The Language of Men (17 page)

I handed him one of the tall, smooth posts, and he dropped it into the ground with a hollow thud. The posts stood at attention like exclamation points, quietly punctuating our progress.

"Better blow up those
Little Mermaid
swimmies, boy. You'll be floatin' in no time."

My father liked to work, especially after work. In the summer, he came home from Waldbaum's supermarket in the early afternoon with a giant watermelon perched on his shoulder. Tossing his keys on the table, he gave my mother a kiss ("Hey, toots") and walked out onto the deck. I was in the pool, floating on a package of hotdogs. The supermarket often gave my father free pool floats, leftover promotional items from a Memorial Day sale. Each year, my brother and I floated on a different wheel of cheese or processed meat.

Without a word, he took a few short steps and launched the watermelon, arching it over the grass. It hit the surface like a bomb, gushing water into the air. The waves rocked my hotdog float, almost tipping me over. I rubbed the water from my eyes and watched him twirl a toothpick with his tongue.

He dragged the lawnmower from the shed and wrapped a green bungee cord around the handle, securing the safety kill switch. He liked to smoke while he cut the grass and it was a nuisance to hold the safety switch and a Winston at the same time. My mother muttered about his carelessness as she knelt in her garden, propping up sunflowers with wooden stakes.

With the roar of the mower, my father became a mime. When he passed the pool, he shot me wide-eyed, open-mouthed looks or pointed out a blue jay pecking the bird feeder. If the blade chopped a stick or hit a rock, I watched his lips form short, sharp words. He paced the grass in even strokes. Sweat began to soak through his tank top. He peeled it off in one swift movement and tucked it into his back pocket. I watched his biceps tremble each time he turned the mower. His muscles reminded me of the sacred stones in
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,
the hard, tan rocks that encased precious diamonds. My father caught me staring and gripped the air with his right hand, tilted it to his mouth. I translated:
Ginger ale, boy!

The inside of our house was freezing, quiet except for the television in the living room. It was on most of the day, even if no one was watching. In the mornings, before my mother took me to school, she turned the television on for our dog.

"Keeps him company," she said.

My father flicked his Winston into the bushes. Small blisters of sweat gathered on his shoulders. The mower roared as he drank. He had several pink spots on his back and arms. There was one on the top of his head that I couldn't see then but I knew was there; I stared at it when he fell asleep on the couch. After years of "naggin'," my mother convinced him to have some of his freckles examined. The doctor removed a few of the darker ones. The biopsies came back normal, so he figured he could stay in the sun as long as he liked. And he did.

I used to think heat made a sound—that I could hear those blurry ripples rising off a hot highway or the hood of a car. It was an electrical hum I couldn't shake from my ears. Floating in the pool, I had stared up at the oak leaves waving their final goodbyes before Hurricane Gloria, and listened to the heat.

When my father told me it was the cicadas and not the heat, I wasn't relieved. In the summer, we collected their shells and lined them on his workbench in the garage. I hunted for them in the backyard, plucked them off trees or the shingles on the house and added them to our collection. We built an army out of their brittle hollow shells. Brown, legs like needles, bulging eyes, a slit down its humpback where the larger insect had emerged. They were terrifying. I couldn't imagine what the bigger bug looked like. I took a few of them to the side of the house and crunched them beneath my sneakers like little dead light bulbs, never certain they wouldn't flicker back to life.

One day, I saw something dead in the driveway. It was a giant insect with a long plump body and black eyes. Its iridescent wings seemed baked into the asphalt. I crouched down and rolled a pebble at it, shocking it back to life—wings vibrating, slapping the asphalt. It bounced as if on a hot skillet, flipped and hovered, then darted at me and crashed into the back of my hand. I yelled, running into the house.

"Whatchu think been comin' out those shells we got in the garage?"

I didn't believe him. This thing was huge; no way it could fit inside that brittle shell. Later, as I lay in the pool on my hotdog float, I thought about the sound of heat, how there must be thousands, millions of creatures waiting in the trees.

