Make Me Work (17 page)

“Hello, Clayton,” she said.

“Hi, Mrs. V.,” he said. “My uncle has a car, but it's not here. He lives in Philadelphia. He's been visiting us. We would've called a cab to the train, but Gabriel said you were coming this way anyway.”

“It's fine, Clayton,” my mother said. “Where is he?”

Clayton affected great embarrassment, flapping his arms and covering his eyes. “Let me check on him,” he said, and ran down the overgrown slope beside the cinder cliff.

“I guess he stepped into the woods,” I said.

“What for?” my mother asked.

I looked up at the sky. “I guess to go to the bathroom, Mom.”

She lowered her eyes at the dashboard. “Oh, I see,” she said.

In a few minutes, Clayton and Luther clambered up the embankment. Luther was wearing the heavy brown tweed suit. It was the hottest day of the spring so far, probably eighty degrees. I couldn't imagine why Luther had chosen the winter clothes. Then I remembered: he was crazy. He carried the half-empty paper shopping bag and held himself elegantly erect.

“Mrs. V.,” said Clayton, “this is my Uncle Luther.”

“Pleased to meet you, Luther,” my mother said.

“Ma'am,” said Luther, taking off the brown fedora and bowing from the waist beside her driver's window.

Something I hadn't realized about Luther in the open air became intensely clear when we were all in the car. He smelled bad. He smelled, in fact, like an asylum patient, and there was no mistaking or ignoring it. My mother looked over at me in the passenger seat. I never saw her smile more insincerely. She rolled her driver's window down. “Let me know if that's too much air for you, Luther,” she said, pulling out onto the road.

“I like air,” Luther said.

“And no wonder,” my mother said. “You're overdressed for this weather.”

I poked her thigh as if to say, Jesus, Mom,
they're poor. Those are probably the only nice clothes he has
. I saw her catch my meaning.

“Did you enjoy your visit?” she said.

“Yes'm,” Luther said. “Didn't expect to stay quite as long as I did.”

“Family visits can just go on and on, can't they?” My mother laughed.

“Yes'm, they sure can.”

We drove past the well-kept older homes on the shady road between the asylum and town. I wondered what Clayton and Luther thought when they saw places like that. The town was a village, really, and just as it began there were two big stone churches, Lutheran and Episcopalian, one on either side of the road. They were churches from an earlier time, cathedrals com pared to the modern Catholic one my family attended, a depressing brick rectangle next to a filling station.

Luther ogled the Episcopalian church, pressing his forehead against the car window and gaping at the ivy-covered stone and the mythic figures portrayed in stained glass. I braced myself to hear him claim to be Jesus or one of those colorful saints, but he didn't say anything.

The train station was at the beginning of town, before the stores began. The maroon-and-silver train was sitting there. My mother pulled in and the three of us got out. “Thanks for the ride, Mrs. V.,” Clayton called to my mother in the car. “See you, Gabe,” he said to me, and winked.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

“To Philadelphia with my Uncle Luther.”

“What are you talking about, Clayton?” I whispered.

“You knew I was going,” he said loudly, so my mother could hear. “I told you that.”

“No, you did not tell me that.”

Luther doffed his hat for my mother again and backed away. I started to follow after them.

“Gabriel, come on,” my mother said. “You can say goodbye to Clayton here. How long are you going for, Clayton?”

“Two or three days,” he said.

“You can survive without Clayton for a couple of days,” my mother said to me, and I got back into the car.

For a half hour I trailed behind her through the stores. I didn't want candy or comic books or any of the things I'd always wanted in town before. When we drove out, the train was gone. I controlled myself all the way back to the asylum, certain I would see Clayton walking home by himself on the side of the road. But I didn't. On the ride up our mountain, I broke down and told my mother everything. She didn't believe it. She called Mrs. Parker, who didn't believe it, either. I was sent up to my room while she called my father at work. I looked out my window, but I couldn't see the asylum buildings below us or New York City on the horizon; the trees were already green enough to screen that all out. When my father got home, his low voice resonated through the house exactly as I imagined the voice of a Jersey state trooper—a terrifying sound bereft of animation or joy.

