Super America

by Anne Panning

  “He’s okay,” my mother said. “I mean, just scraped up.” She put a hand on my father’s shoulder, and kept it there. “He’s at the police station. With Rebecca.”

  “And?” my father asked.

  “DUI.” My mother looked at me, rolled her eyes, shook her head. “Leave it to Harry.” She seemed to imply that of course I would never act as recklessly as Harry.

  “And?” my father asked. Perpetually cold all winter, he wore a black turtleneck sweater pilled at the neck and arms and a wool Hudson Bay blanket folded over his lap. I wondered sometimes if he ever felt what the doctors had described to us as “ghost limbs,” but if he did, he didn’t say so and I didn’t ask.

  After the second phone call came with more detailed information and directions as to their whereabouts, my mother tried to decide how best to proceed. Julie wasn’t due to arrive for her shift until ten thirty to help my father get ready for bed. Although my mother tried calling to see if she could come early, she kept getting her machine. “Well, we have a few choices,” my mother said. I liked her best when she shifted into this take-charge mode. It was so uncharacteristic of her yet so encouraging to see. “One, we all go. Harry and I lift you into the car, Peter, and we deal with it from there.” She touched a finger to her nose. “Two, I go and Harry stays here with you until Julie arrives.” I wasn’t overly fond of that option, since I hadn’t ever had to act as my father’s caregiver before. The idea of helping him onto the toilet terrified me. I also knew my mother wanted me along for moral support. We could commiserate about the bad luck we’d been dealt and could gather forces about how best to deal with Harry.

  “Three,” my father said. “I have a three.”

  My mother and I looked at him to see if he was serious. “You have a three?” The condescension was thick in her voice. “Okay, Peter. Let’s hear it.”

  She hustled into the front entryway to get her coat and boots and barely seemed to be listening. She threw my jacket to me, and I put it on. I wanted to run upstairs for my camera but could imagine the irritation I knew would be in my mother’s voice if I even broached the subject of shooting Harry and Rebecca at the police station. “No boundaries for what’s appropriate” was something she’d said to me before.

  “Three is that Rose said anytime I needed any help to give her a call.” I stopped on the landing. My father sat rolling himself in small back and forth movements in front of us. “So let’s give her a call. Then you can both go.”

  The night of the sushi incident had come and gone without my mother ever knowing, as far as I knew. But her reaction to his suggestion filled me with doubt now. She held her purse stiffly against her side and walked right up to his wheelchair and just stood there, daring him to move. “Don’t do this to me, Peter,” she said in a voice so hushed I had to lean in to hear.

  “Don’t do this to me, Peter,” he said back. Who knew anymore if he was mocking her or losing his grip.

  “I’m still going to love you,” she said, “because I’ll always love you, always. But I want you to tell me the truth ...” She glanced up at me on the stairs, watching like a spectator, then must’ve decided I wasn’t going to stop her. “Did you?” she asked. She couldn’t even say it. “Did you—with Rose?”

  He shook his head, nodded, laughed. He threw his hands up over his face and hid.

  Like an angel, Julie arrived and saved us from further scene. A blast of cold air slipped in with her as she shut the door. She’d gotten our messages, she said, and got here as quickly as she could. “How we doin’, Peter?” she said. “Looking good.” Then, looking up to see our blank faces, she said, “Is there something I should know?”

  My mother gave her the quick story about Harry, then she and I left the house, squinting through the icy snow that stung our faces and coated the car. We let the engine warm up for a full ten minutes and sat there, silently, watching our breath cloud the air and then disappear.

  “If you know anything ...” my mother said. She adjusted the rearview and avoided my eyes.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I swear.” I had never lied to her before and realized, once I had, that it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. Instead of the tangle of the moral high ground, this path was smoother and easier to tread; I could breathe easier this way.

