Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  Mother restrained Gordo in favor of reason. She said it wasn’t at all fair to those who suffered through the Depression to make a game of it. And what about all the families who’d seen it all through? Carla’s grandfather hadn’t stopped treating patients just because they paid with popovers and baskets of eggs. Mother had new dresses whenever she needed them and went right on with her flute lessons. Out came the brown family photographs, but Carla slapped them away.

  “Liar,” she yelled. “I know what I saw.”

  But did we know what we saw, in the sense of recognizing a thing previously met? Were we innocent as farm animals and in danger of being misherded? Was there any use in lecturing Carla about “facts”?

  For children arrived since Hiroshima, the lines have been fine. Nothing but clarity would do, while contradictions dropped all around like leaflets urging surrender. Nostalgia was forced on us. We learned not to learn by example.

  Dictum: In our world, nothing would ever be simple. The very best methods were required, each of us a little project separated one from another by fine lines. Everything in the technique.

  “When you wish upon a star…” And they said for us all to sing together.

  We learned from the evidence: It was all a job. We had to imagine furiously, find room inside those lines. Even that was a job, to be somewhere else. And scary sometimes, like you might not come back around. But the clarity was there. We knew what we saw.

  5

  SOMETIMES, WITHOUT RECOGNITION OF how or when, I will find that a tiny cactus spine has worked its way into my hand. I clench my teeth and feel sand grinding on my molars. I live in the desert now, but it is in no way novel. Here is the same quiet geometry of the suburb I come from; only the scale is different. Climate, topography—these things are interchangeable as wallpaper. I recognize the stunned atmosphere of this place, its heavy padding of silence, its isolation.

  Lake Success. The name itself suggests a real-estate swindle, some collection of placards and surveyor’s stakes at the edge of an alkali pit. In truth, we were only minutes from the city limits. Airline pilots lived there, and pharmaceutical researchers, and even a member of the state legislature. The streets were bright, lined with cars, and humid winds blew in from Little Neck Bay. But just the same, Lake Success was a ghost town waiting to happen. And waiting still.

  I choose a typical Friday evening of twenty-five years ago: My sister and I are supine before the television in our flannel pj’s, a bowl of cheese twists between us. A smell of cologne clings to the white shag carpet and the mighty thrumming of the furnace sends a buzz up through the floor to our bellies, recently packed with peas and lamb chops and spumoni. After the usual finagling with the sitter, we have been permitted to seal ourselves into the parental bedroom and watch their set. They are dining with friends at the country club, Mom in a brand-new dress. The thin, striped box and gray tissue are still on the bed behind us. I throw a cheese twist in the air, catch it in my mouth, and Carla giggles. The cartoon show is over and Carla gets up to change the channel. There are no arguments; we have canvassed TV Guide during dinner and agreed on what to watch.

  Here, then, in all its triviality, is the lush life aspired to in those years. So it went in a thousand other suburban fastnesses across the land—the lamb chops, the new dress, the freshly bathed children safely encapsulated.

  We were really at no great remove from the L.A. sound-stages where the households of Ozzie Nelson and Donna Stone and Beaver Cleaver carried on their bloodlessly engineered relations. There we were in achingly white Cape Cod Colonials, each with tidy hedge and lawn, and inside the same vast Formica surfaces that Harriet polished so tirelessly, the same wide staircases down which Wally and Dave and Ricky scrambled on their way to baseball practice, the same spacious dens where Ward Cleaver tamped his pipe over actuarial tables. Surely my own family was as deserving of renown as these others.

  I suggested this once to my mother, that we ought to have our own show. “You’re prettier than Donna Reed,” I said.

  “And a hell of a lot better actress,” she said, and drifted outside to sweat and pull weeds.

  What we wish to believe is this: that all those shows were worse than ridiculous, that they presented idealized, dangerously illusory figures, and that our inability to live up to them brought on guilt and disappointment. (How eager we were some years back to accept the specious rumor that Jerry Mathers—the actor who portrayed Beaver Cleaver—had died a mud-sucking grunt in Vietnam.) But this is fatuous, self-flattery at its cheapest.

