In the classroom, I was sullen and aloof, and I secretly ridiculed the ambitions of the other students. They were planning to go to college, get married, and have jobs, buy homes and a stake in the American dream. The seeds of envy were ready to sprout into hate. I found myself wallowing in bitterness, just like Father had done. The Coldiron Curse hadn’t died with him after all.
Virginia became my savior. She was an outcast, too, but had sought out the role, rehearsed it as a devoted understudy, and slipped into it like stage costume. She was from a wealthy family, both parents members of the local school board. She sat across from me in Biology, and I stole glances of her out of the corner of my eye, watching her with an admiration that bordered on worship. When she caught me looking, she would smile at me with perfect teeth.
Though I had an affinity for Biology, I wasn’t a top student because I was afraid of standing out, of being noticed. But I wanted Virginia to notice. With her fine ash-blonde hair and oval face, she became the meat of my dreams, the main course of my unformed fantasies. Her eyes weren’t bovine as were those of the cheerleaders and beauty queens. These were cobalt blue and deep, almost painful to look at.
She wasn’t squeamish about dissection, and I’ve always admired a girl who had a way with a blade. That semester, as we graduated from worms to frogs to small sharks, her savagery escalated accordingly. When her partner was no longer willing to work with her, repulsed that Virginia was going so far beyond the demands of the assignments, I volunteered my services. I had been working alone, shunned, the twenty-fifth student of a class broken into pairs.
Virginia had a terrific sense of humor. She saw right away that I matched her skill with a scalpel. She enjoyed shocking the others, sticking pins haphazardly into the eyes of the defenseless dead creatures. Once she fashioned a crude earring by attaching a fish heart to a looped paper clip and wore it most of the afternoon. Finally a teacher stirred from apathy long enough to report her to the school authorities. A quick search of the rules found nothing prohibiting the ornamental display of animal organs, though Virginia was chastised for “disrupting the classroom.” Of course, because of her parents’ being on the school board, no one was willing to suspend her.
Because she was an untouchable, she became even more outlandish. She began wearing a black leather jacket she had found behind a bar on Devlin Street. The jacket had a huge grinning skull sewn on the back, with crimson ribbons of flesh clinging to the bone. What she was doing in that part of town, and what would happen when the owner claimed his rightful property, I never asked. She wore camouflage pants that billowed out above the ankles and adopted hiking boots long before it became a weary fashion.
We quickly became inseparable. She saw behind the granite facade of indifference I hid behind, saw the sensitive child inside the man I was awkwardly becoming, or maybe she peeked through the windows of the Bone House. In turn, I encouraged her originality and served as a willing audience for her stunts. She was “Negative Girl” and I was “Her Poet,” not because I ever wrote anything but scribbles on napkins, but because I wore thick glasses with black frames and she mistook my involuntary solitude for intellectual disdain. We began meeting at the football field during lunch, sitting in the bleachers and looking for gods in the April clouds.
Our friendship had been based on mutual distrust of “the system,” and our relationship had been confined to school hours. In some secret locker in my heart, I had stored a small hope of something more. Certainly not love, not ever again love, Sally had carved that coffin and Mother had driven the nails. Virginia caused me to twitch, and she inflicted a vague ache I hadn’t known since Hope Hill’s aromatic hair.
One lunch hour at the football field, she went for the kill. “What really happened that night, Richard?”
I smelled the grass that a worker was mowing, smelled the lilies that grew in the marshy moat around the press box. I counted the wrens that were sitting on a power line overhead. There were seven.
“I don’t know for sure. I guess what they wrote in the papers is probably the truth.”
“Didn’t your mother ever talk about it?”
“I suppose she’s trying to forget.” Just like I was
“Doesn’t it freak you out?”
To know that sometimes things happen that are beyond your control? Even if you made them happen? Though I enjoyed looking into those blue eyes, I turned away from her. “I don’t want to talk it about it anymore.”
