The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (100 page)

I cleaned myself off with the Dairy Queen napkins. Patty Katz said she had never done anything like this before. It wasn’t that she regretted it. She wasn’t sure how she felt. Her voice, her crying, were like the sounds of a girl in some other car. I got up, got zipped, got out of the car for a walk.

When Patty dropped me off at my house, she said she thought she loved me. I thanked her for the ice cream and told her I’d call her the next day—a promise I doubted I’d deliver on, even as I was making it. After she drove away, I stood there in the front yard, looking up at the light behind the shade in Ma and Ray’s bedroom. It was after midnight: Ma was up there worrying. It wasn’t as if she
ever asked for much, I reminded myself. Or
got
much, either, for that matter—from Ray or from my brother and me. I had put up with Thomas for seventeen years at that point. What was one more friggin’ year?

I
didn’t
call Patty Katz that next day. And the following week, when I suggested that she and I go for another drive out by the Falls, she told me she’d rather go to a movie or go bowling or do something with other people. Did I know Ronnie Strong from school? He and her girlfriend Margie were going out. Maybe we could double. Yeah, maybe, I told her. But I didn’t want to date Patty; I only wanted to screw her. So I was cool to her for the rest of the week and got a little chillier each week after that. Anne Generous, too, had lost some of her allure. She had large feet for a woman her size. She could be bossy. By the middle of August, I was hardly speaking to either of them.

But here’s the funny thing: after the big stink Thomas had made about that typewriter, he hardly touched the damn thing all during our freshman year. Hardly ever cracked the books, either. He’d been a pretty conscientious student in high school—had worked harder for his B’s and B-minuses than I’d worked for my A’s. But at UConn, Thomas couldn’t sit still long enough to study. He claimed he was too distracted. The dorm was too noisy. His professors were impersonal. Our room was too hot; it bothered his sinuses and made him sleepy whenever he tried to read. He was always walking out to the fire escape for gulps of air, or squirting Super Anahist up his nose, or talking about how miserable he was—how much he hated all the jerks and losers and skanky girls who went to our stupid school. Instead of studying, he watched TV in the lounge, drank instant coffee all day long (we had an illegal hot plate), then stayed up half the night and slept through his morning classes.
He resisted making friends and resented the friendships I made with some of the other guys on our floor—Mitch O’Brien and Bill Moynihan and this senior named Al Menza who was always looking for a game of pinochle or pitch. Thomas would get a bug up his ass if someone just knocked on the door or asked to borrow something of mine or wanted me to play some pickup basketball. “Am I
invisible
or something?” he’d huff. Or mimic.
“Is Dominick here? Where’s Dominick?
Everyone
loves Dominick the Wonder Boy!”

“Hey, if you want to play some hoops, then just come out on the court and start
playing,
” I told him. “What do you expect, an engraved invitation?”

“No, I
don’t,
Dominick. All I expect is that my own brother isn’t going to stab me in the back.”

“How’s my playing a game of basketball stabbing you in the back?” I asked, exasperated.

He sighed and flopped facedown on his bed. “If you don’t know, Dominick, then just forget it.”

One afternoon, Menza asked me in the middle of a pitch game what was “with” my brother. Instantly, I felt the cards bend in my hand. Felt my face get hot. “What do you mean, what’s ‘with’ him?” I said.

“I don’t know. He’s a little off kilter or something, isn’t he? You don’t see him all day long and then you get up in the middle of the night to take a leak and there he is, wandering around the halls like Lurch from
The Addams Family.
”

The other guys laughed. O’Brien was one of them. I forget who else was playing with us. O’Brien said he’d gotten up one night and seen Thomas running laps around our dorm. After midnight, this was. The middle of the frickin’
night.
I said nothing, stared hard at my cards, and when I finally looked up, all three guys were looking at me. “Jesus Christ, Birdsey, you’re blushing like a virgin on her wedding night,” Menza said. “Someone pop your cherry or something?”

