I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  That summer, Leo and I rekindled the friendship we had started a couple years before in summer school math class. The few times I’ve ever bothered to think about it—to analyze what it was that made us friends in the first place, way before we were brothers-in-law married to the Constantine sisters—the only thing I ever came up with was the fact that we’re opposites. Always have been. At high school dances, I was your basic fade-into-the-woodwork type. The kind of guy who’d stand there all night watching the band because he was too scared to ask any girl to dance. Not Leo, though. Leo was a performer. That was back when his nickname was “Cool Jerk.” Sooner or later, someone would request that song, “Cool Jerk,” and Leo’d get out there in the middle of the gym floor and dance this spastic solo. Kids used to circle him four or five deep, clapping and hooting and laughing their heads off at him, and Leo’s fat would flop in all directions, the sweat would fly off his face. I admired his nerve, I guess, in some screwy way. One time, in the middle of a schoolwide assembly—one of those slide-show yawners about people from other lands—Leo raised his hand as a volunteer and got up on stage, yanked on a grass skirt, and took a hula lesson from these visiting Hawaiians. “Cool Jerk! Cool Jerk!” everyone started chanting over the ukulele music, until Leo’s hip-rolling began to look like something other than the hula, and the crowd went wild, and even the Hawaiians stopped smiling. Neck Veins, the vice principal, walked onstage, stopped the show, and told the rest of us to go back to our third-period classes. Instead of taking off his grass skirt and exiting gracefully, Leo started giving a speech about how JFK High was a dictatorship like Cuba and we should all go on strike. He was suspended for two weeks and barred from extracurricular activities.

  “How can you hang around with the biggest a-hole in our entire school?” Thomas kept asking me that whole summer when Leo and I had been in remedial algebra together. Leo was an asshole; I knew that. But, like I said, he was also everything my brother and I were not: uninhibited, carefree, and funny as hell. Leo’s colossal nerve had gotten the two of us access to all kinds of forbidden pleasures that my goody two-shoes brother would have objected to and my stepfather would have beaten me for: the X-rated Eros Drive-In out on Route 165, the racetrack at Narragansett, a liquor store on Pachaug Pond Road that gave minors the benefit of the doubt. The first time I ever got shit-faced drunk was out at the Falls in Leo’s mother’s Biscayne, smoking Muriel air tips and passing a jug of Bali Hai back and forth. I was fifteen.

  Now, four years later—during our work-crew summer—Thomas was just as resentful of Leo’s and my rekindled friendship as he’d been the first time around. “Just what I need: another dose of Leo Blood,” Thomas would say if I told Thomas that Leo was coming over after supper to hang out or to pick me up. Ma liked Leo because he was a good eater. Ray said he’d learned in the Navy not to trust the Leos of the world any further than you could throw them. “Watch your rear flank with that one,” Ray told me. “He’s too full of himself. Guys like that will sell you right down the river.”

  The fact that my stepfather worked third shift meant that he was home all day and had first dibs on the mail. I had two magazine subscriptions coming to the house back then, Newsweek and the Sporting News. It always bugged me that Ray got his hands all over them before I did—bent back the pages, wrinkled up the covers, left them all over the place so’s I’d have to go looking for the things. At our house, mail was Ray’s property no matter whose name was on the envelope, and if you complained about it, it was you who was committing the federal offense.

  One day in July, Thomas and I got home from work and found Ray sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a bottle of Moxie and waiting for us. “Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t the two geniuses. Have a seat, fellas. I want to have a little chat with you guys.”

  Ma was waiting, too, looking ashen, twisting a dish towel in her hands. She had made sweet cucumber pickles that day, a favorite of Thomas’s and mine. A row of canning jars was lined up on the counter. The kitchen smelled sweet and vinegary.

  We sat. Ray turned to Thomas. “Suppose you explain this!” he said.

