Making Nice (19 page)

The woman stepped out of the car wearing one of those impossibly pink neon jackets from the eighties and yelled that what we were doing was illegal. All of us backed away—some on instinct, others habit, others imitation—spread out in varying directions around her, readying ourselves to run for it. If she had said one more word, made a noise or sudden movement even, I’m sure it would have been enough to break whatever tenuous gravity was keeping us there. But then one of the older, braver guys—Nicky Mastro or Alex Tracy, Bobby Ruth, Tolin Farrell—stepped forward into the white silence and said so calmly it somehow seemed polite, “Shut up, cunt.” I couldn’t believe it, and by the look on her face neither could she. Before she had time to gather herself enough to respond someone else mumbled, “Yeah…” and someone else said, “Yeah,” and someone else wondered out loud if her jacket was L.L. Bean, and someone else threw an iceball that hit her in the back. She spun, wild-eyed and finger-pointing, demanding to know who threw it. She was then hit with another iceball, this time in the ear. Then someone else threw an iceball at her and then all of us threw iceballs at her, including my little brother, who really had no talent for making iceballs or for throwing, and I remember his coming apart midair. The woman scrambled into her car and slammed the door, iceballs thunk-thunk-thunking on all sides, and again her wheels slipped and again a couple guys ran over and grabbed hold and got their ride. Five minutes later they came back on foot, carrying the broke-off spoiler as a trophy.

*   *   *

That afternoon my brother and I trailed off to 7-Eleven, where Gay Sal, the gay cashier—who on the side dealt ugly paintings to my mother and other ladies around town, and who years later disappeared and was rumored to have died of AIDS, and then later not to have to died of AIDS but a heart defect—had spread a few collapsed cardboard boxes on the floor by the door. My brother and I stomped our boots, said Hey Sal and he said, “Hey fellas, have your mother call me,” and we said, Yeah OK sure, and walked around to the coffee island and made ourselves hot chocolates and drank them hunched over and huddled right there in the store. When we went to pay, Sal shooed us. “
Pshhhhh,
” he said. “Just have your mother call me.”

On the cold way home we were passed by a blue minivan, on the back of it Nicky and Alex, not squatting but sliding along on their stomachs, sprawled out like supermen, the two of them laughing as one of their belt buckles sparked on a bare spot in the road just before they and the minivan disappeared over a small hill. We continued on without saying a word about it.

On Woodlawn we passed the Catalanos’ brick-and-shingle colonial with the white picket fence. The upper left was Jamie’s room, I think, who in the second grade I developed a twenty-year crush on after my hamster Luigi bit her finger with his two long, too-yellow front teeth during a parent-arranged play-date gone bad, Jamie running home, never to return. After high school she vanished, only to reappear at my mother’s funeral a decade and some later, my mouth opening in slack-jawed awe at the surprise minutes before I gave a mean-spirited eulogy that I used as an opportunity to take jabs at not only my mother’s asshole family, but also god, fate, the universe, my brother’s friend Skip for some reason, the priest—who had just announced what a pleasure it was having gotten to know my family over the last month and got my sister’s name wrong in the same sentence, the funeral home, the well-meaning women who said lame things in an attempt to comfort us, the traffic on Sunrise Highway, blue cheese, Republicans, and Omar Minaya, then general manager of the New York Mets. Jamie was gone before I was finished.

On the left was Tommy Decosta’s, who would eventually pull his police-issued pistol and point it at my face over a drunk misunderstanding on a humid summer night, and who, to my own surprise, I would walk directly toward, screaming.

We passed the Scheiblers’ white single-story, the quiet couple who never had kids, and then the yellow house where the Gimmlers did and beat them until one day there were moving trucks outside and they were all gone forever.

Lastly was the McMillans’, a family of right-winger lawn-care nuts I never liked much in the way a kid can not like someone but not know why until they’re older, and then I just felt bad about not liking them when, after the funeral, the Mrs. brought us trays and trays of lasagnas and zitis and casseroles, all of us drinking more than eating anyway.

Then my brother and I were home.

