by Adam Haslett
Walking past the cemetery of the Congregational church, I cross the street into the grocery-store parking lot. It’s barely half full and baking hot. Through the glass door at the rear of the building, I can see the row of three cash registers. And there’s Alec, leaning against the steel rim of one of the narrow black conveyor belts, talking to Doreen, a heavy smoker in her late sixties with a dyed-red bouffant and heavy jowls. Whenever I come into the store she tells me how much everyone loves Alec and she herself is clearly charmed by him, by how polite he is and how well he listens. He has a slightly precious manner for a fourteen-year-old, almost courtly. He asked me last year if he should take metalwork or theater, and I told him he’d meet more interesting people in the theater class. Which may be part of the reason for how he holds himself now, I suppose—the acting he’s been doing. But his formality he gets from his idea of me. He’s the only one born in America, the only one of the three who was excited when we told them we’d be moving to England.
I’ve never watched a child of mine strain to be an adult before. Michael and Celia have done it in private, away from my view, though their mother says I’m the one locked away from them, and I suppose I can’t deny that. But here is Alec now with his chin ever so slightly raised, nodding with judicial solemnity at whatever Doreen is pattering on about, while one foot taps rapidly on the linoleum floor and he holds his hands down at his waist, picking discreetly at his cuticles, his attention fixed on her. Something she says causes his eyes to widen in surprise, and he shakes his head, feigning indignation. And then his hands are out at his sides, he’s leaning forward, gesticulating with great vigor, and Doreen rolls her head back, laughing. Alec smiles, delighted by what he’s just said and the response it’s getting. The young actor with the audience of one. I find it almost repulsive. The overweeningness of it. Is this what I have bequeathed him? Doreen turns back to her register, and starts passing a woman’s groceries down the belt for Alec to bag.
All three of my children have jobs and more or less pay for their own things. Still, I don’t know how much of our situation they understand: that there is only debt. Their mother would never tell them, but she yells it at me at night. And though Celia has given up, Alec sometimes knocks on the living room door and pleads with us to stop fighting, and then the liquid in my skull becomes so heavy I can barely keep my eyes open, wanting so much for it all to go away—the tight air, the words contracting like muscle over bone. Alec pushes the woman’s grocery cart to her Volvo, but it’s only as he’s skating it back across the parking lot that he sees me off to the side and comes to a halt.
Business being slow, they don’t mind him taking his lunch break early. We walk down toward the town hall. I have no destination in mind and he doesn’t ask for one. It’s ordinary for us not to talk when we’re alone together, which isn’t often. He’s become prehensile, stretched up on spindly legs. He could probably bathe more than he does. He’s in that larval stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child’s body. This is what boarding school is for. To store them away during years like this, so they can suffer without the embarrassment of their parents watching. And much good that did you, Margaret would say. He’s fiddling with his fat little Swiss Army knife, picking out each blade and tool, folding them back down again, then fanning them out at different angles.
“I’m hungry,” he says.
We keep going past the Catholic church and the police station and the semi-detached white town houses set back from the road. There are free tables visible through the window of the diner; at least it will be cool inside. I spent a lot of time here last fall with a legal pad drafting letters to investors for what I thought might become a new investment fund. Tradesmen and retirees are the people who frequent the place. Not the young mothers or men on business meetings. The food’s too greasy and the inside not clean enough. The owner, a Latvian fellow who sat with me one afternoon and spoke for two hours about his life in the Soviet navy, waves from the kitchen. The smells from the fryers are unusually heavy. They fill my head and lungs, leaving me slightly nauseous. I notice the dandruff on Alec’s shoulders as he hunches over the laminated menu. He is asking me if I heard his question. The waiter is standing by our table. No, I tell him, what’s your question?
“Is it okay if I get the chili and a Monte Cristo sandwich?”
Afterwards he will want chocolate cake. In restaurants his mother tries to save small sums of money by ordering the cheapest thing on the menu. Which I’ve always considered defeatist.
“What are you getting, Dad?”
“Nothing,” I say, “I’m fine.”
The beast isn’t in Alec. I have no way of knowing this for certain. He’s too young. Maybe I just don’t see it and don’t want to. But in his eagerness to please there is such squirming energy and a kind of literalness. He’s up on the surface of himself opening outward, even when he’s embarrassed, perhaps particularly so then, because he finds embarrassment so painful he’ll do anything to get off the spot. He’s a bit of an exhibitionist, too. As a toddler he used to walk naked into our bedroom and stand there, biting his lower lip and smiling. There’s a photograph of him at my brother-in-law’s house at Christmastime when he’s four or five standing at the top of the back stairs with his trousers down asking for help in the bathroom. Who the drunk was that took the picture before helping him, I forget. Never such things with Celia, and certainly never with Michael. Being the youngest, that is part of it. He understood the rules from the point of view of someone who got to break them. They were provisional, and with wile, they could be set aside. And then eventually I would have to give him a spanking and he would weep. But his sullenness never lasted. He was too impatient. And still is. Impatient to be older. He eats his sandwich with his mouth open.
