by Lily King
“Good evening,” Nixon says. He’s wearing a black suit and black tie. “This is the thirty-seventh time I have spoken to you from this office where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this nation.”
My mother usually berates Nixon whenever he appears on TV, but tonight she’s silent. She listens intently on her bed, chewing her lip. Nixon holds his stack of papers, reading from the top one then setting it gently to the side and starting at the top of the next. His hands don’t seem to be shaking. His words wash over me: political base, national security, American interests. It sounds like any other speech. He glances up only briefly to the camera, except at one point when he lowers his papers and without reading says, “I have never been a quitter.”
After a long time his voice starts to slow down and I know he’s getting to the end.
“To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer. May God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.” And then he gathers his pages and they shut the cameras off.
“Goodbye to your sweet ass!” my mother hollers, then falls back on her pillows, exhausted, satisfied.
3
At the end of August we leave Lake Chigham. It’s like our arrival played backwards, with Nonnie giving us kisses in the doorway and then Grindy pulling me and my mother into a hug in the grass beside our stuffed car. But we don’t drive directly to Ashing. We go to Boston, where we meet Garvey at Park Street and I get out of the car and my mother drives away. She’ll pick me up at Garvey’s in three days. We go down a grimy set of steps below the street and take the T to Somerville.
Garvey’s apartment is on the third floor of a house that has slipped off its foundation sideways. A corner of the porch is sunk into the ground. Everything is broken—the porch railing, the windows. Even the front door has a crack running up the middle.
“This is the best part, right here,” he says, stopping in the dark stairwell to breathe in. “Smell that?”
I smell a lot of things and they’re all disgusting. “Your BO?”
Garvey laughs. “No. It’s Indian food. She makes it every day at lunchtime. She’s gorgeous, too. She wears these”—he sweeps his arm along his leg to the floor—”wraps. And she has this smirk I can’t interpret.” He shakes his head and keeps climbing, saying nothing about the people through the door on the second floor and the music they’re blasting. It gets hotter the higher we go. At the top of the stairs it’s bright—the sun pours through two big windows—and broiling. He pushes open a door that doesn’t seem to have a knob.
“Here we are. Home sweet home.”
It smells like vinegar and wet dirty socks. There’s linoleum, not just in the kitchen but covering the whole apartment, and my sneakers stick to it as if I have gum on both soles.
“Here. Bring your stuff to my room.”
Off the short hallway are three rooms. “Deena,” he says, pointing into a tidy blue room with a lime green bedspread and hundreds of earrings, the dangly kind my mother won’t let me wear yet, hanging from ribbons on the wall. “Heidi”—her room is just a pile of clothes and no bed—”and me.” Garvey’s room is all bed— two queen-sized mattresses put together. “We like to sprawl,” he says. “I’ll put one back in Heidi’s room and you can have your privacy in here.”
“Do Mom and Dad know you live together?” I’ve heard my father rant about Garvey’s generation enough to know he wouldn’t like this at all.
Garvey’s eyes widen and he covers his mouth with both hands, mocking me. “Ooooh, don’t tell them. I’m so scared of what ‘Mom and Dad’ think.”
“They’re not dead. They’re just getting a divorce.”
“Oh, thanks for the clarification.”
“They’re still your parents.”
“They’re my progenitors, not my parents. The word parent suggests something a little more hands-on.” He starts to drag one of the beds toward the door. “Besides, they’re both getting more than I am now.”
“Getting what?”
He drops the mattress and pats me on the head. “Little babe in the woods. So much to learn.”
There’s a fan in the corner of the room. I squat down to feel it on my face. My sweat turns cool, then disappears.
Garvey lies down on the bed by the door. “I’m surprised you let Mom escape for an assignation with her paramour.”
I have a bad feeling about what he’s just said. “Do you mind speaking English?”
“You let Mom go off with her boyfriend.”
“She just went to Sylvie’s. I’ve been there before.”
