Our neighborhood is the buffer zone between the rest of leafy, bucolic West Mendhem and the sooty, decaying threat of Leicester, whose defunct factory smokestacks you can actually see from the windows of our house. When Leicester’s “complexion”—as one of my junior high school teachers once delicately put it—started to change in the 1970s, this neighborhood was the first rung a lot of white Leicester families (including mine) could grab in the middle of their frenzied exodus from the old city. Kids who would have grown up little Catholic punks in Leicester instead grew up little Catholic punks just over the border, this while their infuriated parents mourned the loss of their native city and cursed the arrival of the Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other assorted boat people who were—even as we speak—turning beautiful old Leicester into a filthy warren of drug dealers, knife-wielders, lazy welfare recipients, and other sorts of miscreants. They shouldn’t have left so easily, these parents (including mine) would say to each other; they should have stayed, shown some gumption, fought for their neighborhoods. But they didn’t, and when they moved into one of the half-dozen towns that ringed Leicester, they stopped going back there to eat, to shop, to pray, or to visit, because by now almost everyone, including the terrified elderly, had left as well.
To me, it’s the sleeping giant just at our backs, the once-thriving hulls of black textile mills and Art Nouveau bridges that gird the sluggish Merrimack River, the repository of memories that makes up the history of my dispossessed suburban family and all of my dispossessed suburban cousins. It’s where my mother and father grew up, on opposite sides of the river in the days when Italians and Irish had rumbles because they were the only ones to define each other’s difference. It’s also where my parents met, at a bar just after Thanksgiving 1963, everyone still mourning the killing in Dallas, she with her mostly Italian friends from St. Agnes Academy, he with his, mostly Irish, from City Catholic Prep. She was finishing the nursing program, now disbanded, at Leicester General Hospital, her mind filled with four-color textbook illustrations of nervous systems and clear mason jars of human brains and lungs suspended in formaldehyde. He had just come home from four years in Boston, attending business school by day, and bartending at night, living with two roommates in a basement apartment on Bay State Road, now back to a retired, widowed mother still shell-shocked at the loss of her eldest son, her only other child, in the Korean conflict. (That was our other grandmother, the meek one, who died—of nervous exhaustion, I think—when I was ten.)
I’ve always wanted to know what he said to his friends when he saw her, what she said to hers, duck tails and loafers with pennies on one side of the room, sweater sets and pedal pushers on the other, cigarette smoke and cheap beer coursing between in a show of Roman Catholic daring, and finally what they said to each other. They had lived for twenty-some years in the same city and never seen each other before, but surely he had a friend who knew one of her three sisters or friends. It’s so difficult to picture sudden romance between them, something with strings rising in the background, difficult to picture anything other than the worn-in, slightly contentious “Hey, Art?” “Hey, what?” “Hey, Art?” back-and-forth by which they ferry what seems to be only key information to each other these days.
They married in May of 1965, then settled back in Leicester, in a three-room apartment just a mile’s walk in any direction from everyone they knew, into a carefully budgeted life. They filled the place with just enough affordable Danish modern furniture to make it livable; socializing revolved around weekend excursions to Salisbury Beach or Saturday nights playing cards or Monopoly with my mother’s sisters and their husbands, all of whom had no choice but to become best friends. Brenda came in 1966, me three years after, and we moved to a one-story ranch-style house in one of the planned neighborhoods on the semi-suburban western outskirts of the city. Then the big surprise, Joani. My mother sat around watching the Watergate hearings with utter indifference during her pregnancy, concerned only with the proper development of her third child.
We were now a completed family. By then they were preoccupied, like everyone else, with the thought that the public schools were going down, even the relatively good ones of our semisuburban neighborhood, and they followed their friends and their relations out of Leicester and into the provinces, to West Mendhem, where we live today. “Why not?” they said. The time was right—Leicester was changing, we needed good neighborhoods and good schools, and my father had been promoted from bookkeeper to salesman, with a route that kept expanding thanks to his easygoing, no-pressure rapport with the area’s shop owners and restaurateurs. He didn’t glad-hand them; he asked them about their wives and their kids and their entrepreneurial aspirations while he took his lunch at their bar counters like the other local businessmen; then, somewhere in between, he’d tell them what new cheese wheel or pepperoni stick they couldn’t be without. He was a regular guy, not your regular salesman, and they liked him immensely.
