“Do you have anything from our lifetime?” I asked. She pushed the door to her room closed to reveal some longhaired guy with a beard staring sternly at me from the back of the door. He looked like Charles Manson, but it said “Dennis Wilson” above his head and “Pacific Ocean Blue” just under that. “Why do you have this here?” I said.
“It’s some old poster of my dad’s. I like it—he’s cute,” she replied. Everything was old. She liked old things. She didn’t believe in reincarnation or anything like that, but sometimes she felt that she might have been born in the wrong time. She didn’t feel much connection with the world, she felt connected only to things in the past. That’s what she told me, but later.
Her bed was a girl’s bed, with a flowery comforter and an old stuffed bear on the pillow. “It was my mother’s,” she said. “Hold him, he’s soft.”
I was at a loss for words, so I just held on to the bear and looked around again. There was another book on her bed, Arshile Gorky: Paintings and Drawings. I put the bear back on the bed and looked at the book. Stuck into the pages was a large folder, and I opened the book to it. The painting reproduced on the left-hand page was a number of black patches connected with black lines on a gray background.
Anna quickly took the book from me. “It’s a painting about losing his earlier paintings and books in a fire,” she said, and put the book back on the bed.
“Gorky. It’s a funny name.”
“It’s not his real name,” she said. “He just invented it.”
“He’s not alive, I bet.”
“Dead.”
I knelt on the floor and looked at the scattered albums. “Did you buy all these?”
“My father used to work in a record store in college. He must have a thousand albums.”
She seemed to enjoy my exploration of her room, sifting through the artifacts she had carelessly assembled.
We heard the front door open. “That’s going to be my dad,” she said. “There’s something I have to tell you about him. He doesn’t have any hair.” A second later her father appeared in the doorway.
She was right, he didn’t have any hair, but I had thought she meant he was bald. He didn’t have any hair. He didn’t have any eyebrows or eyelashes or whiskers, nothing. He was as smooth as an egg, and shaped like one as well. He was a small man, no more than five and a half feet. He looked meek, with his small black expensive-looking eyeglasses and conservative blue suit and white shirt. But his appearance was deceptive. His large, fleshy hand extended toward me as we were introduced, and when I shook it I could tell he was strong. He squeezed my hand hard and kept exerting more pressure. It was one of those fatherly gestures, I guess, like telling me not to mess with his daughter. I tried to give him the best “You can trust me” or “Don’t worry” shake back, but I’m sure he interpreted it as “We’d be in bed right now if you hadn’t come home.” He gave me a stern look with those bald eyes, distorted slightly by the lenses of his glasses. I got the message: He could hurt me. Anna later told me that he worked out every day. He didn’t lift weights, but ran and jumped rope and boxed. He was younger than my father by about ten years, but he was maybe in the best shape of his life and getting stronger, while my own father was riding around in his golf cart and softening into a marshmallow.
He talked for a couple of minutes and then left the room, saying, “Please keep this door open, Anastasia, at least while you have guests.” The door swung open and the hairy Dennis Wilson disappeared.
Mr. Cayne was a loan officer at the bank. “He used to be a repo man,” Anna told me. “So don’t mess with him, or me.” She said that he had once gone to repossess a car and had just started it and was ready to drive off, when the owner flung open the door and grabbed the steering wheel. Mr. Cayne grabbed the guy’s wrist and told him to let go of the wheel. He didn’t, and Mr. Cayne began to squeeze. “My father broke his wrist and pulled his arm out of the socket,” she said.
“He told you this?”
“I found out about it,” she said. “Just a word to the wise—be nice to me.” She reclined on the bed. I walked over to her, but remained standing.
An old Bible rested on the nightstand next to her bed; it might have been the last thing I expected to find in her room. I picked it up and marveled at it. “You read this?” I said.
“Look around you, I read everything,” she said. “Don’t read too much into it.”