She touched my shoulder. “Hey, Poet, it’s okay.”
Three sparrows flew away.
“We all have our secrets. Forget about it,” she said.
Forgetting was my sole occupation. Or rather, soul occupation, as Mister Milktoast put it. He loved his puns.
“Richard?”
I looked at the power line. The sparrows were gone, stolen by the freedom of wings.
“What?”
“Let’s go out on a date.”
I turned back to her and fought upstream against the force of her eyes. After a moment, I was breathing again. I smiled, trying out unfamiliar muscles. “Are you kidding?”
“Well, I can’t wait forever. Were you ever going to ask me?”
“You’re the Negative Girl.” Though I wasn’t a writer until much later, until I started this autobiography, I’d already come to know the emasculating sting of rejection.
“And you’re afraid of me.”
No, just afraid of myself. And the secret person inside. Or all three of us. “Your Poet fears only words,” I said.
“Words like ‘yes’?”
I nodded my head, afraid to say it. She laughed.
“I’d go anywhere with you.” I stared with desperate eyes, hoping their loneliness glittered instead of stabbed. She returned my smile, and her face outshone the spring sun.
My heart soared like the sparrows. Then it plunged, shot down by worry. I had never dated. How should I dress? How did normal people do this? Was I supposed to get tickets to the ballet, or was a coffee house more in order? Was I supposed to try to kiss her? French her?
I hadn’t told Virginia I lived in my car. She probably thought my slovenly appearance was just more disdain, a further rebuke of the straight world. I didn’t want to take her home to meet my mother, either. There would be none of the niceties of a storybook courtship.
“As long as you drive,” I said. She had made fun of my old rusty sedan when I pointed it out among the gleaming cars in the school parking lot. She drove a jet-black Mitsubishi, given to her by her grandfather, who had been a county commissioner and realtor for decades and had owned half of Ottaqua at one time or another.
“Okay, but you can’t say anything about my speeding. I’ve got a foot of lead in this here shit-kicking boot,” she said.
“Are you trying to scare me away?” I’d delved into the melodramatic pop of The Smiths and The Cure, music best described as “Let’s fuck and die.” I assumed that air of nihilistic nonchalance. “What better way to go than in a massacre of metal and gasoline?”
“That’s my Poet, finding romance in violence,” she said, laughing with the confidence of one who was young enough to think the future rolled on endlessly, with no detours or red lights to slow the ride.
“I’ll meet you tonight.” I sensed I had a date with destiny as well as with this wild and wonderful girl. Something stirred inside the Bone House, but I made sure the doors were closed and bolted.
“Come here to the football field at seven and we’ll figure out what to do,” I said, so casually it might have been rehearsed. Or spoken by someone else. “Maybe we can catch a movie down at the Flick, go out for pizza or something.”
Normal, safe, teen-age stuff.
“Or we can sit and watch the stars, talk about people. Get away from it all.” Virginia’s voice had taken on a dreamy quality, and she idly twirled a strand of her white-blonde hair. There was a promise in her words, or perhaps a threat. Anticipation of either rushed blood to my head, choking off reason
. I was ready to risk everything for a chance to be close to her. And, she didn’t know it, but so was she.
We walked back to the main building. She blew me a kiss just before we parted, then made a snatching motion with her hand, pretending to put the imaginary kiss in her pocket. Corny, but we both knew it was corny, which made it much more daring.
“For later,” she said, and at that moment I fell in love for real.
“Fell” is the proper word for it, or “autumned,” as Mister Milktoast would say. I was rushing from dizzy heights. My chest expanded like a helium balloon. The clouds spun and the sky bled blue as I watched her walk through the doors. So this was what those FM radio songs were about.
The rest of the day blurred by. After school, I stopped by my mother’s place for some clean clothes. I had been storing my stuff in the trunk of the Valiant, but everything smelled of musty metal and gasoline. Mother had left my bedroom untouched, perhaps in the hope that I would one day return. I pulled into the cluttered driveway and headed up the apartment steps, determined to get in and out quickly. When I went inside, she was slouched at the kitchen table in a matted gray bathrobe, gazing out the window at the big beech tree across the street, or maybe a dead squirrel that had been caught in a rundown.
