Naked (6 page)

We nodded at the casket — my brother, my sisters, and I — knowing that with her, it would never come to that. Our father,
on the other hand, the man weeping in the front row, he would prove to be more difficult.

I found the book hidden in the woods beneath a sheet of plywood, its cover torn away and the pages damp with mildew.

Brock and Bonnie Rivers stood in their driveway waving good-bye to the Reverend Hassleback.

“Good-bye,” they said, waving.

“Good-bye,” the reverend responded. “Tell those two teens of yours, Josh and Sandi, that they’ll make an excellent addition
to our young persons’ ministry. They’re fine kids,” he said with a wink. “Almost as fine and foxy as their parents!”

The Rivers chuckled, raising their hands in another wave. When the reverend’s car finally left the driveway, they stood for
a moment in the bright sunshine before descending into the basement dungeon to unshackle the children.

The theme of the book was that people are not always what they seem. Highly respected in their upper-middleclass community,
the Rivers family practiced a literal interpretation of the phrase “Love thy neighbor.” Limber as gymnasts, these people were
both shameless and insatiable. Father and daughter, brother and sister, mother and son: after exhausting every possible combination,
they widened their circle to include horny sea captains and door-to-door knife salesmen. They did it in caves with their Doberman
pinscher and on their slanted roof with the construction crew hired to replace the shingles. The first two times I read the
book, I found myself aching with pleasure. Yes, these people were naughty, but at the age of thirteen, I couldn’t help but
admire their infectious energy and spirited enjoyment of life. The third time I came away shocked, not by the characters’
behavior but by the innumerable typos. Had nobody bothered to proofread this book before sending it to print? In the opening
chapter the daughter is caught with her brother’s
ceck
in her
pissy,
calling out, “
Feck
me hard,
hardir.
” When on page thirty-three the son has sex with his mother, he leaves the woman’s “
tots
glistening with
jasm.
”

I showed the book to my sister Lisa, who tore it from my hands saying, “Let me hold on to this for a while.” She and I often
swapped baby-sitting jobs and considered ourselves fairly well read in the field of literary pornography.

“Look in the parents’ bedroom beneath the sweaters in the second drawer of the white dresser,” she’d say. We’d each read
The Story of O
and the collected writings of the Marquis de Sade with one eye on the front door, fearful that the homeowners might walk in
and torture us with barbed whips and hot oils. “I know you,” our looks would say as the parents checked on their sleeping
children. “I know all about you.”

The book went from Lisa to our eleven-year-old sister, Gretchen, who interpreted it as a startling, nonfiction exposé of the
American middle class. “I’m pretty sure this exact same thing is going on right here in North Hills,” she whispered, tucking
the book beneath the artificial grass of her Easter basket. “Take the Sherman family, for instance. Just last week I saw Heidi
sticking her hands down Steve Junior’s pants.”

“The guy has two broken arms,” I said. “She was probably just tucking in his shirt.”

“Would you ask one of
us
to tuck in
your
shirt?” she asked.

She had a point. A careful study suggested that the Shermans were not the people they pretended to be. The father was often
seen tugging at his crotch, and his wife had a disturbing habit of looking you straight in the eye while sniffing her fingers.
A veil had been lifted, especially for Gretchen, who now saw the world as a steaming pit of unbridled sexuality. Seated on
a lounge chair at the country club, she would narrow her eyes, speculating on the children crowding the shallow end of the
pool. “I have a sneaking suspicion Christina Youngblood might be our half sister. She’s got her father’s chin, but the eyes
and mouth are pure Mom.”

I felt uneasy implicating our parents, but Gretchen provided a wealth of frightening evidence. She noted the way our mother
applied lipstick at the approach of the potato chip delivery man, whom she addressed by first name and often invited to use
our bathroom. Our father referred to the bank tellers as “doll” or “sweetheart,” and their responses suggested that he had
taken advantage of them one time too many. The Greek Orthodox church, the gaily dressed couples at the country club, even
our elderly collie, Duchess: they were all in on it, according to Gretchen, who took to piling furniture against her bedroom
door before going to sleep each night.

