by C J Hribal
“Dad,” I stage-whispered. “He’s cheating.”
“I know,” said my father. “He’s going to lose anyway.”
I don’t think I had ever seen my father so confident before. He let the guy switch sides of the break so he could put the cue ball down where he wanted, and he acknowledged the guy was cheating, and he didn’t seem bothered by it at all.
“But, Dad,” I stage-whispered again. “He’s cheating.”
“It’s okay,” said my father, “cheaters never win.”
I don’t know if my father believed that or not at the time. In later years he railed quite a bit about all the cheating and fraud and backstabbing that went on at his company, the methods guys used to get ahead, to make more money, to make sales, and our father made it clear he was being screwed by other people’s shenanigans, and certainly by the age of fourteen I had seen plenty of kids cheat with great success, but he said it in the Dog Out that day with the surety of a choirboy, with all the earnestness of a young Horatio Alger, with all the aplomb of Lord Baden-Powell uttering his code to his first troop of Boy Scouts.
Clearly our father’s unruffledness nonplussed the sharpie. He missed his next shot badly, even with his homemade advantage, and soon after that left the bar. “No two out of three?” asked our father. “No guts, no glory?” The sharpie had lost five straight to our father after taking the first two.
“Fuck you,” said the sharpie, and that was the last I ever saw of him, though the Dog Out was one of our father’s favorite bars.
“How did you know he was going to lose?”
“He’s a salesman, like me,” said our father, resettling himself at the bar. “Peddlers always talk a better game than they play.” He sipped his beer. “Once he started asking for special dispensations from the pope of pool, I knew he was lousy.”
The pope of pool? I wasn’t going to ask. But my curiosity about the sign was overpowering. I pointed at the top of the cash register. “What does that mean?” I asked.
Mike the bartender was grinning. “Go ahead, Wally, tell ‘im.”
“Your Curiosity Has Just Cost You a Quarter for the Juke Box, Thank You,” said my father. “Cough it up.”
My father paid for my curiosity, of course, and even let me choose the songs from the jukebox. Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, the Monkees. Our father winced, muttered something about kids today, you couldn’t take them anywhere, but he was grinning at Mike when he said it.
We left the bar that day with me feeling closer to my father than I probably had in ages. My father was a genial giant among men. Fair, strong-minded, indulgent of his children, and a damn fine pool shot.
We came home to discover that Nomi was coming to live with us, and though our mother announced this with a smile, she soon broke down crying. Nomi was coughing up something of a different nature entirely.
15. Accidents and Acts of God
The summer Nomi came to live with us we didn’t get a whole lot of wet, and what we got came at the wrong time. Nomi came in May. Artu would stay in Chicago, working, because that was the only way to keep up the insurance for her treatments. “What treatments?” we asked. Our mother stumbled for a circumspect way to tell us. Finally she just came out with it. “Cancer treatments. They’re not sure, but they think maybe they’ll help.”
May. Maybe. Things should have been growing but they weren’t. The corn, the alfalfa—everything was a pale green, heat-seared as though it might be August. Nomi, supporting herself on our mother’s arms, looked over our fields and said, “Looks like the only thing blooming around here is inside me.”
Asked Ernie, “Is it like a Big Max is growing inside her?”
“Something like that,” said our mother.
“So if the weather inside her changed, the Big Max inside her would shrivel up and die?”
“That’s what they’re trying to do, dear.”
“Just don’t give her any water,” said Ernie. “That’ll take care of it.” For the rest of the summer he scowled whenever he saw Nomi drinking iced tea.
In his eagerness to understand and to help, Ernie was confusing the roles of God and Mother Nature. It is a common enough mistake. Most children are paganists before they become theists. And adults confuse the two as well. We found this out when our parents tried to collect on the toolshed the tornado had blown down our fields. Said the insurance agent, “Sorry, Wally, but acts of God are not covered by this policy. And tornadoes are acts of God.”
“Everything,” said our father, “is a goddamn act of God.”
“You need a policy that will say so,” said Og Tieken, our insurance agent. “For a little bit extra you can be covered for acts of God.”
“With or without flooding?” asked our father. “Have you got a Noah policy, a forty days and forty nights rider?”