  Rebecca’s parents had beaten us to the station. Her father (Dr. Bob, as he liked to be called) was not full of the usual lively banter but stood stiffly in his fur-collared wool coat like a Russian soldier. His wife, Mary Annie (the name itself a giveaway she was from the South), greeted us by squeezing our hands and smiling grimly. It wasn’t lost on me that tradition dictated that the boyfriend was responsible for the girlfriend, and therefore Harry, in addition to being in trouble with the law, was also now answerable to Rebecca’s family. To make matters worse, she was an only child and certainly Bellport High School’s most intelligent, well-read, well-rounded (tennis club, yearbook editor, study abroad in France) student.

  After politely asking after my father, Mary Annie explained that the “kids” were with a couple officers having their paperwork processed. “Ya’ll can rest easy. They’re okay,” she said. “Just a little shaken up.” Her smooth, soft-looking face suggested ease, leisure, pampering. Next to her blunt blonde bob, my mother’s long flyaway ponytail made her look like a ratty hippie housewife.

  I always assumed that Harry drank no more or less than most students his age, but I also assumed he would never get behind the wheel of a car drunk, much less in a snowstorm. Apparently, according to Dr. Bob, Harry’d been turning off at the East Avenue exit ramp but had miscalculated the distance, then overcompensated, then rolled over after colliding into the guardrails. “Granted,” he said, smoothing his beard, “the road conditions did not help the boy.” Nor, I thought, had his heavy drinking. The Breathalyzer tests were off the charts, according to what my mother had managed to harangue out of Harry on the phone.

  “I’m so sorry Rebecca had to be involved,” my mother said.

  Mary Annie shook her head politely. She wore all gold jewelry that shone warmly against her middle-of-winter tan. “Nonsense,” she said. “There’s no harm done, thank God. And we know it must be hard to manage everything at home now that—” She paused and touched a small gold hoop earring. “Well, now that you’ve got so much on your plate.”

  It was a polite way of saying “now that your husband has lost his legs in a terrible accident.” I noticed nobody but us could ever face it head on. My mother, I could sense, was gearing up for some sort of rebuttal or speech. It was as if people assumed our family now leaked out an awful contagious poison, and she wanted to assure everyone that no, they would not become afflicted by mere association with us. Before she could defend her tribe, however, my brother walked out with his arm slung around Rebecca’s shoulder. They both had Band-Aids on their faces, making them look like small wounded children.

  “Hey,” he said. Tears sprang to my eyes when I saw him—for what could have been a terrible loss. Harry had been working part-time at the coffee shop downtown and had saved up for a leather jacket—the black motorcycle kind with silver zippers and buckles and snaps. Instead of making him look tough and mature, it made him look young and innocent—his lips too red, his cheeks too soft. His eyes were bloodshot, and when he blinked they stayed closed just a fraction of a second too long. His movements were liquidlike and slow. At one point, he stumbled slightly on absolutely nothing. Rebecca clung to his arm like a damsel. Her skin was pale and her eyes unnaturally bright. They would have made a wonderful photograph, and the thought of my camera sitting at home caused me a small ache of regret.

  Clearly no one wanted to yell at them or scold, but the silence felt excruciatingly loud to me. Thankfully a young cop came out and explained things to the parents. Harry was a minor, he said, and so he wouldn’t be jailed tonight. Rebecca, apparently, was free and clear, but Harry would have to appear in court for sentencing within the next two weeks. Everyone murmured their thanks and apolo
gies and the cop left, handing my mother a thick envelope of papers and carbons. “Keep an eye on him,” he said, which seemed to suggest it was somehow her negligence that had caused him to drive drunk in a blizzard and crash. I wanted to shout at the cop: “Look, we’ve got a pretty fucked-up family situation on our hands here and I would appreciate your cutting my mother some slack.” But I didn’t, of course. I put an arm around her shoulder and led her outside while Harry and Rebecca separated with an intensity that made me think of Romeo and Juliet, which I’d just read in Advanced English. They groped and cried and Harry ran his hands over her rumpled hair until finally her parents said it was time to go.

  At that moment I had an overwhelming urge to be Harry. There was an intensity inside him that glowed brighter than any of us. It compelled you to look, to listen. I didn’t know what it was. Walking out to the car with him, I figured it out. The pain, the danger, the drama were his own. He’d created the terms. He was not spectating. He was not living in reaction to my father’s accident like my mother and I were. He had his own agenda now. Maybe he always had.