The book wound up in the hands of our ten-year-old sister, Amy, who used it as a textbook in the make-believe class she held
after school each day. Dressed in a wig and high heels, she passed her late afternoons standing before a blackboard and imitating
her teachers. “I’m very sorry, Candice, but I’m going to have to fail you,” she’d say, addressing one of the empty folding
chairs arranged before her. “The problem is not that you don’t try. The problem is that you’re stupid. Very, very stupid.
Isn’t Candice stupid, class? She’s ugly, too, am I wrong? Very well, Candice, you can sit back down now and, for God’s sake,
stop crying. All right, class, now I’m going to read to you from this week’s new book. It’s a story about a California family
and it’s called
Next of Kin.

If Amy had read the book, then surely it had been seen by eight-year-old Tiffany, who shared her bedroom, and possibly by
our brother, Paul, who at the age of two might have sucked on the binding, which was even more dangerous than reading it.
Clearly this had to stop before it got out of hand. The phrase “Tight willin’
gasshole
” was growing more popular by the day, and even our ancient Greek grandmother was arriving at the breakfast table with suspicious-looking
circles beneath her eyes.

Gretchen took the book and hid it under the carpet of her bedroom, where it was discovered by our housekeeper, Lena, who eventually
handed it over to our mother.

“I’ll make sure this is properly disposed of,” my mother said, hurrying down the hallway to her bedroom.
“Fecking,”
she laughed, reading aloud from a randomly selected page. “Oh, this ought to be good.”

Weeks later Gretchen and I found the book hidden between the mattress and box spring of my parents’ bed, the pages stained
with coffee rings and cigarette ash. The discovery seemed to validate all of Gretchen’s suspicions. “They’ll be coming for
us any day now,” she warned. “Be prepared, my friend, because this time they’ll be playing for keeps.”

She was undoubtedly referring to the episode in chapter eight where Mr. and Mrs. Rivers offer their children to a band of
crusty gold miners with foul breath and rough, callused hands. The Rivers children seemed to enjoy it, but then again, they’d
been raised that way.

We waited. I’d always made it a point to kiss my mother before going to bed, but not anymore. The feel of her hand on my shoulder
now made my flesh crawl. She was hemming a pair of my pants one afternoon when, standing before her on a kitchen chair, I
felt her hand graze my butt.

“I just want to be friends,” I stammered. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

She took the pins out of her mouth and studied me for a moment before sighing, “Damn, and here you’ve been leading me on all
this time.”

I read the book once more, trying to recapture my earlier pleasure, but it was too late now. I couldn’t read the phrase “He
paunched his daughter’s rock-hard nopples” without thinking of Gretchen barricading herself in her room.

I thought I might throw the book away or maybe even burn it, but like a perfectly good outgrown sweater, it seemed a shame
to destroy it when the world was full of people who might get some use out of it. With this in mind, I carried the book to
the grocery-store parking lot and tossed it into the bed of a shining new pickup truck. Whistling out of apprehension and
nervous relief, I took up my post beside the store’s outdoor vending machine, waiting until the truck’s owner returned pushing
a cart full of groceries. He was a wiry man with fashionable mutton-chop sideburns and a half cast on his arm. As he placed
his bags in the back of the truck, his eyes narrowed upon the book. I watched as he picked it up and leafed through the first
few pages before raising his head to search the parking lot, combing the area as if he might spot either a surveillance camera
or, preferably, a vanload of naked swingers pressing their bare breasts against the windows and inviting him to join the fun.
He took a cigarette from his pocket and tapped it against the roof of the truck before lighting it. Then he slipped the book
into his back pocket and drove away.

When he was young my father shot out his best friend’s eye with a BB gun. That is what he told us. “One foolish moment and,
Jesus, if I could take it back, I would.” He winced, shaking his fist as if it held a rattle. “It eats me alive,” he said.
“I mean to tell you that it absolutely tears me apart.”

On one of our summer visits to his hometown, my father took us to meet this guy, a shoe salesman whose milky pupil hugged
the corner of his mangled socket. I watched the two men shake hands and turned away, sickened and ashamed by what my father
had done.

