Then Mrs. Chang turned to me, still holding the clippers, and for a brief moment it seemed that she would shave my head, too. “You,” she said, “are in bad health.” She walked over to me and pressed the pads of her thumbs beneath my eyes. Then she pulled my mouth open and inspected my teeth and then my fingernails, which were overgrown and embedded with dirt. “You maybe have lice, maybe not,” she said. “Your hair is too full of knots to see.” My mother had been working nights that year and Malinda and I had been home alone much of the time. Left to my own devices I had been living on a diet of Coke and saltine crackers. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed my hair. “Go home,” Mrs. Chang said to me, “and tell your mother to wash your hair and brush your teeth.” As far as I know you never told anyone about this, and I never told anyone that you had cried. Even at that young age we had developed between us the discretion of thieves.
In fifth grade you were held back and fell from Malinda’s grade into mine, and this was when you made your only friend, Bill Yablonski, frecklefaced and bucktoothed, fat, his pants always falling down, Bill Yablonski the pyromaniac who was always lighting matches and burning them down to his fingertips, who once started a fire in his desk. Your friendship appeared to be wordless, both of you going around with your hands stuffed in your pockets, your heads down, kicking stones, or sitting quietly sharing a cigarette at the back corner of the playground, in an alcove behind a warped, dying shrub. It got so that one of you was never mentioned without the other—Bill and Elwood, Bill and Elwood, Bill and Elwood—like some comedy act, two desperate fools, Laurel and Hardy, Tom and Jerry, Lenny and Squiggy. In science class that year we learned about electrons, the desire for even the smallest forms of life to pair up, the unstable ones hopping from ring to ring in search of a mate. We were told that this was how two atoms bonded, each completed in the other, and this was something that made sense to me, to my otherwise unscientific mind, because I had seen it in life. Yes the mind hurt, at that age, to see a person alone, indeed the sight of you talking to yourself had always troubled me. But then you found Bill and the two of you joined in my mind, you settled down, and for years I hardly thought of you.
By the time we entered high school (a sprawling, run-down building, many of its windows cracked and held together with duct tape) you were over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, hulking. Though your hair was still blond your eyebrows had grown in thick and black, the combination giving you a fierce look, which teachers took to be threatening. They sensed a defiance in you, and you wound up spending half of your time at the in-school suspension program, sent there not so much for the reasons others were (fighting, destroying school property) as for your complete lack of interest or effort in the classroom, how you almost never remembered your books or even bothered to fill out tests. Stories went around about you—how in English class you had titled your first essay “S.A. #1,” how in biology you had so vexed your teacher, answering I dunno to such a long series of increasingly simple questions that she had burst out crying and kicked you out of the room. The suspension room was in the busiest corridor of the school. Its walls had been knocked down and replaced with glass, the idea being to put offenders on display, to shame them, but whenever I saw you there you looked perfectly comfortable, asleep on a pile of books, your mouth open in a half-smile.
Sometimes, when my sister didn’t object to my following her, I stood in the same circle as you in the parking lot before classes started, where the smokers huddled together against the cold. One morning you removed your jacket to show off the tattoo you’d gotten over the weekend—your own name curved across your bicep in Gothic capitals—and when you displayed it, proud, the joke went around that you’d been compelled to tattoo your name on your arm as a means of remembering it. Man, you said, in your famously warped voice, which was like a regular voice projected through a tube—Fuck you guys! Fuck you!—enraged at first, but then surrendering to the joke, laughing, as was your only choice, your place in that circle being that of its jester. Sophomore year you bought and fixed up an old Camaro, slapped it over with red house paint, and you and Bill sat in the car before school started, the windows fogged over with smoke, the radio blasting, WAAF, nonstop rock, crank it up. As the year went on you showed up to school less and less, until one day the inevitable happened, you dropped out. I was sitting in history class when you walked in the room and handed a piece of paper to the teacher, Mr. Hickey, a mouselike character so pathetic he wasn’t even made fun of. You gotta sign this, you said. And Mr. Hickey frowned, took the paper from you and examined it. “Are you sure,” he said, in a trembling voice, “you want to do this? Have you thought about this decision, and all of its consequences?” You said, Yup. Mr. Hickey was slow about retrieving his pen from his pocket, slow about signing his name, which he finished off with a flourish so dramatic he might as well have been signing a death sentence. “You’re choosing a very hard way to go, you know,” he said, keeping the paper to himself for a moment longer, as though this might change things. I know, you said, and took the paper from him and walked off, your boots clomping down the hallway. If it passed through our minds what would become of you, it was only briefly. If we thought about you thereafter it was only because it was strange to see Bill—who wanted to be a firefighter and who therefore had to finish school—going around by himself. Whenever I saw him he was leaning against a wall, flicking his lighter open and closed, setting a tiny slice of the world on fire and then snuffing it out, over and over and over again.
