Martin and John (11 page)

MY OLD BEDROOM takes the contents of my new suitcases grudgingly. Drawers that years ago held only my underwear and T-shirts and jeans now overflow with gardening magazines, sewing supplies, all types of yarns and knitting needles, half-woven macramé projects, jigsaw puzzles, books of completed crosswords, and down in the bottom drawers, my old underwear and T-shirts and jeans. I take these clothes out now and throw them away, then replace them with adult clothing: underwear that has changed from white jockey shorts to baggy boxers and one worn bikini that I don’t remember packing and also throw away; plain T-shirts give way to new ones with slogans like “B is for Boy” and “AIDSwalk ’87”; and only the Levi’s look the same, though these new ones are larger than those I discard.

In the garden my stepmother sweats furiously, the drops rolling off her nose and spotting the dry earth. She wears her gloves now, and they are caked with flaky soil; a few streaks of dirt fill the creases of her forehead from where she has wiped her brow. She digs in the ground with her fingers to pull out large marigold bushes by their roots, tugging sometimes three or four times when the plants resist. I sit down on a small mound and draw my knees close to my chest. I pull a
long blade of grass and chew on it, but I spit it out when I taste its bitter juice. I know if I wait long enough, my stepmother will tell me what’s going on. She does: “That was a cucumber mound you’re sitting on,” she says, then pushes me down when I start to rise. “Don’t worry,” she says, “it never sprouted.” She digs out another marigold plant and tosses it aside. “I read in one of my gardening magazines that if you plant marigolds in thick rows between your vegetable patches, the flowers will draw the bugs away from what you really want to be growing, which is your food.” She talks and works, and seems to be speaking to the plants, as if chastising them. “They offered it as an alternative to pesticides, and I wanted to get away from all that artificial stuff anyway.” “It didn’t work?” I say, when she seems to have finished. “No, it didn’t. I think the marigolds actually lured bugs in the garden, and after they’d finished decimating the flowers, they moved on to my vegetables.” She pulls a bloom off one plant and shows it to me; it’s half-eaten, and the orange petals are brown-edged where insects have chewed. “Anyway, I thought I’d get these out of my way now. I’m always tripping over them.” The garden has been my stepmother’s passion for the last three years, and she invests six to eight hours daily on the huge plot. Now, pulling out plants, she seems to be unraveling all that work somehow, loosening the ties that have held the garden together through three harsh summers. When I stand up, I see the flowers lying behind her and stretching out before her. They divide the garden like borders on a patchwork quilt, and
now I see why the garden seems to be unraveling: the plants she has already picked make frayed edges, their green leafy parts and bright orange flowers spilling over their lines into the corn, cucumbers, and tomatoes, while those that remain waver a little in the hot breeze, like loose threads waiting to be plucked. I put a hand on Bea’s back, slick with perspiration. Her hair, tied in a ponytail, sprays across her skin, matted to it by sweat; a few gray strands stand out distinct from the brown ones. Were this a romance, I think, I could trace the length of each gray strand with a finger; and if this were fantasy, the gray would return to brown under my hand. But I only ask, “Do the flowers really hurt?” Bea sits up at my words and shucks off her gloves. “No,” she says tiredly. “They don’t hurt.” She gets up and walks to the hose, abandoning her gloves on the ground like empty seed shells. “I hurt,” she says, dousing herself. The sweat is washed from her body, replaced by water pumped from one hundred and twenty feet beneath the garden.

ALL I KNOW is that he left her for his secretary, who is young and thin and pretty, and went to high school with me for nearly a year. She blushes as she lets me in her small house, murmuring, No one thought we’d ever see you again. Once inside and past her drab yard, I recognize my father’s taste and money in the furnishings: overstuffed floral-printed chairs, imitation oil seascapes, and a three-inch-thick shag the
color of wet red clay. My father insists we take his car to dinner, not the Volkswagen I’d pulled out of the garage for the first time in years. He’d bought it for me when I was eighteen to entice me to stay home, but the odometer has barely a thousand miles on it, and I’m twenty-six now. My father pulls his car from an innocuous, tin-sided, padlocked carport, and we drive away, leaving his mistress in the doorway.