I opened the Bible to Ecclesiastes, where a bookmark was placed. One passage was underlined: “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly; I perceived that this also is vexation of the spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
She watched me read the passage and then took the book from me and tossed it on the bed. “It’s an old copy,” she said. “I didn’t do that.”
Anna told me that she was an only child, just like me. Okay, that last part isn’t true, technically. I have a brother and a sister, but they are ten and twelve years older than I am, respectively, and they have been long gone for most of my life, so I’m basically an only child. Both of them left home when they turned eighteen, and my sister hasn’t been back at all. My brother, Paul, went to Princeton and would come home for the holidays, but now he’s married and has three adopted kids and lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and we hardly ever see them. “Why would anyone want to go to someplace called Baton Rouge?” my father said the few times my mother asked if he wanted to go. She’s gone a couple of times, but the last time she tried to go, her flight was canceled and she didn’t know what to do, so she just sat in the airport. After my brother called to see which flight she had taken, my father drove out to the airport to pick her up. She hasn’t expressed any desire to go to Baton Rouge again.
My sister, Joan, left for California the week after she graduated from high school, and we haven’t heard from her since. She had a lot in common with Dad; she also liked to retreat to remote places, and now she has virtually disappeared.
There was also a daughter between my brother and me, seven years older than me, but she died. She lived to be nine days old. Her name was Denise and she’s buried in the cemetery south of town. My brother told me they used to go out there once or twice a year—the whole family—but I’ve been there only once and that was a long time ago. I wonder what my parents were like before.
Once, when I was younger, I accidentally broke something of my brother’s, a model plane or something, and he started screaming at me that I would never have been born if Denise had still been around. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but try getting the idea out of your head. Sometimes I wish that she had lived and that I wasn’t around.
parents, idiots, and incompetents
My father’s an accountant. He’s a numbers guy, not a people person. That’s an understatement. I imagine he inhabits his spreadsheets as if they are other countries, places where he is the silent master of his silent subjects. Maybe that’s why he likes numbers—they can be tamed, domesticated, they are pliable, dutiful, and quiet.
My father started his business with his best friend right after college, and they make a nice, comfortable living in our small town. They are no longer friends, but they still work together. My father is a quiet, solitary person anyway. If he’s home, he’s in his den. It’s a small room at the back of the house on the first floor. It’s just off the dining room, so he can get up from the table and retreat immediately into his dark, wood-paneled cave. In fact, he always sits at the table with his legs out to the side, ready to bolt to the den. I’ve been in there only a few times. Entry is by invitation only, and my father rarely invites anyone.
A bookcase covers one entire wall, filled mostly with books on golf, pictures of golf, and a few trophies my father has earned. He still plays, but he’s starting to lose interest even in that. I’m sure it’s because he has to play with other people; if he could be the only person on the course, I bet he’d play all the time. His world is s
lowly being reduced to his office and his den, and no one thinks that this is odd.
My father went to Brown University. He played football there, and he now has the appearance of a former lineman who has gone soft. He has a paunch, a sagging gut that hangs over his belt, dragging his whole body with it. His body looks slack and fleshy, although he isn’t a fat man; he just sags, in either contentment or resignation.
You might think that our respective football experiences might have provided some sort of father-son bonding, but they did not. He came to a game or two of mine, but offered no comment afterward. He didn’t offer any advice either, take me into our yard and give me any pointers or practice. He didn’t even tell me any anecdotes about his own days on the field. I have no idea if he was a good player or terrible. I’ve seen photographs of him in his uniform, looking large and trim, peering out of his mask, staring steadily into the camera, but there’s no story to go with these images. He didn’t even show me the pictures; my mother did. He remains as silent in life as in the photographs, and my mother is horrible at remembering the details of their college days anyway. Even when I broke my finger he had little to say, no words of encouragement or sadness, only a matter-of-fact comment. “Football’s a tough sport.” No shit, Dad.