“Oh, flood insurance is pricey,” Og said. “You’re on high ground, you don’t need that.”
“Oh, you never know,” said our father. “I might get me some of that extra insurance just so God can do what He likes. And so can Mother Nature. The two of them can go sky-bowling with our pumpkins any time they feel like it.”
There it was, that confusion again. As near as I could figure, for things like tornadoes and hail, big events, God and Mother Nature were in cahoots. For regular weather, it was strictly Mother Nature, and for anything unpredictable and freakish, like a calf being born with two heads, it was an accident, an act of God that threw Mother Nature for a loop.
Which meant, I guess, that what befell Nomi was an act of God. Although it wasn’t completely unpredictable: Nomi smoked a pack, a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. The surgeon general had years before come out with his warnings about smoking maybe sort of possibly being harmful to your health. Our mother was more succinct. “I guess what they’re saying is true. Those things can kill you.”
Nomi was given Ernie and Meg’s room across from the bathroom, and they moved into the downstairs rec room with Ike, Wally Jr., and me. Although Nomi was, when she wasn’t in pain, her usual acerbic and jocular self, we avoided that room a lot. Something was going on in there that we did not understand and wanted no part of. Unless you had business in Cinderella’s or our parents’ room at the end of the hall, you avoided going down that hall entirely.
I couldn’t avoid going down that hallway. I was curious about Nomi, for one thing. What was happening to her was scary, but my guilt at neglecting her was far greater than my fear of her pain. For another, in the past couple of years I had discovered a great many things of a private nature, two of which happened to be my parents’ shower and my penis. It was a curious, perhaps necessary dual discovery: my almost obsessive desire to be clean twined with a powerful inclination toward self-abuse. I won’t elaborate on the obvious intersection of the two except to say that the shower stall in our parents’ bathroom was metal and the staccato thunder of water on metal masked my groanings.
“My,” said Nomi, “you sure take a lot of showers.”
“I like to be clean,” I said.
“I understand,” said Nomi. “You like your privacy when Mother Nature pays a visit. Some changes,” she said, “are best explored in private. I trust everything is where it should be?”
“Huh?”
“Is everything going okay with you, Emcee?”
“Yeah, I guess. Is everything going okay with you, Nomi?”
Nomi sighed and lit a cigarette. “No, everything is not going okay with me. But it’s my own fault, I suppose. I like these too much. Always have.” She looked small and shrunken in the double bed, more so than she had when she was recovering from hip surgery in the House That God Built. It creeped me out, but she was Nomi, whom I’d known always.
“Are you going to be okay, Nomi?”
“I’d like to believe so, Emcee, but no one can say for sure.”
“Not even the doctors?”
“Not even God,” said Nomi, looking out the window. Nomi said she was tired then, she needed to rest, and
I left, looking for someplace where I could ponder what was happening to me and to her in private.
If it was Mother Nature regularly visiting me, and an act of God visiting Nomi, then why did everything seem so accidental? The assigning of a personality, a willful presence, to the nature of accident threw me for a loop. But for the past couple of years everything was throwing me for a loop. And more than anything that summer I wanted to be by myself, largely because I’d made other discoveries.
I shouldn’t have been snooping. We all knew better than to be checking out our parents’ dresser drawers. But snooping is an addiction. Once you find one thing mildly curious you keep looking, and once you find the mother lode you simply cannot stop yourself. All the guilt in the world won’t keep you from looking where you oughtn’t.
The first few times we snooped in Augsbury, it was Cinderella, Robert Aaron, and me. We discovered a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog and snapshots of us as babies. We also found baby teeth in coin envelopes with our names on each one and the dates the teeth were lost.
“That blows the Tooth Fairy theory,” said Robert Aaron.
“Shut up,” said Cinderella. “Like you believed any of that stuff.”
“I used to.”