*   *   *

Before heading inside we checked the bashed-in metal mailbox with no number because checking the bashed-in metal mailbox with no number for mail was exciting even though we never got any, then we walked around the house to the back door. When we reached it I didn’t go in, instead I turned and made for the garage. My brother followed for a ways, then stopped and—just before I rounded the far corner—yelled, “Look! I’m peeing hydrochloric acid!” Yeah-yeah, sure, I said. “No seriously! Look, it’s smoking!”

The temperature had risen to just above freezing, and the icicles hanging from the garage roof had begun to melt and dripped a straight line of different-sized holes in the snow, and I hovered above them for a second, marveling at them like tiny crop circles. Then I kicked around with my boots till I found the Rheingold cans, picked one up and took my right glove off and pulled the tab. The first sip was slushy and bitter and I retched and spit. The second sip was the same, only I pinched my nose to kill the taste and kept it down.

I looked toward the house, where through the window I could see my mother cooking dinner, the long twisty cord of the phone stretched across the kitchen as she wooden-spooned something around the hundred-plus-year-old iron pan she’d inherited, the same pan my father would eventually ruin with soap and steel wool, making my mother cry for the thousandth time. Most likely he’d be on the couch in front of the TV in the den—the same couch he’d sleep on for a year and a half after she died—his shirt pocket filled with pretzels he’d snuck in there, a half-completed crossword in his lap. My sister would for sure be upstairs in her room doing who knows what, daydreaming of Bon Jovi probably, and my brother would still be in the hallway, defrosting himself over the radiator, dripping snow while our overweight bulldog Roxy came up wiggling her whole body to greet him, grunting like a pig as she licked the puddles forming at his feet. They were all there and they were waiting for me, and we were going to have dinner together and tell one another stories from our great day.

But for right then I was still fourteen and drinking my first and then second beer behind the garage, thrilled at this new feeling—a feeling not unlike the slippery happiness of being dragged along by something larger than me—as I watched the house and dreamed of my family inside it. And as if I’d conjured them, there they were in the bay window, all of them, gathering in the dining room for whatever my mother had cooked us for dinner. I watched them and drank, and just as everything was starting to feel soft and warm the wind gusted the snow sideways off the roof and the pine trees and the ground, whirling the world white.

OK

This is the one where I AmEx-ed my way from California to Ohio to see Fatlegs after she headfirsted her way into the world and forever ruined Tara’s vagina—that’s what my brother says anyway, and he would know, he’s seen it—me calling her Fatlegs cause she had fat legs and ’cause I’m not clever. When he put her in my arms for the first time I couldn’t help but be amazed at how little she was, and loud, and then I was disgusted when he told me the details of the delivery as he sipped his bottle of Budweiser, me in my head recalling that smart thing a smart person once said about birth:
Between shit and piss we are born
 … but in Latin! “Yep,” I said to myself, then, “Yep, yep, yippeeeeeeeee,” as I pinched her fat legs and poked her tummy and touched her nose before handing her back to my brother and grabbing myself a beer, the first of many that trip, ’cause Fatlegs was something to celebrate and ’cause that visit was followed by another—which is what this is really all about—a four-day reconnaissance mission to 3 Woodlawn Avenue on Long Island to check how bad things had gotten with my father.

Bad.

I stood there wondering mostly about the toaster, unplugged and finger-smudged and tipped over on the old mail– and crumb-covered counter, both slots duct-taped shut for a reason or reasons I couldn’t figure. I gave up to consider the microwave, its once-white touch pad brown with index-finger grime, the handle a few shades darker, a wire coat hanger dangling from it, displaying a half dozen different rubber bands and a Looney Tunes necktie. It was his Christmas one, Bugs Bunny busting out of a gift box holding a candy-cane-colored carrot and looking that look he looks before he asks that thing he asks, and me in my head again answering that I have no idea what’s up, because I didn’t. It was ninety-something and humid, seven and some months since last December when we all got together at my sister’s place and ate pot cookies and drove through the car wash three times until Dad thought he was having a heart attack. We were headed to the hospital but got hamburgers instead.

