Man of the Year

by Lou Cove

  “How about some fireworks?” Papa asks. “Our neighbor on the hill gave me some. And he’s bringing more.”

  “There are fireworks down here,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” Amanda asks, sliding alongside me. Everybody moves in my direction and the dock swings around to compensate for the shift. “Oh, look. There really are fireworks in the water!”

  “Poseidon’s lighting up his candles for you, my man,” Howie declares, arms open, accepting me as I wrap against him. “Happy birthday!”

  “Happy birthday,” Papa echoes. I turn to look at him, seeing me in the arms of another man, and my heart heaves with guilt. I break from Howie, smelling of wine and sea, to hug my father. And he hugs me back, hard. His love as strong as ever.

  Just then, Sarah appears on the dock in cutoff shorts and a white T-shirt knotted above her waist. “Happy birthday,” she whispers and kisses me on the cheek. The whole dock hoots in approval.

  “This is literally the most magical place on earth,” Carly says, staring into the dazzle of the phosphorescent water. And then she begins to sing that song again:

  Love of my life I am crying,

  I am not dying,

  I am dancing.

  Sarah pulls me to her. “I wish I could go home with you. Your family … they’re not like other families. Definitely not like mine. I want to be part of this one. Part of yours.”

  It’s OK, I think. It’s actually OK.

  Mama and Enid join Carly and sing.

  Dancing along in the madness,

  There is no sadness,

  Only the song of the soul.

  And then, just like on the record, we all leap into the chorus, exchanging partners, spinning until the dock is spinning with us, louder and louder beneath the last bit of life left in the sky.

  And we’ll sing this song,

  Why don’t you sing along?

  Then we can sing for a long, long time.

  Why don’t you sing this song?

  Then we can sing along,

  Then we can sing for a long, long time!

  Out of the corner of my eye I see the rich guy from the mansion on the hill. He has appeared silently at the shoreline, a cigar clamped between his teeth and two live roman candles under each arm, unleashing a spray of blazing magnesium red fireballs over the blackening water.

  “Happy New Year!” someone shouts. “Here come the ’80s!”

  Apologies to the Emotional Barometer

  Time slips, unmemorable in the absence of our friends. Our house always seems big, but with Howie and Carly long gone it’s colossal. And hollow. This time they are gone for good, Mama is locked away in the basement framing prints or running errands, and Papa, who usually fills any available space, suddenly isn’t. The spontaneous soirees are no more. I should be grateful for the calm. I should be.

  Aged out of the Alternative School, I move on to something new. That polychromatic room with a single, empathic teacher and a—finally—familiar set of faces, has been replaced by a complex of fluorescent industrial hallways and cells that host besieged teachers and druggies who smoke Parliaments and listen to AC/DC, Foreigner, and REO Shitwagon. Combine a hospital, a prison, twenty Charlene Smutches for every Uli and Penny and you get my new high school. I feel like Mac McMurphy, locked in the Cuckoo’s Nest, praying for Chief to mash the mercy pillow on my face and let it end.

  Sarah’s house in “LA” is 129 impossible miles from mine. Uli, Gretchen, and Penny have scattered to other schools. I’m starting fresh, where fresh is a door closing behind me, not a window opening onto a new world. Fresh is time and place doing that familiar shuffle beneath my feet. Frozen never sounded so good.

  It’s a September school night but Mama announces that she’s going out on her own for the evening. A first. Papa says he doesn’t feel like cooking, also a first. He suggests Victoria Station for popovers and prime rib. “Plus you can ride in my new Celica,” he says as we head out the door. I like the new sports car he’s purchased. We never had two cars before. I wonder if he’d let me sit in his lap and try it? Walking out the door, Amanda looks left, right, then says, “I keep looking for the minibus. I wish it would come back.”

  I invite Uli, who I haven’t seen in a few weeks, and we punch and wrestle in the back of the silver hatchback.

  “Tell me about your day,” Papa asks when the Victoria Station waitress delivers our entrees. “Worst part, best part.”