I threw my cards down on the bed and got up, walked toward the door. “Hey, where you going?” Menza protested. “We’re in the middle of a game?”

“You win,” I said. “All of you. I fucking forfeit.”

For the rest of that afternoon, those guys blasted “The Monster Mash” nonstop on Moynihan’s stereo. Put the speaker in the doorway and filled up the hallway with the sound of that friggin’ song. Sang the
Addams Family
theme when Thomas and I went downstairs to supper,
complete with finger-snapping. It passed; that kind of ball-busting usually does. But the nickname they’d given Thomas stuck. From that afternoon on, he was “Lurch” to all the guys in Crandall Hall.

When I wasn’t arguing with Thomas or defending him in some half-assed way, I was spending my time with my face in the books or slumped in front of our Royal typewriter, hunting-and-pecking my way through some paper that was almost due. The noises I made while I was studying became an issue: the clacking of the typewriter keys, the squeak of the highlighter across the page, even the crinkling of cellophane if I got myself a snack from the machine in the basement. I began studying in the library as much as possible. I hated the sight of Thomas’s scowling face, the squirt-squirt of his nose spray, and those faraway sighs of his in the dark in the middle of the night. He was going to flunk out if he didn’t wake up—break Ma’s heart and make Ray hit the roof. He could end up getting his head blown off in Nam. But I was goddamned if I was going to
make
him study—if I was going to throw him over my shoulder and
carry
him to his classes.

Somewhere near the end of second semester, Thomas got notification from the freshman dean about his academics. The letter advised my brother to make an appointment with his office as soon as possible. Instead, Thomas began a frenzy of makeup work. “I can pull this off, Dominick,” he told me. “What are you looking at me like that for? I
can.
” He went to professors’ offices and pleaded for extensions and incompletes. He kept our hot-plate coils glowing orange and threw cup after cup of coffee down his throat. A kid on the second floor sold him some speed so that he could cram night and day for his upcoming exams. He was popping No-Doz like they were M&Ms. Thomas put so much shit into his system that he burst blood vessels in both his eyes.

One afternoon I came back to our room and found him sobbing on my bed. “Don’t be mad at me, Dominick,” he kept repeating. “Just don’t be mad. Please.” It was the way Thomas had begged Ray when we were kids—when Thomas had triggered one of Ray’s rampages.

Our whole room was pulled apart; there were papers and shit all over the floor. Over on my desk was a screwdriver and a rock and a hammer and our typewriter. The case had been cracked up the middle, a six-inch piece broken right off.

I told him he’d better fucking explain what was going on.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Just don’t be mad at me.”

He had finally written an overdue English paper, he told me, and then had gone to type it and not been able to find his key. He’d waited and waited and waited for me—he never knew where I was anymore. He might as well not even
have
a roommate. After a while, he’d panicked, convincing himself that I’d taken the key and hidden it from him because I wanted him to fail. I
wanted
him to flunk out. Why did I even lock the stupid typewriter, anyway? Why did it always have to be locked?

“Because guys in this dorm steal,” I said.

“Then they’d steal the whole thing!” he sobbed. “It’s
portable
!”

When the lock on the typewriter case wouldn’t give, no matter what he tried, Thomas had gone outside and gotten the rock and busted it open. It had seemed like the best thing to do until he did it. Then, right after that, he remembered where he’d hidden the key at the beginning of the semester: in his extra soap dish up on the top shelf, the one he never used. Would I please,
please
just type his paper for him? He’d straighten out, buy a new case for the typewriter. The paper was due at 9:00 o’clock the next morning. He couldn’t type because his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He was too nervous to concentrate. The “w” and the “s” on our typewriter weren’t working now, but he’d gone down to O’Brien’s room and O’Brien said we could borrow his typewriter. The paper itself had come out pretty good, he thought. But his English teacher wouldn’t give an inch. If he got it there at 9:01, she probably wouldn’t even accept
it. She was out to get him.