I was surprised to see you a few months later, when I rode with my mother to take her car to a mechanic, an old friend of hers named Wade, a long-faced man who fixed cars out of his own garage, cash under the table. Wade’s garage was at the end of a dirt road, and around it were several flat-roofed, leaning houses. In the yard between Wade’s house and his neighbor’s there were a half dozen or so old cars, parked haphazardly, and three kids were running around and through the cars, playing a game of evasion and capture, shouting threats, opening and closing doors, honking horns. I assumed these kids were Wade’s and stood watching them. Until suddenly a woman I recognized as your mother emerged from the neighboring house (a simple box of a house onto which had been added, with no apparent design, several sloping additions) and called out to them—Jimmie, Davis, Ellen, get away from Wade’s cars—and the kids, moaning, went back to their own yard. Your mother stood on the front porch shaking out a braided rug, a small cloud of dust rising from it, and as I watched her—hunchbacked, the flesh of her arms sagging, jiggling—I wondered how she could possibly be your mother, the mother of those younger kids. It occurred to me that she must be your grandmother. Just as I was thinking this you came rolling out from underneath one of the cars, quick as a jack from a box. You stood up and wiped your brow, nodded at me—we had never been friends and this was all we owed each other—and then looked at my mother in the frowning way that people tend to do when they first put a face with a name. For if your family was known for its troubles, mine was known for my mother’s beauty and for the terrible chaos she tended to create with it. She had, for instance, broken up a marriage the previous summer. For years she had been dating a married man who was keeping her—and, it must be said, me and Malinda as well—in a lakefront condo, but things had soured between them, their fights growing more and more spectacular, resounding across the lake (When are you going to leave her, I’m not going to give this away forever you know; Baby, you already have…) until one night, drunk and vengeful, my mother had called the wife and given her an earful. Everyone knew my mother’s story. Going through life with her—the somber, apologetic shadow that followed her around—was something like being a public defender.
You walked through Wade’s garage and into his house, letting the door slam behind you. “That’s my apprentice,” Wade told my mother, after you disappeared inside. “Fucked in the head but the kid can fix anything.” After which Wade and my mother went back to their conversation, concerning Wade’s redheade
d and estranged wife, her attempts to fuck him over in court, his subsequent attempts to fuck her back by hiding his assets. Wade was a man who liked to leave sentences hanging in the air unfinished. “I tell you,” he kept saying, without further comment. “I tell you what…” He liked to stroke his chin, shake his head, gestures of bewilderment and regret. And I recognized these words and those gestures as yours, too, things you had said and done a thousand times while standing in the smokers’ circle, I tell you, I tell you what, things you must have picked up from Wade. I recognized, I thought, your life. A kid drawn to his neighbor, to the shadowy work of fixing cars, to the refuge it gave him from his own house. I’d long been looking for something similar, and I felt in that moment a connection to you, something shared between us.
