Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” My mother sighs, throwing down the salad fork and awkwardly scooping Brenda out of her chair and into her arms. “Honey, you’re not gonna look like a marshmallow. You’re gonna look like a beautiful mother-to-be. You’re gonna glow.”

  “Shut up! I am not!” Brenda bellows into my mother’s shoulder.

  “Yes, you are! Eric, isn’t your sister gonna be a beautiful mother? How could she not be? She’s an Ianelli.” I know she says this loud enough for my father to hear in the other room; every chance she gets, my mother dismisses the influence of his side of the family on her children. She thinks they’re bloodless, slack-jawed bumps on logs, and that my father was the only one who got out and made good. “Isn’t she gonna be beautiful, Eric?” she says again, eyeing me sternly.

  “Of course you are, Brenda. After all, you’re my sister,” I say, and my mother and I both laugh with forced brightness. We both just want her to calm down; she’s like an explosive we’re constantly trying gingerly to defuse.

  “No, I’m not. I’m a friggin’ cow,” she says, but at least she’s merely sniffling now.

  “No, you’re not,” my mother and I say in unison. Brenda remains collapsed in my mother’s hug for a few more seconds, my mother stroking her back and saying, “Baby, baby, shhhhh, it’s okay,” the whole time, until finally my sister extricates herself, sits down again, and wipes her face with a napkin. She takes a sip of her coffee.

  “Whatever,” she says.

  “That’s right,” my mother says, shooting me a “Whew!” look and turning back to the salad. She always passes me this look after a fight with Brenda, and I always respond with a twisted little grimace. The look is supposed to say, “Aren’t you glad we calmed her down?” but since I’m half-convinced that my mother deliberately riles her up, I can’t ever fully share in these looks. It’s like my father says to both of them: it takes two to tango.

  Now there’s a little hush, the sound of the ball game filtering back into the kitchen, and the New Big Fact settles back in around us: Brenda’s ten weeks pregnant by Frank, who’s now a security guard at one of the state correctional facilities and even though they’ve been going out since high school, there are no stated plans of marriage. My parents took the news okay; they told Brenda whether she wants to get married or not is completely her choice and they’ll support her whatever she does, but I know that more than that is going on in their heads. (Marriage or no marriage, Brenda is having the baby; the “A” word never came up, and in my family, it never will.) Joani and Grandma don’t know yet, nor does anyone else except me. My parents told me—they said they knew I was mature enough to handle it. They also said Brenda wouldn’t tell me herself because she was too ashamed, and it would be nice if I went to her with a show of support.

  So I did. I found her in her room, splayed out on her bed, listening to Black Sabbath and playing with the tassel from her high school graduation mortarboard, which she keeps pinned up on a bulletin board alongside ticket stubs from heavy metal concerts at the Worcester Centrum and Polaroids of Frank, her friends, and herself, usually depicted blitzed out of their minds up at Salisbury Beach, their faces shiny with beer and cancer-inducing suntans. She took one look at me and looked away; obviously, she knew we had been in conference downstairs.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She made some kind of noise into her pillow on the side opposite from me.

  “Hey, Brenda,” I said, closing the door behind me and leaning against it. “Ma and Dad told me.”

  “Uh-huh,” she mumbled listlessly.

  “I just want you to know I’m not judging or anything.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why should I? It’s great news. It’s happy news.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, unmodulated, as Black Sabbath shrieked on. I’ll never know how Brenda listens to that toxic stuff. I only listen to alternative music, like R.E.M. or the Smiths, and I’ll admit I also like some old stuff like the Supremes and Billie Holiday. And Madonna, which I try to play down.

  “You and Frank were probably going to get married anyway, right?”

  “What?” She flopped over and looked at me blankly then, like I was really outstaying my welcome.

  “I said you and Frank are probably going to get married anyway, right?”

