Probation (21 page)

“Yeah, then you’d be as old as me.” I laugh.

“You’re not that old,” he answers.

Home, we go directly to bed. We undress shyly, careful not to look at each other, and crawl under the covers. Long minutes pass in the dark and I think he has fallen asleep. Then, sounding younger than he has all night, he asks me a question.

“Andy?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you happy?”

Something about his tender solicitousness compels me to lie.

“Happy enough.”

“Good.”

My answer seems to satisfy him and he rolls over on his side. He’s soon swept up in the arms of Morpheus, transported to a big, fluffy bed in a penthouse in the sky and Prince Cary is swearing his eternal love and the credits roll and they live happily ever after.

I
know better than to call from the phone at my mother’s house. The King of Unpainted Furniture is certain to have caller ID. He’ll have a stroke if the name Anthony Nocera pops up. (The phone is still listed in my father’s name even though he’s been dead for years.) I’m sure the King is screening her calls. Particularly today, traditionally an occasion for greetings and best wishes. I know how he thinks:
Wouldn’t it be just like that little worm, that little piece of shit, to pick a day like today, when she’s even a bit more vulnerable than usual, to come sniveling around, tail between his legs, with promises of how he’s changed, how it was all just a bad dream.

Over his dead body. No, more likely, over
my
dead body.

He’s sure to have taken precautions. He’s probably thrown every single Catholic in the state of North Carolina at his daughter. He wouldn’t even bother to check out the portfolios of the older ones or the prospects of the young. What the fuck would he care? He’d floated me for years. Nothing he couldn’t do again. The screening wouldn’t be rigorous. Alcoholics, deadbeat dads, suspects under indictment, numerous cases of halitosis and body odor, countless fashion victims in poly-cotton blend khakis: they’d all pass with flying colors. There was only one qualification.

None of them could be me.

A shot of bourbon will bolster my confidence. A small one, just enough to give me a backbone. What if she hangs up on me? What if she tells me she doesn’t want to hear from me and threatens dire consequences if I try to contact her again? Worse yet, what if she laughs at me? That would be the cruelest response of all, more terrifying than a vicious, angry attack. Stop making excuses, I think. That’s not your Alice, she’s incapable of hate. How do I know? I know because she wrote me a letter after the house was sold. The sentences were so perfectly straight I could almost see the invisible ruler guiding the pen across the stationery. Her wastebasket probably overflowed with balls of expensive writing paper, discarded if the pen went an eyelash astray. The perfection of the handwriting and the symmetry of the pages affected me as much as the words themselves.

No prosecutor could have drafted a more damning indictment of my indefensible betrayal and her humiliation.

I finally found the courage to ask my gynecologist for the test. Knowing the questions she would ask didn’t prepare me for the shock of hearing her words. What are your risk factors, Alice? How often did you and your husband have unprotected sex?

No judge or jury would have shown me such undeserved mercy.

I would have preferred to say all this in person, but I knew I couldn’t. For too many years, I was willing to close my eyes to everything, ignoring the obvious, not because I thought things would change, but because I wanted them to stay the same. Living without a husband is easy. But every day I miss my best friend.

I’ve read and reread it more times than I can count. I wanted to, meant to, reply. One epistle, carefully crafted in my head over several days in Denver, came close to being committed to posterity. It was apologetic, empathic. I wanted her to know I wished I were different. I’d change if I could. That even if I ever found someone to love, I’d never love anyone more. I should have scribbled it onto paper while I was euphoric and light-headed in the thin air of the Mile-High City. But my best intentions sank in the oppressive humidity of North Carolina. I never set pen to paper.

Nothing has changed. I’m still rejecting her, sending her to the mailbox day after day, expectantly at first, certain I would respond, despondent when, after a few weeks, she realized I wouldn’t. Why doesn’t she curse me as the bastard I am and hate me with a blazing white passion? No, she still finds some excuse to exonerate my bad behavior, excoriating herself for the unpardonable transgression of making a small, kind effort to reach out to me. Drink me, I say, and she drinks and she keeps on shrinking, Tiny Alice in our little Southern Gothic melodrama.

Tonight I’m going to make amends. I pull out my cell phone and dial the number. She answers on the second ring.

“Dunkin’ Donuts!”

Alice sounds happy and giddy, a little tipsy. I ought to try something witty, something half-witted, like “a dozen chocolate glazed to go.” But my mouth is too dry and my voice is cracking. “Happy Birthday” is all I can manage.

