Sleeping Tigers

by Robinson, Holly

  I remembered one of those early rants clearly: I was a sophomore in high school, talking to Karin on the phone one Saturday when Dad told me to hang up. Typically, my father would have called me more than once; I counted on those warnings, eking out every moment of phone time. But this time Dad stormed into the kitchen, his face scarlet, the veins on his neck bulging.

  “It’ll never be `wait a minute’ again. Not from you, Missy!” he bellowed, and slapped me so hard across the face that I dropped the telephone receiver and fell to the floor, my knees buckling beneath me like a doll’s.

  My mother and Cam ran into the kitchen, Cam with his hands balled into fists. I was sixteen, so my brother must have been thirteen then. Mom knelt down and held me in her arms until she realized that I refused to cry. Then, as if on cue, we both stood up, brushed ourselves off and walked into the dining room with Cam silently dogging our heels, turning our backs on the volcano behind us.

  Lucky for me, my mother had taught me how to mostly dodge or sweet talk my father, how to be all smiles and tiptoes whenever the man was in a mood. That was the only time my father ever struck me.

  Cam, though, had it much worse. His adolescence coincided with the peak of Dad’s melancholy drinking, and he spent his teen years ducking my father’s noisy, sloppy moments of affection as fervently as he dodged the blows when Dad started careening towards him, shouting at Cam to cut his hair or bring up his grades. Dad didn’t sober up completely until Cam left home for college. Cam had never been able to forgive him.

  We’d come to the end of the Bay Bridge. “So, do you have a job?” I asked.

  Cam laughed. “You sound like Dad. Sure I have a job. Not a career. Just a job that lets me come and go.”

  “A job doing what?”

  “I’m a falafel man.”

  “Well, thank goodness your college classes prepared you for something.”

  “College taught me that I wanted to avoid the ol’ nine-to-five ball and chain. What about you? Still wiping snotty noses for a living?”

  “Funny. Fourth graders wipe their own noses, thank you very much. It’s one of the first things we teach them.”

  “Suppose somebody has to.”

  I thought back, trying to remember what Cam might have been like in fourth grade, but failing. “It’s really good to see you. I’m sorry we’ve been so out of touch.”

  Cam was leaning against the seat, his eyes closed, occasionally reaching up to scratch his scalp. His damp hair hung to his shoulders, and every time he scratched his head, another handful of sand tumbled onto his shirt. He wore a tattered flannel shirt over sweat pants cut into a pair of shorts. Blue plastic thongs dangled from his bony feet. It occurred to me for the first time that Cam might be broke. He might really need Jon, not just to tell him what to do, but to help keep a roof over his head. How much money could a falafel man make?

  Now Cam tugged his beard. “Huh. I always thought we still were in touch.” He caught my look of disbelief and grinned. “Missed me, huh? Well, now you’ve got to kiss me.” He leaned over and gave me a wet, salty smack on the cheek. “There. Feel closer now?”

  I smiled. “Remember that time you came to live with me in college?”

  “Sure.” Cam rearranged his long legs and whacked his knee against the dashboard. He rubbed it. “Ow! Fucking piece of shit Japanese cars! Made for midgets. Yeah, you were living with that weird girl with the Cleopatra hair. She was a wildcat in bed, man.”

  “What?” I was so shocked that my voice came out as a squeak. “You went to bed with Debra Shriner?”

  “Hey, watch the road! Yeah, sure I did. Well, to be exact, she went to bed with me.”

  I tried to think back. How could it have happened? The year Cam visited, I was a junior in college and he was threatening to drop out of high school. My parents were, as my father so diplomatically put it, “at the end of our tether with this damn kid.”

  During Cam’s spring vacation, my parents sent him to me. He had been skipping classes and my mother had caught him smoking dope in the garage. She had searched the house and found baggies of grass everywhere, she told me, weeping into the phone.

  “He must think we’re too stupid to notice our son’s an addict,” my mother said. “Talk to him, Jordy. You’re the only one he’s ever listened to.”