  In his hand, he was crinkling Thomas’s tissue-paper grade report from UConn—all those D’s, F’s, and Incompletes my brother had said nothing about. Ray waved it back and forth like evidence. “What’s the story here, Einstein? You been taking a joy ride up there? First you flimflam me out of my hard-earned money and then you can’t even bother to study?”

  “Come on now, Ray,” Ma said. “You said you’d give him a chance to explain.”

  “That’s right, Suzie Q. And that’s exactly what I want to hear. His explanation. And it better be a good one.”

  Thomas sat there, hands in his lap, eyes averted and brimming with tears. Like I said, Thomas never could defend himself. So Ray continued to bully him.

  He himself had never been to college, Ray said, so maybe he was just stupid. But for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why he should keep throwing away his hard-earned money so that this clown sitting here across from him could make a joke out of his college education. What, exactly, was he paying for? Could either of us two Einstein college boys or our mother tell him that?

  Thomas’s whole body shook. He could explain what had happened, he said, but could he please just get a drink of water first?

  No, he could not just get a drink of water first, Ray told him. He could tell them what the hell he’d been doing all year long instead of studying. Ray took a long sip of his Moxie and slammed the bottle back down on the table in a way that made me jump. Made all thirty of those college credits evaporate.

  Thomas cleared his throat. “Well . . . ,” he began. His voice was loud one second, nearly inaudible the next; he explained in a rambling way that he had had a tough time adjusting to college. A hard time sleeping. “I was always so tired. And so nervous. I just couldn’t concentrate. . . . I kept trying and trying, but it was always so noisy there.”

  “It was noisy?” Ray said. “That’s your excuse? That it was noisy?”

  “Not just that. I felt. . . . It was a lot of things. I guess . . . I guess I was homesick.”

  Ma took a step toward him, then stopped. Caught herself.

  “Oh, gee whiz,” Ray mocked. “Mama’s poor little bunny rabbit was homesick.” Each time Thomas opened his mouth, he handed our stepfather more ammunition.

  “I’m really sorry, Ray. I know I let you down. You, too, Ma. All I can say is that it’s not going to happen again.”

  Ray leaned toward him. Got right in his face. “You’re goddamned right it isn’t, buddy boy. Not with my money.” He turned to Ma, jabbing a finger at her. “And not with yours, either, Suzie Q, just in case you’re getting any cockamamy ideas about getting another job. Maybe you don’t know a con game when you see it, but I sure as hell do. This guy’s going to stay home in September and work for a living.”

  Thomas was silent for several long seconds. Then he told Ray that if he had another chance, he could get things under control.

  “Oh, you could, eh? How?”

  Thomas looked over at me. “Dominick goes to the library to study,” he said. “Maybe I could try that. Go study at the library with Dominick. And if some of the teachers could just give me a little extra help . . .”

  I could tell by Thomas’s thickening voice, by the way his words kept catching in his throat, that he was about to surrender to full-out sobbing—the kind of snorting, sore-throat wailing that Ray had been able to draw from him ever since we were kids. I wanted to save my brother from that. Didn’t want him to hand Ray that satisfaction. So I put my own neck on the chopping block.

  “My GPA is 3.2, Ray,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong with that?”

  He looked over at me. Took the bait. “Well, why don’t you tell me what a goddamned GPA is then, Mr. Smart Ass?” Ray said, turning to me. “After all, I only went as far as my third year of high school. I only fought in two wars, that’s all. I’m not a walking encyclopedi
a like you and Smarty Pants over there. I’m just the working stiff that puts food on the table.”

  I stared him down. “It’s a grade point average,” I said. “Four points for an A, three for a B, two for a C. I made the dean’s list, Ray.”

  “I made the dean’s list, Ray,” he mimicked back. “So who does that make you? King Farouk? Does that mean my shit stinks and yours doesn’t?”

  “No. All it means is that I made the dean’s list.”

  “Gee, that’s great, honey,” Ma said wearily. “Congratulations.”