I put my bags down to scratch my itching ankles, the fleas pinging and ponging off them as I dirty-looked the three U.S. Postal baskets under the table on the filthy floor, the first filled with newspapers and crossword books, another with electrical cables and old batteries, the third with empty bottles of diet cola and cranberry juice. I worried about his urethra while getting hypnotized by the refrigerator-freezer, the only clean-looking thing around, now magnet-and-picture-less. I supposed he was trying to forget us, and I supposed I was there to remind him.

But he was at work for another hour or so, so I double-timed it up the stairs and into the bathroom where I found Steve on top of the toilet tank, skinny and unmoving and staring into the corner at something only he could see, a yellowed flea collar too tight around his narrow neck. He was relatively new, a supposed-to-be-low-maintenance pet my brother rescued to keep our father company and help him along. I cat-called him like
psssssswssswssssss
, hi Steve, hey boy, then reached out to pet him but he got all puffed up and hissy and clawed the air near my hand like an asshole, so I called him an asshole and a fuckface and tried to pet him again, because now it was a thing between us, a competition, a cat-petting one. “I’m gonna fuckin’ pet you, dude,” I said. But this time he bolted off the tank and into the tub where he stood his ground, high-pitch-noising at me and shadowboxing the air whenever I got too close. “OK, you little jerk,” I said. Then I turned on the shower.

Would anyone believe me if I said that didn’t work, that he didn’t leave? Because that’s what I’m saying: that didn’t work and he didn’t leave. He only flinched a little and blinked a lot at the offending water, and I was frightened by this wet thing looking at me all mad and drippy. I’d never seen a cat do anything like that before, and I tried to imagine what exactly has to happen to a cat to make it behave this way. I don’t know, and am disappointed in my brain’s failure to conjure anything except the memory of my father crawling around in his purple underwear the night my mother died, one-legged and drunk as hell as he made his sad and slow way across the floor to the bathroom.

What my brain
could
do though was realize just how skinny Steve was now that he was wet, really skinny, and I prodded him with the business end of the toilet plunger to scoot him to the far end of the tub, then stripped down and climbed in with him, at the opposite end, to cool down and think, and the first thing I thought was how much I hated the second shower curtain.

The reason there were two: some years back, like twelve years back, water started coming through the hallway ceiling below. My father put a second shower curtain against the wall and over the window as a stopgap, he said, until he could get the rotting wood windowsill replaced and the tub re-caulked. Only he never did. There was a great deal of infighting about it until he agreed to hire somebody, only he kept putting it off by not being around when the guy showed up.

The guy finally got his chance some Sunday by dropping by unexpectedly after the ten o’clock at St. John’s the Episcopal, his entire family in tow. My father told me he looked out the window and saw three Mexican women and an unidentified dude eating corn while four kids took one-a-time turns jumping off the porch and throwing pinecones at a fifth. I was just happy to hear it was being fixed, only to discover on my next visit home it wasn’t. My father didn’t pay the guy to replace the caulking or the sill. He paid him to install a suspended ceiling under the damaged one in the hall, the foam-tile kind with the drop-down metal grid you see in dentists’ offices and commercial properties.

“That way when the water leaks I can just replace the tiles,” is what he told us.

The second shower curtain was a reminder of all that, and by default a reminder of all the other repair jobs he fucked up or sabotaged; the end table propped up with a tennis ball on a Snapple bottle, the vise grips for a sink hot-water handle, the boats he left to leaf litter and long winters. And it was this, the boats he neglected to winterize—leaving two to ice over and sink and another’s engine block to crack—that injured me more than anything. My happiest years were the ones I spent on those boats, dicking around the river with pals or zipping across the flat and glassy bay at five a.m. to surf the sandbar off Sunken Forest before the wind got on it, then foot-clamming for lunch. There were fishing trips and camping trips and rides up the river at night just for the hell of it, all of us young and tan and fit and figuring it out over beers we’d stolen from our parents’ garages and refrigerator crisper drawers. The rest was ahead of us.

And standing there in the middle of The Rest—naked, flea-bitten, and motherless in a dirty shower in a dirty house getting dirty-looked at by a fucked-up cat—I blamed him. Or blamed him partly anyway. Some of this, I was sure of it, was his fault.