Now, at seventeen, to remember growing up in this house, in this family, seems to be about remembering what it was like to be buffeted by currents stronger than myself but not yet knowing how to negotiate them. There was always the purposeful screaming of Brenda and my mother, and the less deliberate screaming of Joani—sick with this or that cold, falling down the stairs, getting some smelly old blanket or stuffed toy taken away from her for washing—and at the center of it all, my father’s silence or his philosophical little laugh, “heh,” not much more than a hiccup: my father, who seemed capable of endless reserves of patience, or self-removal, a Zen-like quietude surrounding him and his ball game, him and his newspaper, him and his paperwork.
I grew up, somehow, in the middle of it, carving out a narrow private chamber between the outside world of school and beatings and hated baseball and soccer practices, and the Fitzpatrick-Ianelli world of silent men and unsilenceable women. I filled it at first with drawings and funny little lifelike props cut and pasted out of construction paper, then later with books and old movies and magazines and piano lessons, all sorts of faces and voices that blessedly looked and sounded absolutely nothing like what surrounded me at home, in school, around town. There was the soporific drone of teachers, the unspeakable curses of older boys before they threw my schoolbag into the street, the nightly brawls between Brenda and my mother over punky boys or failed classes or Brenda’s general bad attitude, the interminable slurred, slow grind of Joani’s conversations with herself.
But there was also the strange, archaic, formal, dazzling syntax of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the honeyed, regal comportment of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind or Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Philadelphia Story—modes of speech and behavior like I had never seen from anyone in my family or in West Mendhem. In People magazine and Vanity Fair there were reports of people with inestimable sums of money and schooling and experience, even the reports of some ordinary people who had fallen out of step with ordinariness and ended up having marvelous lives. And from sheet music the elaborate machinations of Mozart and Brahms and George Gershwin, and, even more extraordinary, my growing ability to translate their black markings back into tricky chords and phrasings, on the upright piano we had gotten from my grandmother when she sold her Leicester house, in the living room with the accordion doors shut on either side so as not to disturb the television in the den or the squabbling in the kitchen.
I didn’t hide these elements of my private life, but at the same time no one inquired about them. They were largely quiet things, I pursued them on my own time, and it’s almost as though everyone observed an unspoken rule of no entry in this province of mine. Either that, or they simply didn’t care. I was bookish, I was creative, I was artistic, I was private, I didn’t make any trouble. Now I look around my room at the books I’ve collected, the books I somehow managed to hear about, seek, find, purchase, and devour, and I’m almost shocked at what I’ve managed to get away with while everyone else was making noise in other quarters of
the house. I’m shocked at everything I know that no one knows I know. No one ever said, “What are you reading? What’s it about?” It shocks me—no one ever thought to ask.
* * *
“Eric, come play patty-cake with me and Joani,” my annoying parochial-school fourteen-year-old cousin Bethie Lynn calls back to me as I take off across the lawn in the middle of the barbecue and slip back inside the house.
“Okay,” I call. “I’ll be right back,” but it’s a lie. I can’t take Bethie Lynn and her little Goody Two-Shoes platitudes anymore. In fact, I can’t take any more of my extended family this afternoon: not Grandma and Auntie Reenie, Bethie Lynn’s hulking mother, also a nurse, fighting over whether Grandma can have another meatball-and-sausage sub; not unmarried Auntie Lani, who’s been hacking up a lung, chaining Virginia Slims all afternoon; not Auntie Winnie, the youngest of the four of them and the manager of a children’s clothing store in Methuen, who’s running across the lawn in her pink jelly shoes to swat my little bratty cousins Jason and Robbie over the head for beating up on Brittany, the three-year-old daughter of my oldest cousin, Frannie, who thinks she’s a yuppie because she’s a C.P.A. and told me that going to Yale, or anything other than business school, was a waste of money; not my father and all my sullen, mute uncles who have been playing cards and smoking cigars all afternoon, the cooler full of Michelob Lites right beside them. All I want to do is hide out in my room and finish A Handful of Dust, which is on my summer reading list for senior year, and which I happen to be devouring.