  By Valentine’s Day our house had been widened and expanded and opened up in such a way that it felt more like a small, bright gymnasium instead of an old Victorian. When Harry and I were little we used to hide in the small front-hallway closet tucked under the staircase. I could almost smell the rich spike of cedar and could almost feel the rough brush of wool against my cheeks just thinking about it. Sometimes Harry would lock me in the closet and not let me out for just a second or two too long, and I’d whine and squeal like a trapped animal until my mother came running around the corner with a wooden spoon, threatening to use it on Harry’s backside but never following through. Now the closet was gone, and in its place were a wider doorway and a perfectly smooth transition from the hardwood floors of the hallway to the Berber carpet of the living room. All the doors—at least those that remained—had gold-plated handles that could be grabbed easily and practically pushed open. The bathroom off the kitchen used to be so small you could hardly turn around in it; in fact, you used to be able to touch the small pedestal sink while sitting on the toilet. Now, the bathroom had been bumped out and expanded so that our kitchen was half the size it used to be. Our kitchen sink was now so low I kept accidentally reaching into the air for it, and all the appliance knobs jutted out against my legs when I brushed by. Quite frankly, the renovation had left our house stripped of character in a cheerless, antiseptic way. “We might as well have moved,” I muttered to Harry, who sat at the computer in the pantry (also expanded) making a clip-art last-minute valentine for Rebecca. “I mean, it’s like a new house now anyway.”

  “Yeah.” Harry clicked at the keyboard, ignoring me in favor of his project. He and Rebecca seemed to have bonded even closer after the DUI fiasco, as if the trauma had served to rekindle some spark that had faded. Our mother had grounded Harry for one month, and although she’d been firm that that meant no visitors and no going out, gradually Rebecca started to come over after school and in the evenings, and my mother seemed too weary to fight it. The fact was I knew she liked Rebecca, and more than that, I knew she liked the idea of her son dating a professor’s daughter. Our mother had always wanted to get a graduate degree but had stalled out at the bachelor’s after Harry and I were born.

  Rebecca’s family had a certain cachet in town due to their unconventional lifestyle (Dr. Bob drove a tiny old vw Bug that you could hear puttering down the street from blocks away) and behaviors (during a brutal heat wave one summer, they showed old black-and-white home movies in their front yard and invited the public to attend). But they never went too far over the top so as to offend or alienate. Most people, myself included, had always found them strange but knew that strangeness was bred out of an intelligence and irreverence not often evident in a small town. I could very much understand the attraction Harry must’ve felt towards them.

  Harry pushed his chair back and stood up. “So is this cool? What do you think?”

  I walked over to see what he’d done. On the computer screen was a stock black-and-white photograph of two dogs lying on top of each other, their ears and tails overlapping. Over the photograph Harry had superimposed the words Be mine in a bright red lashing font. Along the bottom, some song lyrics from his current favorite band spoke about “love like a tidal wave / Tsunami I’m breaking the bank for you.” Frankly, I didn’t get it, but it seemed harmless and sweet enough. A big black heart hung over the dogs.

  “I mean, since you’re the big photographer and everything,” Harry said before I could respond. He shrugged his shoulders, as if the whole thing were a big joke and didn’t mean anything to him. “I mean, whatever.”

  “Very cool,” I said. “She’ll like that.”

  “Really?” Harry went to the refrigerator, grabbed a diet soda, and cracked it open. “You don’t think it’s too gay?” He drank lustily from the can, and I could hear the carbonation fizzing in his mouth.

  “Gay?” My heart beat double time for a second. Did he think I was gay? Was he trying to tell me he was gay? But then I realized it was just Harry picking up on the latest slang. Last month it had been “wicked”; the month before that it had been “strapped”; before that, “sweet”; before that, “dag” as in, “Dag, that is one serious snowstorm out there.” Frankly, I found it rather affected, but then I was not nearly as cool as Harry.