“Oh my God!”

Oh my God good or Oh my God bad?

“Oh my God. I’m so glad you called.”

Oh my God good.

I hear the clatter of dishes, chatter, glasses clinking. She’s on the kitchen phone.

“Sounds like quite a bash going on there.”

“Yeah.”

She sounds a little hesitant, nervous, as if her deeply rooted Southern conscience is stricken. How impolite. Caught red-handed. She’s having a party and I’m not invited.

Hold on a minute,
she says.

I hear her talking to someone.
Just an old girlfriend
, she says,
calling to wish me a happy birthday. Who? Susie. You remember her. I’ll remind you later. I’ll just be a minute.

I hear a door open and close as she steps outside, into the quiet evening.

“That’s better. I’m so glad you called,” she says again as if she doesn’t know what else to say.

“Hey, I’m sorry I never wrote back.”

“That’s okay. I shouldn’t have written you.”

“Stop apologizing.”

“Sorry. How is Ruth? I heard about the cancer.”

“Not too good.”

“I’ve wanted to call, but I didn’t know if…”

“She’d really like that.”

“I’d like to see her. I miss her.”

“That would be real nice.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ll tell her you’re gonna call. She’ll look forward to it.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

I ask after her sisters, her mother. She catches herself before she asks if I want to say hello to them.

“Look, don’t tell them I called.”

“No. I won’t.”

It’s a nice, comfortable feeling to share a secret with her again.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“I mean, I just mean with Ruth and all. It has to be hard on you. That’s all I meant.”

“I know that.”

“So how are you?” she asks.

“I’m okay. Really.”

“I worry about you,” she says.

You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t even think about me. And if you do, it should be to hate me. Don’t let your mind drift across the years, skipping from memory to memory, skimming the surface of our life together. The Turnbull & Asser shirt and the tie from Pink you gave me on my thirtieth birthday. Our first night in our first home. A hot Fourth of July in Rome, drunk on Sambuca, celebrating ten years of marriage, promising each other to return to this same little place to celebrate our twentieth. You holding my head as I vomited in the toilet, devastated by the call telling me my father was dead. Small, insignificant events and the important landmarks of our life, now all equalized by the passage of time, none able to evoke any emotion stronger than nostalgia for the past.

“I worry about you too,” I say.

“Andy, I’m so glad you called.”

“That’s the fourth time you’ve said that.” I laugh. “I’m starting to think you’re trying to convince yourself.”

“Well, I was thinking of calling you anyway. I just…well…Andy, I’m pregnant.”

I barely hear the rest of the conversation. It’s a double celebration—a birthday and engagement party. Her fiancé is so sweet. He has a thirteen-year-old son. He’s so nervous about starting a new family. He’s this. He’s that. She knows I would like him.

I’m only half conscious of her voice. I’m more a detached observer, someone overhearing a conversation in a dream and recognizing a familiar voice responding with the polite niceties. I’m so happy for you. No one deserves to be happier. I know the baby’s going to be beautiful. Have you thought of any names?

“Andy, are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay.”

I need to let her go, send her back into the kitchen, back to her new life.

“I’m glad I called.”

“It was a great birthday surprise.”

Not as great as the one you’ve given me.

“Andy?”

“Yeah.”

“You know this doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I’ll always love you. In some way.”

In some way. At long last, a level playing field. Now the love going both ways has qualifications, conditions.

She bursts out laughing. At first, I think she is mocking me. No. Someone has come up from behind and grabbed her by the waist. She giggles, says bye-bye, and hangs up the phone. And ninety-some miles to the north, the scene continues without me, the not-so-young lovers, still enchanted by the newness of their attraction, swaying to music that only they can hear, a favorite song, its lyrics known only to them.

Who wrote this ending to my story, the one that started on a night like this, hot and sticky, when I looked up to the constellations and instead saw my neighbor’s son stepping out of his underpants? The night that ended with me in the back of a squad car, too stunned to even cry? The Brothers Grimm have given her a knight in shining armor, a Prince Charming to rescue her, and a house full of people applauding her happily ever after. I’m not sure I like the way this has turned out, not that she doesn’t deserve the happiness a new life and a baby can bring her. I refill my glass and stroll barefoot out into the backyard, uneasy, consumed by a strange, unprecedented fit of jealousy, agitated by the only conclusion to be drawn from the life growing inside her.