I slip out the kitchen and up the stairs. It’s nice upstairs, cool and quiet, and I’m thinking that I’ll read for a little while when I hear voices coming from Brenda’s bedroom. It’s Brenda and Frank, her boyfriend, who I guess has been hanging out up there all along, because I can hear the sound of the ball game on Brenda’s black-and-white TV.
I stand frozen outside the door. “I can’t fuckin’ stand them anymore today,” Brenda says, tense. “Fuckin’ Frannie. I know she knows, just from the way she looks at me. She’s such a fuckin’ snotty bitch.”
“Brenda, wouldja cool down?” I hear Frank say. I like Frank okay, I guess, even though he kind of scared me when Brenda first brought him home. He grew up with just his dad in the most run-down part of town, by the old train tracks at the bottom of Main Street, and he probably would’ve been kicked out of West Mendhem High School for all sorts of things if he hadn’t been such a football hero. He’s the kind of guy who would’ve harassed the shit out of me when I was a freshman, except he didn’t because I was Brenda’s little brother. He even told other guys to leave me alone, and they did—at least, when he was around.
Then it sounds like Brenda’s going to cry again. “Oh my God, Frankie, what am I gonna do? I’m gonna start showin’ pretty soon. I’ve gotta tell ’em. Oh my fuckin’ God, I can’t believe I’m having a baby! What am I gonna do?”
“Baby, baby, shhhh! Take it easy, Bren. It’s not what are you gonna do. It’s what are we gonna do. And we’re gonna get married, right?”
There’s a pause. Then Brenda says, “Yeah, I guess so.” She sounds defeated, but maybe that’s because her voice sounds muffled through the door.
“Whaddya mean, you guess so? We’ve been talkin’ about it all along, anyway, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So no better time than the present, right?” Frank sounds much gentler than he usually does, like when he’s reminiscing with my father about old Thanksgiving games, or talking about the Puerto Rican muthafuckahs he has to guard all day at the correctional facility.
“I guess so,” Brenda says. “But even if we get married next week, they’re still gonna know it happened before.”
“So what? So screw your crazy family. Screw the whole fuckin’ world. I don’t give a shit about what any muthahfuckahs say. Do you?”
“I guess not,” Brenda says. She sounds a little calmer now, appeased.
“So what’s the big deal, right? We’re gonna get married, Bren, and we’re gonna have a baby boy.”
“Baby boy?” Brenda asks, annoyed.
“Baby boy, baby girl, I don’t care. Whatever.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Pretty soon I can hear them making out, that ungodly smacking sound. It’s funny; I’m genuinely concerned about Brenda and Frank, but in a strange way their whole situation almost seems kind of wholesome and old-fashioned to me. Like it’s out of West Side Story, or that horrible song “Jack and Diane.” You know, “two American kids doing the best they can,” and that kind of thing, even though I know it’s not nice for me to reduce them to a John Cougar Mellencamp song.
* * *
It’s around seven o’clock now. Most everybody has gone home, except Auntie Reenie, Auntie Lani, and Auntie Winnie. Now they’re having the big talk downstairs in the kitchen with my mother. My bet is that nobody wants to take in Grandma except for Auntie Reenie, but the other aunts won’t let her because she and Grandma fight too much and Grandma will end up having another stroke, if Auntie Reenie doesn’t have one first. Brenda and Frank went off to a movie or something, and Grandma and Joani are taking a nap together in the other room. I think my father’s downstairs in the den reading a MacArthur biography, keeping out of everything.