“I’m not going to make any excuses,” he says over a red plate of spaghetti and meatballs. “The life went out of our marriage.” He leans over with the napkin tucked in his collar; pushed forward by his girth, it drifts across his plate. He whispers, “She stopped getting her period, you know, and after that, she just dried up.” He sits back and examines me to see if I’ve understood. “Well, I’ll tell you something. I’m still not ready to be old, even if she is.” The first time he wasn’t “ready to be old” came nineteen years ago, when he married Bea three years after my mother died. He twirls a forkful of pasta on his spoon and stuffs it in his mouth as if to stop himself from saying anything more, because, after that, he remains silent for the rest of the meal. We listen to the tinkling of silver and crystal, to the low voices from other tables and occasional shouts from the kitchen. Piped-in Italian music plays on a revolving loop, and the second time “That’s Amore” comes on, our meal finished, my father sits back and listens to the song. As the last strains die out, he says, cautiously, “So how are you doing in that department?” “What do you mean?” I say. He pauses, and cleans his hands before speaking. “Are
you sleeping with anyone?” he asks, and quickly wipes his mouth and looks at the other tables. Leave it to my father to boil it down to the big boff-o-rama. Barclay would say that, not me. “No,” I tell him. “I’m sleeping with no one.” “But—” my father says, because I haven’t clarified the matter in exactly the way he wishes. “But there is someone who wants to sleep with me. I’m just not sure I want to sleep with him.” My father sighs at this last word, then quickly regains his composure. He runs a hand through his thinning hair, and as often happens, some of it gets caught in the gold band of his Rolex. He winces as he snaps the errant strands from his scalp. “So,” he says, “you’re not still doing what you used to?” “I make house calls now.” The skin of his cheeks and forehead covers his eyes in a squint. “House calls?” he asks. “I work for a hospice.” His face brightens. “Oh, that’s good.” “No,” I say, “it’s not, really. But it’s necessary, and it’s safe.” “Safe,” my father repeats, and then makes a business of signaling the waiter and paying the bill. He gulps a glass of water as we leave the table, and on the way out the door grabs a thick handful of chocolate mints, and he eats them all during the car ride home.

MY STEPMOTHER WASN’T always idle. She had a nursing degree and worked in a small, poor rest home for the first few years of her marriage to my father. She took me with her one summer, because my father’s contracting business looked
like it wouldn’t make it and bringing me to work cost less than a babysitter. My stepmother, always busy at the home with some real or made-up task, left me alone to wander the halls or play in the courtyard, surrounded by old people in baby-blue or pastel-pink bathrobes forever falling open to expose worn pajamas underneath. One woman, Mrs. Derkman, never moved from her bed; she lay there with her legs curled to where her breasts used to be, her arms holding them in place, her hands balled in fists of powerless defiance. No one visited her. She stared at the wall all day, blinking sometimes, but never speaking. Her silent mouth and fixed eyes fascinated me. When I fed her—because after a while my stepmother allowed me to—she ate without looking at me or the spoon. Her mouth opened when she smelled food, and after swallowing it opened again. If I waited too long between bites she closed her mouth and wouldn’t open it even if I pressed a spoon filled with vitamin-enriched oatmeal—the only thing she could eat—to her lips. I would leave the room, wait a moment, and re-enter. She had no sense of time, it seemed, and her mouth sprung open the moment she smelled the food again. Is this sickness, I sometimes wondered, or is it age, or is there a difference between the two? When she died the next year, the morticians had to break her joints to straighten her limbs so she would fit in her casket, and they found that her fingernails had grown a half inch into her palms, and her buttocks were two large bedsores. I didn’t see this, though; my father refused to allow me near the
home after he came one day and saw me laughing with two old men, one of whom shamelessly played with his genitals through his pajamas. “All that death!” my father bellowed. “All that degeneracy. I don’t want my boy to be a part of it,” and he worked twice as hard then to make his business succeed so my stepmother could bring me home and raise me without death or degeneracy ever touching my life.