“Yeah, well you used to a lot of things.” Cinderella had recently gotten cynical, her hair a blond waterfall over her face, her breath smelling of cigarettes and Life Savers. She pawed through the drawers: lipsticks, compacts, a bundle of letters written on onionskin paper from when our parents were first married. “I’ve read those,” said Cinderella knowingly. “Like you’d really be interested in where you should put things.” I made a mental note. Cinderella never let us read those letters. Next time I was alone I would. We looked at more photographs—First Communions, Halloweens, Christmases, Easters—and at our father’s boxers, printed with tiny diamonds or those fat commalike things called paisleys. We discovered our mother’s lingerie, gauzy things we’d never seen her wear. The way it was stuffed into the drawer you couldn’t tell if it had been hurriedly hidden or just forgotten. Cinderella was competitively curious. “I wish I had nice stuff like this,” she said, holding up a sheer black jacketlike thing with a tie at the throat and black fluff at the hem. “It wouldn’t go to waste, if you know what I mean.”
We didn’t know what she meant, but that hardly mattered to Cinderella these days. She had a boyfriend, a guy who was out of high school already. And it wasn’t poor, sweet Mikey Spillsbeth. This worried our mother and pleased Cinderella. “She’s got to stop thinking of me as a Goody Two-shoes,” Cinderella told us, holding up one of our mother’s black lace underwire bras. “I wish I had Mom’s chest. Why didn’t I get Mom’s chest? Mom’s chest is wasted on her,” said Cinderella, the bra comically empty as she held it pinched to her shoulders.
That was one of the great mysteries of life, I thought, though I didn’t tell Cinderella. Life was full of mysteries and secrets, and you could ponder all you wanted, but that didn’t mean you were allowed to figure anything out. Like how come our dad was so big and we were all skinny? And how come our mom had what she described as a voluminous chest and Cinderella’s were petite little mounds? Or why did peanut butter toast always land peanut butter side down? Or why was I drawn to the letters and our mother’s lingerie drawer like a bee to honey? I knew I was bad, and that I would be punished, if not in this life then in the next, but I couldn’t stop myself. I had to know, I had to see. And the opened boxes and drawers in our parents’ bedroom, as though everything had just been thrown together or taken apart, made it easy.
One of the many reasons I spent a lot of time by myself that summer was I was getting boners at the drop of a hat. Had been, actually, for the last two years. It didn’t help that the magazines—Time, Life—were running more and more risqué pictures: fashion layouts with models wearing about what we found in our mom’s underwear drawer, and through the sheer tops the models’ inconsequential breasts but dark nipples were clearly visible. But it wasn’t just that. Anything could trigger it. The swoop and dip of a barn swallow, the cold taste of Tang on a hot day, smelling clover in the fields, watching Glenn Beckert, Don Kessinger, and Ernie Banks turn a double play, pulling myself up on the chin-up bar, seeing Dorie Braun with the right insouciance in her eyes, a bit of rounded flesh peeking out over her swimsuit cup, a bit of belly over her hip-huggers’ waistband—anything at all could set my stem rising, and then it was a question of what to do with it. Peeing with an erection was tricky. You had to push the little fellow down and stand further back, so gravity came into play, allowing the arc to find the porcelain. I wondered if this was why the urinals at school smelled like they did. Was there a whole nation of men and boys out there, all walking around all day with stiffies, and none of them disciplined enough in their aim to hit their intended targets? It certainly gave me a different picture of America. Not an America I wanted to belong to, although I was already a part of it.
I worried, too, about the eagerness with which I crept past Nomi’s room and stole into our parents’, reading and rereading those letters, savoring their incomprehensible deliciousness, fingering the lingerie with the same luscious, lewd thrill of those border guards lo! those many years ago. What it felt like under my fingers! I got goose bumps just touching it.
And then I wanted to wear it. There I was, standing amid the water-spotted Reader’s Digests and Popular Mechanicses, the accordioned copies of They Were Expendable and A Bridge Too Far, my fingers running up and down the silky length of our mother’s scarlet nightgown. Surely no boy in America was doing what I was doing right then. I showered, our mother’s panty hose just above my head. I toweled off, Little Jr. (I was picking up terminology from our mother’s letters) stiffening under the terry cloth. Then I wrapped the towel about my waist like Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments. Little Jr. strained to peek through, but the towel’s weight was more than it could lift.
