The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (96 page)

She went to this psychologist for a while afterwards—after the big lingerie heist. The guy’s name was Dr. Grork. She saw him until her insurance ran out. I’m not a big believer in shrinks—all that probing and prodding into my brother’s potty training and puberty never did
him
any good. Not that I could see. Did harm, actually. Harmed Ma. I remember this one shrink right at the beginning—this old guy with hair in his nose—who tried to pin the rap for Thomas’s illness on
her.
He told her the research suggested that mothers who couldn’t love their sons enough sometimes kick-started manic-depressive disorder and/or schizophrenia. Which was pure horseshit. Ma gave the both of us everything she could and then some—
especially
Thomas. Her “little bunny rabbit.” She lived and breathed for that kid, sometimes to the point where it got a little sickening. Where it was like,
Yoo-hoo. Hey, Ma? Remember
me
?
Believe me. I was there. Not loving him enough
was
not
the problem.

But anyway, Joy and this Grork guy got to the bottom of things pretty quickly. The breakthrough came one day when he asked her to describe what she felt
like when she stole and she told him she felt turned on. That she’d get wet when she did it—sometimes even play with herself in the car driving away. It embarrassed me when she’d go into it like that—come home from Dr. Grork’s and tell me everything she’d just told him. One time, she said, she stole a purse at G. Fox, then got in the car and started rubbing the merchandise against herself while she was driving out of the parking lot. Began finger-fucking herself and came right there on the entrance ramp to I-84—it was so intense, she said, she almost rammed right into the back of a Jag. “Okay, okay,” I told her. “That’s enough. Spare me the details.”

According to Dr. Grork, Joy’s compulsion had to do with the fact that she’d been sexually abused when she was in junior high. By her mother’s brother. Well,
half
-brother, I guess he was, technically.
Is.
He was stationed at the naval base in San Diego; he lived with them for a while. He was ten years older than Joy, in his early twenties when it started; she was thirteen. It wasn’t rape or anything. Well, it was and it wasn’t. Statutory rape, I guess. It had started as fooling around, Joy said—water fights, wrestling matches. Then one thing led to another. They were alone a lot, she said. After a while, she just stopped moving his hands away. Stopped telling him to stop. Joy’s mother worked second shift.

It went on until “Unc” got transferred to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Here’s the sickest part: they kept it going for a while. Through the mail. He’d write her these dirty letters and enclose little pieces of himself: fingernail clippings, beard trimmings, even dead skin from a sunburn. It was
her
idea, she told me; she’d beg him to. She’d take them out of the envelope and eat them. Sit there chewing on the guy’s fingernails. Then he got a girlfriend and stopped writing. Stopped answering her letters and accepting the charges when she’d call him collect after school. Then the new girlfriend got on the phone and told her off. Screamed bloody murder at her. That’s when Joy started shoplifting. Dr. Grork said stealing made Joy feel powerless and powerful at the same time. The same as her uncle had. The same as her two husbands, too, I guess. Really, she’d just come home from those sessions with Dr. Grork and lay everything right out there, whether I wanted
to hear it or not.

She was eighteen when she married the first guy. Ronnie. Graduates from high school and—bam!—elopes out in Las Vegas before the end of the summer. She’s always talking about what a big mistake that was—how she’d gone right after graduation to Disneyland and had a job interview to be a cast member there. She’d make a perfect Cinderella, the woman told her. That’s one of the big disappointments of Joy’s life—that she never got to be Cinderella at Disneyland. That Ronnie guy was just a kid, too, I guess—twenty or twenty-one. That’s how she came east: he was transferred to the sub base in Groton. They lived down in Navy housing on Gungywamp Road. I’ve painted houses there. It’s depressing: house after house, all of them just the same. Joy and her
second
husband lived there, too—different house, same street. Dennis, the chief petty officer. She started sleeping with number two while number one was out at sea.

That’s what I’d identify as Joy’s third liability, I guess. Her
major
one. The fact that I can never quite trust her. Not 100 percent anyway. Not that she ever cheated on me—at least not that I know of. Just that she might. With some guy closer to her own age. That’s how I picture it happening, anyway: Joy and some superficial asshole in his twenties—some idiot who isn’t able to see beyond his own dick. There are plenty of those guys strutting their stuff down at Hardbodies, where she works. All those young guys with the gelled hair and the weight-lifting belts and the one earring. They’re coming out of the woodwork at that place. It’s like a fucking epidemic.