  Then she gave me a huge, sarcastic, big-eyed look and said, mock-portentously, “Time will tell.” I was taken aback—Brenda hardly ever talks to me in that cryptic way—and muttered something before slipping out, leaving her and Black Sabbath behind. She called in sick at the card shop three days in a row and hardly left her room, heavy metal blasting constantly from its depths. When she emerged, it was only to go to the beach with her girlfriends and get shitfaced three nights in a row. That’s what they were fighting about when I came down this morning; my mother couldn’t believe that Brenda would be stupid enough to drink herself blind when she knew she was carrying a kid—in this day and age, no less, when people should know better (which is the same thing she says about Brenda’s smoking and my father’s high cholesterol intake).

  I glance at Brenda across the kitchen table. She’s still sniffling a little and patting her face dry. “Are you going to tell anybody today?” I ask her.

  “Couldja not be so loud, Eric?” she says. “I don’t want them hearing upstairs.”

  “They’re not going to hear,” I say. “Grandma’s telling Joani the pressure cooker story, and Joani wouldn’t understand anyway.”

  “Don’t underestimate your sister, Eric,” my mother says. That’s what she always says to us about Joani; in fact, it’s what we all say to each other: “Don’t underestimate Joani.” What everybody is waiting for Joani to say or do, I don’t know. Stand up on a chair and denounce all of us as hypocrites, fools, woeful underestimators?

  “I don’t want to tell anyone yet,” she says. “Why should I have to tell them until I start to show? They’re all just going to judge me anyway and call me a slut.”

  “Brenda, they are not!” my mother says. “Would you stop being so melodramatic? This is your family, for God’s sake. They’re gonna support you whatever you do, not judge you.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see.” Brenda sulks.

  “And besides, do you think you’re the first person in the history of the world for this to happen to? It happens all the time now, because there isn’t the self-control there used to be among young people.”

  “Oh, would you not start in with that bullshit again!”

  “Fine. Fine. Shut me up. All I’m saying is that this isn’t the end of the world.”

  “Well, do you want me to tell them?”

  My mother opens her mouth to come back fast, then snaps it shut, considering. “I want you to tell people when you’re ready to tell people. If that’s today, then fine. We’re all gonna stand by you. If that’s next week, then fine. If it’s when you show, then fine. If you wanna go into hiding from your family, then fine.”

  Brenda pulls a cigarette out of her pack and holds it, unlighted, in her hand. “How can I go into hiding from my family when Grandma’s right here in the house, breathing down my neck and telling me I need to lose weight all the time anyway?”

  “Bren, I don’t know. I’m just saying it’s your child, it’s your choice.”

  “You don’t want me to tell,” Brenda says, moving to ignite the Newport with her big yellow Bic lighter. “You’re ashamed.”

  “Don’t you dare light up that cigarette in my house!” my mother says, lunging for the lighter. Brenda slips out of the chair and makes for the screened-in back porch. It’s the only place my mother allows her to smoke in the house, but I always smell it coming from her room.

  “How can you smoke one of those deathsticks when you’re responsible for another human life?” my mother shouts after her.

  “Ma, shhhh!” I say. “Think about upstairs.” Not a word from the den, where the ball game and the rustling of newspaper goes on.

  Brenda sticks her head back
in the door, the fully lighted cigarette stuck in her mouth. “Like this,” she says, and blows a mouthful of smoke into the kitchen.

  “You are hateful!” my mother screams back, before Brenda runs out the back porch and around the corner of the house, laughing maniacally. “Hateful!” she yells again, before she notices Mr. LaFollette next door trimming his hedges and ducks back into the house, mortified. She slumps down at the kitchen table. “Oh, Eric, honey, what did I do to deserve a hateful daughter like that one?”

  She’s asked me this a million times. I could give the usual answer that begins, “Brenda doesn’t hate you, she loves you; you’re just both very strong personalities,” but today I just say, “I don’t know.” My mother’s been a geriatric nurse now for over twenty years, and she’s fond of saying that she can communicate with a roomful of eighty-year-old infants babbling away in a dozen different dialects of dementia, but half the time she can’t communicate with her oldest daughter, a grown woman who speaks perfect English. (Plus every four-letter Anglo-Saxon word ever invented, I should add.)