No matter. Something besides how much cloth my penis could bench-press was calling me out of the bathroom. Something I’d discovered on one of my first forays to our mother’s lingerie drawer. I was always looking for new stuff, things I’d missed last time. Everything was tangled up, tossed together; you couldn’t be sure what belonged with one outfit and what with another. I rationalized the intrusion on the grounds that putting things away was one of our chores, so my being there had a kind of logic to it: I was trying to find out what belonged where. Armed with opportunity and motive, and needing only courage to run the Nomi gauntlet, I was back there every chance I could get. It was wrong, I was going to hell, I was racked with guilt, tormented by what I saw, but I was also thrilled and curious, and that thrill of being admitted to the hidden mysteries—even if they remained mysteries—was worth the price of admission.
What I found were pictures of our mother without any clothes on. In the pictures, our mother’s torso was white and blocky, like rough-cut marble. Beneath her belly was a stippling of skin that reminded me of bread dough, and one breast was lower than the other, more rounded, and canted to one side. Its nipple was larger, too, more oblong, and her areolae, had I known to call them that, were huge and dark. She was sitting at the kitchen table, as though waiting for coffee to be served, leaning forward, her breasts flattened and spread out, her cheek resting in the palm of her hand. She looked whimsical and amused. When she was sitting back she looked bored, the same look our faces got when our father fiddled with the camera too much. “Hurry up and take the picture,” our mother’s face was saying. “I’m not sitting here naked just so you can get your jollies with the camera. Who cares if it’s too light or too dark? What’s it going to matter? Who’s going to see them besides you, and you can see them any time you like?”
I imagined this conversation between them, our mother bored and a little impatient, but willing to play along if it pleased our father, and our father frustrated that the equipment wasn’t working right, the flash failing to fire, or firing too early, or the photo tearing when he pulled it from the back
of the camera, and then the fixer, that pink tongue of chemicals you had to wipe over the picture to keep it from fading, something could always go wrong with that, and meanwhile our mother is sitting there naked, nipples stiffening in the cool of the house, and it was this moment of easy yet awkward intimacy between them, stolen from the rest of their day—we were outside, playing, likely to return soon, sweaty and demanding Tang—that made me realize what a fragile, wonderful thing marriage is, and to what lengths one will go to preserve it.
There was one other photograph, and it revealed mysteries I couldn’t even guess at. The photo shows our mother reclining on the bed in the House That God Built. Her legs are spread, and the photo is taken from the foot of the bed, by her feet. Our mother looks vulnerable and inviting. Looking at the dark bush of hair where her thighs met, I can’t believe our father didn’t put down his camera immediately after this photo was taken. Who could resist? Certainly not me, and I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. I just knew I wanted to climb up there. I had the feeling it was home; it was where I needed to be. I touched myself. Little Jr. was a hard branch grafted into my groin. It felt as though it might burst into flame if I kept touching it. I kept touching it. I was driven by some force that seemed both inside and completely outside myself. Satan, I was given to understand, did his best work through ecstasy.
We had stopped going to parochial school once we moved to Wisconsin. It was simply too expensive. To make up the difference, every Wednesday we went to Sunday school (Sunday school on Wednesdays—another contradiction of the Catholic Church), which was run at St. Gen’s by a nun with all the charm of a drill sergeant. She delighted in instructing us in the wages of sin by telling us stories that illustrated her point, stories that scared the bejesus out of us.
Sister Henrietta’s favorite story was of the boy who went to a cabin with a group of friends (he was eighteen, an age remote enough from us to give it the proper moral weight and glamor)—including some girls (Sister Henrietta called them “girls”; she called anyone under fifty “girls”)—and come Sunday morning the boy in question went waterskiing rather than to church to take our Lord Jesus’ Holy Body and Blood into his soul to nurture him morally and to give him strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One. That was her name for Satan: the Evil One. “But he did not go to Mass to take our Lord Jesus’ Holy Body and Blood into his soul to nurture him morally and to give him strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One,” said Sister. “He went waterskiing with his friends. With those girls.” Sister Henrietta raised a bony finger. I stared at the three dark hairs growing from a mole on the underside of her chin. Did she know they were there, and if so, why did she choose to ignore them? Didn’t nuns own tweezers?