“Are we going to go back to Maine ever?” he asks. “Like, this summer?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and I can tell from the way he stops chewing for an instant and glances at me that he suspects there is something wrong with me again, though what that means to him I have no idea. I am, after all, out of bed and here with him now. And I am all he has ever known. I heard him once through the door of his room boasting to a school friend that his father had his own company and made all the decisions himself and traveled all over the world. My strange American son, who doesn’t close his mouth when he eats, but is otherwise so well mannered.
“Celia earns more money than I do,” he says. “And she just makes salads at the restaurant. But she gets better tips. So I think maybe I should ask for a raise. I saw the assistant dairy manager’s paycheck and he makes eight forty-five an hour, I get six twenty-five, but I still work the dairy case when he’s not there. Don’t you think I should ask for a raise?”
“You should visit your grandmother in England,” I say. “She’s mentioned that to you, hasn’t she? You coming there to stay with her sometime?”
“There’s nothing to do at her house.”
One day he’ll go. She won’t tell him the story of her own father, or the one time I met him—by accident, in a shop in Southampton—because for her it wouldn’t be proper to discuss such unfortunate things. Which makes me think that I should tell him.
My mother never mentioned my grandfather because he’d divorced my grandmother, which was unheard-of then, and taken his sons with him. He’d gotten rich several times and always wound up broke, though how I’m not sure. The day I met him would have been sometime in 1946 or ’47. My mother and I were in a queue at the bakery, waiting for bread rations. She gripped my arm and I looked up to see her staring in guarded terror at a man with a gray-brown mustache, dressed in an expensively tailored suit and bowler hat, who had stopped beside her.
“Hello, Bridget,” he said. “You look well. And who is this?”
For a moment, she said nothing. I thought the man had offended her by being familiar. But then, in an oddly low tone, very unlike her usual voice, she said, “This is John. John, shake your grandfather’s hand.”
; It was the first time she’d seen him in twenty years. He waited with us in the line and then came back to the house for tea. He told us he was living in London, and that he had come down to Southampton for the day on business. I remember how he sat with his legs crossed in the wingback chair by the fireplace, with his gold cuff links and polished brogues, his body very much at ease, as if he’d run into an old friend and was visiting a house he knew well. Each time he took a biscuit from the plate he gave me a little smiling nod. After half an hour of pleasantries and intermittent silence he checked his watch and said he had a train to catch. On the doorstep, he kissed my mother on the cheek and tipped his hat to me. “Very glad to meet you, John,” he said, and then he was gone.
Given that he was a stranger, his sudden brief appearance didn’t much matter to me. But the sight of my mother perched on the edge of the sofa as the two of them spoke—her jaw tightened, her eyes wide and unblinking, her body rigid as a post—quickly and quietly destroyed the illusion of her perpetual sameness, of her having always been my mother and nothing else. She suffered for alien reasons, caught up in times I could never reach. I’d understood that people put on various manners: the soldier’s perpetual joking; my teachers’ punitive zeal; even my father’s brusqueness, which suggested everything was an interruption, could seem an act. But my mother had always been actual life, not prejudice or adaptation. She was the way of knowing anything to begin with. Until that afternoon. Air raids hadn’t frightened her. She would shoo my brother and me into the reinforced room, get the little bag of food from the cupboard, and tell us to sit under the dining room table while she and my father sat in chairs nearby, only occasionally whispering to each other. Her voice didn’t change then. It simply became more efficient. But here was an elderly gentleman having tea on a Saturday morning in our sitting room who could make her very speech and body foreign to me.
We didn’t talk about his visit once he’d gone. I presume she told my father about it, but not in my presence. It would have happened eventually, the revelation of her partialness, that she might need something, that her need could be a burden, but it came so suddenly and so starkly. I forgave her everything I had ever blamed her for and tried to love her more without saying anything. She lives on her own now in a pleasant market town outside Southampton, in a comfortable little brick-house development that my brother found for her. To the children she is Granny with the good dark chocolates and the strict table manners. She will blame Margaret.
“You didn’t say if I should ask for the raise,” Alec says.
And in my children’s eyes, how long have I been partial? How long have I been a burden?
“Why not?” I say, but my words have no life to them, and he knows it.
His cake has arrived and is already gone. He scrapes at the last smudges of icing. “Mom said you were better.”
His straight brown hair falls at a slant across his brow. I could reach over the table now and touch the top of his downturned head. The beast is a projector too, every day throwing up before me pictures of what I’m incapable of.