Someone, someone who is not me, has stuck his fucking dick in her and got her pregnant.

You’re an idiot, I say out loud, pacing across the lawn. Did you expect her to remain untouched, unsoiled, shrouded in the veil of celibacy, faithful beyond the legal bonds of the marriage, until death did us part?

Yes, I admit, in a rare moment of honesty, too devastated by the knowledge that I’ve been completely and irrevocably replaced to have the strength to lie.

H
er words aren’t explicit. But her body language, her moods, tell me, tell the world, what she can’t quite bring herself to say. She’s scared. Things aren’t going well. She’s not responding to the treatment as well as was hoped. She’s cranky, irritable, prone to snapping. Not at me. Never at me. She’s very careful how she handles me. Just yesterday she bit her tongue so sharply I’m sure she drew blood. A single harsh syllable managed to escape before she clamped down. The pitch, the tone of her voice, indicated criticism. Of what? My inattentive driving? My distracted grunts at the latest updates from Florida? The volume of the radio? The station? I turned off the music, cleared my throat, and asked a question about my niece Jennifer, defusing the tension, if only temporarily.

But today, I am sitting across from my mother, and the table between us feels as wide as the Sahara. I feel small, horrible actually, at my reaction when she hands a gift-wrapped box to me. My mother laughs, asking if I remember my father’s rule book for life. The three simple laws all men must obey. Of course I remember.

No jewelry but a watch.

Boxers, not briefs.

Men don’t wear sandals.

I’ve never broken a single one, even refusing to wear a wedding ring. Did him proud on that one. But the gift in the box meets rule one only by a technicality. Calling it a watch is like calling the mansions of Newport cottages.
Functional
is not a word I’d use to describe it. Uncomfortable, queasy actually, is how it makes me feel.

“You don’t like it.”

“No. Of course I do.”

“No. You sniffed it.”

“What?”

“You sniffed it. Ever since you were a little boy, I could always tell if you liked something by your face. If you didn’t like it, you sniffed. It always reminded me of a cat.”

“That’s not true.”

“Why are you arguing with me?”

“I’m not arguing with you.”

“It’s Mother’s Day and I’m your mother and no one knows you as well as I do.”

My counselor accuses me of describing my mother as if she were an ethereal spirit, rarely engaged, a benign, but remote, presence. He says I romanticize her, speaking of her like she’s Cinderella, content in her life of servitude. He says he senses conflict between us, deeper and more painful to admit than that with my father. Bullshit, I tell him.

No one knows you as well as I do.

It brings the blood rushing to my cheeks. I call the waiter over and order a drink, a real drink, muddy hundred-proof swill, no ice. And much to my surprise, my mother asks him to bring her another glass of wine, no, make that a highball please, with ginger ale, on the weak side. She takes a cigarette from the package and asks for an ashtray. It’s a nonsmoking section but some strange authority in her voice compels him to obey.

My mother, by Bette Davis.

I wish my counselor were here to witness this little scene. See, Matt. My mother’s not the Pollyanna you say I make her out to be. I know she’s not perfect. But why should I share that with you? Why should I give you the opportunity to pick her apart? She’s at least earned my loyalty, hasn’t she? She’s never done anything to hurt me. And I really resent you implying she has. All right, all right, I’m inferring that, you didn’t imply it. Thank you for correcting my word usage once again.

“Well, you’re wrong,” I inform her. “I love it.”

“Then why are you sniffing it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…well, I don’t know. I mean, it’s Mother’s Day and I take you to dinner and give you a dozen roses and you drop five grand on a fucking watch.”

“Watch your language.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, it’s Mother’s Day and I’m allowed to do what I want and I wanted to celebrate being a mother.”

“What about Gina?”

“Taken care of. Diamond earrings.”

“Why are you doing this?”

She takes a deep drag on her cigarette and blows the smoke across the table, annoyed.

“You know why.”

No, Matt. You’re wrong. There’s no conflict between my mother and me. There can’t be. Just the opposite. It’s been her mission in life to protect me, keep me safe, and make sure the world has righted all the wrongs it has inflicted on me.

All that boy wants is to be with you. Why can’t you give him that?

That voice is so clear in my memory it’s as if I’m back in my bedroom, listening to my parents argue downstairs. That voice, quiet but persistent, insistent, repeated over and over, throughout my life. The voice of the iron fist in the velvet glove.