  Ray told her to shut her trap and stay out of it. He put down Thomas’s grade report and picked up mine, then proceeded to discredit my accomplishments one by one. B-plus in psychology? Big deal! That stuff was a bunch of happy horseshit as far as he was concerned. A-minus in probability? He didn’t even know what that was, for Christ’s sweet sake. He laughed with particular disdain at the A I had earned in art appreciation. “Kids your age are over there dying for their country, and you’re sittin’ in some nice little classroom, ‘appreciatin’ paintin’s on a wall? And I’m paying for it? I never heard of anything so goddamned pathetic.”

  “So what is it you want, Ray?” I said. “You want the two of us to go over there and get our heads blown off by the Viet Cong? Is that what would make you happy?”

  “Don’t say that, honey,” Ma said.

  Ray leaned forward and took hold of me by the front of my T-shirt. Pulled me up to a standing position. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that, buddy boy,” he said. “Understand? I don’t care how many A’s you got on your lousy—”

  “Let go of me, Ray,” I said.

  “You hear me? Huh?”

  My T-shirt twisted a little in his grip. Cut into the back of my neck. “I said, let go of my fuckin’ shirt.”

  “All right, you two,” Ma said. “Come on now. This isn’t necessary. Calm down.”

  “Calm down?” Ray said. He let go, shoving me backward so that I lost my balance, fell against one of the kitchen chairs. “You want me to calm down, Connie? Okay, I’ll calm down. Let me show you how calm I can get.”

  Ray took Ma by the arm and walked her over to the counter where her pickles were. He grabbed one of the jars and flung it like a grenade against the refrigerator door. Grabbed another. It smashed on the floor in front of Thomas. A third smashed against a leg of the kitchen table. By the time he’d finished, the floor was littered with broken glass and pickles and rivers of juice—the ruins of my mother’s day.

  I wanted to kill the bastard. Imagined picking up one of those jagged pieces of glass and going after him with it. Sinking it into his heart. But I just stood there, terrified.

  “How’s that for calm, honey bunch?” Ray asked Ma. He was red-faced, short of breath. “How do you like them apples? Huh?”

  Ma went for the broom and the mop, but Ray told her to stay put and to shut her big trap for once in her life. He had something to say to all three of us and all he wanted us to do was shut up and listen.

  Thomas and I were both a couple of pantywaists, he said, and as far as he was concerned, it was all Ma’s fault. We were Suzy and Betty Pinkus, the little college mama’s boys, hiding behind her apron strings instead of doing what was right. Neither of us gave a good goddamn about our country—about anything except ourselves. Did we think he had wanted to go over there and fight the Krauts? Did we think he wanted to put his life on the line a few years later in Korea? Men did what they had to do, not what they wanted to do. Our mother had spoiled us rotten—had treated us like a couple of crown princes. The two of us were nothing but take, take, take. We’d been like that our whole fucking lives and he was sick of it. We could go plumb to hell if we thought he was going to keep shelling out. He was finished with that bullshit.

  It was futile to defend yourself when Ray went full-tilt into one of his rages. Whatever shots you got in weren’t worth what he’d come back at you with—weren’t worth the toll it took on Ma. The best thing you could do was cut your losses. Relax your face of any emotion. Play defense.

  That was something I always understood and Thomas never did. That afternoon, my brother sat there, sobbing and apologizing, as if enough tears and “I’m sorrys” would make him love us. Or at least stop hating us. Ray railed on, backing up and slamming into him again and again, one verbal collision after another. Just witnessing it was enough to make me puke.

  I headed for the back door, sloshing through pickle juice, crunching glass underneath my work boots with every step. “Get back here! Who told you this was—?”

  I slammed the door behind me.

  I was in a jog by the time I got to the end of Hollyhock Avenue, clomping up the hill to Summit Street and then through the woods. I stumbled past a family having a picnic and a teenage couple swapping spit by the edge of Rosemark’s Pond. Went crashing into the water, boots and work clothes and all.