An army of liquor bottles covered the linoleum floor. Flies hovered over half-empty plates of food, finding heaven in the heaps of fetid meat and moldy pools of gravy. The stench of bourbon hung thick and sweet in the air, along with a deeper, ranker odor. Mother was sitting in her own vomit.
She gave me a bleary look.
“My big boy’s home,” she rasped, her cracked lips trying to smile, but even that coordination was beyond her. Her lips wiggled like a pair of fat earthworms mating on a hotplate. A strand of yellow drool ran from one corner of her mouth, collecting at the base of her chin, and a gob fell into her lap as she lifted her head.
She had aged a dozen years in the weeks since I had last seen her. Creases and splotches fought for domination on the ruined topography of her face. The late afternoon sun through the window sharpened her features, sparing not a single wrinkle. The light was honest and brutal.
She looked at me with puffy prizefighter eyes, her swollen red lids like overripe fruit. I looked into them and shuddered.
This woman had endured unimaginable pain to bring me into the world, in an assault of fire and needles between her bloody thighs. This woman had sung me lullabies, changed my diapers, and given me suckle from her stretch-marked breasts. This woman had delivered me to my earliest and most terrible enemy and then absolved herself through voluntary amnesia. Her weakness paved the road of my childhood with blood and bruises. Her love had covered up my gravest sin like flowers smothering a coffin.
She spread her arms, like a crippled bat trying to take flight. Her robe fell open, revealing her scrawny, pink nakedness.
“Come here and give Mommy a big hug,” she said.
CHAPTER TEN
No love is more sacred than that between mother and son. All maternal kinships should resemble a Renaissance painting of Madonna and Child. The mother with her milk-white skin and healthy blush of rose at her cheeks, gazing lovingly down at the plump-faced infant who is wearing a cherubic smile. An ideal captured in oil, preferably with dramatic clouds etched overhead, funneling holy light. But here, in this true illusion of life, there is no such graceful light and there are no virginal births.
A black rage rolled over me. I wanted to reach across the table and pull Mother out of her filth, slap her across the face until I drove out whatever demons she harbored. But I knew the demons. I had inherited them and they walked the halls of my Bone House.
The rage passed, and as the dark veil dissolved, I saw her as she really was, weak and scared and self-deluded. She sought any escape she could find and was willing to go to obscene extremes for distraction. She was to be pitied, not hated.
The one who was to be hated was beyond the reach of retribution. If there was blame, it lay with him. He had done irreparable damage, plowed mad furrows in the fields of our lives and sown salt, then had escaped into death. I could only hope there was a hell, or somewhere even more deserving of his wretched citizenship.
“Mother,” I said, brushing her wiry, unkempt hair away from her waxen forehead. “You don’t have to do this.”
She began crying. I would have thought those eyes had been wrung dry long ago, like a bed sheet twisted in the hands of an impassive washwoman. But crystal tears collected in their corners, glistening around the rims before beginning their slow, sad journey down her cheeks. Emotions always disgusted me, whether my own or another’s.
“...not your fault...,” she said, between sobs. “My poor baby...it’s not your fault.”
“Shh, it’s okay now. You’ve just had a little too much to drink. Everything will be okay.”
“I’m so sorry...for everything.”
I held her by the chin and wiped her face with the dirty cloth of my shirtsleeve. She reached for the mayonnaise jar she used for a tumbler, her fingertips smearing fresh prints on the greasy glass. She was no longer bothering with ice cubes. Ice only slowed her descent into oblivion. Watered-down suicide.
“I had to get away, Mother. After everything else, at least we had each other. But even that turned bad. We’re still in his shadow.”
“I just get so lonely sometimes.” Her tears gave out, and glass reclaimed her eyes.