Our next-door neighbor received a BB gun for his twelfth birthday and accepted it as a personal challenge to stalk and maim
any living creature: sunbathing cats, sparrows, slugs, and squirrels — if it moved, he shot it. I thought this was an excellent
idea, but every time I raised the gun to my shoulder, I saw my father’s half-blind friend stumbling forth with an armload
of Capezios. What would it be like to live with that sort of guilt? How could my father look himself in the mirror without
throwing up?

While watching television one afternoon my sister Tiffany stabbed me in the eye with a freshly sharpened pencil. The blood
was copious, and I rode to the hospital knowing that if I was blinded, my sister would be my slave for the rest of her life.
Never for one moment would I let her forget what she’d done to me. There would be no swinging cocktail parties in her future,
no poolside barbeques or episodes of carefree laughter, not one moment of joy — I would make sure of that. I’d planned my
vengeance so thoroughly that I was almost disappointed when the doctor announced that this was nothing but a minor puncture
wound, located not on but beneath the eye.

“Take a look at your brother’s face,” my father said, pointing to my Band-Aid. “You could have blinded him for life! Your
own brother, a Cyclops, is that what you want?” Tiffany’s suffering eased my pain for an hour or two, but then I began to
feel sorry for her. “Every time you reach for a pencil, I want you to think about what you’ve done to your brother,” my father
said. “I want you to get on your knees and beg him to forgive you.”

There are only so many times a person can apologize before it becomes annoying. I lost interest long before the bandage was
removed, but not my father. By the time he was finished, Tiffany couldn’t lift a dull crayon without breaking into tears.
Her pretty, suntanned face assumed the characteristics of a wrinkled, grease-stained bag. Six years old and the girl was broken.

Danger was everywhere and it was our father’s lifelong duty to warn us. Attending the country club’s Fourth of July celebration,
we were told how one of his Navy buddies had been disfigured for life when a cherry bomb exploded in his lap. “Blew his balls
right off the map,” he said. “Take a second and imagine what that must have felt like!” Racing to the farthest edge of the
golf course, I watched the remainder of the display with my hands between my legs.

Fireworks were hazardous, but thunderstorms were even worse. “I had a friend, used to be a very bright, good-looking guy.
He was on top of the world until the day he got struck by lightning. It caught him right between the eyes while he was trout
fishing and cooked his brain just like you’d roast a chicken. Now he’s got a metal plate in his forehead and can’t even chew
his own food; everything has to be put in a blender and taken through a straw.”

If the lightning was going to get me, it would have to penetrate walls. At the first hint of a storm I ran to the basement,
crouching beneath a table and covering my head with a blanket. Those who watched from their front porches were fools. “The
lightning can be attracted by a wedding ring or even the fillings in your teeth,” my father said. “The moment you let down
your guard is guaranteed to be the day it strikes.”

In junior high I signed up for shop class, and our first assignment was to build a napkin holder. “You’re not going to be
using a table saw, are you?” my father asked. “I knew a guy, a kid about your size, who was using a table saw when the blade
came loose, flew out of the machine, and sliced his face right in half.” Using his index finger, my father drew an imaginary
line from his forehead to his chin. “The guy survived, but nobody wanted anything to do with him. He turned into an alcoholic
and wound up marrying a Chinese woman he’d ordered through a catalog. Think about it.” I did.

My napkin holder was made from found boards and, once finished, weighed in at close to seven pounds. My book-shelves were
even worse. “The problem with a hammer,” I was told, “is that the head can fly off at any moment and, boy, let me tell you,
you’ve never imagined pain like that.”

After a while we began to wonder if my father had any friends who could still tie their own shoes or breathe without the aid
of a respirator. With the exception of the shoe salesman, we’d never seen any of these people, only heard about them whenever
one of us attempted to deep-fry chicken or operate the garbage disposal. “I’ve got a friend who buys a set of gloves and throws
one of them away. He lost his right hand doing the exact same thing you’re doing. He had his arm down the drain when the cat
rubbed against the switch to the garbage disposal. Now he’s wearing clip-on ties and having the restaurant waiters cut up
his steak. Is that the kind of life you want for yourself?”