I REMEMBER LITTLE of my seven months in high school, save that, at fourteen, in gym, my sexuality and sexual preference were both revealed to me by a sudden erection in the showers. I don’t know why but I panicked, and ran away across the slick tiled floor. The other boys’ laughter followed me; they were the last people ever to do that. Brown bricks make the building: brown bricks and straight walls and square corners, and it seems that the plain mess just fell here, that human hands couldn’t possibly have constructed such a lifeless husk. Inside, the halls reverberate with the sound of my footsteps, and an occasional laugh comes from behind the closed door of a summer school class. A silver-haired woman dressed in a gray polyester skirt and matching sleeveless sweater, her fat feet swelling from red high-heeled pumps, hobbles up to me. She looked the same twelve years ago, though even then I didn’t know her name. “May I help you?” she says, and I quickly answer, “Just reminiscing.” “Just what?” she says, cupping an ear toward me, though I doubt
she’s hard-of-hearing. “Remembering,” I say loudly, giving her the benefit of the doubt. “Strolling down memory lane.” I put an arm around her shoulder and pull out a long-unused smile and give it to her. She steps along with me, I at her pace. She’s confused, I can tell, and flattered, as I point out my homeroom, show off the locker where I kissed my first girlfriend, and stop outside the glass-walled cafeteria where another boy and I once got into it. I don’t tell her that he chased me here from the gym, nor do I mention that I pushed his face through the plate glass door; I call it a scrap, and laugh, and she says, “Boys will be boys,” and laughs with me. There is the exit, I think, through which I once ran in fear. Today I stop in the doorway and wave at an old woman whose name I still don’t know. “Come back some time,” she says. “Sure,” I say: the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.

MY STEPMOTHER RARELY cooks. She drinks spring water through the morning and afternoon, and then orders out for dinner, usually something that can be delivered and eaten from its own disposable container: Chinese food, Italian food, things like that. Sunday comes and goes, then Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, Friday and another Saturday. How my parents divide their possessions I don’t know. My stepmother comes in after meeting with him at his office in town. “Well,” she says, “he’ll keep the business, but
I’ll get forty percent of anything it makes and fifty percent if he ever sells it.” That’s only fair, considering her inheritance financed its start. “He’ll keep the Lincoln, of course, and I’ll keep the Jeep.” The sticky point seems to be the house. “If we sell it, we’ll split it sixty/forty, my way.” She looks at me. “But that’s only if we sell it. We’d like to give it to you, but we both think you should live here if we do. We don’t want it to fall to ruins, and there’s no sense paying to keep it up if no one’s here. Do you want it?” she asks bluntly. I look at the family pictures mounted on the walls of the new living room, hoping that in one of them I’ll find a reason to accept the house or decline it. But the images are hidden behind glass frames which reflect the lamplight like puddles catching the morning sun. “I don’t think you should sell it,” I say. “Why don’t one of you keep it?” My stepmother sighs. “John, that’s a moot point by now. Your father and I have been over and over this. We both put a lot into this place, and it wouldn’t be fair if one of us got it at the expense of the other. The only fair thing to do is give it to you or sell it.”

She lets me think about it for a while, and one week consumes another, and then another. Summer clamps down like a vise, wringing us dry, and the leaves on the catalpas flap like dry laundry on the line. The sprinkler system cuts off even faster now, and it can be used only during the evenings, since the combination of water and sunlight during the afternoons only magnifies the heat, singeing the grass. My stepmother works in the garden less and less each day. We sit
around the house for hours; Bea listens to Vivaldi and Bartók, humming absently under her breath and starting new needlepoint or knitting projects that she’ll shove in a drawer as soon as the hot spell breaks. Her cigarette smoke drives me from the living room, first to my bedroom, but that room swelters in the old, un-air-conditioned part of the house, so I retreat to the basement. There, I sift through boxes labeled John’s Things, boxes filled with toys that grow progressively larger and more masculine. Lincoln Logs give way to a stainless steel Erector set; a rusted tricycle finds its replacements in a BMX motocross bike and a racing ten-speed. There are bats and rackets and hockey sticks and all sorts of balls, and all of them are alike in their dusty age. Two boxes contain only war toys: fake guns and knives and combat fatigues, and a folding shovel still crusty with dirt from its last long-ago use. In the bottom of one box I find a doll my real mother gave to me. My father had shaken the bead-stuffed thing in Bea’s face one night and screamed, “This is what destroyed my little boy!” I sneered at him and swatted the doll from his hand, telling him I didn’t even remember its name. This was right before he’d given me the car. My father looked at the doll, its long dress folded above desexed legs by the force of its landing. “Pretty Boy,” he said. “You called it Pretty Boy when your mother was alive.”