“She went to Sylvie’s. But Sylvie’s in France. And so a guy named Martin is going to be there with Mom. You are definitely not the sharpest tack in the box.”
Tears rise and the fan blows them toward my ears. Say hi to Sylvie for me, I just said to her in the car before she dropped me off. I will, she said.
“You really didn’t know?”
I shake my head. When I find my voice, I say, “Is he from Ashing?”
My brother laughs, loud because he’s on his back and because he loves it when I’m stupid. “Shit, no. God, Daley, do you think she’d ever have anything to do with the warmed-over corpses in that town?”
“But that’s where we live. We’re moving back there on Monday. I’m starting sixth grade. Mom found an apartment downtown on Water Street.” I say all this to make sure it’s still true.
“I know. And that’s all for you. For your benefit. Mom outgrew that town a long time ago.”
“So who is Martin?” I can barely move my lips. I forgot how bad my brother could make me feel when he wants to.
“I don’t know. That’s what I was trying to ask you.”
If my mother lied about who she was with, she could have lied about where she was going, too. It makes me woozy to think of a whole weekend of not knowing.
At least I know where my father is. On a Friday night at five-thirty he’ll be sitting in the den with his second martini. He’ll be looking at the local news, thinking about the pool and how he’ll clean it in the morning, test the chlorine balance. The dogs, just fed, will be moving swiftly around the yard, looking for the right place to pee and poop. Scratch will be trained by now, but if he lifts his leg in my mother’s rosebushes, my father will leap up and holler at him.
“Have you seen Dad?”
“Yeah. I went up there last weekend. Stupid.”
“What happened?”
My brother covered his eyes and groaned. “I don’t think I should tell you.”
“What’s wrong with him? What’s the matter with Daddy?” I picture him on the kitchen floor, for some reason, unable to stand. I can see it so vividly. I stand up myself, as if I can go to him.
“Nothing’s the matter with him, Daley. Have a seat.” He says this like a homeroom teacher. “He’s hooked up with—” He looks at me, deciding whether I can handle it. But it turns out I already know.
“Patrick’s mother.”
“I knew you weren’t as dumb as you look.”
Mr. Amory and me went to Payson’s. Mr. Amory and me cleaned out the shed. I’ve been reading about it all summer.
At six, we walk to the Brigham’s where Heidi works. After my brother’s roasting pan of an apartment, the street is cool; Brigham’s is like walking into a fridge. Heidi is waiting on a boy and his grandmother. She gives us a small smile, then turns her back to us to make their frappes. A blue apron is tied loosely at her waist and her hair hangs in a frayed braid. She slides the tall drinks and two straws to her customers and takes their money without speaking to them. Her face is moist, despite the air conditioning. She looks different than I remember, faded somehow.
“Hi there,” she says to me, but she is not glad to see me or Garvey. Her eyes are dull and olive, not the clear green I remember. “You made it.”
Garvey and I share a raspberry rickey at a corner table until her shift
is over. Outside it is hot again, and the sidewalk is crowded with people coming up from the subway stairs or racing to them. After a summer in the woods, the chaos makes me uneasy. I stick close to my brother, who leads us to a Greek sandwich shop.
“Haven’t been here since yesterday,” Heidi mutters.
“I can’t really afford La Dolce Vita,” Garvey says, pointing to a fancy place down the street.
“You wouldn’t know la dolce vita if it hit you on the head.” She smiles but my brother does not.
The restaurant is hot and smelly and it’s no wonder Heidi doesn’t like it. We sit crammed in a corner. My brother orders me a falafel sandwich that tastes like sawdust mixed with onions. He has a big plate of diced meat and Heidi tells me to watch how he chews like a cow chewing cud. My brother tells her she should have stuck it out with Graham, and Heidi’s eyes get pink. She catches her tears with her thumb. They are drinking something called grappa and it seems to make them hate each other.