  So they put Cam on a bus to Amherst and I collected him at the station. My brother looked like every other stoned kid wandering around the University in a hoodie and sagging jeans. I didn’t want to set him loose on campus, not knowing what he might get himself into, so I drove Cam straight to my apartment and parked him there under the eagle eye of my roommate, Debra, while I went to classes.

  The apartment was cheaper than living in a dorm, but there was a reason for that: the only source of warmth was a cranky space heater in the living room. Karin was doing a semester in Ireland and my other roommate, Debra, was someone neither of us knew very well; she had answered an ad. Her biggest vice was singing, which Debra did every afternoon with her headphones on, weaving her head like a cobra’s as she sat cross-legged in front of the gas stove.

  “Well, was Debra nice to you, at least?” I asked Cam now, keeping an eye on Shepherd Jon’s van as we wound our way up through the Berkeley hills.

  “Sure. For a horny sixteen-year-old boy, it was a heavenly fate.”

  I shuddered and tried to put the image of Debra devouring my skinny, stoned brother out of my head. “Is this your street? I lost Shepherd Jon.”

  “Yeah. Keep going straight to the top of the hill. On the left, that blue turd with the dog shit brown trim. Can you believe that color combo? Jon’s parents were definitely color challenged.”

  “So that was it with Debra? That once?”

  “Hell no! I must have screwed Debra Shriney Hiney a million times that one week. Sure got me off drugs in a hurry. Now I had a new addiction, and it was way more fun.”

  True enough. Cam did ease up on the dope after that. He aced his SAT’s and was accepted into one of the small independent colleges in Maine.

  “And all this time I thought I was the one who turned you around, when it was really Debra the Predator,” I teased. “But that still doesn’t explain why you crashed and burned your senior year of college.” I glanced at him. “I never really understood what happened, you know. One minute, you were Dean’s List. And then Dad was tearing up your tuition check and burning it with the trash. What happened?”

  Cam drummed his long fingers on the dash. “I figured out that college is a fine fucking fantasy life, but has no bearing on reality.”

  “That’s absolute crap,” I snapped. “You wouldn’t be frying falafel if you’d only put in three more measly months. You had a 3.8 grade point average! You could have coasted right on up to the podium to get your degree.”

  “Maybe it was more important for me to piss Dad off than graduate,” Cam said mildly.

  “But why, when it cost you everything?”

  Cam picked at something on his flip flop. “Jesus, take a chill pill, Jordy. What did it cost you, what I did? You chose the high road, I chose the low. You’ve got your little life, your little job and your steady paycheck. Meanwhile, all I have to worry about is nothing but me, myself, and I.”

  We were in Jon’s driveway now. I bit my lip to keep from lashing out. So Cam wasn’t ambitious. So what? Everyone knew too much ambition caused heart attacks.

  The neighborhood smelled of that cocoa-scented mulch that everyone in Berkeley scattered in their gardens to control the weeds. At least Cam was living in a decent area; this was a suburban neighborhood of professors’ homes and swing sets. A group of men whizzed past on bicycles, hunched low over the handlebars and wearing goggles that made them look like insects.

  Across the street, a scrawny blonde teenager toted a baby in a backpack, striding purposefully to the corner until she saw our car and stopped to stare. Cam was already walking towards the house, so his back was to her, but I smiled at the girl and waved. She didn’t wave
back.

  Shepherd Jon’s house was a Victorian, all turrets and porches and odd round windows. It had fanciful gingerbread trim beneath the eaves and the porches sagged.

  “Quite the Gothic abode,” I commented, following Cam up the walk. The door gaped open. Shepherd Jon and the others were already inside; I could smell coffee.

  “Cool, huh?” Cam said. “And cheap.”

  I brushed the sand off my jeans before stepping through the front door. Not that it mattered. There was so much sand in the front hall, it looked like someone had deliberately laid a gritty path to the kitchen. Cam ran his hands through his hair. Now that it was dry, it was the same color as mine, with the same wiry, wavy texture. I’d lost my hair band somewhere on the beach, so both of us had tangled tan manes.

  A chipped mirror hung in the front hall. In its reflection, Cam and I looked like a pair of shaggy lions. Our eyes were the same bright blue in our narrow faces.