Which is not to say there’s trouble between us in bed. We’re still okay in that department, Joy and me. We’re fine. It’s not off the chart the way it was at first in those Ramadas and Best Westerns, but it’s still pretty damn satisfactory. It’s work sometimes, though. On my part. It’s probably stress—my brother and the business and shit. Joy’s always telling me to get down to the club and work out more. She’s always trying to get me to get a massage from her buddy, the Duchess. “He’s a genius,” she told me once. “His fingers, his rhythm—you can feel him actually drawing the tension out of you.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid of,” I said.

“Stop it,” she said. “You’re just being homophobic.”

“Yeah, well,” I told her, “whatever.” That time we went over to their house for dinner? Thad and Aaron’s house? . . . Aaron’s somewhere around my age. They live over on Skyview Terrace in one of those glass-walled contemporaries that look out onto the river. Land of the big bucks out there, folks; land of the high-altitude tax brackets. Skyview Terrace used to be part of the old mill complex, and before that, it was part of the Wequonnoc reservation lands. We used to fish out there sometimes before they developed it—Leo and me, Thomas and me. You should see the views of the river, especially in early June when everything’s just come out—the leaves on the trees and the mountain laurel. You look out there and you can almost believe in God.

Aaron’s an architect.
He’s
the one with the Porsche and the deed to the house. On the way over there that night, we had to stop at two package stores before we found this twenty-four-dollar bottle of special wine that Thad said would go perfectly with what he was making: scallops in cream sauce with those stupid duchess potatoes. The theory was that Aaron and I were supposed to have something in common because of our age and because we were both “in the building industry.” I had to laugh at that one. An architect and a housepainter are both in the building industry the same way Roger Clemens and the guy who sells the Fenway franks are both part of the Red Sox organization. That dinner lasted forever. I sat there all night, drinking Danish beer and listening to Aaron talk about jazz fusion and mutual funds. Trying to be cool about all this gay art they had hanging up all over the place. Joy and Thad spent the whole night gossiping about people they knew from work. Joy says Thad wants to phase
out his massage therapy and get into the catering business. Aaron will put up the money if it’s what he really wants to do, Joy says, but first Thad has to learn the business: marketing and management courses, not just the fun stuff like mixology. Thad told Joy that when he opens his business, he wants her to be his bartender. Joy says she’s never had a girlfriend she could trust as much as she trusts Thad. She says she can tell him things she can’t even tell me. Which is sort of scary, because she tells
me
plenty.
Miss Openness. Miss Finger Fucks Herself on Interstate I-84 and Eats Guys’ Fingernails.

Joy has this idea that, once she gets all her debts paid off, we can start saving and buy a house and get married. Live in one of those places in the real estate books. “I’m fifteen years older than you,” I told her one time. “I stopped believing in somewhere-over-the-rainbow a long time ago. I’m damaged goods.”

“I’m damaged goods, too!” she said, cheerfully, like it was some happy coincidence—me and her discovering we had the same birthday or something. . . .

I changed my mind, did the dishes after all. Put away the pans. Passive-aggressive: what’s the point?

Joy keeps her distance from Thomas; she’s afraid of him, I know that much. She was afraid of him
before
he cut off his hand—right from the beginning. When she first moved in with me, I used to bring him over to the house on Sunday afternoons. Dessa and I had always done that, and then, after the divorce, I’d kept it up. It was a pattern, a ritual. Joy didn’t say anything about it one way or the other for a while. She was on her best behavior. Then one Sunday morning—we’d been together for about six months by then—she asked me out of the clear blue not to go get him.

“But he
always
comes over on Sunday,” I said. “He
expects
me.”

“Well, I just thought it would be nice for once to spend the whole Sunday alone—just you and me. Just call and tell him you’re sick or something. Please?”

We were both naked together in the bathroom when she said it, I remember. We’d just had some pretty intense sex and I was about to grab a shower. Before Joy, I didn’t even know they made women who liked that much of it.

