Labor Day (3 page)

The class folded after that one session, but Evelyn and my mother got to be friends. She’d bring Barry over a lot in his oversized stroller, and my mother would make a pot of coffee, and Evelyn would park Barry on the back porch and my mother would tell me to play with him, while Evelyn talked and smoked
cigarettes, and my mother listened. Every now and then I’d hear some phrase like
delinquent child support
or
face his responsibilities
or
my cross to bear
or
deadbeat bum—
this was Evelyn talking, never my mother—but mostly I learned to tune the whole thing out.

I tried to think up things Barry could do, games that might interest him, but this was a challenge. One time when I was really bored, I hit on the idea of talking to him in a made-up language—just sounds and noises, along the lines of the ones he made himself now and then. I parked myself in front of his stroller and talked to him that way, using hand gestures, as if I was telling this elaborate story.

This seemed to get Barry excited. At least, he responded by making more sounds than before. He was hooting and yelling, and waving his arms more wildly than normal, which caused my mother and Evelyn to come out on the porch, checking things out.

What’s going on here? Evelyn said. From the look on her face, I knew she wasn’t happy. She had rushed over to where Barry’s wheelchair was parked, and she was smoothing his hair down.

I can’t believe you’d let your son make fun of Barry like this, Evelyn told my mother. She was packing up Barry’s stuff, collecting her cigarettes. I thought you were the one person who understood, she said.

They were just playing, my mother said. No harm done. Henry’s a kind person, really.

But Evelyn and Barry were already out the door.

After that, we hardly ever saw the two of them anymore, which wasn’t such a loss in my opinion, except that I knew how lonely my mother was for a friend. After Evelyn, there was nobody.

One time a kid in my class, Ryan, invited me for a sleepover. He was new in town and hadn’t figured out yet that I wasn’t somebody people had over to their houses, so I said yes. When his dad came to pick me up, I was all ready for a quick getaway, with my toothbrush and my underwear for the next day in a grocery bag.

I think I should introduce myself to your parents first, Ryan’s dad said, when I started getting in the car. So they won’t worry.

Parent, I said. It’s just my mom. And she’s OK about this already.

I’ll just duck my head in and say hi, he said.

I don’t know what she said, but when he came back out, he looked like he felt sorry for me.

You can come over to our house anytime, son, he said to me. But that was the only time I ever did.

S
O IT WAS A BIG DEAL
, bringing Frank home in the car with us this way. He was probably the first person we’d had over in a year. Possibly two.

You’ll have to excuse the mess, my mother said, as we pulled into the driveway. We’ve been busy.

I looked at her. Busy with what?

She swung open the door. Joe the hamster was spinning in his wheel. On the kitchen table, a newspaper from several weeks back. Post-it notes taped to the furniture with Spanish words for things written in Sharpie:
Mesa. Silla. Agua. Basura
. Along with teaching herself the dulcimer, learning Spanish had been one of my mother’s projects planned to occupy us over the summer.
She had started out back in June playing the tapes she got from the library.
¿Dónde está el baño? ¿Cuánto cuesta el hotel?

The tapes were intended for travelers. What’s the point of this? I had asked her, wishing we could just turn on the radio, listen to music, instead. We weren’t going to any Spanish-speaking country that I knew of. Just getting to the supermarket every six weeks or so was an accomplishment.

You never know what opportunities might lie ahead, she said.

Now it turned out there was another way for new things to happen. You didn’t have to go someplace for the adventure. The adventure came to you.

Inside our kitchen now, with its hopeful yellow walls and its one remaining working lightbulb, and last year’s magic ceramic seed-growing animal, a pig, whose crop of green sprouts had long since turned brown and dried up.

Frank looked around slowly. He took in the room as if there was nothing unusual about coming into a kitchen in which a stack of fifty or sixty cans of Campbell’s tomato soup lined one wall, like a supermarket display in a ghost town, alongside an equally tall stack of boxes containing elbow macaroni, and jars of peanut butter, and bags of raisins. The footprints my mother had painted on the floor from last summer’s project of teaching me how to fox-trot and do the two-step were still visible. The idea was for me to put my feet over the foot patterns she’d stenciled on the floor, while she counted out the beats as my partner.

It’s a great thing when a man knows how to dance, she said. When a man can dance, the world is his oyster.

Nice place, Frank said. Homey. Mind if I sit down at the
mesa
?

What do you take in your coffee? she asked. She took hers black. Sometimes it seemed as if this was all she lived on. The soup and noodles were bought with me in mind.

Frank studied the headline on the newspaper that sat there, though it was several weeks old. Nobody seemed in a rush to say anything more then, so I thought I’d break the ice.

How did you hurt your leg? I asked him. There was also the question of what happened to his head, but I thought I’d take things one at a time.

I’m going to be straight with you here, Henry, he said. I was surprised he’d taken in my name. To my mother he said, Cream and sugar, thanks, Adele.

Her back was to the two of us, counting out the scoops. He appeared to be speaking to me, or about to, but his eyes were on my mother, and for the first time I could imagine how a person who wasn’t her son might see her.

Your mom looks like Ginger on that show on Nickelodeon,
Gilligan’s Island,
a girl, Rachel, told me one time. This was in fifth grade, when my mother had put in a rare appearance at my school to watch a production of
Rip Van Winkle
where I played Rip. Rachel had put forward the theory that maybe my mother actually was the actress who played Ginger, and we were living here in this town so she could escape her fans, and the stresses of Hollywood.

At the time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to discourage this theory. It seemed like a better reason than the real one for why my mother hardly ever went anyplace. Whatever the real reason was for that.