  “Worst part was … ummm … I can’t say.” I take a bite of my Reuben, extra Russian dressing squeezing out the sides and greasing my chin. “And the best part? Watching Rabid on cable after school.”

  “Rabid was on cable? During the day?”

  “Yup.”

  He sighs briefly, and then says, “But what’s this about the worst part? You can’t say? That’s not how this works. So say.” He wags a finger at me and then uses that same finger to smooth one side and then the other of his mustache. I fidget. “You’re trying to stall. Tell us the truth.”

  “I got in trouble.”

  “At school?”

  I nod.

  “For what?”

  “I gave a girl a copy of Delta of Venus.”

  “Anaïs Nin,” Papa explains to Amanda and Uli. “She was a lover of Henry Miller’s. One of the greats.” And to me he says, “Well, at least it’s quality. But you’re not supposed to bring that stuff to school, Einstein.”

  “That’s what I learned at school today.”

  Uli laughs. He knows I spent all of last night smoking pot and reading the book, which was on the shelf in the TV room alongside Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth. He knows I jerked off five times, about once every three chapters. But at least I’m on to the sophisticated stuff from the bookshelf instead of the bathroom or under the bed.

  “And you thought this girl…” Papa nudges.

  “Veronica.”

  “OK. Veronica was the right kid to share this book with?”

  “She gave me something so I wanted to give her something.” I touch absentmindedly at the serpentine talisman hanging from a chain around my neck.

  “Fair enough. Moving on. Uli? Best part?

  “Ummm … My mom bought me a new derailleur for my bike?”

  “A new derailleur, eh? What do you have now? Bianchi?”

  “Peugeot.”

  “Good choice. Not a Bianchi, but you know your stuff. And worst?”

  “When Lou gave Veronica that book instead of me.”

  Papa slaps his knee. “Ha! Extra points for honesty. You get dessert. Amanda? Best and worst?”

  “I don’t have a best or a worst. Everything was the same,” she says.

  Papa squints doubtfully, rips a popover in half and butters it. “But I have a question for you,” Amanda continues.

  Papa clears his throat. “OK. Well, the worst part of my day had to do with a new welfare policy that’s seriously making me reconsider my faith in government…”

  “It isn’t about your best or worst,” Amanda interrupts.

  Papa scowls at the affront. “But we’re doing best and worst.”

  “I’m not.” Amanda, still a few months shy of eleven, sounds so unlike herself I can’t help but look her way. What is that sound? Not angry. Not hysterical or whining. Just flat. There isn’t really anything to her voice. Just an out-of-place monotone from the slight girl with the straight brown hair and the ugly new bionic glasses.

  “Alright then,” Papa recalibrates because he’s heard the same unfamiliar tone. “Fire away.”

  Amanda brings her hands from her lap to the table and folds them neatly in front of her. She looks plainly at Papa and says, “Do you remember how you always said that you and Mama would never get divorced?”

  My father clears his throat. “I remember.” Papa’s voice is different, too, now. Uncharacteristically soft. He takes a sip of beer and licks at the foam in his mustache.

  “How come they have three kinds of carrot cake here?” I ask, feeling a su
dden urge to change the subject. “Since when do they make cakes with vegetables? That’s disgusting.”

  Amanda ignores me. She is staring at my father like he’s a painting on a wall in a museum. “Can you still say that?” she asks him. “That you’ll never get divorced?”

  We all look at him now. He doesn’t answer but his face turns deep red. He purses his lips, sips his beer, looks for the waitress then looks back at his ten-year-old daughter who has addressed him with astonishing directness.

  “No,” he finally says, simply. “No. I can’t.”

  He says the words, then holds his mouth very tightly and swallows visibly, but there is more to be said and it is right on the tip of his tongue, pressing at the inside of his teeth to get out.

  And then Papa starts to cry.