  Now she looks at me across the table and smiles wanly, picking up Brenda’s mug and drinking the lukewarm remains. “How come you never give me any trouble?” she says to me. “Don’t you want to give me trouble sometimes?”

  “Don’t you already have enough trouble?” I ask.

  She laughs. “It’s not trouble, it’s God’s test, right? That’s what Grandma always says, right?”

  “Yeah, but now Grandma is one of the tests.”

  She swats my arm across the table in mock horror. “Don’t you talk that way about your grandmother. You want God to hear that?” Now we both laugh. I can never tell how seriously my mother takes religion. I mean, from the way she goes to church almost every morning before work, it’s obvious that she takes it seriously, but I think it’s more of a comfort to her in the midst of all her anxieties, a reminder of her childhood, when she was surrounded by nuns and superstitious Old World grown-ups and everything was conveniently black and white. Whether she really still believes in a strict sequence of transgression, punishment, penance, and absolution is what I wonder about.

  “Daddy says you liked Yale, didn’t you?” she says.

  “Yeah, I did,” I say cautiously.

  “It’s fancy, huh?”

  “It’s definitely up there.”

  “But why not Harvard? That’s just as good quality, isn’t it? Then you could come home on the weekends and we could come see you all the time and—”

  “Ma! You know that’s not the point of college.”

  “Well, how would I know the point of college? I went to nursing school. That’s not college. It’s the start of a life prison sentence in a loony bin.”

  “Cut it out with that talk. You know what I mean.” We’ve had this conversation before, and I’m holding my ground.

  “I know, I know,” she says. “I want you to go where you want to go.”

  “I’m going to apply for lots of scholarships.”

  “We’ll find a way. It doesn’t look like we’re gonna have to put Brenda or Joani through anytime soon. So we can focus on you.”

  “Great,” I say tightly. It makes me uncomfortable when they refer to me this way, like I’m the last great hope or something.

  She glances up at the clock and jumps. “Jesus Christ, Mary, and Joseph, look at the time! Everyone’s gonna be here in a little while, and I haven’t even made the marinade. Go ask your father when he’s gonna pull himself away from that game and start the grill.”

  I get up to go, but she stops me. “Honey, would you just scratch this little itch on my back? It’s been driving me crazy ever since Brenda came down this morning. Ha Ha.”

  “Yuk, yuk,” I say. She’s always asking me to scratch an itch on her back. “Where is it? Right here?”

  “No, down a little, over to the left. Over a little more. No, back. That’s it! Oh, that feels good.”

  “You think Brenda’s gonna tell anyone anything?” I ask as I scratch.

  “Why does anyone have to tell anyone anything?” She sits up straight in the chair. “We’re not politicians. We’re not celebrities. What we do in our own little family is our private business.”

  “Not for long, in Brenda’s case.”

  “Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Ooh, scratch that harder. Just a little harder.”

  “Ma, what do you want me to do, use a Brillo pad?” My arm is getting tired from scratching.

  She pops out of the chair. “All right, smart aleck, forget I asked. Go ask your father. I’m gonna do the marinade.” She disappears into the pantry.

  My father is intent on the Red Sox in the den, but he looks up at me when I pop my head in. I slip into my usual voice when addressing him—a little more sober, a little lower, a little bored. “Dad, Ma wants to know when you’re gonna—”

  Suddenly, there’s a burst of excitement and cheering on the TV, a home run or something. “Eric, hangonaminute!” my father says, actually popping out of his chair and squatting in front of the TV so he looks like a catcher. “Ooh, sonofagun! Get it! Get it! Sonofagun!”

  I watch all this feeling very aloof and slightly disdainful. I know the rudiments of baseball, but I gratefully haven’t followed it since I put my foot down when I was twelve and said I wouldn’t play another humiliating season of Farm League. Now he looks up, flushed, at my impassive face; a current of civic passion moves from Fenway Park northward to West Mendhem, into our house, right through my father, and stops dead at me. “Big moment?” I say softly to pull him out of his bewilderment.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah! Evans comes up on second—” He looks at me again, blinks, and in a millisecond he comes to. “Eric. What’s up?”