  No need to look elsewhere for disappointment. That predetermined Maple Street existence was very much our own, in all the canned events through which we moved like chess pieces, in the good cheer we displayed so methodically, in the very drabness of our squabbles over report cards, dating etiquette, crunched fenders.

  What, if anything, can be concluded from all this? That I can no longer make distinctions, cannot see the differences between desert and suburb, video village and hometown? That I am a purveyor of counterfeit analogies? Very well, then, shove all aside for realism. Clear the decks for truth, and I will fill in the rest of that Friday night twenty-five years ago.

  The movie we have chosen is a bore: too much dialogue and not enough of the giant clams. Carla tinkers restlessly with tubes and jars on Mom’s cosmetics tray. I remind her that we aren’t supposed to touch anything in the room. Carla is two years older and says so what to that. She sprays herself with an atomizer, smears her lips red. She opens a drawer, ties a scarf around her neck, and dangles off the end of the bed, waving her tongue like a lizard. All right, this is more interesting than the movie. We bounce on the heavy mattress awhile, then she paints me too. We rub mouths, wet and slick, tasting of soap, until the oily red is spread over our cheeks. There’s even a streak on the coverlet and that means trouble. So I pretend to be mad, wrestle past her kicking legs so I’m on top, tickling her stomach till Carla begs me to stop or she’ll wet herself, so I do.

  And hours later the folks come home, drunk and bellowing. Mom bungles into my room and frightens me with her poking and her broken-glass voice. I curl against the wall to escape her reeking breath. Afterwards I hear thuds from their room and Dad being sick.

  And all night I have strange pressured dreams. I wake up sore and hot with a thickness in my head.

  And what began that night has been with me, to one degree or another, ever since: an unquashable sexual desire for my sister.

  There. Happy now? While Jim Anderson does time for embezzlement, his Princess gives head behind the bowling alley to pay for her habit. Donna Stone, well, she’s pretty dim these days behind the Woolworth’s lunch counter, not a lot to say since that drunk driver took out her whole family Christmas Eve. And Beaver? Everybody knows about the Beav; he’s torn and stinking under a betel palm as Charlie strips him of boots and wristwatch.

  Realism, it may be seen, has no more to do with reality than anything else.

  6

  I WAS EIGHT YEARS old when I first saw my mother on the stage. Gordo drove us into the city for the Saturday matinee. We stopped for fried clams en route and Carla was sick all over herself the minute we rejoined traffic.

  Gordo punched the gas pedal. “I’m not taking you in that condition,” he said.

  Carla kicked and sobbed while being led into Aunt Rita’s Lexington Avenue apartment building, but I wasn’t the least sorry she was being left out. The experience would be exclusively mine. And I wouldn’t have to share the intermission candy that had been promised.

  I remember the sense of event, the rustle of overcoats and the aromas of perfume and cigarettes, far better than the name of the play or even what it was about. A comedy, yes, one of those set in Westport or Bala-Cynwyd: tennis rackets and cocktail glasses, a long white sofa with tasseled cushions, and my amazement at the living laugh-track surrounding me in darkness that reached undiluted to an impossibly high ceiling dotted with gilt extrusions. My plush seat cradled me like an outsized hand,
and the program’s coated paper curled and went sticky in my small one.

  You can see my attention was not where it belonged, and so could my father, artist of laws. His hand fell threateningly on my knee; he hissed. So I fixed my eyes in the prescribed direction, took in the furniture and the cellophane fire that shed no light, passed quickly over yapping faces. I could follow words individually, but completely missed their point. Too, the voice tones were like none I’d ever heard. Considerably later, I learned of projection from the diaphragm and reaching those red EXIT bulbs at the back of the theater; but at that moment all dialogue felt alien in my ear. I lowered my gaze to the rows of heads in front of us, studying varieties of hair.

