I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  I wrapped a towel around myself and went into Ma and Ray’s room to use the phone. In the mirror above Ma’s bureau, I started shadowboxing with Dessa’s old boyfriends, letting punches fly at my own reflection. I dropped to the floor and did some push-ups. I was edgy. Couldn’t stop whistling. I told myself I was feeling good—feeling “up and at ’em”—but it was nerves. The fear that I’d blown it with the best person I’d ever known in my whole stupid, sorry life.

  I dialed the Constantines’ number and waited. Looking around, I suddenly saw Ma and Ray’s bedroom the way Dessa might see it. Her parents’ room was three times this size. It had wall-to-wall carpeting, a couch, a mural painted right onto the friggin’ wall. My mother and Ray had a worn linoleum floor and pull-down window shades, Ray’s collection of ceremonial weapons, Ma’s Holy-Roller stuff: crucifix, Mary statue, praying hands on this sorry little wooden shelf that Thomas had made in junior high shop class. The afternoon sun highlighted the dents in the wood where his hammer had missed, the nail hole he’d forgotten to wood-putty. In that same shop class, I’d made an end table with a built-in record rack to hold LPs. Mr. Foster had put it in the spring showcase where he put the best stuff. He’d placed a philodendron plant on top of it and some of his own records in the rack. My project gets put in the showcase, but what does Ma save? Put up in her bedroom? Thomas’s piece-of-shit shelf.

  Why wasn’t Dessa answering? Where was she? . . .

  I looked over at Ma’s holy picture of the Resurrection—Jesus, his Technicolor heart aglow, his eyes as forlorn as a basset hound’s. Some sex life they must have with that thing hanging right over their bed. . . . I flashed on the long-ago day when she’d bought that thing, down at the five-and-ten. The same day that crazy guy on the city bus started touching her. Got off the bus when we got off and chased us. . . . I saw her sitting there on that bus seat across from us, scared to death, letting that guy’s hand wander wherever it wanted. She’d acted the way she always did when anyone pushed her around: just shut up and took it. Waited for Jesus to come to her rescue. If it was true that the meek were going to inherit the earth, then Ma was going to be a Rockefeller.

  I thought about a discussion our political science class had had the semester before: about whether religion was or was not “the opiate of the people.” . . . I hadn’t bothered going to Sunday Mass once since I’d gotten home from college for the summer. I was making a statement about who I was now—how I’d changed—so I stayed in bed every Sunday morning. It was a sore point with Ray, especially now that he’d been made a big-deal deacon down at the church. I was pretty sure it was a source of pain for Ma, too. Not that she ever said anything. Not that she’d risk that. . . . But, hey, it was my life, not theirs. Why go to church when God was just a big joke? A cheesy painting from the five-and-ten? I wasn’t going to be a hypocrite about it like Ray. . . . Thomas still went every week, of course. Mr. Goody Two-shoes. Mr. Touched-by-the-Holy-Ghost. . . . I thought about Professor Barrett, my art appreciation teacher the semester before. Her and her abstract expressionism. She’d taken our class down to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “Come here! Let me show you!” she’d said, leading me up the spiral to a wall full of drips and squibbles. She’d singled me out for some reason—had taken me by the arm and pulled me toward Jackson Pollock, her patron saint. “God is dead and Pollock knows it,” she’d announced out of the blue one day in class, her profile lit eerily by the dust-flecked cone of light between slide projector and screen. Sondra Barrett: according to the rumor, she was hot to trot. Got it on with both famous artists and undergraduates. Had she been coming on to me that day at the museum? Could I have pursued it? If Sondra Barrett ever got a load of my mother’s Jesus painting—fine art by Woolworth’s—she’d probably need oxygen or something. I tried to think of me and Sondra Barrett in some loft someplace, going at it. Tried not to keep seeing that crazy guy who’d felt up my mother that day on the bus—his filthy coat, the lump on his forehead. The way he’d sniffed at my mother while he touched her. She’d done nothing, said nothing. . . . Maybe that was how Thomas and I had come into the world: maybe some miscellaneous motherfucker had jumped her in a dark alley someplace and she’d lain there. Done nothing. Maybe that was why our conception was some deep, dark secret.