My mother was a professional incompetent. My father one day came up with the idea that she should work, that we would live better, more comfortably, if she contributed to the household income. My mother agreed, with little resistance. She wanted to get out of the house, and was eager to see if she could make her way in the working world. She soon discovered, however, that she had no talent, no aptitude, no training, and no skills. She attempted numerous jobs, mainly of the clerical, receptionist, office-assistant variety, but was fired from all of them. She couldn’t type, couldn’t file or work a computer, and was helpless with a phone that had more than one line. She was a detriment and a liability to any company or organization. Her friends joked that she had even been fired as a volunteer at the local library. I don’t know whether this was true, but my mother turned bright red every time the subject was mentioned.
For a time, my father was convinced that her employers held her to too high a standard, or didn’t take enough time to train her properly, or were bad managers with unclear expectations. Or they were simply idiots. My mother agreed. Together, they would show those idiots a thing or two about work and how things should be done. So my father hired her as his own assistant, or more accurately, as an assistant to his assistant. Of course, by now my father had forgotten about the initial reason for wanting my mother to work. He was now paying her, so there was really no extra money coming into the house. It was now a moral issue, family honor, and a matter of worth. “What the hell,” he said at dinner when it was all decided. “How horrible can it be?”
It was horrible.
From the few hours of interaction I witnessed on week-nights, between the time they got home and the time my father retreated to his den, they fought, argued, bickered, and baited each other, constantly. Mistakes, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and all other unresolved issues of the day would surface surprisingly and suddenly. “What were you thinking?” my father would blurt out, and they would be off, thrashing through a thread of my mother’s fuck-ups. She couldn’t do anything correctly, it seemed, and often admitted as much, although she defended herself frequently, blaming an assortment of circumstances. Some of it would have been laughable, if their arguments hadn’t descended into anger and resentment, and if either of them had had a sense of perspective, objectivity, or humor. After my father had bawled her out for mangling yet another phone message she had handed him, she would yell, “I wrote it exactly as they told me.” “They’re changing their story.” “They’re liars.”
My father is a stubborn man, and because of that stubbornness, blind confidence in his abilities as a manager and mentor, or the strength of his desire to see that his wife did not become the laughingstock of the work force, he stuck with her for more than a year. Finally they gave up. I don’t know who raised the white flag first, but one morning my father left for work and my mother stayed at the kitchen table, dressed in her robe and drinking coffee. Her days as a member of the working class had come to an end.
Now she is incompetent for free. She is almost as ineffective as a homemaker, housewife, whatever you call it, as she was in the corporate world. If she has trouble with anything around the house, she is more than likely to leave it for my father to deal with when he gets home. Once, when she had trouble opening a can of chicken broth, it waited on the kitchen counter for my father to open when he got home so she could start cooking dinner. This of course meant that dinner wasn’t waiting for Dad when he walked through the doorway, which meant that his disappearing act into the den was also delayed. This was fine when my mother was working, but unacceptable when she is home all day. He was not happy. “Solve the problem,” he screamed. “Solve the problem by yourself.” I don’t know how many cans of soup the neighbors opened after that, but dinner is always ready on time.
The greatest, most obvious, talent my mother displays is her ability to straighten. She has a vision in her head of how she wants the cloth napkins and placemats arranged on the dining room table, and she spends time over days, weeks even, adjusting them until they are in proper alignment. She labors over the drapes, forcing the pleats and folds of the fabric to align to her will. Before I had my own phone, I would sometimes use the one near the bed in my parents’ room, and my mother would always yell at me because I had disrupted the comforter or pillows, or who knows what else. We were running late one time and she stopped on her way out of the house to adjust the coats hanging on the wall pegs near the back door, and I joked that if my head were cracked open and I needed to get to the hospital, she would still stop to straighten things before we left. She didn’t think that was funny.