I could have whaled into him for what he’d done—for what he had failed to do all year long. But as angry as I was, I felt scared, too—scared of those blotches of blood in his eyes and the tremors in his hands, the revved-up way he was talking.

I got him calmed down. Heated him a can of soup. Yeah, I’d type the stupid paper, I told him. I had him lie down and told him to not say one friggin’ word about the noise O’Brien’s typewriter was making. I began.

It was an essay about the theme of alienation in modern literature—a patchwork of
Cliff Notes
and bullshit that contained no specifics and made hardly any sense. Its rambling sentences went off in a dozen different directions and never came back; the handwriting was almost unrecognizable as Thomas’s. That paper scared me more, even, than his behavior. But I typed what he’d written, fixing up things here and there and hoping against hope that his teacher would find something coherent in what he’d put together.

He was asleep before I finished the first page. He slept through the night and at 8:45 the next morning was still sleeping. I walked across campus and handed his teacher the late paper. Assuming I was Thomas, she gave me a dirty look and said she hoped I had learned a lesson about personal management. Maybe in the future, I wouldn’t be so quick to inconvenience people.

I wouldn’t, I said. I definitely wouldn’t.

When I got back to our dorm, I stood, bewildered, before our broken typewriter case—passed my finger over its sharp, smashed edge. Turned and stood there, studying my brother as he slept, mouth agape, his eyes shifting behind the lids.

At the end of second semester, the university put my brother on academic probation.

“Come in, come in,” she said, standing up from her computer. “I’m Lisa Sheffer.”

Flat-top haircut,
Star Trek
sweatshirt, little earrings all the way up one ear: whatever I’d expected,
she
wasn’t it. Five-one, five-two at the most. She probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet.

“Dominick Birdsey,” I said. She had a handshake like a vise grip.

I thanked her for her message the night before and started rambling about my brother, telling her his history, about how his being there was a big mistake. Sheffer put her hand up, traffic cop style. “Could you just hold on a minute?” she said. “I need to enter some information about another patient before I forget. Have a seat. This should take like two seconds.”

It was fair, I guess. We’d made a 10:00 appointment; the wall clock above her head said 9:51. My eyes bounced from that flat-top to the mounds of paperwork on her desk to a carved wooden bird with its head cocked to the side. Overhead, a fluorescent light buzzed like a mosquito.

“You get used to one program and the next thing you know the computer nerds up in Hartford change it on you,” she said. “They have these workshops whenever they update the software, like they’re doing you a favor. I go to the office manager, ‘Excuse me? I’ve got a kid in after-school day care and an Escort that’s already living on borrowed time. Why can’t I just use the stuff I’m used to?’ But no-
ooo.
”

The phone rang. “Uh-huh,” she kept telling the person on the other end. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” I got up and walked to the window—wired glass, two-foot square. Why would anyone want to work at this place?

Outside was a recreation area—a pitiful excuse for one, anyway. Couple of picnic tables chained to a cement floor, a rusty basketball hoop. A small group of patients was being herded out there, each guy squinting as he hit the sun. No sign of Thomas.

“So your real name’s Domenico, right?” Sheffer said. She was off the phone, back at her computer.

“Only on paper,” I said. “How’d you know that?”

She said she’d seen it somewhere in my brother’s records.

I nodded—told her I’d been named after my grandfather. Had she seen our birth certificates or something? Thomas and me listed under Ma’s maiden name?

“And your brother says you’re a housepainter, right?”

“Yup.” Jesus, was this appointment about Thomas or me?

“You give free estimates?”

“Uh . . . yeah. I do. So how about my brother?”

She clicked away a little more on her keyboard. Looked up. “Domenico was my grandfather’s name, too,” she said. “That’s why it popped out at me. Domenico Parlapiano. How’s that for a mouthful?”