  Resignation and disappointment spread gently across my sister’s face and she nods knowingly. Then she starts crying, too. And for the next two unbearable minutes, they both sit there crying, loudly, embarrassingly, openly.

  “What’s going on?” Uli whispers to me as my father finally gets up and goes around the table to hold my sister.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and I don’t want to know. So Uli and I get up and go to the bar section with the tabletop Missile Command and shoot down planes and stop falling bombs and empty sugar packets into our mouths.

  *

  Three weeks go by. Nothing is said. Whatever caused the eruption seems to have subsided. I never ask, and Papa never mentions it again.

  And then one day he calls to me from the second floor.

  “Louis! Come down for a sec! Mom and I want to talk to you.”

  I’m reading about Red Ronin, a rampaging robot originally constructed to destroy Godzilla, who’s now after the Avengers with a bitchin’ solar blade. “Can’t right now!” And for a moment there is no reply. I’ve done it. I’ve avoided the conversation I don’t ever want to have.

  Papa arrives silently at my door, eyes the water bong I left by the bean bag chair.

  “You’re high?”

  “No.” Iron Man’s getting the shit kicked out of him by a shuddering yellow-green blast of plasmatic energy erupting from Ronin’s shield. His arms cross awkwardly, legs fly back behind him in a paralytic superhero ballet. I imagine Tony Stark, trapped inside, sweat against iron, listening to his breath echo in the helmet. So claustrophobic. Can’t escape.

  “Son. Honey. You need to come down now. We have to talk about something.”

  I toss the comic on the lower bunk, swing down to the floor, and follow him down the hall, around the banister, down the stairs, and into his room. My sister and brother are there on the bed with my mother. No one says anything. I lie down, facing away from the family, spot an ancient bunny pellet among the dust bunnies under Mama’s dresser.

  As unusual as we are, this part turns out to be surprisingly by-the-book, my parents reciting the script you’d expect: “We’ve got something to say” … “difficult” … “sad news” … “divorce.”

  Amanda wails at the word. My mother breaks at the sound. David is lost. I lie still, silent. The questions come next, all from my sister: “Can’t you do something? Try harder! You promised. Who’s staying? Who’s going? Where will we live? What about school?”

  Now David cries, because Mama and Amanda are crying. And Papa is crying again. The ugliest sight of all. They are an emotional hurricane on the bed, wet and bellowing. I can’t stand it. This is where we are. Message received. Let’s move on.

  “Don’t you want to say anything?” they ask me.

  I look at my sister. “I’m sorry I made you clean up your own puke that time I was babysitting you,” I say, recalling her on her knees, swirling sick with a wet towel. She starts to cry again and I go to my room.

  Mom comes up first, knocks lightly at the door, asks if she can come in, goes away when I say “no.”

  Papa next, no knock, just calls my name, says “If you want to talk…”

  Only when Amanda calls meekly for me do I unlatch the door. She stands there, skinny and shivering in a worn flower nightgown, swollen eyes searching my face. She’s unsure of what to expect. Will I tease her? Punish her? Send her away feeling worse than when she knocked? Looking at her sad little frame, I am suddenly soft.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  She shakes her head slowly, staring at the bleached square in the center of the floor where Bunny Yabba used to live.

  “I didn’t,” she whispers, tears running silently down each side of her face. “I just asked. Maybe that’s why…”

  “That’s not why.”

  “But maybe if I never asked. Maybe if I never said anything…?” My sister’s body folds in on itself and she chokes on the grief squeezing out.

  “It’s their fault,” I touch her bare shoulder. She shakes her head again. “It’s their fault, not yours.” She collapses against my chest and I hug her, weakly at first, then more tightly as the heat of her tears soaks through my shirt.

  The signs have been all around me but I failed to see them. I wasn’t looking. I was looking for naked girls. Water bongs. Howie. I didn’t listen to the most highly attuned emotional barometer in the family. She saw this coming a mile away, didn’t she? Suddenly all her crazy whining and crankiness passes through a universal translator and comes out as: Hey! I see what you’re doing! You’re fucking up and breaking us! Stop!