“Just you and me,” she repeated. She took my hand in her hand and slid my fingertips over her breasts, across her stomach, down to the stickiness we’d just made. Steam clouds rolled in the air around us. I’d already gotten the shower just the right temperature. “Please?” she said.

“But he
expects
me, Joy. He
waits
for me. Sits out in the solarium with his jacket zipped up.”

She let go of my hand and put herself against me—reached up under my balls and stroked me there. Smiled. Watched me blink. Watched me swallow. Good sex with Dessa was something we’d taught each other, but Joy came into the thing we had already
knowing
what would drive me crazy. Same things that had driven her two husbands crazy, I guess. And her uncle.

“What about what
I
expect?” she said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?” Her finger kept stroking. In another ten seconds, she’d get whatever she wanted.

I took her hand by the wrist and held it away from me. Stared at her. Waited.

“It’s not . . . ,” she said.

“It’s not what?”

“It’s not that I don’t
like
him. I
do
like him, Dominick. He’s a nice guy, in his own weird way. But he scares me. The way he acts sometimes. The way he looks at me.”

It was crap, what she was implying: that Thomas was eyeballing her. Lusting after her. I mean, most guys do. Joy’s a very good-looking woman. She gets her share of ogling. But with all the medication he’s taken over the years, my brother has about as much sex drive as a mannequin. “
How
does he look at you?” I said. “Give me the specifics.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It isn’t even really that. He just kind of gives me the creeps.”

“He gives
everybody
the creeps,” I said. I was still squeezing her wrist. Squeezing it a little harder, even.

“Yeah, but . . . well, part of it—I’m just trying to be honest, okay, Dominick? Don’t get mad, but . . . part of it is that you and he
look
so much alike.
That’s
what’s a little scary. Sometimes he seems like some weird version of
you.
”

I kept looking at her until she looked away. Then I let go of her hand and stepped into the shower.

“Hey, just forget it, okay?” she called in, over the hiss of the water. “Go ahead. Bring him over. I’ll deal with it. It’s my problem, not yours. I’m sorry, Dominick. Okay?”

Her hand reached past the plastic curtain and inside for my hand. I stood there and watched it move, searching, like the grope of a blind person. I refused to grab it, to take her small, perfect hand in some soggy gesture that gave her permission to feel that way—to say what she’d just said about him.

I wouldn’t give her that. I couldn’t. Which is probably, right there, why it’s never going to work with her and me.

I picked up Thomas same as usual that day. Drove him all the way up to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., which he didn’t give a crap about seeing. Took him out to eat at a Red Lobster on the way home, where he spilled melted butter all over himself. Got back purposely late. I gave Joy the silent treatment for the next couple of days—treated her so shabbily that I ended up rooting for her instead of me. She doesn’t have it easy living with me. I know that.
You
try being the brother of a paranoid schizophrenic. See if it doesn’t royally fuck up
your
life.
Your
relationships.

I stood there staring at the blinking message machine. Remembered the other phone messages—the ones I hadn’t listened to yet. Hit the button.

Beep.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Birdsey. This is Henry Rood again. It’s five o’clock, sir—the end of the workday.” (He was slurring his words, had jumped the gun on cocktail hour again.) “Not that
your
workday ever began, Mr. Birdsey. At least not here it didn’t. I’m still waiting for you to return one of the five calls I’ve made to you now. I’m marking them down—all my attempts to communicate with you. I have a little pad here. Maybe I should just call the Better Business Bureau instead.”

“Maybe you should just blow it out your ass,” I told the machine. I’d get to his freakin’ house when I got to it.

Beep
. “Uh, yeah, hello. My name is Lisa Sheffer. I’m trying to reach Dominick Birdsey? In regard to
Thomas
Birdsey? Your brother?”

Here we go again, I thought. What illustrious organization are you with, honey?
Hard Copy
?
Geraldo?

“I’m a social worker at Hatch Forensic Institute and I’ve been assigned to him, or he’s been assigned to me, or whatever. . . . I know
you were pretty upset tonight when you came in with him, and I just thought you might want to talk to me? Have me walk you through the procedures down here or whatever? You can give me a call if you want to. I’m going to be in my office until about ten o’clock tonight.” I looked up at the clock. Fuck! It was twenty after ten. “Or, you can call me tomorrow. Relax, now. Okay? Okay.”