  Harry grew impatient with me. “I just wanted to get your opinion,” he said. “I mean, no biggie.”

  “I think it’s great,” I said without hesitating. “Really. That photo is perfect.”

  He gave me a leery eye and reached into the bag of chips I’d been eating. “I wish Mom would cook once in a while,” he said. “I was busting her chops about it the other day and she practically whaled on me.”

  “I know.” I felt a strong urge to defend her but restrained myself. I missed just sitting around like this in the kitchen talking about things. Ever since the accident it seemed all we did was argue over who got the shower first or who’d drunk the last of the milk, never daring to have real conversations, since we didn’t know when our father might come wheeling in to interrupt us. The floors were so smooth there was never any warning. The thresholds had been removed, and it was all one big continuous plane like a skating rink. He could stealth us, and so it seemed safer to stay quiet than to risk him overhearing us.

  “It sucks, doesn’t it?” Harry said. He sat back down at the computer, his back to me. I froze, not wanting him to stop.

  “Big time.” I hopped up onto the kitchen counter, which was so low now my feet dragged against the floor.

  “I just wish none of this had ever happened,” Harry said. “I mean, it’s never going to be any good now. You know? I mean, whatever.” The printer slowly chugged out a copy of his valentine, heavy and wet with ink. “His life is basically fucked. Which means our lives are basically fucked. I mean, right?”

  “Well,” I started to say, but our father wheeled into the room and I quickly backpedaled. We should’ve really known better.

  If he’d heard us, though, he didn’t act like it. He was bright eyed and quite possibly jazzed up on painkillers. Why he still took them I didn’t know and didn’t ask, although my mother had informed me that even though he seemed all right, he was sometimes in a lot of pain. Mentally or physically? I’d wanted to ask, but knew it was best not to push her.

  “Guys,” he said. He’d lost muscle weight from being in the chair, and his clothes hung off him now and showed his newly angular frame. Before, I would have described my father as athletic to the point of brawny or even buff. He used to lift weights while he watched television at night. Our garage was full of in-line skates, cross-country skis, a treadmill, a volleyball and net, and a wet suit he’d bought one summer, vowing to take scuba lessons at the college. Now his arms had that soft freckled look of someone who didn’t get out much. Granted, it was the middle of a most hellacious winter, but still. You could tell the summer months woul
dn’t help him much either. “I’ve got news,” he said. His speech, oddly, did not sound like him anymore. A slight echo rang through his words, and a hesitancy skipped between every syllable.

  “What’s that?” Harry said gamely. His valentine was ready to go, and I could see he was eager to move on to other things. Our talk was over, and I was disappointed that it was. There were so many things I’d been filing away in my head for just this occasion, and now it was too late.

  “I’m going to walk again!” our father said. He looked up at us both, I felt, challengingly. He rolled back and forth in the chair, which was, I was learning, his version of pacing back and forth with excitement. “I’m going to get legs!”

  At first I thought he was delusional, but then it dawned on me that he was right: he could get artificial legs, prostheses. Why not?

  “Right on,” Harry said, but I could see he was checking out. He inched toward the doorway, nodding. “That’s very cool, Dad, but I gotta fly.” Ever since he’d totaled the Honda, Rebecca had taken to coming over to our house in her mom’s white Subaru wagon. It would sit in front of our house camouflaged by winter. Apparently, she was here now, because the front doorbell rang as if on cue, and Harry ran for it.

  “So, what do you think?” While my father waited for my response, I saw my mother pull up in the driveway and knew it was grocery day.

  “Just a sec,” I said. “I’ve got to help Mom with the groceries.” I slipped on Harry’s boots, which always sat by the back door unlaced and at the ready, but when I got out there my mother met me on the walkway carrying only a small white bag and a bouquet of roses.

  “Takeout chicken from that new place your father likes,” she said, and asked me to carry it. The warmth seeped through the bag and onto my fingertips. I wanted to prepare her for my father’s news, but a drab winter’s light hanging over our backyard made me think better of it. The light was the perfect color of loneliness, and I wanted to photograph it before it faded but knew I wouldn’t likely get the chance.