetables at the sink. A man reading the newspaper. A couple of kids in an upstairs bedroom, playing Twister. A girl lying on her bed, talking on the phone.

There was an apartment building on this street—an old house that had been turned into condominiums, probably—where I always looked up. There was this one particular apartment whose windows I liked studying, where the family always seemed to be sitting down to dinner at just about the same hour every day, which happened to be when I was passing this particular corner. It was sort of a superstition with me, you might say, that if I saw the three of them—the father, the mother, and the little boy—gathered around the table, as I generally did, nothing terrible was going to happen that night. I think the person I was worried about not getting through the night, at that point, was my mother. Who would be sitting at her table alone right about then. Having her glass of wine, reading her
Good Life
book.

This family just always looked so happy and homey was the
thing. More than any of the other family dioramas in the
How People Live
museum, I wished this was the one I was coming home to. You couldn’t hear what the people were saying, naturally, but you didn’t have to, to know things were going well in that kitchen. The conversation probably wasn’t especially earth-shattering (
How was your day, honey? Fine, how about yours?
) but something about the feeling around that table—the soft yellow light, the nodding faces, the way the woman touched the man’s arm, and how they laughed when the little boy waved his spoon around—gave you the impression there was no place else they’d rather be at that moment, or anyone they’d rather be with than each other.

I guess maybe I’d forgotten where I was, and I was just standing there. It was a cold night—cold enough that I could see my breath, and see the breath of the person coming down the steps of the apartment building, with a little dog on a leash, so little she might have been walking a feather duster. Smaller than the smallest poodle, even.

Even before I recognized her face, I understood I knew the person walking the dog, I just didn’t know from where. All I could see was skinny legs under an oversize black coat, and high-heeled boots, which people didn’t usually wear in our town. Never, actually.