  A breeze entered the room, flapping the window shades. Some of the rips in those stupid shades had been repaired with Scotch tape gone brown. What had Dessa’s old man told her—that she’d be settling for less if she hooked up with me? I felt myself blush with the truth of it. Crooked the phone between my chin and shoulder and threw a few more sucker punches. Take this, you rich old fuck! I been sneaking into your house all summer long. Making your daughter scream from it. Fucked her one time on your bedroom floor, you prick, so take that!

  I heard footsteps on the stairs.

  Thomas’s.

  Heard him close the bathroom door, take a leak, flush. I listened to his clomp-clomping back down the stairs. I realized I’d been holding my breath at the sound of his moving through the house. Suddenly, the ringing in my ear came back to me. The phone over at Dessa’s: on its fortieth or fiftieth ring by now. Why wasn’t she answering?

  Maybe she was out at their pool. Or standing right there, watching it ring. I banged the phone back down on the receiver, then picked it up and dialed again. If she’d just goddamned answer, I could explain myself. The night before had been a case of temporary insanity, that was all. It would never happen again. She was safe with me.

  Period.

  End of subject.

  I flopped back onto Ma and Ray’s bed. The sheets had been stripped, the mattress’s imprint of coils and springs showing through from beneath. Brown stains dotted the middle. Maybe they flipped that Jesus painting over when they were in the mood. Shit, man: Ma having sex. And not just with Ray, either. Who was my brother’s and my biological father? Maybe he never even knew about us in the first place. Maybe she’d never had the guts to tell him he’d knocked her up. . . . I flashed on a long-ago afternoon down at the playground when Lonnie Peck told me that dirty joke. You know what happens when your father fucks your mother? The punch line had included a demonstration: one of Lonnie’s cigarettes poking in and out of a circle he was making with his thumb and finger. Lonnie must have been in seventh or eighth grade at the time—lethally cool in the eyes of my friends and me. Lonnie’s joke had simultaneously clarified for me the plumbing that went on between men and women and planted the dirty picture in my mind of Ray and my mother doing it up here in this bedroom. When I got home that afternoon, I first taunted my brother with my new knowledge and then burdened him with it, leading him into Ma and Ray’s room and demonstrating the same way Lonnie had, using one of Ray’s own Viceroys from the pack on his nightstand. Thomas told me I was a pig. “Maybe that’s the kind of thing Gina Lollobrigida does,” he said. “But not Ma.” I kind of wanted to believe that myself, but I didn’t believe it. And if I was going to know, then Thomas was going to know, too. I needed to inflict the knowledge on him. So I held my little demonstration closer to his face and laughed and sped up the cigarette’s jabbing motion. That was the thing about us, the difference: I knew that the world was basically a bad place—that life stunk and God was a joke, a cheap painting you could buy at the five-and-ten. I knew it; Thomas didn’t.

  Pacing the room, I stopped to finger the stuff on top of Ma’s chest of drawers: Avon cologne, dusting powder, jewelry box, family pictures. I’d given Ma the jewelry box for Christmas the year I was a high school freshman. When I opened it, that song “Beautiful Dreamer” plinked away underneath the small satin compartments, same as it always had. It was Thomas who’d spotted the jewelry box first, downtown in the window of the Boston Store. He told me he had decided to save up for it for Ma even before he’d known it played her favorite song. He seemed to marvel at the coincidence. Then a snowstorm had put shoveling money in my pocket while Thomas sat around all day watching TV, and I’d gone downtown late that afternoon and beaten him to t
he punch. I was always doing that to him when we were kids: letting him know which of us was smarter, stronger, faster on the draw. Maybe that was why he was acting so wacky these days. Maybe I’d finally made him crack. I’d had no idea “Beautiful Dreamer” was Ma’s favorite song. If I’d ever thought about it at all, I would have probably guessed “Hot Diggedy, Dog Diggedy” or “Ricochet Romance,” two of the tunes I remembered her singing along with the radio when we were little. In the kitchen with us, with Ray out of the house, Ma sometimes let her hair down. Risked being silly.

  I don’t want no ricochet romance

  I don’t want no ricochet love

  If you’re careless with your kisses

  Find some other turtle dove

  I snapped the jewelry box closed again. Hey, if it was true that I’d pulled a dirty trick or two on my brother, I reassured myself, it was just as true that I’d saved his ass plenty, too.