I don't want no grandkids, boy. Least not right now. Don't mean nothin', you bangin' around, just clean up after yourself. Cable guy was here last week, and the poor bastard just about needed a chisel to pry your bed off the wall. What'a'ya doin' stuffin' rubbas back there? Get rid of them things. This ain't no Easter egg hunt.

It's that one with the big hooters, ain't it? Well, glad you're bein' safe. That's important. Ain't like when I was your age. Now you catch something and that's all she wrote.

You talk to your brother 'bout all this, right? He knows. 'Less you want Mom to do it, which I doubt you do, boy. What else is there to say? It is what it is. Like I said, don't mean nothin', you havin' fun. Don't have to be worryin' 'bout pickin' out drapes or shit like that.

It was a different time back then, boy. People got married right outta high school and if you didn't have kids by the time you were twenty-three, twenty-four, older folks started lookin' at you like somethin's up.

Like with Mom. She and Haggemeyer were engaged. I was with Maddy. But by the time I got back from Vietnam, somethin' changed, you know? Lost that lovin' feelin'. All the dough I was sendin' back from Saigon, Maddy was spendin' it. Bought herself a new 'Vette. I was in love with her jugs—there was no romance there—but still, what a burn. And I guess Hag, I don't know, I never got that whole story, but Hag started screwin' things up with Mom.

Didn't bother me none. They broke up, but we all still hung out. If it bothered Mom, she never said anything.

The night I asked her out—I go over to Grandma and Grandpa's house and knock on the door and Mom answers. Musta been nervous, you know, cuz I'm on the porch doin' the friggin' Ethiopian Shim-Sham.

No, wise guy, I didn't ask her to share a
"so-dee-pop."
I didn't get a chance cuz Grandma was listenin' the whole time from her bedroom, and once she heard where the conversation was headed, she yelled,
"Well, it's about time!"

So, how'd we get here, boy? That's right. I was tellin' you to be safe.

WORD SPREAD FAST. Party hook-ups often did. One of my best friends, Joe, shunned me without a thought. The rest of my friends, guys I'd known since kindergarten, whose lives I could trace through the home movies my mother shot—the baseball and football games, Halloween parties, and Christmas plays in elementary school—turned away from me and didn't look back. Some lasted longer than others; one or two held on for a few weeks, sat with Mia and me at the back of the lunchroom, but they didn't last long. They, too, slowly left our table, like leaves falling off a tree. From the way they ignored me in the hallway, you would have thought I was dating all of their ex-girlfriends, not just Joe's. But one was bad enough.

Sorry, dude. Bros before hos.

I felt heroic in some small way—
Joe can't tell us who to love!
—plus I was part of that insignificant group in high school, the male members of which rarely got asked out on dates, let alone hooked up. It was sort of an achievement for all of us that Joe had managed to score Mia in the first place. I had dismissed notions of rising to the top of the social world long before—rich jocks and cheerleaders, brand new cars. I remember walking between the BMWs and Hummers in the student parking lot, feeling like I was wandering in a museum, searching for a tour guide.

Though I couldn't move up the social ladder, I couldn't let myself sink to the bottom, either: grow a thin, scraggly beard or wear shorts and boots all year long. I despised the limitations of my class—comfortable knock-off Polo shirts, jeans, sneakers, clean and boring haircut—not a jock, not a nerd, not a theater dork, art weirdo, or a dirtbag. But I understood that mediocrity offered a kind of camouflage. I blended in.

Overnight, I became a different breed, half of a Siamese twin. My arms grew around Mia's shoulder; her arm connected to my back. We shuffled down the hallways. I used to watch those creepy couples with my friends and had laughed when they walked by our lunch table. Now, I was one of them—attached to something stronger than myself.

Mia didn't have many friends. She was pushy, always standing up for herself and telling people what's what. If she didn't tell you off her mother would. We would sit in Mia's room watching
Pretty Woman
as her mother, a tough Italian lady with short curly hair, argued with the principal, or a neighbor, or another parent.
Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable,
she would say into the phone, as if she were lecturing a child.