But what did I really have to do with you, and you with me? We were two people around the same age, growing up in the same failing city, walking the same streets under the same clouds, nothing much. Except to say that once, without knowing it, you did something that changed my life entirely. With the smallest gesture you altered the course of my life, split it in two, and since then I haven’t been able to think of you without feeling a stab, the question of what might have become of me if you had done otherwise.
This was during the summer of 1988, the summer after you dropped out of school. My mother had recently married her third husband, Bud Francis, a man after the fashion of Burt Reynolds who gnawed on toothpicks and stopped at every mirror he passed to fluff his hair. Bud was an appliance salesman and sole heir to Francis Housewares and Electronics, a fluorescent-lit warehouse rumored to have dealings with the mob. Over the Fourth of July weekend he had put in long hours at something he kept referring to as “the No-Money-Down Independence Day Appliance Blowout,” and as a reward to us he suggested a weekend at the beach.
The beach was an hour north, a place where people from our city went to sun themselves and stroll along the boardwalk, a hundred-yard stretch of junk shops and restaurants, a concert hall and an arcade. There was a desperate feel to the place, not only on the part of the motels and restaurants competing against one another for a modest survival, but on the part of the tourists as well, who went around, lemming-like, after some thrill they couldn’t name and couldn’t seem to find. Stories were always being told about the beach—about how friends of friends had stumbled into a party at one of the motels or rental cottages, a party at which the music was loud and the beer was free, at which everyone gathered around the person in question and laughed at his jokes, held their stomachs laughing, a party at which there were hijinks, people swinging from chandeliers and lighting off fireworks, a party at which lines of blondes stood admiring the person in question, each hoping to be chosen as his prize. Hearing these stories people kept driving north hoping for the same but failing to find it, a ritual of expectation and disappointment. Even at fourteen I had begun to wonder why the beach continued to thrill people. But it did, it certainly did. And so, even though it required a familial configuration the likes of which Malinda and I tended to avoid (all of us together in the car on the way up, sleeping in the same motel room as our mother and Bud), we went.
On the ride up Malinda read a magazine while I pretended to read a book, though I was really listening to my mother and Bud, who were, absurdly, still getting to know each other. They had met only months before and married in a rush, and Malinda and I had suddenly found ourselves living in a house with a man we didn’t know, who didn’t know us. In the first few months my mother and Bud had been charmed by the process of getting to know one another, delighted to discover mutual tastes and experiences, but lately there was an edge to these discoveries, the sense that if they had known better they might not have married. Their talk could skid without warning from the curious to the enraged, or disgusted, or spiteful, as it did that day with the passing mention of a certain Sandy D’Angelo, an acquaintance of Bud’s.
“Sandy D’Angelo?” said my mother. “I know Sandy D’Angelo! We used to go to church together!”
“Man, what a bitch,” Bud said.
“Really?”
“Big-time.”
“How do you know her?”
“I don’t know her all that good. You could say I knew her three or four times, if you know what I mean.”
To which my mother didn’t respond, the mere mention of another woman, or the fact that she considered herself superior to Sandy D’Angelo and therefore degraded by being placed in her company, sending her into the kind of complicated, seething mood to which excessively beautiful women often felt themselves entitled. Bud kept trying to make conversation but my mother only responded with yawns and sighs, with angry stabs at the radio’s buttons. She didn’t speak to him again until he turned off the highway, into the sun, and said, “Shit, where’d my sunglasses go?”
“They’re on your head, dumbass.”
“Why do you have to talk like that?”
“Because I do.”
“Have a little class,” Bud said.
And my mother burst out laughing. “You’re telling me about class,” she said. “I love it.”
“What? What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. It’s just that I’m not about to take social advice from a man wearing his weight in gold jewelry.”
“Jesus!” he said, and shook his head. “What the hell’s wrong with my jewelry?”
“Girls,” said my mother, consulting us in the rearview, “tell him.”