  Ring, ring. . . . Answer, goddamnit! I knew she was home. Playing games.

  One by one, I studied Ma’s framed photographs: Ray, young and skinny in his Navy uniform; Thomas and me, kindergartners in bow ties and sideburned high school seniors; Billy Covington in his Superman pajamas. The largest photograph—the one in the heaviest, fanciest frame—was a brown-tinted portrait of Ma’s father, whose gravestone I’d been trimming and weeding around all summer long.

  Domenico Tempesta. “Papa.” The greatest griefs are silent.

  I’d asked Ma about the significance of that gravestone inscription. However she’d answered me, it had been a non-answer.

  “Did he have that put on there, Ma? Or did you?”

  “What? . . . Oh, he did. He made all his own arrangements a couple years before.”

  “So what’s it mean: ‘the greatest griefs are silent’?”

  She’d never answered that question. Or the other question I’d had: why he and his wife—my grandmother—had been buried on opposite sides of the cemetery. According to the date on his stone, “Papa” had died the summer before Thomas and I were born. Had he known about us—that his unmarried daughter was pregnant with twins? In the framed photograph, Domenico’s eyes seemed guarded and suspicious—as if he didn’t quite trust whoever was taking the picture. I looked over at Jesus’ eyes on the adjacent wall. Compared the two. Jesus was a sad sack; Domenico was a son of a bitch.

  This is ridiculous, I thought. I’m wasting an entire Saturday afternoon listening to a fucking phone ring. Still, I couldn’t quite hang up yet. She could be just getting home from someplace, throwing open the front door, and rushing to pick up. Or, if she was playing games, then fine, I’d outlast her. Sit there and let it ring until she weakened.

  Ray’s side of the bedroom still had that same “no trespassing” feel to it—a holdover from when we were kids. From the earliest days, Thomas and I had been warned not to wake up Ray while he was asleep. And whether he was asleep or awake or out of the house, we were forbidden to enter their bedroom by ourselves because of the sheathed knives and swords and daggers he kept on the wall. “Those things are sharp enough to lop someone’s head off,” he’d warned us more than once. “If I catch you in this room when you’re not supposed to be, I’ll wallop you into next week.”

  I walked over and opened his closet door. He was still a nutcase about shoes: ten or eleven pairs on the floor, spit-shined and lined up, ready for inspection. The gray work pants and shirts he wore every night to Electric Boat hung neatly from hangers, pressed and ready to go. Ray always had Ma roll up his shirtsleeves to the elbow and then iron the folded cuffs.

  On the wall above Ray’s bureau were the untouchable weapons, his framed service medals, and the small, blurry photo of his dead mother, a skinny hillbilly-looking woman who, my brother had once observed, looked like a young Ma Kettle. Sitting atop the bureau in their usual order were Ray’s shoehorn, hairbrush (comb stuck inside the bristles), Gold Bond powder, Aqua Velva. One time as a kid, I’d tiptoed into the room while Ray was sleeping and borrowed the shoehorn. Waking up Ray during his daytime sleep would have made him hitting mad, but Billy Covington had said he needed the shoehorn to hypnotize us. He’d dared me to do it, and I had. Billy had tied the shoehorn to a string, rocking it back and forth, back and forth, in front of my brother and me the way he’d seen a man do on TV. “You’re getting sleeeepy,” Billy droned in a strange accent. “Veddy, veddy sleeeepy.” After the experiment flopped, the three of us had gone outside and dangled the shoehorn into the culvert until it accidentally came loose from its tether and fell in. Later that afternoon, Ray woke up, went to put on his shoes, and screamed bloody murder. Billy’s mother had picked him up by then. Through tears and sharp intakes of breath, Thomas and I came clean about the hypnosis attempt and the accident. Ray didn’t beat us as we’d suspected he might. Instead, he positioned me at the top of the stairs and Thomas at the bottom, then instructed us to march up and down until he told us we could stop. It had seemed silly at first. I remember stifling giggles and making secret faces at my brother as we passed each other on the middle steps. But inside of an hour, I was sweat-drenched and wobbly-legged and Thomas was crying because of the cramps in his legs. “Can’t they stop now?” Ma had asked Ray, who sat on a kitchen chair he’d set up by the front door to read the Daily Record and supervise. Ray told her we could stop when he was good and sure we had learned our lesson about respecting other people’s property. That night, while Ray was at work, Ma got out of bed and rubbed witch hazel on my charley horses. We’d spent two hours doing penance—climbing stairs.