  Gordo’s elbow was sharp as my mother entered through French windows at the back of the set. Disillusion took but an instant. She had a white sweater tied round her neck by the sleeves—a style frequently affected at home—and a bundle of fat white blooms across one arm, as if she’d come in from clipping the peonies that marked the edges of our property. Where was the transformation? I knew what “playacting” meant, like any third-grader, and this wasn’t it. I felt like crying when she opened her mouth to speak and out came the teasing snob accent she used to cajole my sister and me into drab chores, or to dinners where we had to keep quiet.

  This display of her ordinary self before strangers was indecent. She was exposed, without even the small tricks of glamour a little boy could recognize. I noticed that Gordo didn’t laugh with the rest. His posture was stiff and defiant, chin jutting. Was he reading the same indecency that I did?

  The curtain couldn’t fall soon enough for me. With alarming suddenness, the slight pressure in my bladder had grown into a torment. I shut my eyes against it, afraid to move. Then I heard my mother trilling from the stage: “How do I get out of here?”

  The lights came up at last and I zigzagged my way to the men’s, praying the hot dribble inside my leg wouldn’t turn into something more. I didn’t want to end up at Aunt Rita’s too. Finding an empty stall, draining myself, I thought for a mad instant of hiding there until the theater was empty and explorable, but knew I’d be found. My father, I was sure, could order up a special police squad whenever he wanted. Nothing to do, then, but thread through the forest of people and find him. At least there’d be chocolate waiting.

  His suede shoes made him easy to locate; they matched the carpeting. He wanted opinions from me. I mumbled around my Hershey bar. This was no time for lenience, though, and he prompted me so fiercely I could barely keep up. A Saturday matinee, indeed. What had been offered as a rare treat turned out to be one more privilege earned through adherence to ceremony.

  As the second act got under way, I was a determined little gut-squeezer. It would take plenty to make me fall for their pretending. I would follow Gordo’s lead, wedging myself in place like a one-man totem pole, taking it all in and giving nothing back. Coolly, I would tell Carla later on how I’d indulged the grownups. But all this went like dust before an angel’s sneeze when my mother reappeared.

  She floated in a strapless satin gown, hair a braided crown that revealed the pale column of her neck. Bright as her eyes, long earrings left glitter trails with every movement of her head. She looked like herself, but had become someone else. Her laughter was slow and low and filled the distance like an echo of itself. Edging forward, edging forward, I finally conked myself against a metal seatback and felt my eyes brim over with the vulgar distraction of pain. Band music spun on a phonograph and my mother danced with a younger woman back and forth across the artificial living room. I had never seen her move with such reckless grace.

  Just as it had begun, with the suddenness of a detonation, this vivid interlude was finished. Lights blinked off, then on again, and the parade of dolls resumed. It was a mystery to me that such an abandoning didn’t empty the place. But the laughers laughed, the snoozers snoozed, and I watched while not watching, in the manner of someone who leafs all the way through a newspaper without picking up any news.

  After a while my teeth began to hurt from the effort of not seeing and the press of discomposure. I longed to peel back time, to rub out those few glory-radiating minutes of satin gown and low laugh, to save my mother. Because what could she do from her place of elevation but slip, trip, and fall into grayness? Into the sad kitchen where we knew her as reluctant wife and nervous mother who stared into the freezer, rummaged in drawers, talked to herself, was constantly looking over her shoulder: Where was it? Had it been there at all?

  After she died, I saw how huge her own longings must have been. It was only on the altar of the raised proscenium that power drew near. She inhaled it through open pores; she swelled with it and rose like a balloon. But there came inevitably a closing line and a final light cue, and the inescapable return to the place where she flaked dried gravy off oven mitts, bandaged knuckles scraped against the cheese grater. What had to be learned was that, over the long run, short respites only deepened the agony. How do I get out of here? You find a place of warm, dark peace where the lights never dim and there is always another page of script: the inside of a television.

  The next thing I noticed was the curtain call—all of them up there holding hands, grinning with what seemed to be embarrassment. And why not? My mother looked right at us and gave a small wave. I looked at the ceiling. Out in the street Gordo bought some flowers and put them in my hand.

  He unsmiled. “Give these to her when she comes out,” he said.