My mother, insisting she be put through to the commander of the Army base, persuading him to punish his vicious brat of a son for bloodying my mouth and calling me an unspeakable name.

My mother, demanding an audience with the school principal, making it clear that it was in my swim coach’s best interest to deliver me a heartfelt apology for calling me “Anita” after a dismal showing—second place—at an invitational meet.

My mother, intimidating my father with her steely gaze, forcing him to confront the neighborhood asshole who was mimicking my high-pitched voice.
Yeah, and when your kid’s digging ditches, my kid will be doing brain surgery and making six figures a year.
He sounds almost convincing. I remember him looking back over his shoulder, making sure my mother had seen and heard him doing the right thing.

My mother, speaking to my lawyer, telling him she’d take care of everything, the judge would be more than satisfied with the arrangements she would make.

My mother’s voice, always fighting for me, as if I were incapable of fighting for myself.

“It’s beautiful, it really is,” I say.

My mother does this quirky thing when she smokes. She flicks the tip of her tongue against her lips, chasing phantom pieces of tobacco, a habit ingrained from all those years dragging on unfiltered cigarettes. Only she hasn’t smoked cigarettes without filters for decades.

“Good.”

“What’s that?” I ask, forever and always distracted.

“It’s good.”

She means the chicken she’s sawing away at. I’m ashamed of myself for not paying attention and, worse yet, for being irritated by her voice.
Good.
She stills slings a diphthong across those vowels. What’s she saying? Gud? G’wood? That’s it.
G’wood.
Why does she still speak with that hillbilly twang after all these years? It’s not like she’s some fucking Queen of Country Music who has to market her “authenticity.” And what’s so
g’wood
about that dry stuffed chicken breast on her plate? How many times has she ordered the same goddamn thing in this same goddamn Gastonia-elegant club dining room with its linen napkins and a dusty silk rose in the lead crystal bud vase? It isn’t
g’wood
. It’s bland and tasteless, seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper and McCormick’s all-purpose spice blend. She reads the critical glint in my eyes and, not quite certain why she’s earned my disapproval, puts down her fork and wipes her mouth with that linen napkin.

I feel like a piece of shit. Why am I so carelessly cruel? What am I doing? She’s been nauseous for weeks; the antiemetics are finally working. Why am I denying her the small pleasure of her Sunday dinner? I’d apologize, but there’s really nothing to apologize for. After all, nothing hurtful has been said, it’s all just been a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation, a misreading of signals. I want to talk to her, but I can’t. I want to talk about this morning, tell her I heard it all. She thought I was asleep upstairs when I was lying in bed, hiding, tugging on my dick, jacking off twice, three times, until I got nothing but dry heaves for my efforts. I heard the familiar kitchen sounds, cake pans rattling in the cabinet, the whir of the mixer, the cling and clang of spoon on bowl, the oven bell, followed by the unfamiliar, a wail, tears and curses, then a deep sigh before getting on with it, rinsing, washing, cleaning up.

When my sister and I were kids, my mother always baked a cake for Mother’s Day. Red velvet layer cake for me in odd years, coconut sheet cake for my sister in even years. It was supposed to be red velvet this morning, even though it’s an even year. All she got for her time and effort was two thick puddles to be flushed down the disposal. Later, when I finally made my appearance, she made a joke of it. Imagine. Forgetting the baking soda. But what she was really thinking was how the malignancy is chewing up her sticky brain cells, digging deep holes into which things disappear, never to be retrieved.

What time is it? she’ll ask. Ten minutes later than the last time you asked, I’ll think. Two twenty, I’ll say.

She’s sentimental these days; the past has acquired a warm, fuzzy glow. Did I know she wanted to be a stewardess? No, I say, resigned to hearing the story again, knowing the pleasure she gets from telling it. She still has a letter from Mr. Peter van Hussell, Recruiter, telling her the airline was growing and encouraging her to apply again when she was eighteen.

My mother, by TWA, in a perfectly tailored suit and jaunty cap, silk scarf knotted at her throat and immaculate white gloves on her hands, dispatching her duties, maybe catching the appreciative eye of the captain.

Coffee, tea, or milk?