  Breathed deeply in and out, in and out.

  Went under.

  I got home sometime around midnight, I guess—well after Ray had gone to work and Thomas had gone to bed. The kitchen floor had been cleaned of glass and pickles. The supper dishes were dry on the rack, my meal Saran-wrapped on a plate in the refrigerator. I was sitting at the table, eating and reading the paper when I heard my mother on the stairs.

  She smelled like the lilac dusting powder I gave her every Christmas—the only thing she ever claimed she needed. She was wearing a housecoat I’d never seen before—a colorful, flowery one. Her toenails were painted pink.

  “I don’t know how you boys can eat cold spaghetti like that,” she said. “Why don’t you let me heat that up for you?”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  She sat down at the table across from me. “Honey?” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, you don’t look all right. You look like the wreck of the Hesperus.”

  “I hate him, Ma,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No, you don’t, Dominick.”

  “Yes, I do. I hate him.”

  She got up and turned her back on me, started putting away the dishes. “You hate his temper, not him. Boys don’t hate their fathers.”

  “He’s not my father.”

  “Yes, he is, Dominick.”

  “The only thing that makes him my father is some stupid piece of paper he signed. What kind of father would bully his son the way he bullied Thomas tonight? What kind of father wants his sons to go off to war and get wasted?”

  “He didn’t say that, Dominick. Don’t put words in his mouth. He loves you boys.”

  “He can’t stand us and you know it. He resents everything about us. He’s been that way all our lives.”

  She shook her head again. “The thing about your father is. . . . Well, I don’t want to tell tales out of school, but he didn’t have it easy when he was a kid.”

  “Don’t keep calling him my father. He’s not my father.”

  “He didn’t have much of a home life, Dominick. His mother was a no-good tramp. He doesn’t talk about it much, but I think that when his temper goes off like that, it just all comes back at him.”

  “Is our real father alive?” I said. “Did he croak or something? Just tell me!”

  She looked me in the eye for a second, and then looked away. Put her hand over her cleft lip. “All I’m saying, honey, is that these kinds of problems pop up in every family. Not just ours. Now do me a favor and don’t walk around here with bare feet. I think I got all that glass, but sometimes you miss a piece. Just be careful, honey. Okay?”

  “Who is he, Ma?” I said. “Who’s our father?”

  She stood there a while longer. Gave me a weak smile. “Well, good night,” she said. “Get some sleep now. Watch out for that glass. Okay?”

  17

  “Mr. Birdsey, tell me about your stepfather.”

  Silence.

  “Mr. Birdsey? Did you hear me?”

  “What?”

  “Yesterday, near
the end of our session, we were—”

  “Can I have a cigarette?”

  “Smoking is bad for your health, Mr. Birdsey. And for mine, too, since I’m in the room with you. I’d rather you didn’t get into the habit of having cigarettes every time we sit down to talk.”

  “You didn’t mind yesterday. You lit the first one for me.”

  “Yesterday was an exception. We were making some progress and—”

  “I think better when I smoke. I remember better.”

  “I don’t quite see how that’s possible, Mr. Birdsey. Physiologically speaking. Let’s move on, please. With regard to your stepfather, do you suppose—”

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  A pause. “Mr. Birdsey, I discuss neither my religious beliefs nor my personal life with patients. It’s my policy. It’s not relevant to what we’re trying to accomplish.”

  “Well, I want a cigarette. That’s my policy.”

  “And how do you justify that in terms of your religious conviction, Mr. Birdsey? I’m curious about that. If, as the Bible says, the body is a temple, then—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Call me by my code name. Especially if this is on tape. I’m vulnerable enough already.”

  “Shall I call you Thomas then? You said during one of our earlier sessions that you prefer the more formal ‘Mr. Birdsey,’ but perhaps now that we’ve established a—”