That night my brother’s apartment is a cauldron, as if all the city’s heat has risen and gathered here. I lie on the remaining bed in the dark, my feet and hands swelling, my skin stretching like a sausage being boiled. They took the fan into Heidi’s room. No air is coming through the three open windows. I miss the water and its cool breezes. Neither Ashing nor Lake Chigham ever got this hot. Headlights and brakelights swim across the ceiling. The cars and people below begin to seem responsible for the heat. A siren blares, spewing hotter air. I dream that I am rebraiding Heidi’s hair over and over. I can’t get it tight enough. I wake up to the sound of a door shutting.
Out the window my brother and Heidi are walking away, down the sidewalk, not touching. Garvey told me last night that they had to run an errand in the early morning and they’d be back by ten. I stay in the room as long as I can, but my hunger and need to pee drive me out. The bathroom is filthier in broad daylight. I don’t let my skin touch the toilet seat, the way my mother has taught me. I find cornflakes and milk in the kitchen, and just as I sit down with my big bowl on the couch, Deena’s door opens and a man comes out, naked. He’s very hairy.
“Hey,” he says, reaching for his jeans and T-shirt, which are beside me on the couch. He leaves, still naked, out the swinging, knobless front door. I hear him dressing in the hallway, then his bare feet sticking on the stairs on the way down.
The heat has retreated slightly; a breeze, an actual breeze, comes through the windows.
Deena’s door opens again. “Shit. Is he gone?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Shit.” She looks down at a pair of glasses in her hand. “Shit.”
She throws them out the window. Then she stretches her long arms up to the ceiling and side to side. She is naked too, and her breasts are enormous, three times the size of my mother’s. She’s thin so they don’t even seem to fit properly on her chest, the nipples nearly facing each other. Her waist tapers in and then her hips flair out and her thighs are thick and strong. Her body is fascinating to me, womanly in a way my mother and my aunts in Chigham are not.
“I’ll get something on and join you,” she says, noticing my stare. She comes back in a short shiny robe that barely covers her bum.
“So your parents are splitting up,” she says, sitting beside me where the man’s clothes had been.
“Yeah.”
“How does that feel?”
How does that feel? The question echoes. I shrug.
“Was it hard with them fighting all the time?”
“They never fought. They didn’t really talk to each other all that much.”
She laughs. “I guess you and Garvey had different parents.”
“No,” I say quickly, before I get what she means.
“He tell you where he was going this morning?”
“No,” I say again.
She pushes her thick lips in and out, thinking. If I ask I know she’ll tell me but she strikes me as dangerous, full of things I don’t want to know.
“He is really fucked up. You know that, don’t you?”
My heart starts beating really fast, the beginnings of the dead star feeling. I put my bowl in the sink and go back to Garvey’s room. I lock the door. When I glance out the window, there they are in front of the house, not moving. The top of Heidi’s head is pressed into my brother’s chest and his arms are wrapped awkwardly around her. It looks like he’s the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the ground.
A half hour later they come inside. I wait for Garvey to come back to his room to check on me but he doesn’t. I hear them moving things around in Heidi’s room, then a kettle whistles and my brother calls, “Milk and honey?” down the hallway and she says, “Yes, please,” her voice low and ragged like she hasn’t used it yet this morning, or maybe has used it too much.
They settle in there, on the other side of the wall from me. Their talk is quiet and intermittent, calm, like little waves lapping against a hull. Then I hear something awful, a sort of yelp, like the wail of an animal in the woods, impossible to tell if it is male or female, only that it is coming from the room next to mine. Then it’s quiet.
I find a thin paperback on the floor called The Breast. “It began oddly,” it begins. “But could it have begun otherwise, however it began?” I read a few chapters. A regular guy has turned into a big hundred-and-fifty-five-pound boob. His penis changes first, into a nipple. Only Garvey would own a book like this. When I get tired of reading, I try to snoop but there is nothing, no secret notebook or hidden scraps of paper in his drawers. I’m angry at him for forgetting about me and I want to find something terrible about him that I can shove in his face.