She might have traveled the world, had adventures, met people earthbound girls would never have an opportunity to encounter, had songs and stories written about her. But first, she wanted to see the ocean. The Jersey shore was only an hour away from the ketchup factory and her roommate Betty had a car. Every man should be as fortunate as my father and first appear as an object of desire backlit by a blazing sun. She was on her back, her arm slung across her face to protect her eyes from the sun. The voice, gravelly, with a harsh accent, light-years from the familiar rhythms of the Carolina hills, made her turn her head in the sand. She opened her eyes and saw his flat, strong feet, inches from her face. My mother’s eyes wandered up his calves, his thighs, passed quickly over the wet jersey trunks, and settled on the black thicket covering his chest. Her eyes played a silly trick on her and created a halo effect around his head. He could never have been born in her mountains, not with his thick black brows and crooked nose and eyes such a deep brown they seemed black. He belonged to another world. He had big white teeth and a smile that made her believe he could see through her modest swimsuit. And when he knelt beside her, she was thrilled and mortified at the same time.

He smiled and told her what a pretty voice she had. He made her repeat his name over and over.

Anthony.

Again…

Anthony.

What’s my name?

Anthony.

He persuaded her to wade into the water. She was too shy to tell him she couldn’t swim, had never even stood in water deeper than her knees. And when she wobbled in the surf, frightened and tentative, he stood behind her. His reflexes were quick and, when a wave knocked her off her feet, he caught her before she fell.

My father, too restless to settle for a union manufacturing job and frustrated by the limited opportunities for a journeyman machinist, was rebuilding his life on the G.I. Bill the summer he met my mother, focusing his ferocious energy on mastering the intricacies of heating and air-conditioning. She was not quite twenty and he was thirty-one when they married in a civil ceremony at City Hall in Philadelphia the following year. She didn’t write her brothers; a few of the girls from the factory were her only family at the ceremony. She spent her wedding night and the first year of her married life in his bedroom in his mother’s house. One year after the civil ceremony, after my mother converted, she and my father were married again, properly, in Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi Parish. My mother was three months pregnant with me on her second wedding day.

I might have grown up on the streets of South Philadelphia, nourished on cheesesteaks and Italian water ice, but my father had dreams and a wanderlust that would take him far from the neighborhood where he was born. On an unseasonably warm October morning, he helped his expectant wife into a used Oldsmobile packed with their few belongings and drove away, leaving his weeping family behind on the stoops of Montrose Street. He had five hundred dollars and the president of Pennco Technical School’s letter of introduction to an alumnus who was looking for an apprentice in small city in the South. When he asked my mother, a native of North Carolina, about Gastonia, she looked at him as if he had asked her to describe Jupiter or Mars. And so, within three years of leaving the farm, my mother was back in North Carolina, never to leave again.

He could be demanding. He could be thoughtless. He had a temper and sometimes lashed out, frustrated by the world. She wished he could be more patient with me. But he never hit her or her kids and didn’t get drunk and didn’t run around with other women. He was better than a good provider. And, once upon a time, he had washed her hair and crooned Sinatra tunes in her ear while they swayed to the radio. A lifetime later, on what would be their last anniversary, he told her the day she married him was the happiest day of his life and she held and comforted him while he cried, ashamed because diabetes had left him incapable of making love to her. She told him she didn’t mind, and she didn’t because, after his body failed him, he started to woo her again, kissing her gently first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, just before she spooned her body into his and he fell asleep. If you asked her, she’d tell you she’s had a good life. The world has surprised her by letting her be happy.

My mother, by June Allyson.

But that was the past, and what terrifies her is the future. The holes are getting bigger, and one day, soon maybe, she’ll blithely emerge from the bedroom, her wig on backward, lipstick smeared like a clown, her blouse unbuttoned, her slip mistaken for a skirt. She’ll be smiling, unaware she’s an object of ridicule, no, worse, an object of pity. Poor thing, they’ll say, remember how meticulous she was about her appearance? Today it’s baking soda. Tomorrow she might be wandering naked into the street.

She’d let me sleep this morning, knowing how hard it is to work all week and be at her beck and call all weekend. I need my rest so I can turn her over to Rent-A-Nurse tomorrow morning and hop a flight to escape. And no sooner will I board the plane than I’ll start to miss her, regretting all these days spent away from her, the dwindling opportunities to let her know what she’s meant to me. But if I stay she’ll drive me crazy.
G’wood
, she’ll say over and over again until it pushes me past the breaking point and I’ll want to smash her against the wall.