  I followed Cam to the kitchen at the back of the house. The floor was black and white checked linoleum, the walls lime green, the trim pomegranate red. Oven mitts shaped like stars hung from hooks near the stove; the salt and pepper shakers were bunches of bananas danging from tropical glass trees. It was like the illustration of a kitchen in a children’s book.

  One of the women from the beach, a bloated looking blonde dressed in a colorful caftan, was seated at the kitchen table. Her hooked nose was accentuated by mirrored sunglasses that reflected the checkerboard floor.

  Cam introduced us, using first names only: “Valerie, Jordan. What’s up, Val?”

  “It’s the flesh, the flesh!” Val moaned, nodding in the direction of the stove, where Shepherd Jon was frying bacon. “I can’t bear the flesh.”

  “Val’s a vegan,” Cam explained, handing me a cup of coffee that smelled like burning tires. “Won’t touch meat, eggs, or anything else that comes from the exploitation of animals.” There was a note of admiration in his voice.

  “Vegan Val? Really?” I lifted my chin in the direction of the other woman’s leather belt and shoes.

  Cam gave me a look that said, Don’t start.

  “I love your necklace,” Val breathed, tipping her head like a bird, so that the reflected floor in her glasses shifted. “What are those black stones?”

  I lifted the beads between my fingers and bent down to show them to her. “Hematite.”

  She nodded. “That’s good for grounding.”

  I had to assume that she wasn’t talking about lightning storms. “It used to be my grandmother’s.” I smiled, imagining what Grammy would have to say about this crew. Grammy had survived on beef jerky, beer, canned hash, and television in her metal trailer for seven decades.

  Cam led me through the kitchen, ignoring the chaos. Jon had several things going on the stove. The dark-haired woman from the beach had thrown on a sarong and faded t-shirt; she was pulling plates from the cupboard while the chubby man slipped a coffee cake into the oven. They must have prepared most of the food before going to the beach; it was like being in a restaurant kitchen, frenetic yet carefully orchestrated activity. These people must have been living and cooking together for a while.

  “Can I help out?” I asked.

  Cam waved a hand. “Nah. We’re better off out of the way. They know I’d just burn the house down.”

  As we continued through the kitchen’s back door and into a steamy attached greenhouse, I bristled at my brother’s refusal to take responsibility for even the most mundane aspects of his own existence. So typical!

  “Good thing you have slaves for roommates,” I said, “since you’re so helpless.”

  “Fuck you.” Cam’s voice was mild. “You don’t know jack shit about my domestic arrangements.” He settled himself in a wooden rocking chair in the greenhouse. The chair was stenciled with moons and stars. “I’ve got KP duty. Shepherd Jon doesn’t let anybody off the hook.”

  I pulled up a matching chair next to his. “And he makes the rules?”

  “It’s his house.”

  “But you pay rent, right?”

  “A token.” Cam stretched out his long legs and meditated on the steam rising from his coffee. “Without him, I’d probably be living in People’s Park. So, how are things with you? I take it you wised up and never married that petty bureaucrat with the great hair?”

  “No, I took a lesson from you and ran like hell,” I joked, then hesitated, wondering just how much to tell Cam about Peter and me, or about what I’d been through.

  I hadn’t told Cam anything at all about the breast cancer. I had started several letters, but gave up. My explanations sounded too self-pitying, even when I tried joking about the Barbie doll wigs I planned to buy if I had to go the chemo route, or how I’d be sure the plastic surgeon took inches off my hips if I needed a hunk of flesh to replace a missing breast.

  What could I possibly tell Cam that would sum up my current state of mind, when I wasn’t even sure what it was anymore? That I was scared and lonely? That I could scarcely even look at my breasts in the mirror, because the scar reminded me that someone had sliced and diced my body, taking out a melon ball or two of flesh?

  Sitting next to a brother who had become a stranger over the past two years, I realized that I couldn’t say any of these things. My guard was up against both his pity and my own. I would have to wait and work up to that conversation gradually. I babbled instead about my teaching, the break-up with Peter, and friends we both knew back home, until at last Cam put a hand on my arm and forced me to take a breath.

  “You did the right thing, leaving that guy,” he said softly. “He wasn’t worthy.”