Even though she was a mother—not just
a
mother but
my
mother—and what she had on was an old skirt and a leotard she’d had for a million years, I could see now how a person might think she was good-looking. More than that. Most people’s mothers you saw at school, parked outside at three o’clock to pick up their kids or running in to bring the homework they’d forgotten, had lost their shape somewhere along the line, from having babies probably. This had happened to my dad’s wife,
Marjorie, even though, as my mother always pointed out, she was a younger woman.

My mother still had her figure. I knew from one time when she’d tried them on for me that my mother still fit in her old dancing outfits, and though the only place she danced now was our kitchen, she still had dancer’s legs. Now Frank was looking at them.

I’m not going to lie to you, he said, again, the words coming out slowly, as his eyes took her in. She was filling the pot on the Mr. Coffee with water now. Maybe she knew he was watching. She was taking her time.

For a minute then, Frank seemed not to be in the room at all, but someplace far away. To look at him, you might think he was watching a movie projected on a screen located somewhere in the vicinity of our refrigerator, that still displayed the faded photocopy of my African pen pal, Arak, held up by a couple of magnets with calendars on them of years that were over. Frank’s eyes were fixed on some spot in outer space was how it seemed for a moment then, instead of what was there in the room, which was just me, at the table, flipping through my comic book, and my mother, making the coffee.

I hurt my leg, he said—my leg, and my head—from jumping out a second-floor window at a hospital they’d taken me to get my appendix out.

At the prison, he said. That’s how I got out.

Some people make all these explanations first when they give you the answer to a question that might not reflect so well on them (a question like, where do you work, and the answer is McDonald’s, only first they say something like I’m really an actor or I’m actually applying to medical school soon; or they try to make the facts seem different from how they really are, like saying I’m in sales when what they mean is, they’re one of those people who calls you up on the phone
trying to get you to sign up for an introductory subscription to the newspaper).

Not Frank, when he told us the news. The state penitentiary, over in Stinchfield, he said. He lifted up his shirt then, to reveal a third wound that you wouldn’t have known about otherwise, though this one was bandaged. The place where they had removed his appendix. Recently, from the looks of it.

My mother turned around to face him. She was holding the coffeepot in one hand and a mug in the other. She poured a thin stream of coffee into it. She set the powdered milk on the table, and the sugar.

We don’t have cream, she said.

No worries, he told her.

You escaped? I asked him. So now the police are looking for you? I was scared, but also excited. I knew that finally, something was going to happen in our life. Could be bad, could be terrible. One thing was for certain: it would be different.

I would have gotten farther, he said, except for the damn leg. I couldn’t run. Someone had spotted me and they were closing in when I ducked in that store I found you at. That’s where they lost my trail, out in the parking lot.

Frank was scooping the sugar into his coffee now. Three spoonfuls. I’d be grateful if you’d let me sit here awhile, he said. It would be hard going back out there right now. I did some damage when I landed.

This was one thing the two of them could agree on—my mother and Frank: that it was hard going out into the world.

I wouldn’t ask anything of you, he said. I’d try to help out. I never intentionally hurt anyone in my life.

You can stay here awhile, my mother said. I just can’t let anything happen to Henry.

The boy has never been in better hands, Frank told her.

CHAPTER 3

M
Y MOTHER WAS A GOOD DANCER
. More than that. The way she danced, she could have been in a movie, if they still made movies where people did that kind of dancing, which they didn’t. But we had videos of a few of them, and she knew some of the routines.
Singin’ in the Rain,
the part where the man twirls around a lamppost from being in love, and the girl’s wearing a raincoat. My mother did that number one time, in the middle of Boston, back when we still went places sometimes. She took me to the science museum, and just when we got out it started to pour and there was this lamppost, and she just started dancing. Later, when she did things like that, I’d feel embarrassed. Back then, I was just proud.

Dancing was how she met my father. Whatever else she had to say about him, she told me the man knew how to move a woman around the dance floor, which meant a lot in her book.
I couldn’t remember all that much about times my parents were still together, but I could remember the dancing part, and young as I was I understood they were the best.

Some men just set their hand on your shoulder or against the small of your back, she said. The good ones know, there has to be strong pressure there. Something to push back against.

How to hold your partner when ballroom dancing was only one of the things my mother had a strong opinion about. She also believed that microwave ovens gave you cancer and sterility, which was why—though we had one—she made me promise I’d hold a cookbook over my crotch if I was ever in the kitchen at my father’s house when Marjorie was heating something up.

One time she had a dream that a freak tsunami was going to hit the state of Florida shortly, which was clear evidence that I should not go on the Disney trip with my father and Marjorie—never mind the fact that Orlando was situated inland. She decided that our next-door neighbor, Ellen Farnsworth, had been enlisted by my father to collect information to support his custody case. How else could you explain the fact that one day after my father had called up to demand that my mother take me to Little League tryouts, Mrs. Farnsworth had stopped over to ask if I wanted a ride. Why else would she come over to ask if we had an extra egg, with the excuse that she’d run out in the middle of making chocolate chip cookies? She just wanted to check up on us, my mother said. Gather incriminating information.

I wouldn’t put it past that woman to have bugged our house, she said. They make microphones so small now, there could be one hidden in this saltshaker.

Hello, Ellen, she called out, over the salt, her voice almost musical. There had been a time when I was in awe of how she knew things like this, and how, once she found them out, she
knew just what to do about them. I didn’t feel that way anymore.

As for the Little League tryouts: Little League was just one of those organizations where they squelch children’s creativity by making them follow all these rules, my mother said.

Like how they only let people get three strikes? I asked her. Like how the team with the most runs wins?

I was being a wise guy of course. I hated baseball, but sometimes I also hated how my mother looked at everything other people did, looking for the reason it wouldn’t be our kind of thing. And why they weren’t our kind of people.

What is it with that woman, anyway? she said, right after Mrs. Farnsworth had her fourth child. Every time I turn around she’s having another baby.