He called me downstairs and I told him what we'd done. He didn't hit me—my mother didn't allow hitting in our house—but he didn't have to hit; when I was finished, he turned his back on me and walked away. I returned to my room upstairs, where I deciphered enough muffled words to gather that he was calling the police, and that Luther and Clayton would have a reception when they arrived in Philadelphia.

The next day was Sunday and my father told me to dress up and get in the car. I'd made my Confirmation the previous fall, and now that I was a man it was supposed to be my decision whether to continue worshipping or not. I had decided against it, and hadn't been in the church since Confirmation day. I would have to begin my confession with this information and then go on to my secular sins. I rode down the mountain nearly faint with dread. But instead of taking me to town, my father pulled into the asylum grounds, drove to the workers' barracks, and parked. I didn't know he even knew where the workers' barracks were. I thought the asylum part of my life was separate from him. He was bringing me to apologize to Clayton's mother and father.

“But the whole thing was Clayton's idea,” I said.

“Get in there,” he said.

Mrs. Parker answered the door when I knocked. She was wearing a fancy dress and stockings and shoes. She motioned for me to step inside. Mr. Parker stood in their little living room in a suit and tie; he looked at me, but his face was utterly blank. The four girls sat on the sofa in dresses, with bows in their hair. I didn't understand what was going on. Then I realized that they'd been to church themselves, or were about to go. I'd never seen Mr. and Mrs. Parker dressed as anything but a cook and a grounds keeper, and seeing them now in their Sunday clothes staggered me. I started to cry. When I stopped, Mrs. Parker told me that she and Mr. Parker had had to plead for their very jobs after what Clayton and I had done.

“I'm really sorry, Mr. and Missus Parker. I apologize,” I said, sniffling and backing away, but Mrs. Parker took hold of my arm. Clayton had asked to see me, she said. “He knew I was coming?” I asked.

“Your father called us,” she said, and she led me to Clayton's bedroom door.

He lay on the bed in his tiny, dim room, the only one of us not wearing Sunday clothes. His lips were cut and his cheeks were swollen, and his blackened eyes were puffy slits.

“Well, look who's here,” Clayton said. His rubbery words were hard to understand. “Nice, huh?” he added, indicating his face.

I couldn't think of anything to say. “I'm sorry, Clayton,” I whispered finally. “I got scared something would happen to you.”

“So you made sure something did.”

“No, I didn't. I didn't make sure of anything. I was worried, that's all.”

“You're always worried about something,” he said. “You are such a mama's boy.” He sat halfway up on his bed. “What were you worried about this time, Gabe? That I was gonna ride the train for a few hours and then go home? Big deal. You never rode a train before?”

In fact, I had never been on a train. “My parents always had cars,” I said.

Clayton flopped back down on his bed and laughed.

“What's so funny about that?”

He laughed until I thought he was crying. “I don't know,” he said between spasms. “It's just so funny. Your parents always had cars.”

“I can't do anything about the way my family lives,” I said.

He didn't answer me. I took a step or two farther into his room.

“Hey, Clayton, listen,” I said. “When this all blows over, we can go to the pit and you can push me off the high part. You can push me off as many times as you want.”

“I don't think so, Gabe,” he answered without looking at me. “I don't think we'll be going there anymore,” he said, and we never did.

THIS IS A NATURAL PRODUCT OF THE EARTH

The Transamerica pyramid was even more fantastical in life than in the pictures of it Raymond had seen, a dagger thrust from the center of the earth in the name of life insurance, and as he crossed the Bay Bridge, the entire city delighted him, sliding over his windshield in the sun. San Francisco's exotic face spoke to Raymond, saying he'd done the right thing when he moved to California two weeks ago. Maybe, when he and Christine had some money, they could move up here from San Jose. He followed Mary's instructions into Berkeley, parked the car, and walked up onto Telegraph Avenue. They were supposed to meet in front of Cody's famous bookshop—it was easier than her trying to explain on the phone how to get up to her house in the Berkeley hills—and when he arrived, late, she was waiting for him. But he didn't realize it. He stood on the comer for five minutes, looking back and forth between the rollerskaters in the street and the books in Cody's window. Finally, a woman at a magazine stand walked over and kissed his cheek.