The little agony of stillness is ended by the appearance in the diner of a boy whose name I should know; he’s one of Alec’s friends—Scott or Greg or Peter. I’m facing the door so I see him first. He waves and comes over to our booth. Like most of Alec’s friends, he’s dressed in dark, secondhand clothing—a black suit jacket and paisley shirt, both several sizes too large. When they’re together they look like a group of young hobos. If it’s meant as some kind of class transvestism it doesn’t much work; the air of the costume gives it rather the opposite effect, of boy actors affecting a pose. He and Alec greet each other with elaborate nonchalance. Yet I notice Alec is blushing. Something about the moment is making him nervous. He trips over a question about whether Scott or Greg or Peter is getting together later with others, and the boy, who’s greeted me with an upward nod of the chin, as if he and I were convicts meeting in the yard, replies to Alec with what I think he means to be a sardonic comment, but which instead comes off as a mixture of daffy and cruel. It’s a reference I can’t follow, about someone being lame.
He perches on the banquette beside Alec, who looks most uncomfortable now. They’re like harlequins, the two of them, young and droopy-faced and strange. As a little boy Alec would wake me from my naps by climbing up on the bed and rocking back and forth until I grabbed him and pulled him down on top of me, and then I’d take a coin and grasp it in my fist and he’d use both hands to try to pry my thumb loose and get at it, and everything between us then seemed as I thought having children would be, and as it had never quite been with Michael. I want to break Alec back down to that, to wipe away all this tentative foolery, just for today. And say what to him? Do what? If I ever had the care of his soul, I don’t anymore. I gave it up ten times over by not getting out of bed, by lingering in the basement and letting him find me there, staring at a wall. I may have been all he knew for a time but he’s been old enough for a couple of years now to measure me against others. My trousers don’t fit me. I have to cinch my belts to the last notch. Soaping myself in the bath, I can feel the softness of my flesh where my muscles once were.
“I’m going record shopping with Brad,” Scott or Greg or Peter says; he’s ordered a milk shake without asking if we are staying, and sucks on it noisily. Alec’s desire to go off with him on his expedition is all the more obvious for how he tries to hide it, saying Michael’s probably already got whatever albums they’re looking for. But if he didn’t have to go back to work shortly, he’d be out the door with him. At their age, I wore a blue uniform and spent my idle time avoiding the cruelty of prefects. Excitement was the purchase of candy at the tuckshop. They have more merchandise in their rooms than we had in our house. Still, I’m glad he knows nothing of that world. I pay at the cash register, wave good-bye to the owner, and eventually Alec and his friend trail after me onto the blazing sidewalk.
My family will never know how they saved me. Margaret, maybe, but not the children. When I turn back Alec is looking almost beseechingly at his friend, who seems oblivious to the attention he’s receiving, as he kicks a pebble down the pavement, loping with an ostentatiously casual gait, the cartoon of a rock star, all flounce and droop. I have the passing urge to visit upon him some deprivation to see how his elaborate manner would fare in less bountiful circumstances but more than being angry at this little customer, I realize that what I really want is for Alec to stop paying him such mind. After we’ve passed the town hall, he finally takes his leave, and Alec walks up beside me again, reluctant and clearly deflated as we climb the hill back to the grocery store.
“Remind me who that was.”
“Sam,” he says, sounding practically disconsolate now. All this is wrong. Our time can’t end like this. “Come on,” I say, “let’s walk.”
“My break’s over. They’ll get mad at me.”
“I’ll tell them—I’ll explain it.” I’m already leading him to the other side of the street, the cars halting to let us cross. The sun burns directly above, the buildings giving no cover. I don’t know where we are going. Shards of light from the glass and steel of parked cars burn at my eyes. A little farther on we reach the footpath that shadows the brook—a strip of parkland winding through the town behind backyards and playing fields. I head onto it, making for the shade. I’ve never adapted to the climate here. Summer is an oppression.
“What are we doing?” Alec says.
He’s trailing many steps behind me now. I think that of all of them, he will manage the best. His born selfishness. His impatience. The way we spoiled him. I stop and wait for him to catch up.
“My break’s over,” he says again, pausing a couple of yards away, kicking lightly at the grass. “I have to go. What are we doing here, anyway? Why’d you come to the store?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Why are you acting so weird?” he says. “Can’t you just stop?”
There is nothing I can say to him now that is
n’t murder. But I have to try. “Sam—he seems like a nice fellow,” I say, though I don’t believe it. It’s just that Alec will have friends, and I want him to know that. People he can rely on. People to spend time with.
“What are you talking about? You don’t even know who he is. Just stop, please, will you?” He looks as mortified as if the two of us were onstage together naked.
I can see in his eyes how hard he’s trying not to pity me. This is what I do to them. Over and over. And then, like Alec’s face now, their faces become the mask of the beast, used by it to torment me. My voice used to protect Alec, the way I invented stories for him. Protecting him from the ghosts. Now I’m the spirit trapped in his house.
He’s turning to go, upset and fed up. I walk over to him, to put a hand on his shoulder, but he ducks out from under my touch and hurries back up to the street.