Since we didn't hang out with anyone else, planning the weekend was easy. Like the benefits of school uniforms: restrictive, but reliable. Mia had a hot tub in her basement. Her mother came down to check the laundry, the thermostat, asked if we wanted something eat and then sat in her robe on the recliner, the three of us gazing at the TV like a staring contest. Eventually, she gave up and went to bed. We flipped through the channels for the next fifteen minutes or so, listening to her mother brush her teeth, flush the toilet, and finally shut her bedroom door.

Mia and I stripped each other and stood kissing in the cold basement, the TV on mute. My bare feet felt the slick wooden steps leading up to the hot tub. She stood behind me with her hand on my lower back, running her nails around my waist. At the top of the steps, we stood side-by-side staring into the steaming water. I kissed her again, and slowly submerged myself to the neck.

Don had been in California for almost a year by then. I moved into his room the week he left. One of the first things I did was paint the closet door. He had painted a giant eyeball on it, red veins branching out in every direction, with glow-in-the-dark paint. The first few nights I couldn't sleep, and the neon eye glowed. Even when I pulled the sheet over my face, the glow seeped through. I smothered it with several layers of black paint.

It was fitting that I moved into my brother's room when I did. I was beginning to choose between friends and girls. A little distance was growing between me and my parents, and for some reason it was just so damn easy to sneak things or people in and out of that room. My old room was right on top of my parents' bedroom, but when I was in Don's room, I was the farthest away I could possibly be without leaving the house.

My parents took a hands-off approach with me and my brother. They allowed us to make our own decisions, to determine what was good, what was bad. So my brother drove his $75 Volare to New Paltz at a hundred miles per hour or tripped out at the golf course and pushed the carts off a cliff. I found a girlfriend with a hot tub and soaked until my fingers turned to prunes.

Perhaps my parents were stricter with my brother. Maybe they held onto him a little tighter and he struggled like some feral animal. My brother had a wild look to him: catlike eyes, sharp features. I had cheeks grandmothers were always threatening to gobble up. My brother moved too fast for that.

Mia and I began eating lunch in the library because it was more comfortable. I tried to convince myself that it was nicer in the library, quieter, and that was why we were there. We weren't hiding. We weren't social refugees huddled in the corner picking at peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, watching the silent parade of laughing students march by the windows. We were in love.

"I can
not
wait until graduation," she said.

"Me neither," I said. "Be done with all this crap."

Graduation was like an oasis, a cool paradise free of old friends and their harsh glares. It was also three years away. We ticked off the days like children preparing for Christmas.

"Are you still thinking about going to community college?" she asked.

"Yeah. I don't know. Haven't thought about it much."

She shook her head. "You're wasting your life," she said. "I'll be at NYU, then med. school, and after that, who knows where I'll be. But that's the point—I can go wherever I want."

She reached across her textbooks and held my hand.

"And I want you to come with me."

In middle school, no one seemed to care about my future; no one told me who I was supposed to be. Now everyone had an opinion. More than an opinion—aggressive advice on how I should live my life. Some kids began to talk about their "careers" and "goals." Some dressed differently as high school went on—more professionally, as if a college recruiter could spring from the hedges and interview them at any time. Even Marlon was talking about art school; he couldn't wait to be done with our town.

When I took the time to even consider college, it seemed like another elite environment, filled with people fighting for a place, an identity. I knew I'd eventually choose a community college because it was the easiest route—all I had to do was show up. I got the feeling my mother wanted me to stay home. Perhaps my brother's decision to leave had caught her off guard and she wanted more time to prepare for my departure. I wasn't going anywhere any time soon.

"Can't we just decide what we're doing tonight first?" I asked Mia.

She shook her head, as if she were a frustrated Algebra tutor.
You're just not getting it,
her expression said.

I thought about the lunch periods when Mia had band practice or a tutoring session. Sometimes I sat in the cafeteria, alone, which was social suicide. I wolfed down my sandwich then roamed the halls, trying to vary my path enough so that no one would notice me. Other times I had my mother pick me up in the back of the faculty parking lot. I used the side entrance and walked quickly to her Ford Taurus.