I fell asleep with the book in my hands and had a dream, bits of which I actually happened to remember. I dreamed I was driving around the St. Banner campus late at night in my mother’s hatchback. But it wasn’t St. Banner in my dream, it was college, and I was looking for the place to register. Finally, I got out of the car—it was freezing cold in the dream, I remember—and I went into some majestic old building, where all these Chinese students were gathered, dressed like they were going to a cocktail party, and they were all playing some huge board game, Monopoly or something. Then it got peculiar, because then he—Mr. Snotty Black Guy—got up from the table (he was the only one who wasn’t Chinese) and came toward me. He was dressed in Nikes and shorts, like he was ready to run a marathon, and he had a huge stack of folders under his arm. And he came toward me and said, “Did you bring your files? I hope you brought your files.” There was also classical music coming from somewhere, something very somber with a lot of strings. And I was at a total loss because I didn’t bring my files, or whatever.
That’s all I remember of the dream. Now I’m lying here, in that sweat you get when you wake up from a nap in warm weather, and I’m trying to make sense of it. It’s college worries, obviously. Cavernous old oak rooms and classical music emanating from somewhere—pomp and circumstance, just like Yale.
Now my mother’s calling me from downstairs. “Eric, Phoebe and Charlie are here.”
I pop downstairs. Phoebe and Charlie are standing in the hallway with my mother. They look like refugees from a Grateful Dead concert and they’ve both got these big smiles on their faces like they’re about to burst out laughing any minute. They’re really only friends through me, but Phoebe said she’d pick up Charlie on the way over, and it’s funny seeing them standing there together. Charlie smashed his mother’s car against a telephone pole last week and now she won’t let him drive. Sometimes I wonder how these two fuckups came to be my best friends, because a fuckup I most definitely cannot afford to be. But I know the answer. They’re the only two people at school who I think are funny and interesting, and they’re also the only two people who don’t think I’m a nerdy intellectual freak. Or maybe they do, but they don’t mind.
My mother looks at me skeptically when I come down the stairs. “We’re having a little meeting in the kitchen,” she says to the three of us, “but there’s plenty of food if you guys want to have something on the porch.”
“What do you have, Mrs. F.?” Charlie says, his words a little slower and louder than usual. “I’m starving.”
“You guys can have a meatball sub, or a sausage sub. There’s also potato salad and pizzelle cookies.”
“Oh, I love those cookies!” Phoebe gushes. “Are those the Italian snowflake co
okies, Terry?”
“That’s right,” my mother says, smiling. This isn’t the first time she’s seen Phoebe and Charlie in this state.
“They’re so pretty!” Phoebe says. She’s only about five two, but her long, flowing batik skirts and sandals and long, straight, stringy hair make her look even shorter. She sort of looks like what you’d get if you crossed Janis Joplin with a Cabbage Patch Doll, but I don’t tell her that. Charlie, on the other hand, is over six feet and still seems to be growing. His flannel shirts and jeans always seem too short for his arms and legs. He’s also got the biggest pair of feet I’ve ever seen, which usually smell because he goes around wearing big work boots without socks, even in the summertime.
“They are pretty cookies,” my mother says with a little edge of mockery. She likes Phoebe and Charlie, but she knows they’re fuckups and thinks their parents should have exercised a little more discipline with them. Charlie’s parents have become experts at looking the other way, and Phoebe’s mother and father are too busy running food drives and other charity events through their church. Mr. Signorelli is Italian and Mrs. Signorelli is Jewish, but they both became Unitarians when they got married. Phoebe sings and plays the tambourine in the congregation’s folk band that plays in the basement of the church at the Sunday night coffeehouse, which she takes me to quite frequently. The band is called godjangle, with a lowercase g.
Now my mother stoops down and fingers the fabric of Phoebe’s skirt. “You look pretty in that skirt, honey. Did you like the concert?”
Phoebe flings her head back and says in a deep, dramatic voice, “It was amazing. I was flying the whole time.”
My mother laughs. “I’ll bet you were,” she says, which makes Charlie start laughing, too.
“Look, guys,” I say, starting to feel a little edgy, “why don’t we go to Harrington’s Roast Beef and get a sandwich. I don’t think I can take any more sausage today.”
Getting Off Clean Page 5