“I thought this might happen.” She laughed.

He was too stunned to laugh himself. In Boston six years before, Mary's hair had been short and straight, bluntly cut into a helmet by herself at home. Now it was down to her shoulders and permed into cascades of bouncy ringlets. Her disdain for fashion had been complete, but today she was wearing a red silk dress and red leather pumps, makeup on her eyes, and a grapey color on her lips. She looked great—sexy, if you could still say that—but she didn't look like Mary.

“He finally shows up in California,” she said. “But what's this strange taboo against visiting people? You had to wait until you
moved
out here?”

Raymond's never having been off the East Coast was one of their standing jokes. In every letter, and the yearly phone calls on their birthdays, Mary insisted that he come out and see the marvelous West. He could stay with her as long as he liked, she always said, and the girlfriend was welcome, too. Every year Raymond said he would, and every year he didn't.

And now he actually lived here—with Christine, his girlfriend, who was attending the Stanford Business School. He had a new job with a Silicon Valley importer of high-end computers from Japan, turning painful documentation (“Activate vector object and transform to specified output”) into plainspoken user's guides (“Click on the thick line and then choose an item from the ‘Output' menu”). For the past four or five years—most of the time since he'd last seen Mary—he'd done similar technical writing for outfits on Route 128 around Boston. He never could have predicted this career for himself, but he was surprisingly satisfied doing it. Most people in the industry were decent folks, and he liked to play with hardware. On some level it engaged his soul.

“You could have come out here years ago and been a West Coast saxophone player,” Mary said. “This is a great place to be a musician.”

Raymond only laughed—he'd heard this so many times. Trying to be a jazz musician was what he'd been doing when he and Mary knew each other in Boston. He worked in a photocopy shop on Boylston Street and practiced at night, jammed with music students, played an occasional gig. But he was twenty-seven with a master's in English, and Boston was crawling with eighteen-year-olds who'd never done anything but play saxophone. Nothing mattered to those kids except the horn, and in the end Raymond saw that he'd never be obsessed enough to live that life.

He'd met Mary because she and her daughter, Melissa, moved into his building on Marlborough Street. When he asked her what she did, she said she was a revolutionary. She'd been married to an older man, a sixties political organizer; the politics outlasted the husband. Later, he found out she worked in a hospital as an LPN. Her plan was to get the RN degree she'd abandoned when Melissa was born, and become a barefoot doctor somewhere in the Third World. When she left Boston five years ago, she and Raymond had been lovers for a year. She left because California was warm and friendly and conducive to human life, and nursing school was almost free for state residents. He had wanted to go with her, but she was taking Melissa and no one else.

Now they were finally together in the Café Mediterraneum, Mary's favorite place, having the gigantic caffè latte served there in pint pub glasses. At eleven in the morning, the place was still full of people talking and reading and having coffee and pastry. Some were clearly Berkeley students; others looked like the lords and ladies of the Valley whose Porsches and BMWs idled next to Raymond's old Datsun at every light in San Jose. At a corner table sat a wildly bearded, heavyset man in a dingy T-shirt, reading a dog-eared copy of
Das Kapital
and looking like Marx himself.

Mary sipped her latte and shook her head. “Well,
you
look exactly the same,” she said. “It's spooky, like I just saw you yesterday.” She smiled. “But you're not the same. The body snatchers got my friend. This has really become your life now, huh? Writing computer poop for corporations? You were an artist, Raymond. You've completely sold out.”

He smiled back. Mary's California transformation was entirely in the cosmetics and couture. She was the same old Mary. He'd never been an artist, and as she must have remembered, he could needle right back. He touched the sleeve of her red silk dress. “When you sell out, it's usually for money. I see you've managed to get along without any. This is just something from the Goodwill.”