I always tried to avoid going home immediately after school, because there would always be something for me to do, something to straighten or something to be yelled at for having unstraightened, or some problem or mishap to solve for my mother. She is a woman who needs someone to take care of her, but it isn’t going to be me.
I shouldn’t give the impression that my mother is utterly useless. She cleans around the house (although my father complains that she smears everything: she smears the windows, she smears the countertops, she smears the furniture), and more often than not she has breakfast ready by seven-thirty so my father can eat and get out of the house, and dinner ready at six thirty-five, a few minutes after he has entered the house from another day of not talking to his business partner, so he can quickly sit down at the table and not talk to his marriage partner and son. Some nights all you hear is the sound of our forks scraping against the plates, with my father leading the pace as he shovels food into his mouth. My mother eats at an alarmingly slow pace, counterbalancing my father’s inhalation. You see the fork move toward her mouth, carrying food, but her plate never seems to empty. She is left by herself every night, alone at the table, slowly finishing her meal. The only times my father and I stayed until the end of her eating were holidays, and that was long enough to last the whole year.
My mother isn’t a terrible cook, although I remember my father sitting over a burned breakfast and muttering, “How can you screw up scrambled eggs?” She had a distinct propensity to make chicken breasts with cream-of-mushroom soup poured on top more than my father and I would have preferred, or more than anyone would prefer, I imagine. It had to be the world’s easiest dish: you put the chicken in a casserole dish, pour the soup on, directly from the can, and then make some rice and a salad, and there’s dinner. She also claimed to make an “exotic” dish, tuna curry. While the meal contained both tuna and curry, it wasn’t in any way exotic, unless your idea of exotic is a can of tuna, a can of cream-of-mushroom soup (a family staple), a spoonful of curry powder, and some instant rice. It tasted about as good as it sounds. My father ate oyster crackers at every meal. He kept a plast
ic container filled with them, which he would bring out from his den and set to one side of his plate. He would shove a handful of the little unsalted hexagons into his mouth after every few bites. Sometimes he would emerge from his den with cracker crumbs all over the front of his shirt or sweater, carrying his plastic bucket to the kitchen for a refill.
What my mother lacked in imagination, she made up for in presentation and arrangement. She served her dishes on platters lined with precisely arranged flowers or other garnish. She had elaborate tableware. When we had grapefruit for breakfast (which was frequently—it’s almost impossible to screw that up), a small black box would appear on the table, containing spoons with one serrated edge, designed specifically for removing the sections of a halved grapefruit. After breakfast the box would disappear, and the next morning, if we were to have grapefruit again, it would return to the table, the spoons lined up in their case, ready and precise.
My mother is a big fan of precision, and tries her best to maintain it. Unfortunately, her own incompetence gets in the way. Dinner is served, except when a can won’t open. That’s the way she is: fine unless something goes wrong and that minor obstacle becomes a huge wall she can’t scale. She becomes helpless whenever things don’t go smoothly, or exactly as she imagined them.
school
Anna and I had two classes together, history and math. We never sat together. Mrs. Bell had assigned seats in math, but you could sit anywhere you wanted in history. Anna always sat up front, her chair pulled away from the rest of us. She frequently slept in class, or at least she appeared to be asleep. She would put her head down on her desk and close her eyes, yet nothing was ever lost on her. She seemed to know more about what was going on in class than anyone else did. If she was ever called on, she would answer the question without lifting her head or opening her eyes. Once in history class, Mr. Morrison became so frustrated by her “attitude” that he demanded she sit up and “pay attention.” Anna sat up and began reciting Mr. Morrison’s lesson on Martin Luther King, Jr., word for word from the beginning, providing an impressive demonstration that she’d been paying attention all along. She went on for a good three minutes before Mr. Morrison dismissed her with a wave of his hand and her blond head slowly descended into the black sleeve of her sweater. It was said that all of the Goths could do the same trick, but I don’t believe it.
As Simple as Snow Page 4