When he finally does come in, he drops down face first on the bed and doesn’t move or speak for a long time. His threadbare flannel shirt has risen up with his arms and I can see the pale skin on his skinny lower back and a patch of dark hair at the bottom of his spine. His bum is flat like my father’s, the jeans covering it nearly black with dirt. I can tell he isn’t sleeping; his breathing is loud but uneven, as if there are words attached that I can’t hear. He looked at me when he came in, but now I’m not sure if he saw me. Then he flips over and fixes his restless eyes directly on mine, breathes another lungy loud breath, and says, “Please, Daley, whatever you do, don’t let any guy touch you. Ever. Not until you’re thirty. Or forty.”
I think of Neal, how I will see him in less than two weeks, how he never wrote.
“Please. Please listen to me. They will only fuck you up. Don’t fall in love. Don’t let ‘em close until you know exactly who you are and where you are going.”
“All right,” I say quietly so he’ll take his eyes off me.
He does, and then he looks up at the ceiling and starts to cry. I’ve never seen my brother cry before and he’s bad at it, spastic, his mouth contorted and his hands flailing around his face like they don’t know where to go. I don’t really recognize him as my brother anymore and I put my fingers on the inside of his arm to reassure myself it’s still him. He seizes me, pulls me into a hard, tight hug. My head bobs on his chest as he sobs. Just as suddenly it’s over and he says fuck and shoves me off him and leaves the room.
In Heidi’s room their voices start off quiet again but soon my brother is screaming at her. And she’s screaming back but then she’s doing something that’s not screaming. There are no words anymore; it’s like the horrible yelp I heard earlier but it doesn’t stop; it’s a long deep pitted howl that goes on and on and I feel in my own stomach that need to howl, and for a few seconds I get scared that I am actually the one howling, so hollow and jangly is my stomach.
After that it is silent and I lie all the way down on the bed and fall asleep. When I open my eyes again, the sun is gone and the night outside is a pale green haze. I hear voices in the living room and follow them. My brother and Heidi are facing each other on the couch, eating noodles from blue bowls.
He says something and she giggles and then they both look at me.
“Gra
b some chow on the stove,” Garvey says.
“Let me see if we have any milk left.”
“Milk? She doesn’t drink milk with dinner. She’s not four.”
“Kids need milk, for their bones.”
“Yes, little mama.”
“We don’t have any,” Heidi says, shutting the fridge hard, her voice suddenly flat. When she comes back to the couch with her bowl, she doesn’t sit as close to my brother.
“Sorry,” I hear him whisper behind me as I get my food. “I’m such an idiot.”
I sit on a foam chair.
“So Heidi went with me last weekend.”
“To Dad’s?”
“She got the full monty. ‘Patrick, where’s that puppy?’” My brother can do the most amazing impressions of my father, making his voice just as rough and cracked and pissed off. “‘Goddammit, did he run off again? You kids have got to keep an eye on him!’”
“‘Did he pee in the pool?’” Heidi says, but her imitation is rotten.
“‘No, I think he shat on my tennis whites! Goddammit, that’s a golf ball coming out of his ass!’”
Heidi breaks into peals of high-pitched laughing. I can tell they’ve been doing this all week.
“Mom has a new name,” Garvey says.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s not Mom or Meredith. She’s Your Fucking Mother. You better get used to it. ‘Do you know what Your Fucking Mother did?’” It’s amazing how he can just switch into my father’s body. “‘She literally stole the family jewels!’ Did you know that, by the way?”
I don’t know what he’s talking about.
“I think I’m going to lie down,” Heidi says.
“I’ll come,” my brother says, taking her bowl and putting it by the sink, then coming back to help her up.
“I’m fine,” she says, but she lets him. Then she bends back down to me and gives me a kiss on my forehead like my grandfather did at bedtime. She smells nice and I hope my brother will marry her like he said. They call good night to me over their shoulders and disappear, arm in arm, into her room.