  I sat up straighter in the chair, automatically ready to defend the man who had once been, mistakenly or not, the love of my life. “You hardly knew Peter!”

  Cam shook his head. “I didn’t have to. Remember the wet money?”

  And I did, so suddenly it was as if Cam had suddenly opened a pair of drapes across a window: I saw Peter on a blustery summer day two years ago. Cam was visiting my mother, home from a trip to India, so Peter and I had driven to my parents’ house from Boston to see him.

  Cam and I borrowed a sailboat that weekend to take Peter out on the lake. Peter had dressed the part of “an old salt,” as he put it, in a bright blue striped shirt and khaki shorts, new Topsiders and blue visor. He’d even bought new sunglasses with a braided plastic rope to hang them about his neck. But then we’d come about on the water and started scudding, and Peter had forgotten to duck beneath the mast. He was knocked clean off the boat and into the water, arms outspread and waving like a great blue heron flapping onto the water’s surface.

  Cam and I laughed, but Peter climbed back aboard with a grim, set mouth. Once we were back in my parents’ house, he immediately asked my mother for the ironing board and iron. Peter changed his clothes, stuffed his wet things into the dryer and then stood in the kitchen to iron his money, bill after bill of it, until the green rectangles were smooth and dry and warm on the kitchen counters, laid end-to-end like an enormous chain of green chewing gum wrappers.

  “Peter was a little compulsive,” I admitted now. “But he kept me organized.”

  Cam rolled his eyes. “You need somebody to help you jump fences and whistle in the dark, Jojo, not keep you confined to your safe little sawdust cage,” he said. We sipped our coffee in silence for a minute. Then Cam finally asked, “So what’s with the ‘rents? Is Mom still up to her eyeballs in handicrafts?”

  “She’s onto crocheting now.”

  “What, like afghans?”

  “And hats. Lampshades. Toilet paper covers.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope. Cows, Santas, the Virgin Mary, fleecy lambs with pink tongues. They’re amazing, really. You’d never guess there was a roll of toilet paper under them.”

  Cam cracked up, tipping his head back. “Amazing? Yeah, Jordy, that’s one word for it. Jesus. And how about Dad? Still mowing down the roses?”

  “He took a
pretty good chunk out of the big lilac bush the day before I left.”

  We were both laughing hard by now. Dad had mowed the lawn every Saturday for thirty years, even on the weekend after his hernia operation. Four years ago, everyone in the family–even Cam, though minimally–had chipped in to buy him a riding mower for his fiftieth birthday. Our father had kept it buffed and shining: Dad’s chariot, we called it. Unfortunately, the mower had more horsepower than our tiny yard could withstand. So far, Dad had flattened the knee-high boxwood hedge, Mom’s flowerbeds, a neighbor boy’s bike, and even the mailbox. It was like launching a speedboat in a duck pond.

  “Can you believe our gene pool?” Cam shook his head. “There’s Mom, vacuuming up sandwich crumbs around our lunch plates, always in her pearls, like June Cleaver on Speed. And then there’s Dad in his recliner, soaking up Fox News. Christ, Jordan. Remember that time on the town common? Our perfect All-American Fourth of July picnic?”

  I had just taken a sip of coffee. Now I laughed and snorted the coffee up my nose. I’d nearly forgotten about that. My father had become increasingly patriotic through the years, obsessed with war because he hadn’t served in Vietnam. During that Fourth of July picnic, Dad spotted a trio of young men lounging on a blanket made of American flags. Without warning, he had risen from our family blanket and stormed the group, my mother shrieking after him to stop.

  “Those guys scattered like pigeons, didn’t they?” I gasped. “It was horrible. Dad was out of his mind.”

  “He always was a pissy drunk. Mean as a snake,” Cam reflected.

  “At least he eventually quit,” I reminded him. “AA or not, that must have taken guts.”

  “Jesus, Jordy!” Cam shook his head. “Why do you always defend the guy? He was a bastard. Dad quit drinking only because his doctor said his liver was blowing up like a balloon. So what if he lost his job? Lots of people don’t have jobs, and they don’t take it out on their kids.”