  “You’re the only one who was paying attention,” I admit out loud. “I should have known, but I didn’t. I’m the oldest. That was my job.” This makes her cry harder and I stop talking.

  Eventually she quiets and I walk her down the hall and tuck her into bed. She looks longingly at me before she closes her eyes and I shrug. “Remember the time we discovered sparks under the covers on Christmas Eve?” She nods. “Shouldn’t have been a magical night. We’re Jews. But they were there, right?” Nods again. It was just static. I know now, but we didn’t know then. She still doesn’t. Better that way. “Remember the glowy things under the dock in Maine?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Magic things. The awesome alrightness of being. Think about them while you fall asleep.”

  *

  I lock my door, stuff a towel against the crack, pack the wooden bowl, turn off the lights, light two candles and sandalwood incense, spread a fuzzy orange blanket on the floor. The weed loosens the sad wrinkles of my brain. I climb out the window onto the ledge, gulp reflexively at the bite in the air, jump down onto the gravel-covered roof, and make my way up the steep slate gable to the highest point of the house. I’m four stories up, sitting on that knife-edge, surrounded by a black glass sky, under a rotten crescent moon. From here I can see the dark silhouette of the backyard, the emptying limbs of the trees, the warm light from the fancy house next door. The leaves bring back the memory of North Shore Sundays, whipping all around.

  Pulling my knees to my chest I rock gently at the top of the house, feeling the family below me.

  NICE WORK, YAHWEH! KEEP IT UP!

  It’s a choice now. Break or be broken. I can slide back down to my room or just let go and fall back the other way. It will feel the same until it doesn’t, and then it will feel like thirty feet of thin air, and then it will feel like the brick Chestnut Street sidewalk, or maybe the wrought-iron fence in the front yard if I’m really unlucky.

  I choose neither, shimmy along the metal stripping at the peak until I’m side by side with the chimney. Balanced precariously on a small brick ledge that pokes from its side is a bottle of Southern Comfort that Uli and I mixed with apple cider a few weeks ago. Disgusting then, worse now. But the sweet-hot bitter flood takes me further away.

  I finish the bottle, slide back to the gravel roof. I can’t say how long I was out there, but Here’s Johnny! with Dr. Joyce Brothers and David Bowie. I pull a box of Franken Berry out from under the bed and eat a few fistfuls while Johnny does the monologue.

  Bowie appears, red James Dean jacket, white T-shirt. The crowd goes nuts and Johnny s
ays, “After all this, he’d better be good.” Bowie sings “Life on Mars.” Take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy. Best song I’ve ever heard.

  I try to keep my eyes open during the commercials but before I know it it’s morning and I’m hungover and Mama is calling up the stairs. I might hate her. For waking me up. For letting this happen. I fall back asleep. She calls again. I slap water on my face, grab a bagel, and walk all the fucking way to school.

  The Smell I’m Tasting

  It takes just three days for my mother to leave home for good. She takes Amanda, tries to convince me to join her. She found an apartment in Brookline, a town next to Boston, but I refuse. You can’t make me switch schools again, I tell her. So Papa, David, and I form an unlikely roommate alliance, but after weeks of endless crying, David ships off for the new land. Still, I stay.

  This city I rejected, where everything goes to die, where they celebrate the dark and the dead, is where I now want to stay and live, even as everything that is good dies around me.

  It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;—all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise.

  Good old Hawthorne. Knows this place well.

  Papa and I begin a new life as men in this cavern of a house. I never imagined it could be more empty. But it is. David’s room, Amanda’s room, Howie and Carly’s room, all vacated and left behind closed doors. My bare feet echo through the hall of the abandoned third floor. Howie’s naked pink lady with the acrylic nipples still points to the guest room but the guests are gone.

  Atjeh goes, too. But not to Brookline. To live “on a farm,” Papa says. “We’ve got to take care of each other now.”