“I do, too. I miss you, Mother.”
“Then come back.”
“You know I can’t.”
I began clearing the dishes off the table. I carried a stack of plates over to the sink, my back turned to her. The world beyond the window was a place of sky and sunshine, a landscape that couldn’t possibly house such miseries as ours. On the sidewalk, two girls played hopscotch, taking turns skipping through blue-chalked squares.
“It can be like before...like, you know...all of it.”
“Never again. Not after that.”
“But it happened.”
“That wasn’t us. That couldn’t have been us.”
“How can you say that? You were there,” she said. Her drunkenness had turned cold, her voice arctic.
“Because I had to be,” I said, unwilling to face her. “Do you think I knew what was happening? I was only a child.”
“But not innocent.”
“Nobody’s innocent.”
I could hear the clink of glass and a gurgling sound as she refilled her drink. She took an audible gulp. Her throat must have been stripped of all sensation by her prolonged abuse. Her sibilants mushed with a smooth familiarity, as if she had delivered this soliloquy to the uncaring air many times.
“He was your father. No matter what else, that can’t be changed. You’re the flesh of his flesh. And they say blood runs thick. Blood runs thicker than water.”
I rattled the dishes and turned on the faucet full force, trying to drown out her damning words.
“Thicker than water,” she repeated, softly, but I could hear her even over the roaring in my ears. I ran out of the kitchen. The thunderstorm of rage was returning, stretching from a closet deep inside my Bone House, widening like the flat Midwestern horizon outside.
It was Little Hitler, the bastard child of night, the one I thought was extinct, his mission accomplished. His return was triumphant and cruel as he wallowed in my misfortune and savored the lemony sting of my pain. He brought with him his baggage of paranoia and deceit, as well as memories I hoped had been forever buried. He had desecrated that grave of time gone by, unearthing my most horrible moment and dragging its skeleton through the halls of my head.
“No, no, no!” I shouted, pressing my hands against my temples, trying to physically squeeze Little Hitler out.
Mother thought I was yelling at her. I could hear her stirring, trying to flog her wasted leg muscles into standing up.
My spasms eased and light returned. I stood on the threshold of my room and the threshold of my past. I found myself sag
ging against the door jamb. The memory had been beaten down, reinterred. Little Hitler was gone.
I went into my room. It was like entering the museum of someone else’s life. Exhibit A: My old desk, where I had built model cars, the top pitted where spilled glue had eaten through the polyurethane finish. Exhibit B: A poster of The Beatles, curling at the corners, taped at the creases where the paper had split with age. John, Paul, George, and Ringo looked down like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Exhibit C: My pine-slatted bed, the blankets spread but wrinkled, where I had knelt in prayer, where I had cuddled teddy bears, where Mother had told me good-night stories, where boots had walked, where Mister Milktoast sobbed, where me and Mother had...
Where monsters had crawled from the darkened space beneath, where horrors real and imagined had transpired.
The room was just as I had left it. I was afraid Mother might have begun sleeping there, to dream of flesh and meadows, spring rain and sin, with my scent on the pillow. But the bedspread was the same one that had been there when I had moved out, and it was unstained.
I looked out the window above my desk. It was partially open, and a small breeze played through the dingy curtains. Many times I had gazed at this scene. The garage next door was unchanged, still flaking battleship-gray paint from its cinder-block walls. The lot was strewn with junk cars, engines that had been raped and tossed aside, rusting metal scraps that covered the ground like red bones. The smell of gasoline and grease clogged the air around the building. The occasional ringing of a tool falling on the concrete floor mixed with revving motors and the rowdy voices of mechanics in a symphony of atonal masculinity.
To the rear of the garage was a sliver of the street, and beyond that, a scraggly patch of woods. A gap had been cut through the trees by the power company, the trimmed precision out of place in that forlorn foothold of nature. I had played in those woods as a child, blissful stolen hours away from home with Mister Milktoast as my only company.
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