“You wear too many rings,” said Malinda, without looking up from her magazine. She was scrutinizing an advertisement whose heading read: SKIN AGING BEGINS IN THE LATE TEENS!
“And your necklace,” she said, referring to the slender gold leg that dangled from Bud’s chain, “looks like a nose-picker.”
“Jesus!” he said, and blew air out the side of his mouth. “Now you ruined my necklace! Now I can’t look at it the same! Jesus!”
Bud was an ass-slapping type of man who tried to turn every argument into a joke—Hey, baby, you on your period or what?—and so when the nuclear power plant, situated just a few miles from the beach, came into view, he said, “Look out, she’s gonna blow!” Not knowing our family, Bud didn’t realize that my mother had always subscribed to the theory that one should, when going to the beach, get past the power plant without thinking too much about it. One should hold one’s breath to the best of one’s ability while passing it and then put it out of one’s mind while enjoying oneself for the weekend. And yet for me there was something sickly fascinating about the plant, its fat, pale dome like a ball of risen dough, the activity going on within it—the bombardment and splitting of atoms, the release of neutrons—so unnatural it created within me both a profound nausea and an inability to look away. It was especially hard to look away now, considering what had happened only recently in Chernobyl, considering all the images I’d seen of its aftermath, the doomed city of Pripyat, its tall, slender tenements photographed from such a great height they looked like dominoes, upright but with their eventual falling so certain it made their standing seem strange, sad, like the hopes of foolish people.
“Boom!” Bud said, and turned to my mother expecting some display of amusement. But she only closed her eyes and said, “Jesus Christ.”
When we arrived at the motel Malinda and I scrambled off, leaving Bud and my mother to their fate, which most likely involved, as Malinda put it, their getting drunk and fighting and then fucking each other’s brains out. We spent the whole day walking the beach. Malinda was seventeen, and if she could be said to be interested in anything that year it was the study of other people, what they wore and ate and listened to, how they talked and moved. The beach was so packed there was hardly room to set down a blanket, people were lying flat, the women on their stomachs with their bikini tops untied, couples asleep next to each other, families going through their routines, the elder women sitting under umbrellas, mothers rubbing sunscreen onto the kids, distributing sandwiches and drinks from coolers, ex-army grandfathers, t
heir arms tattooed with eagles and anchors and flags, swinging their grandsons in the surf, couples strolling with their arms around each other. One man, shirtless, kept walking up and down the beach with a boa constrictor wrapped around his torso, smiling every time someone jumped at the sight of him. Over the water a single-engine plane circled back and forth, trailing behind it a streamer on which was printed an advertisement for a local psychic, Mademoiselle Rousseau, full life reading, guaranteed accurate, $19.99. I thought of going. I had a pocketful of money I’d been saving for some unknown purpose—I imagined any number of emergencies in which I’d need to hop a bus or rent a room, bail someone out of jail, bribe an official—and it didn’t seem unreasonable to part with a few dollars in exchange for a prediction of that emergency, when it would come and what its nature might be. For months I’d been stealing fives and tens from my mother’s wallet—very discreetly, I thought—and I had saved almost two hundred dollars.
Malinda kept sweeping across the beach this way and that, like a retiree with a metal detector, though what she was searching for I couldn’t say. She hardly spoke to me. If she said anything at all it was only to register an opinion of a bathing suit, a haircut, a laugh, a walk. She passed judgment in the swift, biting manner common to all beautiful people. For it was true that Malinda had recently become very beautiful. She was another version of my mother, dark-haired and blue-eyed, another Elizabeth Taylor. All day I had seen men looking at her, running their eyes up and down the length of her. She wore a yellow bikini with a pair of cutoff jeans over the bottoms. She had oiled her skin with tanning lotion, and she glistened. Men were so blatant in their staring it was like a scene from a nature documentary, the human animal’s rituals of attraction and mating, the instinct to perpetuate life on bald, sickening display.
Elegies for the Brokenhearted Page 5