  Fuck her! I banged the phone back down on the receiver and the second I did, it rang. “Hello?” I blurted out.

  I was sure it was Dessa, but it wasn’t. It was Leo.

  Yeah, all right, I’d go fishing with him. I didn’t have anything better to do. Six o’clock? All right. Yeah.

  When I went downstairs, Thomas was slumped in the middle of the couch, wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms and this stupid red and blue striped stocking cap on his head. He’d worn that thing all winter long. Inside the dorm. Seeing that hat on his head brought everything back: that weird first year of school, his weird behavior. He was staring like a zombie at the TV.

  “Where’s Ma?” I said. He wouldn’t answer me.

  I went out to the kitchen and came back with cereal, milk, a bowl, a spoon. “Shove over,” I said. Flopped down on the couch next to him. The proximity was a half-baked attempt at peacemaking.

  He was watching an old Tarzan movie—Johnny Weissmuller and Brenda Joyce. When we were kids, Thomas had maintained that Johnny Weissmuller was the best Tarzan and I’d insisted Lex Barker was. I’d even half-convinced myself that Thomas and I resembled Lex Barker—that maybe he was our father and would come back to claim us. I was always doing that when I was little: dreaming up fantasy dads, Hollywood rescues from Ray. It was pathetic. But now, sitting there on the couch eating Cheerios, it suddenly struck me funny: Lex Barker swinging through the trees on Hollyhock Avenue and coming in for a landing in Ma’s bedroom. Ma getting pregnant by Tarzan the Ape Man. Him coming back years later to get us and bring us back to where? The jungles of Africa? Hollywood, California? God, little kids are such idiots.

  “Hey, Jerk Face,” I said to Thomas. “I still say Lex Barker’s a better Tarzan than this guy. Hands down. No contest.”

  No answer.

  “So where’d you say Ma and Ray were?”

  Nothing.

  I reached over and clapped my hands in front of his face. “Hey, Thomas! Wake up! Where are they at?”

  “Who?”

  “Ma and Ray!”

  “At a picnic,” he said, still watching the tube.

  “Ray’s union picnic? That’s today?”

  No response.

  I poured myself more cereal. I almost needed the silent treatment from Ding Dong after all the other bullshit I’d been through in the past forty-eight hours.

  The Tarzan movie had been spliced in about a hundred different places; the action sort of hi
ccuped every couple of seconds. As usual, it was the white hunters in their freshly ironed safari clothes who’d caused the problem—whose greed had stirred up the entire sleeping jungle. Tarzan hustled Jane and Boy down a jungle path, the Zambezis in hot pursuit. Then the three of them jumped into a crystal-clear pool and swam like speedboats. I’d seen this one about a hundred times when I was a kid but had never before noticed the cut of Brenda Joyce’s little jungle dress, the way she half-fondled her tits as she climbed from the glassy water.

  “We will return in a moment to Big Three Matinee Theater,” the announcer said.

  I looked down at my brother’s hand on the couch cushion next to me. His fingers and fingernails were bitten to shreds, the skin red and raw, dried blood in the cuticles. All that past year in our dorm room, he had gnawed and bitten, bitten and gnawed. In two semesters, he’d probably chewed off about five pounds of his own skin. “I think there’s a Yankees game on channel ten,” I said. “You want to watch it?”

  No answer.

  “Thomas? Hey! You want to watch the ball game?”

  He put the weight of the world into the sigh he gave me. “If I wanted to watch stupid baseball, then I’d be watching it.”

  I let it pass. Got up and tried Dessa again. Maybe I’d have better luck on the downstairs phone. But there was still no answer.

  I sat back down next to Thomas. My leg was tapping against the floor a mile a minute. “Hey, you remember that time at Ray’s labor union picnic when he made us sing those stupid songs for everybody? Those war songs he taught us when we were little kids? What were those songs again?”

  Thomas blinked three or four times in a row. Swiped at his nose. “’You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap’ and ‘Good-bye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama,’” he said.