  We waited in a greasy alley. Dusk sneaked in and it was cold. Gordo turned up the collars of both our coats. He stamped and blew steam like an impatient horse. Then the star of the family arrived in a miasma of cold cream, and the two of them launched into a furious argument over Carla.

  “Christ almighty!” She was still reaching for those EXIT lights. “You call Rita’s right now and get her down here in a cab.”

  A dramatic rescue; an on-her-own ride through Central Park as night fell. Carla, however, didn’t appear glad to see any of us, even when fussed over (her dress had been through Rita’s washer and dryer) and given the bouquet.

  “That’s all right,” said the star of the family. “There’s another show tonight and you’ll have a seat in the front row.”

  Then she led the way to a restaurant with peppermint-stripe decor and an electric train that circuited the counter delivering orders. Carla and I threw petals at each other while the grownups sulked.

  “Mom danced with a lady,” I reported, taking my pizza-burger from a little B & O flatcar.

  “Liar.” Carla kicked me softly.

  “You’ll see.”

  “I don’t know about this acting.” Carla addressed herself to no one in particular. “We get sent to bed for it.”

  Note: Phoned main library in the city for data search. The play was called Three on a Mattress. It ran seventeen performances.

  7

  I WAS A SMALL, dutiful boy who was never asked to clean up his room. My grades were steady, my deportment good. “Evasive” was a word I heard often. My mother, concerned that I was old before my time, sent me to a psychologist, who fed me sour-balls and asked repeatedly how I felt about Negroes. A homeroom teacher, one Ted Buttonweiser, wrote my parents, speculating if my lack of extracurricular participation might not mask some deeper problem.

  What must, from the outside, have seemed like timidity was inside the caution that proceeds from mistrust. To put a not very fine point on it, I had my doubts about close contact with other people. Still do.

  I arrived at my sophomore year of high school with the single flamboyance of hair combed in a downward swoop over the brows à la Merseybeat stars Gerry and the Pacemakers. By now I was worried too. Without metamorphosis, and soon, I might be doomed to a life in which I bored even myself. But, of course, nothing is ever as hard as we make it. It took only one chance afternoon of quaint illegality, cruising the empty streets of a housing development with an unlicensed driver and a Baggie of airplane glue, to show me how little was
required and how superfluous my caution had been. It was very much a case of instant possession. When I woke up and smelled the coffee, I moved to Brazil.

  In pursuit of the dissolute, we had energy as never before. We were a cadre with secret codes and unbreachable unity; we were shaking things into a new arrangement, like glass bits in a kaleidoscope. I passed my sixteenth birthday at a gallop, wanting to leave myself behind. I saw the most pampered minds of my generation wild-eyed in the wake of petty vandalisms and inert upon leather furniture, their ennui as transparent as gelatin capsules yet to be filled.

  All in all, it was pretty routine.

  My mother, who took no interest in details, encouraged my new moves.

  “Go on, explore,” she’d say, slipping me a twenty.

  Explore. Expand. See the world.

  Carla, who had been sent to Puerto Rico in April for an abortion, gathered us after dinner one night to view her slides: pretty nurses smiling under coconut palms that flanked the clinic entrance, piles of fruit in the mercado central, a porpoise washed up on the hotel beach.

  “When did you have time to take pictures?” asked Gordo with ominous calm.

  “Was I going to miss an opportunity like that? I just loaded up on Kotex and hit the streets.”

  My mother welcomed it all. Prevented now, by herself, from achieving the safety of the stage, she relied on us for dramatic settings. And, obliging her, we expected her indulgence in return.

  The day I was expelled from school for a supposed role in the pollution of the faculty lounge coffee urn with tranquilizers, my mother came to fetch me, wearing gumboots and a silver fox jacket. What fine technique as we drove home, such delicate shadings in tone. So skillfully did she modulate between fury and self-reproach that I began to suspect her of rehearsing on the way over. It was a nerve-jangling performance. Makeup striped with tears as we reached the driveway, my mother pressed her forehead to the steering wheel and whispered, “Can you get any more of those pills?”