  “Ma wants to know when you’re gonna start the grill.”

  “In a little bit. Just at the next commercial. Tell her to relax; no one’s coming for another hour and a half.” He says half the old-fashioned Massachusetts way, with a long a.

  His eyes dart up to me, back to the TV, back to me as I stand in a kind of brief limbo in the doorway. “Okay,” I say. I notice his coffee mug. It’s one I gave him for his birthday when I was younger. It’s powder blue with a picture of Papa Smurf on it. “You want more coffee?” I ask him.

  “Yuh. Sure. Thanks.” I pick up the mug. “Are your mother and your sister still going at it in there?”

  “No. Brenda ran out the back door with a cigarette. Ma was freaking out.”

  My father gives what I call his short, philosophical little laugh: “Heh. Your mother worries too much.”

  “About Brenda?” I ask.

  “About everything.”

  “Don’t you think she’s got a lot to worry about?” I ask. We’re always having these soft, prodding little disagreements; more to the point, I’m always having them with him, trying to find a little chink in his smooth armor of certainty. He doesn’t take issue with me, or any of us. He’s implacable; he seems beyond us. At least with my mother, I know where I stand. My father doesn’t compliment me, and he doesn’t criticize either. I’m always wondering what I’d have to do to push him in either direction, if I ever chose to.

  “You worry too much, you kill yourself,” he says, putting more concentration into wiping his glasses clean than into the thought itself. He’s got on his weekend clothes, elastic-waist shorts with snap pockets on the back and a T-shirt advertising a new low-fat cheddar cheese. He’s got a lot of T-shirts advertising cheeses, pepperonis, and crackers. He’s a salesman for a company that sells those things to restaurants and little specialty shops.

  I take his mug back into the kitchen and fill it up.

  “When’s he gonna start the grill?” my mother asks.

  “He says in a half-hour or so. He says there’s no hurry,” I say. He spoken between my mother and me—he referring to my father—has some special cadence, some particular kind of weight. I’m not sure what it means, exactly. It’s just how we say it.

  “H
e’s crazy if he thinks he’s gonna get it going in time,” she says.

  “That’s what he says,” I say.

  “Fine. Let ’im.”

  I take the Smurf mug back to him and set it down. He’s back into the game.

  “You’re sure you’re gonna have enough time for the grill?” I ask him.

  “Umph.”

  I shrug and walk out. Through the dining room window, I see Brenda crouching in the middle of the backyard, sort of rocking back and forth. She’s got the cigarette in one hand and both arms wrapped around her middle, and she’s looking up at the sky. It looks like she’s talking and at first I’m not sure, until I catch a fragment of her voice, in a rising pitch—“and I said no fuckin’ way, I swear to God I did”—and it drops down again.

  I walk away before more floats back to me. I feel like I can handle our family secrets; they don’t surprise me. It’s the secrets underneath the secrets that I think would knock me out, everybody’s little private dialogue with heaven, or wherever, that I can do without hearing.

  Two

  We live in the middle-class part of West Mendhem that I’ve always jokingly called the ghetto, the oldest pocket of town, where saltboxes gave way to little one-plot Greek Revivals that gave way to one-plot Victorians that eventually gave way to one-plot split-levels and Cape Cods like the one we live in. Beyond the ghetto, West Mendhem suddenly uncoils into hills and winding roads, farms, the great lake, and the raw new fourteen-room neo-this-and-that houses that squat in tree-shorn developments with names like Yankee Mews or Goodharvest Homes. Excepting these developments, this is my favorite part of town, where I biked away whole afternoons when I was younger and where I cruise aimlessly now when I’m restless after work, edging my mother’s 1979 hatchback close to the shoulder of the road to make room for passing Volvos and Saabs. I like it out here because you can almost forget it’s the twentieth century, or you can almost forget this is America, pretending instead that you’re in the Vichy countryside, racing along as fast as you can to deliver Resistance plans to some nuns in a remote farmhouse.